The Marketplace is the building that enables trade. It allows you to send resources to other players, create trade offers, accept incoming offers and monitor all resource transfers. Whether you are supporting an ally, diversifying your resource income, or recovering from a deficit, the Marketplace is an essential tool throughout the game.
Merchants physically carry resources between villages. They live in your Marketplace and are dispatched whenever you send resources. Each merchant may carry a specific amount of resources, and depending on the amount you want to send, you will need one or more merchants to make the delivery.
Merchants are added automatically as you upgrade your Marketplace — you do not train them like troops.
You get one merchant per level of Marketplace.
After completing a trade, merchants travel to the destination and return home automatically.
While merchants are away, they cannot be used for another trade.
Merchants do not fight and cannot be lost, except if Marketplace is demolished or its level is lowered. Even in such case the ongoing deliveries will be finished.
Initial merchants capacity is determined by tribe. It may be upgraded by building and upgrading Trade Office, and by the Commerce alliance bonus.
Merchants speed depend on their tribe.
Each tribe has merchants with different carrying capacities. Both the initial capacity and the speed of merchants is determined by their tribe. Additionally Romans have a bonus for their Trade Office. It is twice as effective as the same building for other tribes, increasing their merchants capacity even more.
Sending resources to another player is straightforward:
Open your Marketplace
Select 'Send Resources'
Enter the destination coordinates or village name
Enter how much of each resource you want to send
Confirm the trade — your merchants will depart immediately
Alternatively, you can find the target village on the map, and send the resources directly from there.
You can send any combination of the four resources in a single trip, as long as the total does not exceed your available merchants capacity. The game will automatically assign as many merchants as required for the selected amount of resources.
Merchants travel at their own speed. The further the destination, the longer the journey. The game shows you the estimated arrival time before you confirm — always check this when time-sensitive deliveries matter, such as sending crop to an ally under starvation pressure.
Sending resources to alliance members is one of the most important cooperative mechanics in the game. Coordinating resource flows — such as directing crop to a player under attack, who has to feed a lot of reinforcements — is how organised alliances gain a competitive edge.
Be aware that automatic resource-sharing limits exist to prevent unfair pushing between players. Refer to the Automatic Resource-Sharing Limits article for details on how these work.
Instead of sending resources directly, you can create a trade offer on the open market. This allows other players to browse available offers and accept ones that suit them:
Open the Marketplace and its 'Offer' tab
Select 'Create Offer'
Specify what resource you are offering and in what quantity
Specify what resource and quantity you want in return
Optionally limit the offer to a maximum travel time from your village or to your alliance
Confirm — your merchants are reserved and will execute the trade when someone accepts
While your offer is active, the merchants assigned to it are unavailable for other trades. You may cancel the offer at any time, until it is accepted by someone.
You can browse trade offers from other players in the 'Buy' tab in your Marketplace. Each offer shows what is being offered, what is requested, and the exchange rate. When you find an offer you want to accept:
Review the exchange rate — check whether it is fair value for your current needs
Confirm acceptance — your merchants depart with the resources requested by the other player, and the merchants of the other player depart with the resources you wanted at the same time. Their speed might be different, so you may receive your resources earlier or later than the other player.
The NPC Merchant is a premium feature that allows you to exchange your own resources with the game itself, rather than with other players. It converts one or more of your resources into another at a fixed rate, bypassing the need to find a trading partner.
This is particularly useful when your warehouse or granary is about to be fully filled and you don’t want the resources to be wasted — for example, if you produce much more crop than other resources, and your army cannot consume all of it, so you need to regularly exchange crop into other resources to use them to upgrade buildings and train new units. The NPC Merchant acts instantly, without requiring merchants to travel.
