The Art of Daytrading: Fast Starts on Merged & Established Servers

The first thing I should tell you, is that you know more about this game than me, in all likelihood; I played for a month and then retired with all the suddenness with which I entered the game; I cannot tell you a great deal about what armies to attack what with, or what units cost effectively beat which combinations once honour and train times and feeding have all been considered. Almost the bulk of my knowledge of the game is contained in the next volume of words insofar as it would deviate from the standard literature.

I found Evony to be a delightful and addictive game and I am glad that I played it; I left ultimately because I did not wish to devote the time to some of the more tedious things like NPC farming, and what follows is the brief excursion from it that I was able to find. From my reading and discussions with top level players on my server, I believe the following to be completely uncharted waters.

So although I do not propose to know Evony, I know RTS, having once been a top player in other games; and it is from that background that I approached Evony as any top player would: understanding it to be yet in its infancy, the players not having yet established all of the tricks, the secrets, the strategies; Evony is fresh, and even though Daytrading will now be unveiled, I promise that for those who look closely, there are other strategies yet to be discovered.

This guide is about two things: joining established servers, and the strategy of Daytrading.

The premise: Joining a new server is rather dull. It's full of brand new players, or players who were intermediates on their old servers and want to start a new life as a top ranked player, with the occasional expert player whose alliance was destroyed, or an expert player who is using the new server as a second, low stress "play" game. The new games do not offer the same wide field of strong competition as the old established servers do. Previously, it has been thought that it is mostly too difficult to join established servers, competing with players who've had such a head start. But if you are willing to put a lot of time and effort into it, there is a fast track to it, which offers 300-400k prestige in 7 days, fully researched techs in 2 weeks, and 1.2-1.5M prestige in 30 days, a main attack hero with around 200 attack, 10 cities and an army eating between 20 and 35M food/hr. You could do it without spending a dime (although if you could spend $5 or $30 that would be beneficial, for the purchase of several war horns, one Excalibur, one Wealth of Nations and one The Art of War).

How in the world?

Well, it's called Daytrading, and there's a few things you'll need to know...


Production is overrated.

When you've got an empire of cities to manage with clapped out techs and full resources, production, and which players are doing it best, has value. But if you're just entering a game where most other players have reached their mid or lategame, you'll never catch up to their heroes with mayors in the 160+ politics range.

In truth, even with this guide, you'll never catch up in a week's time. It's absolutely critical that you join a good alliance and stay in BP for your max 7 days. If you were spawned in a hostile area and cannot teleport, sometimes you'll even need to move immediately into 12-hour Truce upon exiting BP just to buy yourself a little more time.

So if you can't depend on resources when you'll never have enough to compete with your opponents on a financial scale, with a third of the cities and tiny resource fields with pitiful techs . . . does this mean we shouldn't enter a developed game period?

No. There's another way, and it's right in front of your nose.

When players are that wealthy, the price of resources will be inflated, making it tempting for you to make lumber farms and sell off the resources. Don't. All you get for it is gold, which is nice, but it won't buy you all the building upgrades and troops that you need - those cost resources.

What does happen is ridiculous spreads in the marketplace that occur when a fabulously wealthy player is getting attacked by a bunch of other fabulously wealthy players. With huge resource production and the ability to recover quickly if he can just fend of this attack, he's can afford to buy resources for more than their true marketplace worth. For the sake of immediacy he will not wait for a "buy" order to go through, he will simply purchase the resources he needs at the Sell (Offer) price. And he's not wrong in doing so - if he won't pay the inflated price, he risks his Buy order not filling quickly enough, or getting outbid by another player. Meanwhile if his opponents are willing to purchase resources at retail prices, they will be able to mount defenses and launch attacks faster.

So you see people buying food for 15 (wholesale price) but selling it at 30 (retail price). This spread is a chance to double your money. So you become a Daytrader. At the beginning it won't seem like that much. But if you keep doubling your income, and by the end of 7 days of Beginner Protection you'll be constanting producing troops out of 3 cities with 14-20 rax each, with 3 academies in constant research, wall defenses constantly queuing from your walls, and immediate liquid wealth that far exceeds that of any midlevel player and rivals the reserves of many of the top players (in truth this is actually one of the pitfalls of this strategy, and we'll talk about that later).

The Art of Daytrading Companion Guide

Is now available here, a spreadsheet which contains important calculations for profit margins in the marketplace, net worth converted to adjusted prices for food or lumber, army train time projections and comparisons, and more:

http://rapidshare.com/files/342217706/wreckoning_s_TAD_companion__v_1-0.xls.html


Day 1
The Build

Here's what you do. When you first enter the game, follow the quests to build your first farm, lumbermill, ironmine and quarry. Get up the Inn, Feasting Hall, Marketplace. Keep your Town Center at level 2 for the first 4-5 days of BP. Stay there as long as you can; you gain far much more prestige for things when your Town Center is this low, and you'll want a higher prestige for getting into a good alliance.

From one of your amulets you'll probably get 40k worth of food, iron, or wood. (Hopefully not gold or stone). Get your marketplace up if it's not already, sell the excess of whatever you got, now look for some spreads. It doesn't matter what resource the spread's occurring in. Stone tends to take the longest to sell but yields the highest spreads, so if you are just trying to get some starting capital and don't mind the wait while you do some other stuff, you can put in some bids on that. Once you have made a couple trades to turn your pitiful holdings into a bit more, you want to make your start in food. Food buys and sells the fastest, and you want your little snowball to pick up speed. Don't hold much for reserves at this point. Your snowball isn't worth protecting, and the more times you throw its entirety down the hill, the better result you will tend to have at the end of your seven BP days.

