Guide

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Town Trades

For a town trade, all you need is something to sell, a bit of gold, some caravans and a marketplace. Once the item is listed, people have the option to buy everything in that order. Their caravans will bring the gold direct to your town, and your caravans will drop the goods off. Yes, this does mean that you need to have enough caravans available to deliver anything you want to sell. Often prices for town trades will be slightly higher than hub orders, because of this “inconvenience” to the seller. Another thing to keep in mind is that anyone within ~2000 squares can see and accept your town orders, so there is a very good chance your caravans will be tied up for several days.

There are two ways to select something to sell. Once you’re in the market, you can choose your item from the left hand menu, and then click “Place Sell Order”, or you can go straight to the “Place Sell Order” button and choose from a drop down list.

You might have seen that the list of items on the left doesn’t include animal parts, minerals or herbs. The drop downs will also only show basic items in each category. Anything that is crafted, used in crafting and wine is not able to be sold directly from a town – it must be sold through a hub, unless of course, you skip the markets altogether and come to an arrangement with another player.

You’ll also notice that in the above screenshot, I have the location set to “Visible Towns Only”. This is purely to filter out the hubs for display purposes but it’s important to note that while you can accept orders with this filter on, placing them is not going to work. Clicking “Place Sell Order” from this filter will result in this pop up:

You need to keep the Location filter on “All Locations” to place a town trade, and that will result in this pop up:

From here, life is easy. Choose the item you want to sell (if you haven’t already), enter how many you want to sell and how much you want to sell them for. Next, hit check to confirm all the details.

Placing a buy order from your town works in the exact same way, except you select the “Place Buy Order” button, and you, as the buyer, are not required to pay taxes – the seller will pay those when they accept your order.

Taxes for town trades is always 7.5%, and taxes are always paid up front. If you don’t have the gold available, you won’t be able to list the order.

If everything is as you want it to be, hit confirm and the order will post to the market. You can make as many changes as you like before you hit confirm. If you need to make changes to an order after you’ve confirmed it, you’ll need to cancel the order and start over again. You will not get your taxes back if you cancel an order.

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Traders and Hubs

If you want to trade in hubs, there’s a bit more work that needs to be put in before you can list your first order. But first, a tip.

With the right research, you can send items to any hub from any town regardless of whether your trader lives in that town or not. This is a very good thing, because you don’t really want to build traders in more than one town. There’s enough to keep track of without wondering where your traders belong, and what they think they’re doing.

On to the fun stuff! Step one is to do a bit of research:

Merchant’s Guild will give you the building that allows your traders to be trained in the marketplace and also affects the time it takes to train them and how many you can have. This building only chomps food, and there is no marketplace level requirement to build it.

Faction Markets is also needed first up, as it allows you to send items to a hub, regardless of whether you have a trader there or not.

Finally, you’ll need Trader to actually hire your trader, and you’ll need a level 10 marketplace to start this research. The remaining 3 researches on the Trader line simply reduce the upkeep for your traders, so while they’re nice to have, you won’t desperately need them straight away.

The next bit of research allows you to actually place buy and sell orders.

Trade Office gives you the building that your traders report back to, and the level of this affects the researches you can unlock and how many orders you can have listed at any one time. It is important to note, as the pop ups say, that while you can build more than one Trade Office, each additional one confers half of the benefits of the first one. Trade Office also eats resources as well as food. Keep an eye on your resource production as you level it up.

To begin with, Procurement and Selling will unlock one Buy/Sell order per level of Trade Office, and will increase from there to a total of 5 orders per level (based on one Trade Office).

You’ll notice that after the Trade Office research, there are 4 more researches. Remember how with town trades you can’t modify orders once they’re posted? Well, those 4 researches allow you to make changes, starting from 30 minutes after listing and decreasing to 5 minutes. This probably isn’t something you’ll need for a while yet, but can come in handy.

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Traders

These little dudes are both fantastic and horrible. Fantastic because they allow you to buy all across the map, and horrible because they can be expensive, both in terms of upkeep and cost to build.

The first trader you build will cost you everything you see above, excluding the wine – that guy is completely sober. Every trader you build after him though, will cost wine, starting with 1 barrel and increasing in line with the Fibonacci Sequence. Feel free to take a moment while you run through the sequence, and then you may want to lie down for a bit. Luckily, when you’re getting started, one or two traders will do the trick.

