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Do Merchant Building Work?


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So bartering is like market trading in AoE - there is a "value" attached to a resource and that value goes up or down based on supply and demand. In AoE the values are gold based so you sell a resource for some amount of gold and you buy another resource for some amount of gold.

I read the barter link and it seems similar - why not just use gold based trading like AoE? What are the advantages of direct trading over gold based trading?

That actually seems pretty straight forward if that is what you are referring to.

Trading seems like an extension to AoE trade routes where instead of it just being gold, you can gain other resources. Again, why not just have it gold based? Seems simpler.

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The advantage with the method as specified in the wiki is three fold. First, and least important: it's more realistic. There are some older posts somewhere in the forum where people say they didn't like gold-based trading because it was kinda silly.

Second, and most importantly, the "value" of a gold based diminishes with increased useage. Say we have a route between two markets that nets 50 gold per trip, and we want to buy wood. Wood starts off at 50 gold for 100 wood. So the first trip is worth 100 wood. But after we buy that first batch of wood, the price increases to say 55 gold/100 wood. So our second trip (still 50 gold) is now only worth 90 wood. The third batch being 60 gold/100 wood now means that the third trip is only worth 83 wood, and so on. We wind up with routes giving a constant supply of gold, but rising costs of resource purchasing. It makes the "value" of the route decrease.

Third, and I'm probably wrong on this one, is because the plan doesn't call for "infinite" resources per map. If you want to buy wood from the market, it has to come from somewhere. Some other player has to have wood for sale.

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I wouldn't tie trading and bartering with what is in the players' treasuries. Seems needlessly restrictive.

Also, from the wiki:

generate 5 Supply per second while in trade mode

Imagine a trading cart speed tech reducing the amount of time per trip, thus actually generating less supply per trip. I'd rather just use a simple distance calculation.

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