So you trade, and then you build. Your build will follow a similar transition as other players who are using the low townhall strategy. Your resource fields should be one farm, quarry, and ironmine; the rest are all sawmills; build sawmills until the income they provide is completely irrelevant to you, and at that point stop building them (yes: STOP), and just build things like barracks upgrades, relief stations and so on. Build things that you are going to use right away. You technically won't need an embassy or beacon until your eighth day, so stall those as long as you can. Put barracks in the spaces that an embassy or beacon would occupy. On the 6th or 7th day, demolish these and replace them with the embassy and beacon. Build wall upgrades as overnighter projects or when your wall defenses have capped out.

Rax/Cottage Ratios

Where the cottage/rax ratio is concerned, you want to err on the rax heavy side. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. Basically all of your wealth will come from daytrading and you will STOP building sawmills after the initial first few days; so almost your entire population will be idle; plus your attack heroes in the beginning of the game will be very weak, and you will be able to get a lot of use out of the limited idle population you do have. The more success you have had as a daytrader, the more juicy of a target you will have become for your opponents; your great dilemna towards the end of BP is that of turning your resources into fighting power so that the threat of your defenses is more of a challenge than the reward posed by attacking you. The truth of the matter is that in no way will you be able to fully protect your treasure; but this shouldn't stop you from investing your resources in every way you can think of. We will discuss the rest of what you'll need later.

In the beginning, you need more cottages, maybe 8-10, because they will be capped out at level 3; once you can upgrade your town hall, start demolishing cottages and turning them into rax, until you have only 5-6 cottages per city.

Established server vs newly merged server

When I say "merged server", I mean the regular merged servers such as n4, etc, as well as the superservers such as ss1, and I mean when they are first merged. If they had been merged for a couple weeks or longer, then it counts as "established" to the purposes of this guide. What happens is, all of the old players are given free food for a couple of days, and truce for seven days. You want to get on this merged server on the first or second day of the merge; the purpose being to get a feel of the marketplace, and to build your capital so that you will be ready for the "Big Bang." The first day you will amass a capital, then each day you will double it; on the Big Bang there will be mass inflation and swings, although your capital will be approximately halved in value due to the inflation, from the swings in the marketplace you will be able to increase your capital by 1500% or so depending on how much time you can devote to trading that day. What happens is, players have vast armies that they are unable to feed from NPC farming, since the NPCs do not exist in enough quantity on the map. This means all sorts of chaos and bloodshed which ultimately translates to wide swings in the marketplace. When I tested this, "Santa's Milk And Cookies" meant that players were able to offset some of the side effects of the merge. Perhaps where that is not a factor, the Big Bang will hit sooner.

Just before the Big Bang, you want to start amassing all of the top three resources (food, lumber, iron). Even if there is a steady upward inflation trickle, keep buying; your gold is quite useless after the Bang.

The other benefit of the merged server is that as you grow to intermediate and then upper level player status, everyone will assume that they never heard of you because you came from the other server. What this means is they can make no assumption about you, and they tend to be more respectful of you, whereas on the established server, they assume that if you were someone to be feared, they would have heard of you.

However you may choose to join an established server, in which case these strategies will still apply, with less impressive numbers. Perhaps on a merged server you could pick up 1.4M prestige but on an established server you pick up 1.1M. Of course even the established server will have marketplace swings as wars happen; but you will not be able to predict them as well as you can the Big Bang, as well other traders will have a good sense of where prices should be, whereas people in general are very confused about what should happen in the marketplace after a Bang.


Daytrading Life

When you first start daytrading, pay attention to the spreads and moving prices on all the resources. Pay attention to prices, yes, but your most important goal right now is to find good spreads. If people are buying food for 20g and selling it for 40g, and you buy a whole bunch of food at 20g with the intention to resell it at 40g, but then the prices plummet to 10-20g, don't hold onto your food. Sell it back at 20g, and buy it up again at 10g. The reasons for this are twofold: 1), the doubling up function of daytrading needs to be very active in the early days to combat with the sacrifices you'll be making now and later; 2) on this unknown server you won't know the actual prices of things (and don't bother asking others what the true prices of resources are; for unless they are professional daytraders like yourself, they just don't have a clue). So yes you saw the food selling at 40g so it's natural to think in your mind that the food is now "worth" 40g. But you weren't buying the food at 20g because you thought it was worth 40g; you were doing it because you saw a spread, you saw the ability to be simultaneously buying and selling the same resources for prices that give you a vast profit. If you'd joined the server and seen prices of 10-20 you'd certainly be happy with the spread you saw. So don't get stuck on prices early into the game. Develop your starting capital by buying and selling wherever there is a decent spread and don't be worried about taking a loss here and there. If you make somewhere between 40-100% of your money back most of the time, you'll be doing just DANDY and can afford to take a few losses in the interest of keeping the ball moving and not getting yourself stuck.

Don't be in a big rush to build up your marketplace right away. Get a couple of sawmills up and producing to help with your starting capital. Sell the lumber and use some of that revenue to invest in the spreads that occur on food and stone. Upgrade your marketplace only when the level at your current marketplace is driving you completely batty. The marketplace upgrades take a very long time on the higher levels so you will probably opt to leave BP with a level 7 marketplace out of your first city.

In the Academy, the first researchs you want to tech up are Lumbering and Construction. The reason is because of course these techs will start paying back dividends right away. Get everything you need for a high level Construction, because you're going to want to leave BP with three cities. That's a lot of building! At the end you're going to have so much resources that you've made yourself a huge target. You can afford to build an army and defenses, but you won't have enough time to turn all your wealth into material fighting power. The more cities you have, the more rax you get, the faster you can turn your moolah into troops. Research the first few levels of Lumbering, up to maybe level 6 or 7; don't bother with the higher levels that take awhile, since by the time you are able to research those higher levels, the difference in lumber income should be completely meaningless to you.

Look for spreads

As we said before, look for spreads and don't carry prejudices from fluctuations that have occurred in the span of hours. Try to be simultaneously buying and selling the same resource: this enables you to invest your entire capital without worrying about losing much. You sell 500,000 units of food for 40, and food goes up to 49 - well technically you missed some profit; but since you at the same time purchased 500,000 new units of food at 20, you just sell the new food at 49, and even if the wholesale price of food to buy is now at 29, you are now able to buy 689,655 new units of food. And so on.

Levy for wood, pray it back for prestige

Since lumber will be well over 1g in an established server, you want to levy for wood every time you can possibly remember to. As a little bonus, you can then immediately pray which gives you a fairly significant amount of prestige when you have a small amount of low town halls.

Day 2
Establish a float and stick to it

Daytrading when you first get into it is addictive and exciting. It's fun to watch your wealth double continuously; but remember that your wealth won't defend you at the end of your seven days. You'll need an army. So try not to let your trading interfere with your production queue. Monitor how much resources you need to sustain production and make sure you keep within safe limits. Set a float goal for each of the resources so that you never have to wait for a marketplace shipment to arrive for your next building upgrade.

Remember that gold needs a float too: you want to have enough gold on hand that you will be able to immediately sell your next marketplace shipment. So be careful with the "max buy" button in the marketplace when you're placing a buy order that demands all of your available gold.

0% Tax

By now gold should be meaningless enough to you that the idle population is worth more than whatever gold income you could get from taxing.

Mass Troops

You should have enough resources by now that you can keep a steady stream of troops mounting. Do so. Build archers and warriors - you'll need these for medal hunting in the valleys, since the Rose Medals are a pain (and you'll want to upgrade to Knight before you upgrade your town hall and get the Newbie package which yields rose medals).

Hero Farming

When things are not too exciting in the marketplace and you are waiting for orders to complete, hero farm. Do this by hiring heroes in a level 1 inn, then firing them from your feasting hall. What this will do is allow you to cycle through heroes, firing ones that you don't like. This is very boring and tedious but it is also the very best way to hero farm. It's also the most expensive and time consuming, but you can easily afford the gold in the lategame economy, and as for time, well hey, it's not any worse than farming NPCs. Get the hero farming started early, because your main mission right now is to find one solid attack hero (base 68+), and one really solid intelligence hero (base 68+). Keep all politicans over 66, keep only one intelligence hero - the highest rated one you can find, a 68+ guy (do not believe the stuff about intelligence heroes improving medal drop rates in valleys.. it's been proven otherwise); keep all attack heroes 62+ (you can made this more strict for the attack heroes, if you have limited feasting hall room, or decide to commit to a lot of hero mining).

Medal Hunting & Leveling Up Heroes

Tomorrow you'll want to build your 2nd city, so make sure you have the medal requirements to get to Knight. This will consist of making a few hundred very boring valley attacks. Do these with your best attack hero, your intelligence hero, and then your best politicians so they gather the XP. Your attack hero you are going to rotate across cities for now when you queue up a batch of troops; the politicians are important not for resource production but for faster construction builds. Your intelligence hero is of course super important to you right now.

Day 3
Build your 2nd city, turn it into your main trading city

Now most of the early-prestige guides recommend that you should wait until your fourth or fifth day to create your second city; however, that is because they are using strategies which cannot afford to be constantly queuing troops out of 13 or so new barracks. You can, and so it makes sense to get that new city up, and you may even choose to do it on your second day if trades have been going well.

Now with your second city, keep the town hall at level 2 of course. Build the one farm, quarry, ironmine as needed. Do not build any sawmills. Build the market to level 2 so you can start some stone trades going to get things rolling, then build all the rax and get them to all to level 2 or 3. At which point upgrade the marketplace a little further and transfer your trading wealth over to the second city which will now become the main trading city. The main feature of the trading city is that it contains farms instead of sawmills. Now obviously we'd rather build sawmills since they are twice as profitable, but due to the resource cap, the trading city which builds lumber will always be at 0 production. However if you have an army which costs 2 million/hr to feed and produces 1 million food/hr, the production number is subtracted from the army's food demand first, and then the remaining balance outstanding is applied to your food balance. So your production of 1 million food/hr goes to feed the army, whereas if you were growing lumber, it would be worth much more but you wouldn't get to actually have it.

Another solution would be to grow lumber and not trade it so you don't cap out, but as we'll show later, that would be a very bad idea, since lumber is about the most profitable thing you can trade.

So in your trading city, get the marketplace up a bit as needed, then build up the barracks some more, and the relief station (VERY important in your main trading city, to get this as high as you can, at least to level 6 by the time you leave BP) . . . if things ever get satiated, in those free spots you can build the farms and upgrade them. Farms, for what they're worth, at least do not take much time to build.

What about location? Build it 10-15 miles away from your first city. This looks really far on the map, and it feels very far when your relief station is a low level, but trust me, it's not that far. Cities built on top of each other is the strategy of shortsighted players who do not realize that crunched up in a ball they can assist fewer allies, be assisted by fewer allies, have a much tougher time locating and defending resource valleys, and have far smaller pools of NPCs to farm from. What's more, anyone who decides you are a worthy target will be able to locate all of your cities.

As a trader, you want to stretch out. You'll be wealthy, and thus a target; don't give your enemies the dibs on your locations for free. You'll be shipping lots of resources back and forth between cities, and it'll be annoying in the beginning ... but never fear, you are a transport spe******t. It will not be long before you have good relief stations, and scout and cavalry teams which can carry a lot of resources in a timely pace.

Now with your first city, you can use it to trade everything except lumber, or you could have it trading only one commodity to make things simpler, or use it to trade the slower-moving stone or stone+iron. It's really up to you on what to trade, but do keep those marketplace slots full, even if they aren't as well-maintained as the slots in your main trading city.

Don't Blink

It can be painful at times to look at the trader's fees in the marketplace when they run you for millions of gold. But remember that it's only .5% of the post - so for each successful trade you have to pay out a 1% commission. But your profits will be much higher, so don't hesitate to cancel an unfilled or partially filled order if it's taking up a slot space that could be occupied by a superior order. Especially when things in the marketplace are happening quickly, you will lose a lot of gold from all of the canceling and rebidding. Just accept it; it's part of the dues you pay out as a trader, and don't let it slow you down from making the most optimal choices.

What should I be holding, gold or lumber?

This is a tough question to answer. When you're holding gold, you can be crippled by inflation. When you're holding resources, you do well if there is inflation, but perhaps what is more significant, you cannot be knocked out of the trading game. IE 100M lumber will always have intrinsic value, even if the prices were to drop, there will still be spreads, you can still sell your lumber at the new retail price and then buy it back at the new wholesale price.

Gold on the other hand, doesn't have much intrinsic value; it doesn't feed an army; it doesn't create an army; the only thing gold really does is help liquify your other resources and help create radical marketplace swings. So holding onto gold doesn't really get you much except a bit of trading power; it is the staple of a daytrader and ultimately you will amass it simply because it's easier to sell resources than to buy them; but what you specifically hold onto is probably more about style than strategy.

I personally recommend holding onto everything; I have my floats that I need to maintian production, but I also have trading floats that I try to maintain for every resource, to protect myself from market swings. Lumber is the best resource to mass, because it is very swingy, yields high profit margins, and is very easy to sell. Food is a cool resource to mass, since if you can't sell it, you can always eat it or give it to allies. Iron is a poor resource to mass, because the margins are not as good as lumber (they often look better, esp in games where iron is cheaper to buy, but when examined they are not), and it's far harder to sell than lumber.

The stone defense

This defense is great for nonmerged servers in particular, but also merged servers, where stone sells for less than the price of gold. Often you'll find such disparities as a wholesale price of .01 and retail of .98. What you want to do in these cases is, when you have free marketplace slots open, maintain a wholesale order of stone, and keep renewing it. Your goal is to have your stone wealth become greater than your gold wealth as an anti-plundering device. If you are on a merged server, when the Big Bang happens stone will likely skyrocket above the price of gold; in which case gold will become your plundering deterrent; and you are forced to sell the stone (tho never let it use a slot you could occupy by another resource).

Day 4
Upgrade Town Hall and Build your third city

By now things should be really taking off. Most of the guides recommend keeping your town hall at level 2 until Day Five, but at this point you have been building enough troops and taking enough losses in the valleys that your attack hero is good enough to really be using up that idle population (from your small number of cottages) and you can also easily afford to queue troops out of another 16-20 rax. So get that third city up. This will be a normal city; so it will be on sawmills, although you will delay the actual building of sawmills until you've got the rax up; also be quick on the feasting hall upgrades since if you've doing some good hero farming, you'll want the space.

Creating your own spreads in the marketplace

By the fourth day, you should have enough cash wealth, and enough knowledge of going market prices (if you are on a newly merged server, your knowledge of the going rates will be far superior to that of regular players; for merge is accompanied by skyrocketed inflation, and the regular players won't have their minds adjusted quite yet to the inflation, and will chronically view all resources as "grossly overpriced"). It is time to do more than play the available spreads. For sometimes, there simply will not be a playable spread on a given resource.

What to do then? Create your own.

What this means is you are going to buy out the top and the bottom. Say food is wholesaling at 11,12,13,15,20, and retailing at 22,23,28,29, creating a 20-22 spread, and you believe the true value of food to be 20. What you can do is sell to the wholesale 15,20 orders, and buy up the 22,23 retail orders. The spread is now 13-28. You then place a wholesale order of 14, and a retail order of 27. Now the prices you've set are still reasonable; you haven't raised the true price of food; anyone can tell from looking at the spread, that the true price is probably in the 20ish range. So you merely created a spread which probably exists there most of the time anyway.

Now if you create a spread, you take losses in profit, either directly or indirectly from not selling the resources to their fullest retail potential; you do it because otherwise, the marketplace is stagnant and you cannot buy or sell anything. However if you make the spread, I believe you should monitor it and keep the orders filled as best you can; also defend the spread, because often one or two small orders will come along, and if they don't move then they mess up what the price looks like to the next person, and that second person may intentionally undercut the listed price. So buy out anyone who comes along provided their batch size isn't too great, and reap the profits of the spread you created.


What about largescale dumping of resources?

IE, say lumber was retailing at 60 and wholesaling at 30, and you tried to sell a bunch of lumber 40, trying to lower the price of lumber so that you could buy it up and then sell it the next day once prices had returned to normal. This is generally not a good idea at any point in your trading career. It's far easier to raise the price of something than the lower it. A few reasons: people of course never desperately need gold but they do desperately need food/lumber/iron. People buy resources because they desperately need them, or they sell resources they have overstock of so they can buy other resources they desperately need. Either way they buy, so you are more likely to profit from a short term desperation event if you are raising prices.

So let me repeat: it's easier to sell resources than to buy them... which means that if you raised the price on something, your high "buy" order will last longer than your sell orders; you take a smaller profit on the "buy" in order to gain multiple large profits on the "sell"; if you reverse dump, you will have to renew the "sell" order several times, just to get a few "buy" orders which may not come through anyway. For reverse dumping to work, you need people who have stockpiled tens of millions or hundreds of millionds of lumber and food, and who urgently need to sell them at the precise moment you initiated the reverse dump. But people don't stockpile like that, they are trained not to as they know it makes them targets; the only ones who can do it are the exceedingly wealthy with fast armies; but those players are few and far between, and while you will see them dumping when they have emergencies, it's unlikely to happen at the exact time when you desire it happen.

Day 5
Adjust your floats up, but still spend resources

With three cities, one semi-independent (your first city) and the other city almost completely dependent on shipped resources (because of all the damn troops you are creating from its rax), it is absolutely critical that you do not go under your float on a resource and get screwed. If you set your iron float for 10 mil, and iron skyrockets, don't sell unless you've already lined up a a purchase and it's being shipped to you. You need those resources to feed your troops and your weak cities! Don't forget that you have a lot of capital wealth but your main source of iron right now is the market! Don't allow yourself to run out of a resource so that production stops ANYWHERE on the line. Above all else, whether you ultimately decide to be primarily gold based or lumber based, DO NOT BREAK YOUR GOLD FLOAT. If a disaster happens, prices rise, you run low on something and can't afford to rebuy wood at 80 because you spent it all on food that was selling at 10 ... this is the real disaster, to have cities not producing while you scramble to sell food or iron so you can buy wood.

At this point, you should have a ridiculous amount of gold and resources. You should be constantly queueing up troopsout of 12 rax ... so now what? Get more rax. YOU MUST SPEND THOSE RESOURCES. They are no good to you sitting around waiting to get plundered, build an army to defend them! Destroy the cottages you built - it doesn't take long - and replace them with rax until you only have 5-6 cottages.

What resource should I be trading?

You should trade every resource that looks profitable of course though at this point stone may not be worth the slot space to you. Food is the most volatile of all the resources, followed by lumber and then iron. You started off in food because of the volatility; once you are passed that stage though, crunch the numbers in the spreadsheet I'll provide to see what is the most profitable. When you are wealthy enough to be completing full batch orders of 9,999,999 resources, which you should be by Day 5, the most profitable trades become the highest priced: in this case, a lumber trade of 9,999,999 will earn you twice as much gold as a food trade of 9,999,999. So pay heavy attention to lumber because it will ultimately earn you the most.

Day 6
Talk to Alliances

Your prestige should be now quite high and you should be able to get into many of the top 20 alliances; however the fact that you are in Beginner Protection, and that anyone can see you are in Beginner Protection, with such an enormously inflated prestige, means that one of the top ten alliances may see you as a strong potential, and may allow you to join.

Do take care as you join an alliance; have a look at them all, whether they are warmongering, peaceful, skilled diplomats or friendly casual players or whatever; decide which style of game you wish to play, for you can be a daytrader and play any style (except casual, probably) in any type of alliance. In the beginning of my game, I was a warmongerer at heart, but I joined a peaceful local alliance initially, because I didn't want a red flag flying to further mark me as a target. Once my wealth was surpassed only by my army a few weeks later, I joined a small elite war alliance.

Don't Get Scouted

7 days, three cities and weak attack heroes will not build the kind of army you need to defend yourself. If you get scouted, you're dead in the water, is the main point. So build archers and warriors to fend off completely pathetic attacks, and so you'll have troops to attack valleys and also to have waves for an NPC 10 on around Day Ten... but as far as defending yourself goes, don't even try. Your best bet at this point is to mass scouts, and this way, no one will ever find out what you have. The numbers will vary depending on your game, but basically you want to leave BP with about 200k scout in your main trading city, gates open at all times of course. Then put your actual troops in the other two cities, close the gates, and try not to allow resources to accumulate in those cities until you can afford to put scouts in there.

Scouts are a cool unit tho. They are great for shipping; 100k scouts can carry almost 1 million res; and you'll use your scouts later for scouting other players, honour dumping, fast valley defense, and so on.

If your trading city gets scouted in these early days, depending on whether you were scouted by a hostile, someone far away, or whatever, you are probably going to have to teleport and change the city name.

You'll find other players speaking casually of getting scouted, and other alliance members may tell you to close your gates and let the opponent scout you. But they do not understand your full situation. At this stage in the game it is absolutely critical that no one find out how juicy and ill defended you really are. And of course a trading city is never "just a city" to you, at this point! It is not expendable; it is your game and your livelihood.

