Introduction

Outside the inner wall, just above the hospital, you have the possibility to trade goods. There is no name in the game for this feature (to my knowledge), but it is accompanied by the text "A special price for you, my liege!". There are trade deals that can be refreshed (few for free each day, afterwards you pay gold) and are automatically refreshed each day. It might not be so clear what are good deals and what are not, this guide aims to help you decide what deals to accept.

Resource Ratios

A lot of deals are either paid for by resources, they provide you resources or both. Especially in the case of resources for resource trade it is good to know what is the default ratio, so that you can determine whether the current offer is (much) better or not. To determine the default ratio, we look at three things, the amount that can be gathered on a resource tile, the amount that can be acquired with altar wises, and the amounts that can be purchased for the same gold price.

For resource gathering there are 7 different quality level tiles. The close to the middle of the map the more resource you can get per time you gather. The ratio between the different resources are the same for each level, you always get 4 times as much Iron as you get Crystal and 6 times as much Food or Wood as you get Iron. You can check out the exact amounts for each level if you are interested, by visiting the Wood, Food, Iron and Crystal resource pages.

For Altar Wishes you can get an amount of a resource that depends on the level of the Altar building. Note there is also a chance the resource amount will be multiplied by 2x, 5x or 10x, which we will ignore for our analysis here. The ratio between the resources is the same as for the resource gathering amounts above, so the Iron amount you can get for a wish is 4 times the Iron amount and the Food and Wood amounts are 6 times the Iron amount (or 24 times the Crystal amount). You can see the exact amounts of resource for each Altar level by visiting the Altar building page.

For purchasing resource items from the store, we see again the same ratios. E.g. for 40 gold you can purchase 400 Crystal, 1600 (4*400) Iron, 10000 Wood/Food (6x1600=9600). You can check out the exact amounts of resources you get for each gold price in the store at our resource pages for Wood, Food, Iron and Crystal.

Based on the above comparison we can deduct that the default ratio of the resources are that 1 Crystal equals 4 Iron, 1 Crystal equals 24 Food or Wood, 1 Iron equals 6 Food or Wood. It could be that if you are in need of a certain resource you might accept less favorable rates, and especially early on it is more difficult to get good resource gathering speed for Iron and especially Crystal compared to Wood and Food, but in general you should look resource for resource deals where you get a better ratio that the one mentioned above.

Resource Gold Rates

What might be more difficult to determine is how much gold you should pay for your resources, what is a good deal? You could look at anything cheaper than the store, but I find the store very expensive, I have so far never purchased resources from the store. What I use as a reference is how much I am willing to pay for Altar Wishes and the amount of resources I get for that. If I get significantly more as an offer for the Goods Trading, I take it. In my eyes you should not take less as a Goods Trading offer as you would get for the 2 gold Altar Wish, unless you have already used the cheap Altar Wishes and you are in urgent need. I tend to use the cheap Altar Wishes each day, even if I don’t need the resources at that time.

Resource or Gold for Lord XP

There are also sometimes offer to get XP for either resources or gold. Above I explained a way of assigning a gold value to resources based on what you are willing to pay for Altar Wishes. So I will just focus here on giving an idea of what a reasonable gold value is to pay for Lord XP. In the game the best way to get a lot of lord XP is by the Guild of Explorers, selecting the ones that have high XP payout. Instead of waiting before they are completed you can also pay gold to finish them. As an example the better tasks in the Guild of Explorers can have a payout of 20.6 K lord XP for 8 hours. These 8 hours timer can be reset for 974 gold. From this you can calculate that for every 100 gold you spend on XP points at the Goods Trading you should get at least 2115 Lord XP. You can argue you should get more as with speeding up the Guild of Explorer Tasks you normally get some extra payout as well.

A general tip regarding the Guild of Explorers: although normally I find it too expensive to pay gold for, I typically do it if I can finish a task and start a new large one when I am just about to sign off for a longer time, for example before I go to sleep. This way you can by for example just speeding up one or two hours, make sure you have another task running for the full 8 hours.

Resource or Gold for Speed Ups

So far I have not paid for buying speed ups. You get quite some during normal game play and I have found resources to be much more of an issue than speed ups, so I don’t have too much to say about what is good value for money when it comes to speed up trades. If you do plan on purchasing speed ups with gold I think the Goods Trading is worth checking out. Typically I see offers like two 1 hour speed ups for 250 gold (slightly better than 300 in the store) or 5x1 hour for 300 (a lot better than the 750 gold in the store), that are better than the store price. I am not too impressed with the resource for speed up offerings.

Conclusion

I hope this article has given you some idea for reasonable trades and some guidelines how you can determine them for your specific situation. Nothing in this article is supposed to be too strict, there are always situations in which you need certain resources and you are willing to pay more. If you have questions or other tips, please share in the comment section.

Contributed by: GamesGuide on August 7, 2016