Training time starts at 8 days per dude, and decreases the higher your Merchant’s Guild gets. At level 20, training time is reduced to 4 days. 30 gold/hour is the starting cost for your trader, and decreases as you do those other researches, until you reach a maximum discount of 50%.

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Getting Stuff Into Hubs

Now you’ve spent days researching and building and training and now it’s finally time to list some stuff! To do that, we need to get items and your trader into a hub. Let’s get your trader right on in there first off. There are a couple of ways to do this. The easiest way is to find your hub on the map and choose Send Trader.

You could also go to the Hub Orders screen and order your trader from there, and once they’re in hubs, you may find it easier to use this screen to order them around.

Now, your trader may be on his merry way, but he’s going to need something to sell when he gets there. Click on the hub again, but this time, choose Send Resources. This will take you to the standard orders page. Load up your caravans with what you’d like to sell, making sure you include gold to cover taxes.

If you want those caravans (or a separate order of empty caravans) to stay in the hub, you’ll need to tick a box to make them stay put:

Once you have items in a hub, they will display on a hub inventory screen, which can be filtered to either show everything in all hubs, or broken down to individual hubs.

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Placing Orders

Listing items to sell is much the same as when doing town trades, only you need to specify the hub to sell in. You can do this either by choosing the Location at the top of the markets page:

Or when you click Place Sell/Buy Order:

Different hubs are going to show different tax rates, based on your standing with the owning faction. You may want to take this into account when choosing which hubs to sell at, especially in Broken Lands where the factions are more ornery than in Elgea.

In Baolan, I have a neutral standing with the owning faction (Forbidden Empire), which translates to a 1% discount. In Hedgor’s Haven though, I have a -10 standing with Overoad Traders, so I pay a little more in taxes. These numbers are going to vary by faction and by player.

You can check your standings with various factions here. Keep in mind that if your faction standing is -35 or below, the faction will refuse to trade with you at all.

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Buying in Hubs

Of course, trade isn’t all about selling. Sometimes you want to buy things as well, and that’s pretty easy. Choose your item from the left hand menu (before or after filtering by location), and click Buy.

If you have the gold available in the hub you’re buying from, you can leave the ticker box checked – when you do, when you confirm the order, it will simply swap your gold for the item you’re buying, and it’ll be up to you to transfer the items to your town(s). If you untick the box, much as like with town trades, your caravans will wander off to the hub to drop the gold off. Unlike town trades though, they’ll then cart the items home. The seller’s caravans are never involved in the transaction.

Clicking check will confirm how much you’re going to pay for all of the items. If you’ve got enough to cover it, click confirm and you’re done!

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Getting Items Home From Hubs

You’ve done all your shopping, or made your billions, and now you want it all back in your towns. To do that, we navigate back to the Orders screen in the Trade Hubs tab and choose the hub we want to send stuff home from. After that, it’s like the normal orders screen, except you must choose a destination from the drop down box. If you have caravans from more than one town, you can also specify those. This screen will also allow you to order the caravans to stay put on arrival, but keep in mind that if they don’t belong to that town, they will ignore that order.

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Modifying Orders

Sometimes you want to be the person with the lowest order, or at least more competitive … or in my case, you’re the person that meant to sell 100 cows for 1000 gold, and got your numbers the wrong way around. It’s okay! You don’t have to cancel the order completely, you can change it if you’ve done the right research.

In the Trade Hub page, there are two headings – Buy Offers and Sell Offers. They will show every order you’ve posted, and can be filtered to show all hubs or one hub in particular.

From here, you can cancel the order completely, or simply amend it. When you amend an item, you can only change the price, not the number of items being sold. You also need to keep in mind that factions are greedy, and never refund taxes paid, regardless of whether you’re amending or cancelling orders. If you’re increasing the price, you’ll pay the difference in taxes paid and new taxes when you hit confirm.

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Remaining Trade Hub Screens

Rounding out trade hub management are the In Progress, Movements and Transaction Logs screens.

In Progress shows you all your orders that have been accepted, and require the buyers caravans to drop the gold off, and collect the goods:

Movements shows you all of your caravans out and about, whether they’re moving between hubs or heading to/from a town to a hub. This will also show you your traders as they move around:

I personally never use this one because I find it confusing, but Transaction Log shows you every change you’ve made as far as listing, cancelling, amending and accepting orders goes: