🏙 UrbanPact

Trade Between Cities

Trade deals move resources between city stockpiles every tick. No city produces everything — especially at the top end, where each city can only build 2 of the 10 Tier 3 specialty buildings — so trade is how cities fill the gaps.

How a deal is made

Deals are negotiated, not imposed. Only a city's Mayor or Trade Minister can negotiate:

1. Open /trade and tap 📤 New trade offer. Pick the city, what your city will send each tick, and what you want in return — or offer a one-way gift. Typo'd an amount? Resources you've already added stay in the picker with a ✅ — tap one again and your new number replaces the old one, no need to start the offer over.
2. The other city's leaders get the offer with three choices: ✅ Accept, ✏️ Counter (change the terms), or ❌ Decline.
3. Counter-offers bounce back and forth — each round the other side gets the same three choices — until someone accepts or declines.
4. On acceptance the deal goes live and runs every tick until either city's leadership ends it from /trade.

💡 You can't lose a half-built offer. Stepping back out of the offer builder — or closing it and coming back later — keeps everything you'd picked. /trade shows it at the top as 📝 Unfinished offer, with ▶️ Resume your offer to carry on and 🗑 Discard when you actually do want to throw it away. Inside the builder, « Back now steps up one screen rather than dropping you out, so fixing an amount doesn't cost you the rest of the offer. (One limit: a draft you started while representing a different city can't be resumed or sent — it would commit that city's stockpile — so start a fresh offer from your current one.)

💡 For a one-time exchange, the Review screen checks whether the other city can actually cover what you're asking for right now — if they're short, it warns you (naming the resource and how much they hold) before you send, so you're not putting them in the spot of having to decline. It's just a heads-up: you can still send, since their stockpile may change before they accept.

💡 Each deal carries a number. It's realm-wide, not a count of your own deals — so your city's list can read #7, #43, #48 with gaps, and that's normal. The point of it is that both cities on a deal see the same number, so it's what to quote when you're talking a trade over with the other side.

📜 Trade history

Every delivery your city's routes have ever made is on record. Open /trade and tap 📜 Trade history — any member of the city can look, not just the Mayor and Trade Minister.

• 📜 Recent — every shipment, newest first, showing what moved, which way, and who with. Page back as far as you like.
• 🔁 Routes — one line per standing arrangement, with what it moves per tick and everything it has moved in total. Routes that have been paused or ended stay listed with a marker, since they still moved real goods.

💡 Your hourly report shows the first few shipments of each hour and then points here for the rest — a busy city can run dozens of deliveries in a single tick, which is more than one message should try to hold.

The rules

• Both sides move together, or not at all. If either city can't cover its side of the deal that hour, the whole exchange skips that tick — no one-sided drains.
• Establishing a deal is free. Amounts go up to 500 per transfer per side.
• Any resource can be traded, including Treasury and crafted goods.
• Rare (Tier 3) goods travel by caravan, not by the hour: any deal that includes a Tier 3 resource transfers once a day at the daily reset instead of every tick — the whole deal, both sides, so they still move together. The trade review screen shows a live "next transfer in about N hours" countdown so you always know when it's coming, wherever you are.
  Why they're slower, and why you can't speed them up: a wagon of timber can go out with whoever is on the road that hour. A crate of diamonds cannot — it travels under guard, and an escort is assembled once a day, not on the hour. That's a property of the goods rather than a setting on the deal, which is why there's no per-deal cadence to choose: picking "hourly" for luxuries would mean sending them unescorted. It also isn't a stand-in for a missing feature. Rarity is meant to be felt in time as well as in price — a luxury economy where a caravan lands every hour is just an ordinary one with better-looking icons. The rule follows the goods, so anything rare enough to need an escort moves daily and everyday materials keep moving every tick. If you need luxuries sooner than the caravan, that's what one-time offers are for — they settle as soon as they're accepted.
• Completing at least one tick of a trade route you negotiated earns the 🚢 Trade Route medal — a requirement for Entrepreneur tier.
• 🚉 Cities can only receive so much per day. A city can take in a limited amount of each everyday material — and Treasury — per day via trade and gifts (rare Tier 3 luxury goods aren't capped), as much as it has the rail yards and warehouse crews to unload — and that capacity grows with its Town Hall level. This keeps an Industrial-Era (Town Hall 4) city's huge output from instantly funding a smaller town's whole build order. Industrial cities are effectively uncapped with each other; the limit only bites on very large shipments arriving at pre-Industrial towns, and no everyday deal should ever reach it. An over-limit shipment simply waits — send it in smaller loads or over a few days.