jsc29
Active Member
Between Iron Age and Colonial I traded very actively and it was the primary way for me to make income in Forge of Empires. At one point I was running 300 listings at a time for over 15,000 goods, averaging 50 goods per trade. I was turning over about 7,500 goods per day at a 10% profit, netting me around 750 goods every day. Every night it took several hours to go through my trades and post new ones. If this sounds like fun to you, then read on.
The first thing I did when I started trading was to determine the relative demand for goods, because that would help me know which goods might command higher prices than others. What I did is go through the tech tree and add up the total amount of each good required for research per age. I also looked up how big the production building that made the goods was as well. This is important, because the bigger the production building, the harder it is to build it and the fewer of them there will be. Below I show an excerpt of my spreadsheet which I called "Goods_Required":
The second column records how much of the good my guild had in its treasury. For example, at the time of the snapshot the guild had about 16,000 Copper in the treasury. The fourth column has the number of tiles the production building takes up. For example, a Ropery is a 2x3 building so it takes up 6 tiles. The next seven columns show how many of each good the age shown requires for research. For example, to research all the technologies in High Middle Ages (HMA) takes 60 granite. The two columns on the right indicate my preferred up trades and down trades for each good, based on all the statistics and my general experience.
The next step for me was to determine my market demographics. I tallied up the total number of friends and guildmates I had in each age. This is useful information because you can only trade with three types of people: your neighbors (who are mostly the same age as you), your friends and your guildmates. This is your market population. So, for example, if you have 50 people in HMA in your market, but only 5 people in Colonial, then there will be a lot more demand for HMA goods, than Colonial goods.
So, in planning which trades to post and at what prices all these of these factors play into it. For example, if you notice my guild did not have very much granite, which is not surprising because the granite-producing building, the Granite Mason, is bigger than the other goods manufactories in EMA, so there are fewer of them. Therefore, I would generally both pay and charge a slight premium for Granite. Also, notice that one of my preferred downtrades is Ropes for Granite. So, there I am trading one of the easiest to make goods for one of the hardest.
Notice that research for an age requires goods from four different ages. This is very important, because it means that people in higher ages need lower age goods to do research. For example, to complete all the research in Colonial (CA), requires 30 Gold, which is produced 3 ages lower in EMA. That means you can often trade goods as much as three ages up, what I call a "skip generation" trade. For example, I might offer 60 Gold for 30 Coffee, the most plentiful of the CA goods. If the system allowed greater than 2:1 ratios I would probably have preferred to offer a 60 for 20 trade, but the system limits your trades to 2:1 at most.
There is no fixed price that works perfectly every time. I experimented and used a lot of different price schemes in ratios, but I always let the spreadsheet be my guide to figure out which trades to post and whether to charge more or less. I generally considered there to be four different kinds of trades that can be posted: (1) Up trade to the next age, (2) Down trade to the next lower age, (3) Equal Age trade, and (4) Skip Generation trades (already mentioned), which I always did only in the up direction. Below I describe the typical pricing schemes I used for each type of trade, but be aware that the prices that worked for me on my server (Uceria) might be different than what works for your server. Also, the size of your market is extremely important. If you are in a guild with only 10 people and only have 15 friends, that is going to make your ability to make a profit much more limited. You should aim to maximize your market: 70+ neighbors, 80+ friends, 70+ guildmates.
(1) Up Trades. When trading up my most common ratio was 70:40, which is very close to market value on my server. However, by trading more common goods for rarer goods I could squeeze a little extra profit out of the trade.
(2) Down Trades. Down trades are the toughest, because people tend to need lower age goods, not higher age goods. A typical down trade ratio I used a lot was 30:50 or 30:55. It's not good to set up trades for a lot more than 50 units from the buyer, especially in the lower ages.
