Agriculture Commodity Shop

We’ve now introduced an agriculture commodity shop where players can buy and sell select commodities. You’ll find the price of these commodities will change based on two factors.

The first is a long-term slow change based on commodity input and output. The base selling and buying price will slowly rise or lower depending on the creation and use of those commodities over time. The goal here is to reach equilibrium for these commodities.

The second is much more short-term. It depends directly on how many commodities are bought or sold from this shop. The more you buy, the higher the selling price will go. The more you sell, the lower the buying price goes. These prices are independent of each other (IE: selling a lot of wood will not decrease how much they sell wood for). If nobody is buying a commodity, the price will lower over time and if nobody is selling, the buy price will rise over time.

The price changes are something we will be monitoring closely. We will adjust them as we see the actual use. The end goal is that the actual use of commodities will determine the price. The higher in demand and the lower in supply, the higher the cost. The larger supply and lower demand will be a lower cost etc.

The new commodity shop’s stock limits purchases or sales to 50 commodities at a time, but will instantly restock if the current batch is bought up. There is no limit on how much you can buy a weave.

A couple of other changes – we’ve equalized all the base prices of commodities to 500 gold per. We know this a lot for some of these commodities but this is to start everything off on an equal playing field and allow the market demands to set the prices. The current base prices do not reflect the ease of generation and the needs of the market. Another reason for this higher price is to limit an initial buying surge.

We’ve also adjusted all city and commune commodity shops ‘sell’ prices to prevent players from taking advantage of this price change to make easy gold. These can be adjusted by the Trade Minister or City/Commune Leader to whatever price they would like.

Again, we’ll be monitoring this closely for the time being and seeing how things play out. This is a complex system and seeing it in action will allow us to assess differently than we were able to during testing. As we feel comfortable with everything, we will be releasing a second shop, with prospecting commodities.