🏙 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.
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.

💡 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.

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.
• 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.

Export Market

Once your city has a Customs House, you can sell surplus resources directly to outside merchants each hour for Treasury. It's the city's release valve when your stockpiles outpace your build needs.

How it works

You configure a reserve per resource — the minimum you want to keep on hand. Each hour, anything above that reserve is automatically sold to an NPC buyer for Treasury. Nothing happens until you explicitly enable a resource; everything is off by default.

Merchants only buy whole 1,000-unit stacks — they're not interested in odd handfuls. If your surplus above reserve is less than 1,000, nothing sells that hour; it just keeps building in your stockpile until it crosses the next 1,000-unit line. That means your reserve is really a floor you keep, not an exact number your stockpile gets trimmed back to — you may sit a bit above it while a part-stack accumulates.

1. Open /export. Resources are split across a 🔵 Tier 1 / ⚪️ Tier 2 tab selector at the top — tap a tab to switch between your raw goods and your crafted goods. Each row shows the resource, its reserve, and a 🔒 Max button.
2. Each resource's button leads with its name and a status dot: 🟢 means it's currently exporting, 🔴 means it's paused. Tap the button to flip it.
3. Tap the 📝 reserve button on a row to set how much to hold back — type the number of units. You can type it loosely: 99,000,000, 99 000 000, or shorthand like 99m and 2.5m all work.
4. Want to keep everything and never export a resource? Tap 🔒 Max on its row — one tap sets the reserve as high as it goes, so surplus never ships (the reserve then shows as 📝 All).
5. Setting a lot of them? Each tab has 🟢 Enable all / 🔴 Disable all and a 📝 Keep-all button that apply to every resource on that tab at once, instead of one at a time.
6. That's it. Every hour, any full 1,000-unit stack above your reserve auto-sells and the proceeds land in your city Treasury.

Safety check: enabling a resource whose reserve is still 0 would sell your whole stockpile of it (in whole 1,000-unit stacks) — so both a single toggle and 🟢 Enable all ask you to confirm first, telling you exactly how much of your stockpile would actually ship. Set a reserve to skip the warning and keep what you need.

Prices and priority

Prices are quoted per 1,000 units — a single Timber or Plank is worth a tiny fraction of a Treasury coin, so nobody's selling six of them. Each price reflects what that good is actually worth to produce: how much Treasury your Town Hall could have earned in the time it took to make it instead.

• Your price depends on your own Town Hall level. A resource is worth what your city gave up to make it — and that changes a lot as your city grows. An advanced (Town Hall 4+) city's buildings produce far more of everything per hour than an earlier city's do, without its Town Hall earning nearly as much more Treasury in return — so the very same 1,000 Timber is worth far more Treasury to a younger city than to a mature one. Open /export to see exactly what your city is paid today; there's no single number that applies to every city.
• Pelts price noticeably higher than other raw goods — hunting them down costs real supplies, and that's reflected in what they're worth to the Export Market.
• Crafted (Tier 2) goods sell for exactly the value of what went into them — refining adds nothing to the export price. The Customs House pays for the materials inside a good, not the work of making it, so crafting something purely to export it never beats just exporting the raw materials. Craft for your buildings and districts, not to sell.
• Leather and Furnishings price the highest of any exportable good, since they're built from the scarcest materials in the realm.
• NPC prices are intentionally below what inter-city trade deals can fetch. Think of the Export Market as a floor, not a ceiling — a trade deal is always the better channel, but the Customs House makes sure nothing goes to waste.
• Exports happen last in the tick, after construction, gathering, crafting, and trade. You never export something your city needed for something else that hour.

Unlocking the Customs House

The Customs House requires Town Hall Level 3 and at least one completed Tier 3 specialty building. It does not count toward your city's 2-specialty-buildings limit. The Minister of Exports role unlocks once the Customs House is built and lets a designated player manage export orders without being Mayor.

