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Town Hall 5: the Chamber of Commerce, zoning, shops and the sales phase.
Once a city reaches Town Hall Level 5 it can build a Chamber of Commerce and start zoning land for shops. Merchants from across the realm then open businesses on that land, import goods to sell, and the city's resident families buy them. The shopkeeper earns the profit; the city collects a small tax on every sale.
It is the piece that finally makes residents pay their own way. Up to now families have been something your city spends on — housing them, feeding them, keeping them happy. Now they are also customers.
Reaching Town Hall Level 5 raises your whole city's building ceiling to Level 5, and it asks for two things. The first is a flat bill of materials and treasury — flat meaning it does not grow with your population, so a big city and a small one pay the same. The second is the interesting one: 3 units of each luxury good your city does not produce. For most cities that is eight of the ten.
The test inverts from Level 4 on purpose. Level 4 asked you for the luxuries you make yourself — proof you were running your own industry. Level 5 asks for all the ones you can't make, which you can only get by trading for them. That is the right entrance exam for a tier whose entire content is a marketplace: a city that has never traded with anybody cannot buy its way in. /build lists exactly what your city still owes, and the building encyclopedia shows the full Level 5 cost.
The rest of the city follows, and those upgrades want luxuries too. Your Trading Post, Market, Bank, Library and Hunter's Lodge can each go to Level 5 once the Town Hall is there — and on top of the materials each one lists, every upgrade from Level 4 onward asks for 5 units each of a few luxury goods your city does not produce. The count climbs with the level: Level 4 draws two kinds, Level 5 keeps those and adds a third. They are drawn per city, so no two cities owe the same ones — the encyclopedia tells you how many to expect, and /build names yours.
Your Chamber of Commerce decides what your city is open for business in. Each level of it lets you zone two more kinds of shop, so a Chamber at Level 5 can host all ten. Zoning is done from /city → 🏬 Commerce, by the Mayor or the Minister of Zoning.
Which residential zone should you build next? Open /city → 🏬 Commerce → 📊 Demand. It shows what one full zone of each tier is worth in your city: what it pays the city treasury, and what it pays you personally through any shops you own there. Those two can point at different tiers — a Grand Villas zone pays the treasury most, while the tier that earns you most depends entirely on which shops you have opened — and the panel marks both rather than pretending there is one right answer. It also folds in a quick reference for which class of resident shops where, so you can see why a Silversmith needs Grand Villas and a Tailor does not.
💡 The tax a city collects on shop sales was raised to 5% — so housing more residents is now a meaningful way to grow your treasury, not just your prestige.
Zoning is permanent. Once you have zoned a type of shop, it stays zoned — you cannot take it back. That is deliberate, and it is there to protect the merchants: someone who spends their own gold building a business in your city should not be able to lose it to a decision they had no part in. The trade-off is that the order you zone in matters early on, so pick the shops your residents can actually use first. It is not a mistake you can make permanently, though — a Chamber at Level 5 hosts every type eventually, so a poor early choice costs you time, not the shop.
Each shop type serves particular residents. A Tailor sells work boots to Cottage families; a Silversmith sells to Grand Villa residents only. Zoning a Victualler in a city with no Grand Villas gives you a shop nobody can buy from — the zoning screen tells you how many families in your city would actually shop there before you commit.
Zoned land is built the same way a residential district is: your city contributes the materials over time, and the zone opens for business when it is finished. While it is building, the Commerce screen lists exactly which materials it still needs, so you can see at a glance whether it is progressing or waiting on something you have run out of — and the 🏗 Needs tab of /resources lists it too, alongside your build project and any districts going up, so everything your city is short of sits on one screen. Your hourly report names it as well — each zone still going up shows what it is short of that hour, the same way a building project does, so you do not have to go looking to find out why one has stalled. Those materials come out of whatever your city has spare above its reserve floor, and only after your residential districts have taken theirs — families are fed before shops are built.
The reserve floor is set from the Commerce screen too. It is the cushion your city never builds below, and it is the one number that decides how fast a zone goes up — so the button sits right there on 🏬 Commerce showing the current figure, and you no longer have to go over to 🏘 Districts to change it. It is the same floor either way: there is only one, and moving it moves what your districts, your standing hunting parties and your commercial zones may all spend. Lower it to pour a thin stockpile into your builds faster; raise it to keep more back for your own crafting and exports.
Your hour report follows the build the whole way. Under the Residential Districts section you'll find 🏬 Commercial zones: how far along each zone being built is, what the build drew from your stockpile that hour, and a line the hour a zone finally opens for business and a merchant can set up in it. So you don't have to go looking for progress — it comes to you, the same way a district going up already did.
Once a zone is open, the Commerce screen tells you who is trading on it. Each open zone lists the merchants who have set up shop there by name, or says no merchants yet if the land is still waiting for someone. That is the other half of the picture: zoning is an invitation, and this is how you see who accepted it — which of your zones are earning your city sales tax, and which ones are sitting empty because no Tycoon deals in that good yet. Busy zones show the first few names and then how many more there are.
Everything to do with shops lives on /tycoon, under the 🛍 Shops and 📊 Market tabs.
/queue panel as well as from 🛍 Shops. You buy the goods with your own gold from outside the realm — it never touches your city's stockpile, and it never spends Letters of Credit. One run tops up every shop you own in that city, so a Tycoon with three shops in one place makes one trip, not three — and only pays for the shelves that actually had room.Picked the wrong trades? You get one reset. Every Tycoon has a single, one-time trade reset that clears your picks so you can choose again — a correction for anyone who committed before the picker showed what the market looked like. Shops you have already opened keep trading: they keep their stock, keep earning, and you can still run Supply Runs to them. All that changes is which trades you may open new shops in. There is no second reset, so spend it when you know what you want.
