Idea: Supply the World

Today in the pre-coffee gloom, I arrived at an unusual notion for supplying your military account. I'm sure there are many problems with this particular thought experiment. As with all such considerations, the value is not necessarily that it yields a great approach, but that it makes you think about the various factors in play.

Supplying the World

Centrum has a robust commodities market for basics and food. So what if you decided to just set up shop next to Centrum, and sell those resources for gold on a daily basis? The distance means that your caravans would travel a few minutes at most, allowing you to empty millions of resources per day directly into the central market.

Let's deal in approximate numbers. Prices hover around 0.75 for clay, iron, and stone. Wood is 1.0; food is 2.0. A typical level 20 resource plot will produce 2500 per hour; farmyards make 2000 food per hour. If you used a common 5/5/5/5/5 town, set to 0% taxes, that adds up to about 85000 gold per hour of ordinary materials. That's actually killer! A very well constructed gold farm will give you about 85000 gold per hour, and that's after you spend weeks building it into a huge city.

Further, let's assume that you construct the bare minimum buildings: warehouse, storehouse, marketplace, library, flourmill, (paddock), (common ground). That leaves you with 18 spots for cotters. There are large mineral deposits near Centrum, so you could easily average around 1200 minerals per day. That's another 7500 gold per hour, average.

Using my old setup of 1 capital at 20000 population, that easily allows for 5 commodity supply towns. That would allow gold generation of between 425000-450000 per hour with a very minimal account setup. If the capital contained 2-3 geomancer's retreats, that could boost resource output another 20% for all the commodity towns, taking the final tally to 510000-540000 gold per hour.

Many Flaws

Since this is a thought experiment, there are many flaws to the thinking.

1. The biggest flaw is that commodities markets aren't really bottomless. If a player really started pumping 300000 of each basic resource into Centrum every single day, the market could saturate quite quickly. Prices might start to fall, or buy orders might dry up completely.
2. It's a lot of effort to empty your entire inventory every two days.
3. Gold farms can accumulate limitless gold. If you redline on basics and food, you lose the surplus.
4. The cotters are minor money, but still a nice bonus income. It might be very hard to keep 90 cotters busy, even if you divide them into 20-25 teams of 4.

Still, it's worth considering that this might be a fairly easy way to generate 12-15 million gold per day. It doesn't cost much prestige to speed build the final levels of basic resource plots. You might need 250 prestige per city, which might sound like a lot, until you remember that 75 prestige sells for about 20 million gold. Building up the cities wouldn't take long at all. And who knows, it might be fun to be a commodity tycoon, trying to set prices on the single biggest market in Illyriad. That would allow your military main to focus on the two most important tasks in the game:

Misbehave. Kill lots of stuff.

<^^^^^^^^||==O    Skint Jagblade