Day 7
Final Preparations

This is what you want as you end beginner protection:

- an alliance! One that is going to have nearby reinforcements.
- masses and masses of scouts, supported by archers and warriors
- medal requirements, AND a valley already picked out and captured, so that you can immediately commence the building of your fourth city once you leave BP. Tip: if you send workers or transports full of resources to the valley spot and leave them there when the city is building, the city will have lots more resources waiting for you to start building right away

Day 8
Get your fourth city up

This is pretty self explanatory; it will be your fourth lumber city; build it as soon as Beginner Protection ends, get the rax up, and start queuing troops. Put a beacon on it as you intend to defend it; but leave out a marketplace - you have enough fast shipment options from your trading cities that it's unnecessary for this city to have to buy anything on its own, additionally, you would rather have the marketplace square for another barracks. Also leave out an embassy square for now, although you may choose to build one back in a couple weeks later.

Depending on how well you worked on leveling up your hero, you probably don't have a suitable number of scouts to cover your big cities which has amassed wealth; so continue to work on that, plus training more archers and warriors.

Play the Big Bang on merged servers

This could also be on Day 7 or Day 6 of your journey, depending on when you started. But as discussed earlier, this is one of the main beauties of the merged server, the day when the trucing ends and all hell breaks loose. Remember that when the marketplace changes massively, play the spread, and forget your old ideas about specific prices. Buy back everything that you sell, and resell, even if the buy price of resources is 4x higher than you're used to seeing them, and continue to double your wealth until the spread is gone.

In my game, the Big Bang turned my wealth - 30 billion Gold, valued at .9 billion lumber or 1.8 billion food, and changed it into 500 billion gold, which with the adjusted inflated lumber and food prices, became worth 2.4 billion lumber or 5.5 billion food. Although I continued trading over the next few weeks, it also represented the peak of my wealth, as my escalating costs met that it was hard to grow in capital from then on. However in my game I was slow to develop my other forms of potential income; and for you I hope it will be different.

Commence training Ballista Armies

Try to get your first Ballista armies together as soon as you can. Their main purpose is to not to get food, but just to build XP for your main attack hero, intelligence hero, and main politician (who will be passed around for big city build projects like level 9 walls and relief station). I don't really recommend farming them; you'll annoy your allies and get on the radar of enemies/neutrals. One area you could farm in, is if you capture a player city and inherit some surround NPC 5s.

Week Two

Capture an NPC Level 10 for your fifth city, and turn it into your secondary trading city

A few days after leaving BP, ask an ally to help you take over an NPC 10. He can take out the army and send some loyalty waves a few seconds apart; work with him so that you send in about ten waves at the end of his thirty or so waves, right after his, two seconds apart per wave.

Like all players you'll use the NPC for the level 10 workshop, stable and forge of course; but you should also keep this city. With its full field of Level 10 farms, it makes for a trading city with a powerhouse resource production capacity: the best of both worlds. With the 10 farms and lakes having a substantial bonus, it's almost as good as a field full of sawmills. One of the drawbacks of the NPC city is that as a bigger castle on the map, it tends to draw more attention from curious scouts than your other main trading city which is more of a "sleeper city" ... however your prestige, though high for your age, will still be low compared to the game, and you may not be scouted at all, players of your prestige level not generally having the type of wealth you do. And no, the level 10 walls are not going to help you defend your trading city any better. Walls will not hold back the greedy predators who will seek to take you out.

Cavalry as transporters

Remember how exciting it was to ship millions of resources to your allies via masses of Scouts? The second fastest unit in the game at 1/5th the speed of Scouts, they are nevertheless able to carry 18x more than scouts (technically they carry 20x more, but they eat 3.5x more, and they have to carry their feed with them, so they have less free load). Cav are a good unit to have around; they'll help wear down loyalty on enemy cities you are trying to take over, decimate archer attacks from hostiles without giving you too much honour; they are expensive to build and feed so they will help consume some of your bulging wealth; and of course the fast transport between the cities of yourself and allies.

Long Term Trading

When you first start as a trader, you are daytrading, buying and selling the same resources within a couple of hours, looking for the fast profit. But once you can no longer dump the entirety of your capital into a handful of trades, and you are familiar with the marketplace trends and true prices of items, you can start buying things with the intention of selling them the next day or in a couple of days when you believe that prices will rise again. It's harder to buy than to sell. Therefore you should be constantly buying whenever there is a remote chance of profit; but be willing to sell only when the price is right.

Predicting future trends & the 2:1 price ratio rule

In a developed lategame economy, lumber will be roughly twice the price of food, and iron will be close to lumber. Therefore as your trades stretch out longer, and you can afford to stockpile resources in the interest of maximizing profit, you'll want to be able to predict where things are headed. One is by watching the ratios. If the food spread is 98-120, and lumber is at 140-170, you know there is something wrong; either food is overpriced, or lumber is underpriced. Now if iron was at 200-250, then we could be sure that lumber was underpriced; if iron was at 145-165, then we could figure food is likely overpriced, though we would also use judgment from previous prices we had seen in the marketplace.

Whenever prices shift radically due to a powerful event, such as in the Big Bang and afterwards when prices find a new balancing point, we use the 2:1 price ratio to help determine what will be a healthy price for each resource.

