🏙 UrbanPact

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 — and if you're that city's only citizen, the whole ticket comes straight back to you, so the visit is free. Your hourly report spells this out on the visit line itself: it shows the ticket you paid, how much came back to you as a citizen dividend, and the net — so a visit that costs you nothing reads as net 0 rather than looking like a loss.

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. That line covers other people's visits to your city; the share you get back from your own visit is shown on the visit line instead, right next to the ticket you paid for it, so the same gold is never counted twice. 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.
• Some of the grandest landmarks need more than one luxury good — the Imperial Gallery, for instance, needs Dyes, Marble, and Silk every visit. Your city always supplies whatever it has in stock first, and only the goods you're actually missing get imported. So if you're short on just one of the three, your citizens keep almost the whole ticket — you only give up the slice for what genuinely had to come from outside.

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 fulfillment 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. Buy 1, 5 or 10 at a time, or tap ⚓ Max to fill your remaining allowance in a single run — the button tells you how many that is and what it will cost, and it disappears when you're already at your ceiling. Max is worked out when the run actually fires, not when you tap it: if you've got actions queued ahead of it, every delivery you make while it waits frees up more room, and the run will take that room too. That's why your queue lists it as "top up to your ceiling" instead of a fixed number. One run costs one queue slot whatever size it is, so Max is how you top right up without spending your whole queue on the market. It partial-fills if you're short on gold or near your cap — and when it does, your hourly report says so: it names how many you asked for alongside how many you got, and which of the two stopped you.
• Your cap grows with your rank. You can hold 25 at Trader, and every rank you climb raises the ceiling by 10 — 35 at Merchant, 45 at Magnate, 55 at Baron, 65 at Mogul. The cap is there on purpose: a Tycoon who never restocks eventually drops out of the import pool, so the busiest importers get the most headroom.
• Specializations — you can only fulfill luxuries you've picked. You start with 2 and unlock more slots as you trade (all 10 are reachable). Slots arrive at 40 · 120 · 300 · 700 · 1,500 · 2,800 · 4,400 · 6,200 lifetime luxury units, for your 3rd through 10th — each step a little gentler than the one before, so the ladder eases as you climb rather than hitting a wall partway up. The picker shows, for every luxury, how many units cities need right now and can't cover themselves, whether any credits already sit behind it, and how many imports have gone unfilled recently — sorted by what the realm is genuinely short of, not by how few other Tycoons cover it. The count in brackets on each line is a separate figure: how many Tycoons already picked that luxury. Follow the demand: a luxury with nobody covering it isn't worth picking if nobody needs it imported. You can re-pick (respec) at any time, not just when you gain a slot.
• Automatic routing — when a visit needs a luxury you specialize in and the host city is short of it, the system routes that luxury to you automatically (taking turns fairly among eligible Tycoons), spends your credits, and pays you 110g for every unit you supply. A single visit to one of the grandest landmarks can need up to three different luxuries at once — if you and two other Tycoons each cover a different one, you're each paid for exactly what you brought. No opt-in, no chore — keep credits stocked and the income comes to you.
• Your hourly report shows what you have left. Any hour an import spends your credits, the report tells you both what it cost and how many Letters of Credit you're still holding — so you can see yourself running low a few hours before you actually go dry, instead of finding out when you're already out. The report will also say it out loud once you're holding less than a typical day's spending — and it says that on the short one-line report too, not just the full one.
• Turned-away imports are reported to you. If nobody held a credit for a luxury you specialize in and an import couldn't go through, you'll hear about it — both in the specialization picker and in your hourly report — so you know exactly where a Market Run would put you back in business.
• Your recent deliveries are listed on /tycoon. The panel keeps a short ledger under your rank: which luxury, which city received it, what it paid you, and how long ago. Your hourly report names the destination the hour it happens, but that scrolls away — this is where you can go back and look. Deliveries made before this ledger existed are still listed, just without a city against them.
• You're told when you rank up. Climbing a rank sends you a message naming the rank you reached, the new Letter-of-Credit ceiling it earned you, and which rung is next. It's separate from the note about a free specialization slot — those run on their own ladder, so you may get one without the other.
• Tycoon rank — Trader → Merchant → Magnate → Baron → Mogul, climbing with your Tycoon XP (the same total that unlocks your specialization slots and raises your Letter-of-Credit ceiling). It's a permanent prestige ranking that never stops growing, and it's shown on your profile next to your tier — including the showcase card /profile posts in the community chat, so your rank is visible to other players.
• How Tycoon XP is earned. Two things pay into it, and brokering luxury pays far more: 1,394 XP for every luxury unit you deliver, and 1 XP for every unit your shops sell. /tycoon and /stats both show your XP total with those two lines underneath it, so you can always see where the number came from and what the next rank costs. If you run no shops, nothing has changed for you — your XP is purely your deliveries, and every rank arrives exactly when it always would have.

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 fulfillment — 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 neighbor 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.