(3) Equal Age Trades. I generally always asked for a profit of 5 goods for an equal age trade. For example, do you see the Herbs for Ropes+ trade in my spreadsheet above. That "+" means I would trade Herbs for extra Ropes. So, for example, I might offer to trade 40 Herbs for 45 Ropes. Note that since Ropes are relatively easy to make because the building is smaller, there are always lots of people eager to trade Ropes for Herbs and will gladly pay the 5 good premium. Now, you might say, well if they are so eager, why not charge them 40 for 50? Because of volume. If you can do three 40:45 trades for every one 40:50 trade, you are actually making more total profit, even though the amount of the profit on each trade is less. Volume is critical. You want to set your prices, so you are maximizing volume and just taking a little slice of it. Don't be greedy or you will actually make less money in the long run. Sometimes I would do equal trades if one good is a lot better than another. For example, I would sometimes do even money trades of Honey for Granite, but this was a profitable trade for me, because Granite is a lot more valuable than Honey.
(4) Skip Generation Trades. The biggest profits were in the skip generation trades. The key here was to figure out what the higher age player needed and what they had an excess of. For example, from the table you can see that players researching the Industrial Age (IA) need a lot of bricks. However, the demands for Coke in IA are relatively small, therefore a common trade I would post is 70 Bricks for 35 Coke.
The final piece of the puzzle is to make what I called sideways trades or conversions. The idea here is convert a relatively unmarketable good for one that sells well. For example, in the trade in the paragraph above, 70 Bricks for 35 Coke, it sounds great because it is a double skip, but there is problem: you are stuck with Coke. The whole reason the guy is happy to do such a trade is that Coke is in relatively low demand. So, what do you do? Here is where the magic happens. You trade 35 Coke for 40 Rubber. The reason for this is not just to make the 5 profit, but Rubber is way more in demand than Coke, so you can easily move it. Even if you do a straight trade of Coke for Rubber, it is good because the Rubber will sell fast. You are converting a slow moving good to a fast moving good. Of course, you have to make the spreadsheet to know which goods are in demand.
There is a second way to get rid of the Coke and that is to find a multi-age imbalance. So, for example, in the case of Coke, one such imbalance is that Modern Era needs Coke a little bit, but does not Paper at all. So, what you do is downtrade Coke for Paper. If you have a lot of ME players in your market base, then that trade will execute quickly. Once again, to spot these multi-age imbalances, you need to look at your spreadsheet and find them.
To sum up, the whole key to trading is to create a demand spreadsheet, like I show above, then use it like a map to tell you which goods will trade well for which other goods. For example, ME players need Coke a lot more than they need Paper, so you trade the Coke for Paper. But CA players need Paper more than they need Coffee, so you trade the Paper for Coffee. PE players need Coffee much more than they need Whale Oil, so you trade the Coffee for Whale Oil and so on.
One last thing to be aware of is that it is a lot harder to trade at the higher ages past the Future. The reason for this is that high-age players can make tons of goods by fighting in GBG, so that they have a more limited incentive to trade, especially in the upwards direction. Therefore, the profits to be made trading in the higher tiers are smaller. On the plus side, you can do larger trades with the higher age players. In BA and IA, you don't want to trade more than about 30 goods at a time. At EMA, HMA, LMA it is more like 50. At the mid-tier ages trades of 70-90 do alright and in the upper ages you can do 100-200 at a time.
Good luck trading!
(P.S. The reason why I no longer trade is that I make more by doing GBG and sniping [see my guide on sniping] than I used to make trading. Once you have a level 80 Arc, sniping becomes very profitable. Also, once your attack values start getting above 250/250, if you belong to a high-end fighting guild, you can make a lot of FP and goods by doing GBG. So, these two factors created a situation for me where trading was a less effective use of my time. Note that before I got high attack values I could still do well in GBG because I had so many goods. By negotiating I could turn goods into FP. The same thing is true in GE: you can negotiate to get troops and FP as the rewards.)