Inflation, though it shocks and puzzles nontraders, does not actually affect them the way it affects traders. At the end of the day the actual price of resources does not matter to the regular player. He sells lumber and buys food and iron; and as long as the 2:1 price ratio is maintained, it matters not to him, whether food is 100 or 1000. If he logs on and prices have risen, it doesn't matter to him, since he didn't have gold, he had lumber growing in his fields, and that lumber is still there in his cities and worth approximately the same purchasing power when it is traded in for iron and food. So remember this when you are waiting for prices to "fall." Prices can rise whenever there is a shortage of a resource; but price falls happen with much less dramaticism, over much longer periods of time.

Talk about Trading

Depending on how soon you had access to this guide, to what degree it has become known and with what expertise its policies and recommendations have been implemented and improved upon ... you may or may not have your work cut out for you.

The first thing I should say is that if the knowledge is still relatively unknown, do not talk about it with others, including your alliance fellows; do not allow yourself to become betrayed and your city locations given out until you can defend yourself somewhat, and have eaten much of your wealth. This will happen on the fourth or fifth week, and then there is much less risk to you, to trading talk. Exceptions could be made if your alliance is particularly small and close knit; with close members you trust; or also if you joined a small and friendly alliance who is at war with no one, and thus there are no alliances to send spies to discover juicy targets.

Now if you do talk about trading, you will find many players simply refuse to believe the value of what you are saying; or they will say it takes too much work; or can't compare with the wealth of NPC farming; or so on. One player told me that he did not have a marketplace in any of his cities and when another alliance member informed him of my fabulous wealth he replied that he "didn't need gold." Such thickheaded stubbornness will be your friend. Gold of course was the measure of my wealth given to him by my ally, but gold = any other resource in the game obviously, and creating wealth in the marketplace doesn't net you gold, it nets you lumber and food as well, and no one ever has "enough" food or lumber. Not to mention, if you didn't have a marketplace period, you must be growing your own stone and food, which is beyond silly.

There are other misconceptions. Some people will consider themselves having a bit of "side income" on the marketplace, but this will mainly consist of them selling an unexpected surplus of a particular resource when they notice that prices have gone up abnormally. They will then take the gold, hoarding the profit.

But being a trader is so much more than that.

Whether you decide to talk about trading on your server and to what extent is up to you. However if there are not many traders and you introduce the concept to your alliance, I strongly suggest setting up some trading protocols. The rule I established with the one alliance member who actually took up some of my trading practices was this: we would end all our bids with the key ".6".. therefore if I wanted to sell food for 139, I would sell it for 139.6, or if I was buying food at 90, I would buy at 90.6. My friend would see the key and he would know not to outbid me, therefore we would not fight with each other in the marketplace, but could work together to achieve the same goals. If he wanted to also buy or sell, he would simply match my bid, and I would do the same for him. If you set up an alliance of traders who are all trying to undercut each other, you do a lot of harm to the marketplace. However if he was not online, I would not use my key, and vice versa, since we didn't want it to always be visible in the marketplace, since other people start using it for some reason, and then we can't tell which key is legitimate.

Take a sixth city

What you want for your sixth city is up to you. You could take another NPC city to use as a trading city, but you have two trading cities and you won't be able to sustain fulltime trading out of all three for much longer, plus NPCs take a long time to get to full rax production. You could look for a player city that is ex-NPC, tho quite often these don't have as many rax as you need either. You could look for a regular player city of sawmills or close to 100% sawmills which you could convert.

Trading Protocols & the protection and maintenance of the Marketplace

Just as undercutting alliance members does harm to the marketplace, by shortening the available spreads for everyone to show a profit off of, so does getting into squabbles with other traders. Do not be the jerk who is undercutting everyone by tiny fractions. There are a few reasons for this: 1) It's freaking annoying 2) It antagonizes other marketplace users and encourages them to just do it right back to you which essentially solves nothing 3) It alerts other traders to your presence; if they constantly are seeing this small undercut all the time, will know it's always coming from the same person, and while they may not be able to hunt you down and attack you for your lame business techniques, they may decide to try to mess with you in other ways, primarily by using the same tactics against you or selfishing closing the spread themselves 4) It alerts nontraders to your presence, makes them begrudge and fear the marketplace, and may even deter them from doing business in it

Now if someone is undercutting you, I suggest undercutting them by a real bid, because quite often it's not a real trader but someone who doesn't understand trade etiquette. If it is persistent, you may decide to leave them alone, and see how long they trade for, for some people only trade once in awhile. The one time it's worth fighting for is if resources are moving steadily, and you can monitor the marketplace. In which case you should undercut the obnoxious trader, using smaller orders than you regularly would, since you'll be canceling a lot when he undercuts you.

If things are selling slowly, but you decide to close to spread on him to deny him of his profits, undercut him in larger sizes but smaller batches so you close the spread quickly but don't pay too much in transfer fees. Depending on where the spread falls compared to what you believe the true price of resources to be, you may be able to lure him into bidding or selling for more or less than the true price, at which point you can dump on him. IE if lumber was retailing at 300 and wholesaling at 200, and you believe lumber's true price to be 250 (you would never pay more than 250 for it, or sell if for less than 250), and the enemy trader was selling at 299.9,you could try to undercut him until his price was around 220, and then buy all his lumber. If he is also buying lumber (and you'll be able to recognize him since he is stupidly using the same trademark on both ends), this will not be possible with the current spread since in his mind he will not want to sell for as close as he's paying for it; but let's say you though lumber was underpriced, and the true price was actually 290; then you could lure him down to 260, or 250, and buy his lumber, planning to keep it and sell it back at 350 when prices return to normal. It is by tricks like this that you will be able to take advantage of players who make a poor use of Daytrading knowledge.

