Trade - What is the Benefit?

Trade, what is it? Trade is the transaction between 2 players, between 2 of your own cities, or between one of your cities and a farming village on the same island as the city selected.

--- Trading with your farming villages can help balance out a resource deficiency. i.e. your on a - rock island so you trade 2000 wood for 2500 rock. To trade with a farming village, your market needs to be on level 5.

--- Trading with other players can help when doing bigger projects, such as trying to build up a LS nuke or stock your cave with silver. But, unless during the first month of a world, I try to stay away from trading with those outside my alliance at our allies. To trade with someone else, your market needs to be at level 10 or higher.

--- Trading between 2 of you cities is a good way to mass produce an army. I like to cast Call of the Ocean or Population Growth on my city  when I'm ready to do a lot of building, then, once I've used all the resources up in the city, send the max amount so that I can put the speed-up spell to good use. Later in the game this is the main way of "trading" as you should have enough cities to be self-proficient and have more than enough resources to put 100 LS in the queue in 3 different cities in one day. I recommend building up your market in each city to at least 15, in many of my safe cities they are at level 30 so that I can send the maximum amount of resources each time. (this is more efficient and gets more there in a shorter amount of time)

Trading is also used to a high extent to help boost front line cities that are constantly being used for either offense or defense as they are almost constantly rebuilding. Sending resources from your safe cities to your front line should be a daily occurrence. If you are aggressive like you should be, you'll need it to keep up with the rebuilding that you will be doing. Cities that are dedicated to building LTS are great cities for sending resources from once they have all their defense built and sent out as they won't have anything to build unless the LTS dies.

In the World Wonder Era your entire alliance will be sending everything they can to the WW's in order to get them built first. It is especially important at this time to have your market on lvl 30 and have the special building Merchant built in about half of your cities to help you send even more at a time.

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To see just how much trade plays a part in the game, lets look at what will happen if you aren't trading and moving resources around to where you need them.

--- If you can only send 5000 at a time, and your TT to the city your sending to is 4 hrs, it'll take you 20 hours to get 20,000 of ONE type of resource there. On the flip side, if you are able to send 10,000 at a time with the same TT, it'll only take you 8 hours. You decide what is most efficient and effective.

--- When WW Age rolls around, sending 5,000 at a time isn't going to help very much. But, if you are able to send 22,500 (that is with your market at lvl 30 and Merchant built) that is quadrupling your sending power and cutting the potential TT by over 4 times. If you are able to send 22,500 2x a day, that starts adding up pretty quick. Especially if half or more of your cities are doing it.

--- You lose a LS nuke on your front line. You spend the next 30 days using that city's resources to rebuild it. On the other hand, if you had first filled the warehouse, cast CotO, and then kept filling the warehouse up ,(be careful you don't waste any by overfilling at any time...) you could potentially get more than 100 LS in the queue building at half of the normal build time (or almost at 80% off the normal if you use a 30% less build time spell from a quest)

As you can see for yourself, trading has the power to turn the potential build time of a LS from +30 days to about 2 or less weeks (no gold involved) or to significantly help you alliance in the WW race. Many people don't realize the importance of trading and thus some of their true potential is lost as they are constantly having to stop and wait for a month for nukes to rebuild.