NOTE: This guide was originally posted to the Guides section of the forum so that other people who wanted to do advanced trading could find out how to do it effectively. A moderator moved it here for reasons unknown (because he hates trading and traders? I don't know). Anyway if you would like to have it put back in its proper place, please message the mods about it.
The first thing I did when I started trading was to determine the relative demand for goods, because that would help me know which goods might command higher prices than others. What I did is go through the tech tree and add up the total amount of each good required for research per age. I also looked up how big the production building that made the goods was as well. This is important, because the bigger the production building, the harder it is to build it and the fewer of them there will be. Below I show an excerpt of my spreadsheet which I called "Goods_Required":
The second column records how much of the good my guild had in its treasury. For example, at the time of the snapshot the guild had about 16,000 Copper in the treasury. The fourth column has the number of tiles the production building takes up. For example, a Ropery is a 2x3 building so it takes up 6 tiles. The next seven columns show how many of each good the age shown requires for research. For example, to research all the technologies in High Middle Ages (HMA) takes 60 granite. The two columns on the right indicate my preferred up trades and down trades for each good, based on all the statistics and my general experience.
The next step for me was to determine my market demographics. I tallied up the total number of friends and guildmates I had in each age. This is useful information because you can only trade with three types of people: your neighbors (who are mostly the same age as you), your friends and your guildmates. This is your market population. So, for example, if you have 50 people in HMA in your market, but only 5 people in Colonial, then there will be a lot more demand for HMA goods, than Colonial goods.
So, in planning which trades to post and at what prices all these of these factors play into it. For example, if you notice my guild did not have very much granite, which is not surprising because the granite-producing building, the Granite Mason, is bigger than the other goods manufactories in EMA, so there are fewer of them. Therefore, I would generally both pay and charge a slight premium for Granite. Also, notice that one of my preferred downtrades is Ropes for Granite. So, there I am trading one of the easiest to make goods for one of the hardest.
Notice that research for an age requires goods from four different ages. This is very important, because it means that people in higher ages need lower age goods to do research. For example, to complete all the research in Colonial (CA), requires 30 Gold, which is produced 3 ages lower in EMA. That means you can often trade goods as much as three ages up, what I call a "skip generation" trade. For example, I might offer 60 Gold for 30 Coffee, the most plentiful of the CA goods. If the system allowed greater than 2:1 ratios I would probably have preferred to offer a 60 for 20 trade, but the system limits your trades to 2:1 at most.
There is no fixed price that works perfectly every time. I experimented and used a lot of different price schemes in ratios, but I always let the spreadsheet be my guide to figure out which trades to post and whether to charge more or less. I generally considered there to be four different kinds of trades that can be posted: (1) Up trade to the next age, (2) Down trade to the next lower age, (3) Equal Age trade, and (4) Skip Generation trades (already mentioned), which I always did only in the up direction. Below I describe the typical pricing schemes I used for each type of trade, but be aware that the prices that worked for me on my server (Uceria) might be different than what works for your server. Also, the size of your market is extremely important. If you are in a guild with only 10 people and only have 15 friends, that is going to make your ability to make a profit much more limited. You should aim to maximize your market: 70+ neighbors, 80+ friends, 70+ guildmates.
(1) Up Trades. When trading up my most common ratio was 70:40, which is very close to market value on my server. However, by trading more common goods for rarer goods I could squeeze a little extra profit out of the trade.
(2) Down Trades. Down trades are the toughest, because people tend to need lower age goods, not higher age goods. A typical down trade ratio I used a lot was 30:50 or 30:55. It's not good to set up trades for a lot more than 50 units from the buyer, especially in the lower ages.
