Help:Marketplace
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The market place is where non-local economic activity happens. It is frequented by region lords (and their stewards) as well as traders.
Trade Basics
Trading is done in two steps:
- Someone offers to either buy or sell a certain amount of food for a certain price
- Someone else accepts the offer
That is all there is to it. Please note that all trades are all-or-nothing matters - you can not buy or sell a part of an offer. It might make sense to split up your offers into several batches because of this, so instead of offering 500 bushels for 100 gold, you might want to offer 5x 100 bushels for 20 gold each.
Trading Locations
If you are a region lord or a steward, you can always trade when you are inside your region, whether or not it has a market place. However, if it does not have a market place, the trading distance will be halved.
If you are a lord, steward or a trader, you can also visit market places and trade there. Simply go there and check for available offers.
This is how you trade with remote lands - you need to get to a market place that is within the trading distance from the place you want to trade with. Trades are still conducted from and to your region (unless you are a trader, see below). Usually, you do not care where exactly the food you desperately need comes from, in which case you simply visit a nearby market place and check the offers.
Trader Brokerage
Traders can only broker deals, meaning they can merge multiple buy and sell orders and complete all of them in one act. These brokerages always have to even out, i.e. sell and buy orders must sum up to the same amount of food. As you are only brokering a deal, you have to make them match. You can not broker deals at a loss, you have to make a profit.
Trading Distance
Since this is a medieval game, distances matter. In trading, the trading distance simulates how well you are connected and thus how far away you can see open offers. Trader characters will have a much greater trading distance than others.
Bankers can see all trade offers posted within their realm, but can only act on them according to the rules outlined above.
Diplomacy
You can not trade with regions that your realm is at war with. Neutral parties can deal with partners who are at war with each other, so if your realm is neutral to two realms who are at war, you can buy from one and sell to the other. If you are a trader, you can broker deals between parties at war, as you act as a kind of "clearing house", and neither party will ever know who they actually traded with.
When posting offers as a lord (or steward), you can also restrict the offer further and limit it to either allies or members of your own realm only. Note that this restriction is checked with regards to the person doing the trade, so a traitor trader inside your realm could well trade your food outside your realm still. There is no perfect security in trade. That said, with a tiny bit of effort, it is easy to catch such traitors, so you should not be worried.
