Making the most of your Marketplace

Introduction
Why do you even have a marketplace? That is our first question. The marketplace is unique because it is the only place resources can be transferred between foreign players ( players who are not in the same alliance). Whether you use the marketplace for its real purposor just to get 5 cents from the quest, the marketplace is probably the building which has the most uses in the game. Without it, our cities would be completely self-dependent, and it would defy the essence of a browser game.

Oscillation trading
This is one use of the market, and it is similar to this: take "place" away from "market", and add "stock" to the beginning of the word "market", and you get "stock market". That Is essentially what the market can do, except it has no stocks. You basically buy resources when prices are low and sell them when prices are high. Of course, don't do that when you are a new player and don't know the usual prices in the market. In day 1-4, everything is expensive because players are building and speeding up things, which leads to even more rapid building and the demand for resources. When demeand is higher than supply, prices will increase, especially for stone and lumber. (Note: It is never wise to build a stone city!). If you can build resource buildings early on, you can sell those for high prices and get a lot of gold. On days 5-15, everything gets cheaper so you can buy a lot more resources with your gold. Later in the game, resource prices will stabilize. Whether you trade in small or large increments, oscillation trading can get you a lot of gold.

Storage of resources
Our next use for the marketplace is temporarily storing resources. This can be used to hide resources from an attacker if they are plundering, and storing resources to make room for more production so that the production doesn't halt and it does not get full.

Click on your market, and sell any resource you'd like to hide. Make the price at least twice as high as current prices, but do not make it overly high or else you will have to pay a deadening tax. Of course, to tryuly protect all 4 resources, you must have a lvl 4 market or higher. If you want to store more of the same type of resource, the best thing is to cancel the offer and make a new one because itll take up trading slots if you keep your old offer. But the only disadvantage to canceling and adding is that you will.have to pay the market tax twice. You can't hide gold this way, and you are better off reinforcing a valley with it. (Note: if your ttoops run out of food, they will eat any offered in the market.)

Overpriced trading
You can make sellers go, "sell!" if your.bid is significantly higher than the rest. And buyers do the same thing if your offer is lower than the rest. In the first day of the game, some traders think they can offer.or.sell for extrene prices. Nobody will take these until some brave seller/buyer suggests a.more normal price, and the market resumes again.

Do you need a marketplace?
The answer is no, if only for one city. You do not need it if your resource production is mixed, but if you specialize in something, you should have one. If not, you can have one in total for all your cities.