(3) Equal Age Trades. I generally always asked for a profit of 5 goods for an equal age trade. For example, do you see the Herbs for Ropes+ trade in my spreadsheet above. That "+" means I would trade Herbs for extra Ropes. So, for example, I might offer to trade 40 Herbs for 45 Ropes. Note that since Ropes are relatively easy to make because the building is smaller, there are always lots of people eager to trade Ropes for Herbs and will gladly pay the 5 good premium. Now, you might say, well if they are so eager, why not charge them 40 for 50? Because of volume. If you can do three 40:45 trades for every one 40:50 trade, you are actually making more total profit, even though the amount of the profit on each trade is less. Volume is critical. You want to set your prices, so you are maximizing volume and just taking a little slice of it. Don't be greedy or you will actually make less money in the long run. Sometimes I would do equal trades if one good is a lot better than another. For example, I would sometimes do even money trades of Honey for Granite, but this was a profitable trade for me, because Granite is a lot more valuable than Honey.
(4) Skip Generation Trades. The biggest profits were in the skip generation trades. The key here was to figure out what the higher age player needed and what they had an excess of. For example, from the table you can see that players researching the Industrial Age (IA) need a lot of bricks. However, the demands for Coke in IA are relatively small, therefore a common trade I would post is 70 Bricks for 35 Coke.
The final piece of the puzzle is to make what I called sideways trades or conversions. The idea here is convert a relatively unmarketable good for one that sells well. For example, in the trade in the paragraph above, 70 Bricks for 35 Coke, it sounds great because it is a double skip, but there is problem: you are stuck with Coke. The whole reason the guy is happy to do such a trade is that Coke is in relatively low demand. So, what do you do? Here is where the magic happens. You trade 35 Coke for 40 Rubber. The reason for this is not just to make the 5 profit, but Rubber is way more in demand than Coke, so you can easily move it. Even if you do a straight trade of Coke for Rubber, it is good because the Rubber will sell fast. You are converting a slow moving good to a fast moving good. Of course, you have to make the spreadsheet to know which goods are in demand.
There is a second way to get rid of the Coke and that is to find a multi-age imbalance. So, for example, in the case of Coke, one such imbalance is that Modern Era needs Coke a little bit, but does not Paper at all. So, what you do is downtrade Coke for Paper. If you have a lot of ME players in your market base, then that trade will execute quickly. Once again, to spot these multi-age imbalances, you need to look at your spreadsheet and find them.
To sum up, the whole key to trading is to create a demand spreadsheet, like I show above, then use it like a map to tell you which goods will trade well for which other goods. For example, ME players need Coke a lot more than they need Paper, so you trade the Coke for Paper. But CA players need Paper more than they need Coffee, so you trade the Paper for Coffee. PE players need Coffee much more than they need Whale Oil, so you trade the Coffee for Whale Oil and so on.
One last thing to be aware of is that it is a lot harder to trade at the higher ages past the Future. The reason for this is that high-age players can make tons of goods by fighting in GBG, so that they have a more limited incentive to trade, especially in the upwards direction. Therefore, the profits to be made trading in the higher tiers are smaller. On the plus side, you can do larger trades with the higher age players. In BA and IA, you don't want to trade more than about 30 goods at a time. At EMA, HMA, LMA it is more like 50. At the mid-tier ages trades of 70-90 do alright and in the upper ages you can do 100-200 at a time.
Good luck trading!
(P.S. The reason why I no longer trade is that I make more by doing GBG and sniping [see my guide on sniping] than I used to make trading. Once you have a level 80 Arc, sniping becomes very profitable. Also, once your attack values start getting above 250/250, if you belong to a high-end fighting guild, you can make a lot of FP and goods by doing GBG. So, these two factors created a situation for me where trading was a less effective use of my time. Note that before I got high attack values I could still do well in GBG because I had so many goods. By negotiating I could turn goods into FP. The same thing is true in GE: you can negotiate to get troops and FP as the rewards.)
NOTE: This guide was originally posted to the Guides section of the forum so that other people who wanted to do advanced trading could find out how to do it effectively. A moderator moved it here for reasons unknown (because he hates trading and traders? I don't know). Anyway if you would like to have it put back in its proper place, please message the mods about it.
Last edited:
