Introduction

The Market Place building has been extended with a Merchant Fair recently. In this guide we offer an explanation of all functions of the Market Place and some tips on how to make the best use of them.

Where is the Market Place/Alchemist's Corner/CrucibleAuction House/Black Market Located?

These are all located in the same building. Well actually not really a building. It is located just inside the city wall, to the left of the gate, to the right of the Vault, in front of the elevated platform on which your city buildings are built. By selecting it you can select the functionality, Market Place, Alchemist's Corner (includes the Crucible), Auction House or Black Market.

Market Place

The Market Place offers you six trades. For either resources or gold you can get resources, materials or items. You can accept any of these and they are replaced by new offers. During any day you can do four free refreshes of the offers. If you want more refreshes you have to pay an increasing gold amount (first step 5, next step 20, I haven't bothered to try more).

I am mostly looking at trades which I can pay with resources. When it comes to gathering speed the game uses some default ratios between the resources on which we can base the value. 1 silver is worth 4 iron or 20 wood or 20 food, 1 iron is worth 5 wood or food. Wood and Food have the same value. You can use these ratios as a guideline to determine whether offered trades are interesting or not, unless of course you are in urgent need of one specific resource. Or perhaps for you Wood is more valuable than Food because your Alliance always has an Alliance Farm, and or your Lord, Dragon, Research gives you much better Food Gathering/Production than Wood Gathering/Production boosts.

Using the ratios you will find that some trades are very attractive (e.g. pay 750 wood to get 3000 Food, pay 1800 Wood to get 600 Iron), but some also not favourable at all (pay 7200 Wood to get 1200 Iron). The largest amount of trades are relatively often less beneficial, but I still make all favourable trades every day to get some extra resources.

In addition, if I can get Lord or Dragon EXP items by paying some resources, or for example a Gathering Boost item or a Free Wish, I also tend to do that. I rarely spend gold on any of the trades. If there are items you are interesting to purchase for gold, you might check whether they show up in the Market Place, they typically offer a better price.

Alchemist's Corner

In the Alchemist's Corner you can exchange items from your inventory for Equipment, Magic and Hero Coupons, and you can purchase Equipment, Magic and Hero items with these Coupons.

When you select the Alchemist's Corner in the Market Place Building, you enter a screen where you can select the Crucible in the left plane. In the Crucible you see on the right an overview of all the items that can be transformed to Coupons. These are subdivided in three categories, Equipment, Special and Hero. You can select one of the items and specify the amount you want to transform. Once you select Use you do not do the actual transformation yet, but you get to see in the left plane how many coupons you will get. Only once you click Transform will the conversion be final, be aware that after this step there is no way back.

Exchanging the Coupons for items works in a similar way as the basic Market Place functionality, every day you get 6 offers which can be refreshed for free four times.

We will work on providing a list of possible offers as well as a list of Crucible conversions, so that you can get a better idea what the cost is for the items, and what offers you might want to wait for.

Auction House

The Auction House is an open bidding system. There is a list of items each with a Current Price, a Minimum Increase and Time Remaining. You can place a bid on any item. The bid needs to be at least the Current Price plus the Minimum Increase.

The items listed are from a large variety, e.g. items to boost your March Capacity, Gear, Chests, Lord EXP and Resource items. The prices for most are quite expensive, making this feature mostly relevant for spending players.

Once you place a bid, if your bid is not the highest bid, you can Claim your full bid after the timer expires, so there are no cost if you do not get your item.

Black Market

In the Black Market you can also bid on items, but this time it is not clear what the highest bid is during the bidding process. Only after the timer is finished will the items go to the highest bidder. Others will get their bid back, minus the fee (which currently seems to be 10 gold for all items on offer).

The items listed here are also of large variety and include many Materials, Boosts and Scrolls. Since there is no fixed price you can bid anything. You might be tempted to try out low prices to see if no one happens to bid high, but I expect many will do so, so you probably just turn out wasting the 10 gold fee. On the other hand, the fee is not high.

Merchant Fair

In the Merchant Fair you can purchase equipment that other players have listed, or you can list your own equipment. The Merchant Fair is only open for players with Stronghold 15 or higher, and in kingdoms that are open at least 15 days.

In the Ordered Goods tab you see a list of all equipment on offer. You have a possibility to only look at specific type of equipment. You have options to uncheck a box that also shows items that are not available, basically just listing all equipment it seems, and an option to uncheck a box that also shows items you cannot yet use (based on Lord level).

In the List Goods tab you can list your own equipment you would like to sell. You cannot sell all equipment, I assume only the better ones. If you select an equipment piece you open a dialog where you can select the price you want to sell it for with a certain minimum and maximum. It also shows an average price, not sure whether that is an average it was sold for, or put on offer.

A small amount of Gold based on the item's price will be taken from every transaction as a Merchant Fee.

If an item is not sold within 24 hours, it will be delisted from the Merchant Fair, after which you can reclaim it or list it again.

If you purchased any goods you can only put it up for sale in the Merchant Fair once a set period of time has been passed. Not sure how much time this is.

I currently only have one item I can sell, a purple Properity Necklace. I have not actually put it up for sale, but had a look just to get some experience. I was a bit surprised that the suggested price for this equipment is 14,210 gold, which is far below the value of the materials, 20,600. You might want to consider this when putting items up for sale, whether it is not more favorable to dismantle it for materials instead of selling it. Also if you are looking for materials, you might consider looking at the Merchant Fair and seeing whether there are actually equipments on sale that offer the right combination of materials for you. On this website we offer an overview of all gear, and we recently have added the details page of each equipment with the combined gold value of the materials that are required to forge it.

Conclusion

I hope this explanation gives an idea how these functions work. If you have any tips or questions, please share in the comment section.

Contributed by: GamesGuide on October 28, 2016

(last modified on June 7, 2017)