Tycoons & Luxury Trade

Tycoon is the realm's endgame tier — a licensed luxury importer who keeps the whole map's premium buildings stocked and flowing. Every premium visit now passes through this system, whether you're a Tycoon or not, so it's worth understanding from both sides: the visitor who pays to visit, and the host city whose citizens get paid.

Becoming a Tycoon

Tycoon is reached automatically the moment you meet all four requirements — there's no gold cost and it's permanent (no maintenance, no demotion):

• 2,000 reputation
• premium visits in 5 distinct cities (breadth — this never scales as the realm grows)
• 25 total premium visits (depth)
• the Townhouse tier on your Estate track, or better

Because there's no gold gate, never be afraid to spend on your way up. The travel requirements front-load some exploring — get out and visit early.

The admission ticket (every visitor pays)

Visiting another city's premium building costs an admission ticket in gold, scaled by the building's tier. The ticket is the same whether the city stocks the luxury itself or it has to be imported:

You still earn Reputation and City Score for your home city on every successful visit. If you can't afford the ticket — or the building is out of stock and no Tycoon can cover it — the door's closed and you aren't charged (you keep your gold, and the trip still counts toward your travel medals). Visiting your own city's buildings pays a ticket too, but you recoup a share as one of its citizens.

Earning as a host city

When someone visits a premium building in your city, the admission ticket is split evenly among your city's citizens — look for the 🎟 visitor tickets line in your hourly report. Two things decide how much you keep:

• Keep your landmarks stocked. If the required luxury is in stock, your citizens pocket the entire ticket. Producing your own luxury goods is by far the best outcome — roughly 3× more than letting it be imported.
• If you run dry, a Tycoon imports the goods for you: your citizens still earn a smaller cut (the table above), the visit stays open, and you lose no stockpile. If no Tycoon covers that luxury, the visitor is turned away and nobody earns — so a stocked city always wins.

Running your Luxury Trade (Tycoons)

As a Tycoon you keep other cities' out-of-stock landmarks open and take the margin. Everything is managed from /tycoon:

• Letters of Credit — your prepaid fulfilment allowance. Buy them with a Market Run: a queued action (it fires on the tick, so plan ahead) where you pick a quantity and pay 100g each, up to a cap of 25 held at once. It partial-fills if you're short on gold or near the cap.
• Specializations — you can only fulfil luxuries you've picked. You start with 2 and unlock more slots as you trade (all 10 are reachable). The picker sorts luxuries by how many other Tycoons already cover them (fewest first) — pick the gaps to get routed more often. You can re-pick (respec) each time you gain a slot, until you cover everything.
• Automatic routing — when an out-of-stock visit needs a luxury you specialize in and you hold enough credits, the system routes it to you automatically (taking turns fairly among eligible Tycoons), spends your credits, and pays you the ticket minus the citizens' share. No opt-in, no chore — keep credits stocked and the income comes to you.
• Tycoon rank — Trader → Merchant → Magnate → Baron → Mogul, climbing with the total luxury units you've fulfilled (the same counter that unlocks your specialization slots). It's a permanent prestige ranking that never stops growing.

A second way to earn: supplying Residential Districts

Premium building visits aren't the only place your Letters of Credit get used. A city's Grand Villas district (see Cities & Building) can also run short of a luxury it needs, and when it does, the same specialist Tycoons who cover that luxury for visits get the call. You earn the same 110g per unit you'd earn from an import fulfilment — it's the exact same instrument, just a second customer for it.

A district shortfall is usually bigger than a single visit's, so it's spread across every Tycoon who specializes in that luxury, one unit at a time — no one Tycoon scoops the whole order. Keep your credits stocked with a Market Run and you'll pick up a share automatically, right alongside your visit fulfilments, in the same tick report line.

As always, this only ever happens for a real shortfall a city can't cover by trade — and trading with a neighbour is always far cheaper for the city than importing, so don't expect it to replace visit fulfilments as your main income. It's a bonus channel on top of what you're already doing.