But I will impress again, you do not want to get into scraps with other traders; it is destructive to the marketplace. As a trader you will work the marketplace, take great profits from it, and so you must maintain it also. You are like a national bank that watches the currency, stabilizes it, protects it, with your hand dipped in its pockets all the while of course.

So you will discourage marginal undercutting from other traders; through the creation of spreads you will allow healthy profits to be made in the marketplace for yourself and others; and although you take cuts off of everyone who trades with you, you will be a stabilizer in the market. For sometimes a wealthy top player, or a small war, will dump or buy up a particular resource, and unintentionally create a pricing anamoly; or another trader, or an alliance will purposefully do it, to try to achieve a certain price line. You will be there to subvert them and restore order. In my third week, lumber was retailing at 300 and wholesaling at 210ish. I logged into the marketplace to see a wholesale order for lumber at 295 for 300,000,000 lumber. Now of course no one person ever needs 300M lumber ASAP; if they wanted a fast transfer of wealth between two cities, I would have to think they would just pay the 300 for it; so I have to assume it was an alliance pooling together their monies to try to accomplish a rise in the price of lumber. Checking the prices of food and iron I found that they were priced normally; plus the large buy order indicated of course that there was somethign screwy going on. So I quickly dumped everything I had on the alliance - 180,000,000 lumber; unable to completely dispose of their buy order, but enough to cripple it, and the marketplace took care of the rest before they were able to achieve their goals. Had they been experience traders, they would have known that a big wholesale bid is not enough; you also have to buy out the top end, create a spread, maintain, and do it all in such quantities that you have to figure other traders on your server will not be able to stop you.

Sometimes, to hold pricelines, you will choose to underbid a wholesale order, or overbid a retail order. IE if food is wholesaling at 80,81,89, and retailing at 139,150,152, then you may choose to bid wholesale at 82, and bid retail at 149, figuring that the prices will soon enough reach you, and preferring the prices to be in that direction, but choosing not to buy out the top and bottom end because you are planning on logging off anyway. Or if you have to move a vast quantity of wealth, IE setting up a new trading city you will buy up a capital of lumber, then ship the lumber to the new city, and sell it there; in these cases you must be careful to buy it slowly and sell it slowly, otherwise you will cause short swings in the market which cost you money.

Now what about inflation? In the end it doesn't really matter to you if there is inflation going on or not; you will adjust accordingly. You will always have a lot of gold, and the more worthless gold is, the more ridiculous it will be for those that plunder you. But since people won't plunder, but take your cities, this perk isn't very helpful. However you'll still have so much gold stockpiled, and you won't be able to keep it constantly invested because of the seven figure cap; in that case much of your wealth will be in gold, and so you prefer there not to be inflation, but for prices to be steady, that way you will know the pricelines intimately, and be able to manipulate them quite well, without having to try to guess with imperfect information.

Week Three

Get a seventh city

At this point, a player city is probably easier. Look for one with high level barracks and lots of sawmills, and NPC 5s or NPC 10s around it.

The rise of the Rax cities

So now you have seven cities with two or three being trading cities; then the other cities will be almost entirely dependent on shipments including lumber; and still you will have so much resources that you are unable to spend.

I was able to help this problem out with the creation of rax cities: my seventh and eighth cities were placed in adjacent squares to two different cities; I then created in the rax cities six cottages; a forge and workshop then deleted the forge; a upgraded the feasting hall to level 3 then I deleted the inn; an academy (upgraded high enough to be able to build archers). And that was it. There was no beacon since I didn't intend to defend it, and no relief station since all of the troops only had one square to move. The resource fields had the one farm, quarry and ironmine, but after that there was no production; so I used my building time to upgrade the walls for the prestige, and once they were at level 9 I deleted the workshop and replace it with a rax, giving me 23 rax in total. It's only a couple of more rax, but I had two such cities, and all of my cities had a lot of rax to begin with, so this was just another way to maximize troop production. One of the good things about the rax cities is that they offer more troop production capacity, but have low town halls, which mean you get more prestige. With no resource fields at all, having a level four or five town hall is totally fine, combined with the six cottages and building archers. The entire time, as well, build AT in the walls; what this does is deter random small plunders, since you won't have any kind of army there; but most importantly the AT give prestige, and are cheap at this point for you to build.

The moment you really need a city slot, of course, just abandon one of the rax cities.

Developing your economy

At this point, your politicians and troop training speeds have improved significantly. If you have NPC 5s already built around you, build ballista armies to farm them even if you don't feel you need the food, it's a nice side income; upgrade the sawmills in those first cities you built and go that extra effort to make sure your valley slots are maxed out and level 10 with forests and lakes.

Week Four

Prinzessin

At this time you should have amassed enough archer and warrior that it is time to work on being a Princess. If you haven't been already, start farming NPC 10s around you with your best hero, using war horn, excalibur and level 10 rally spots. The losses will be high, but the food income will mean a lot to you and the XP for your hero will be great. Once you reach Princess, save the city slot for the creation of more NPC 10s, or build/take a new city then abandon one of your rax cities. If you have many teleporters, you may choose to keep one of the rax cities and simply teleport it away from its life of dependency on the city it was built next to.

So that is the basic guidelines!