An empty shop earns nothing, and that's the whole rhythm of it. Demand only ever goes to shops holding stock, so a shelf you've let run dry simply doesn't get served — the customers go to whoever is stocked. Nothing bad happens, you just earn nothing until you restock. It also means an abandoned shop isn't blocking anyone: if a rival's shop is empty, that's your opening.
Your hour report warns you before it happens, and tells you when it has. Two different messages, doing two different jobs:
The compact one-line report carries both warnings too, shortened to counts — "⚠️ 1 shelf sold out · ⏳ 2 shelves low" — with the sold-out alert first and your shops' takings after them. Choosing the short report shortens what you're told, never what you're told about.
Neither replaces the standing picture: 🛍 Shops and the Supply Run screen are still where you see every shelf at once and act on it.
A shop's stockroom is sized to the trade it actually does. Every good has its own full-lot figure — Fresh Bread's is far larger than Silver Service's — and that figure is both the biggest single delivery a shop can take in and the most it can keep out back. The space isn't yours to extend by hand: the building belongs to the city that zoned it. The Supply Run screen shows your stock against your shelf line, like 233/267, so you can always see how much room is left.
The fewer rivals selling your good in a town, the deeper your stockroom. This is the part worth understanding, because it runs the opposite way to how it sounds. When you're the only shop in town selling a good, every buyer comes to you — so you sell roughly four times as fast as a merchant splitting a market with three rivals, and a shelf of the same size would run bare four times as often. So a shop with no competition is given a stockroom to match the trade it does: up to four times the standard lot, tapering back as rivals open (on your own, four times; sharing with one rival, twice; with three or more, the standard lot). The upshot is that a full shelf lasts about as long whoever you are — cornering a market is a reward, and it shouldn't cost you a supply trip every other day to hold.
Because it follows the current state of the market, your shelf line moves when the market does: a rival opening in your town will lower it, and one closing will raise it again. It never drops below the standard lot for the good, and nothing you have already bought is ever taken off your shelf — if a rival opens while you're stocked above the new line, you simply keep what you have and buy nothing more until it sells down.
The Supply Run screen tells you which city needs the trip. Each city you own shops in shows how many of them are empty (an empty shelf earns nothing at all — demand only ever goes to shops holding stock), roughly how long the stocked shelves will last at the rate families are buying, and how many units it would take to fill everything back up. The list puts the city that needs you most at the top: empty shops first, then whichever will run dry soonest. Anything inside two days is quoted in exact hours — "31 hours of stock", not "about a day" — because that's the range where the answer to "can this wait?" actually changes. Past two days it rounds to whole days, always rounding down, so the shelf never has less time than the screen promises.
Big portfolios read a page at a time. Once you own more shops than fit on one screen, 🛍 Shops and 📊 Market Research split into pages with ◀ Prev and Next ▶ buttons, and a line telling you where you are — "Showing 13–16 of 16 shops · page 2 of 2". Nothing is ever left off: every shop shows its own stock and every market its own demand, on whichever page it falls. Your shops are grouped by city, and a city is never split across two pages — the cities with an empty shelf come first, since those are the ones owed a trip. Each Restock button sits with its own city's shops and stocks every one of them.
The sizes are marks to fill up to, not amounts to add on. A Supply Run offers you a quarter, a half or a full shelf, and buys the difference between what's on the shelf and the mark you picked — so you only ever pay for what fits. A shop already sitting at its line costs you nothing and is quietly left out of the run; a bare one gets the most. That's why a run across a full shop and an empty one is billed for the empty one alone, and why a nearly-full shop shows a small, cheap top-up instead of another whole lot.
Every size earns the same profit per unit — filling right up isn't a better rate, it just lasts longer. Since all of them cost the same single queue slot, the real cost of stocking deep is the gold tied up in it: money sitting on a shelf is money not stocking your other shops.
A queued run says which size you picked. In your /queue panel a waiting run reads 🛍 Supply Run (half) — 3 shops in Buzz Hollow, so when you have runs lined up to several cities you can tell at a glance which is the quarter and which is the full — handy on the one screen where you reorder them or drop one.
Short on gold when the run fires? Every shop gets the same share. A run you can't fully afford still goes ahead and gives each shelf the same share of what it needed — it never spends everything on the first shop and leaves the rest empty. The screen shows you what your current gold actually buys before you commit.
So there's no universally right answer, and which way you lean will change as you grow. Short on gold but with queue slots to spare? Spread thin across several shops. Rich but short on slots? Buy big and check in less often.
The screen also estimates how long a lot will take to sell. Treat it as a snapshot of current conditions — it's based on how many rivals are stocked right now, and it changes the moment anyone else restocks or sells out.
The 📊 Market tab is free research. It shows every city that's zoned a trade you deal in, how many families live there who'd buy it, and how many rivals are currently stocked. Rivals means other merchants — your own shop is never counted as one, so a city that reads no stocked rivals is one you have entirely to yourself.
The number worth watching is unserved demand. When families want something and no shop has it, that demand builds up against the city — and it doesn't disappear. Open a shop into a backlog and you inherit it: your goods sell faster than normal until the city catches up. A starved market is the best opening you'll find, and the Market tab is how you spot one before anyone else does.
Every sale pays the host city a small sales tax into its treasury. That's the mayor's entire return for zoning the land — there's no licence fee and shops don't affect happiness in either direction. The tax comes out of what the residents spend, not out of the shopkeeper's profit, so hosting merchants never costs a Tycoon anything and never costs the city anything either.
It's paid every hour and it appears in your city's report.
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