The market, especially at higher level, needs a nerf. Here are my suggestions.
Increase the cost to 200w
OR
Add a 5 second “production” timer on each sell/buy action
OR
Add a 5 second cooldown on each sell/buy action
OR
Increase the market trade cost by 3-5%
Don’t just take my word for it
clips(dot)twitch(dot)tv/AmazonianSolidCroissantTheRinger-KlHgSnKo4FandOHw
Edit: Why tf can’t i post links??
The real problem is not the market mechanics. Real problems are -
Perfect solution. disable buy/sell after doing it once and then unlock it after a while, maybe 15 seconds initially and then bring it down to 5 seconds after some upgrade.
I like increasing the cost as well. It also makes “quickwalling” with markets a bit less likely, which is always annoying.
Even if you’re Slavs its quite profitable to use the market well and hit castle age fast. The market should just be a way to buy resources that are otherwise blocked temporarily or slightly balance the economy. The timer solution is quite nice in that way.
I have a mixed feeling of this change. At least we can see more UU and xbow play now. I wonder if this change will favor knight play further. Saracens should be unaffected by this change.
11 this will make Daut very upset. Be careful.
Why nerf all civs when you only have a problem with a few civs. Even in your clip, Viper only mentions Bohemians due to their bonuses. So, nerf Bohemians not Market.
Except Slavs cannot really do much after reaching Castle age without sufficient farms. But if Slavs took the time to setup farms, then it is more efficient to just not use the market.
Market abuse has become the meta in the last years, everyone uses the market to balance their eco and get unrealistic fast ups that can not be achieved by gathering the food manually.
Not only arena clowns abuse the market now, every single pro player abuses the market and it can only be countered by using the market first urself in most scenarios.
Other suggestion to entirely promote economic build order could be, disable buying until imperial age.
Well, that’s how slow farmers are.
Disable Saracens. 
I think the “easiest” adaption would be to just increase the base value of Food to the same as Stone.
But I would also suggest at the same time to reduce the drop off of Gold for Ressources at later stages of the game. For me it’s partially responsible for the hard cut after the “Late Imp” to “Trash Wars” and it would be welcome if there would be a smoother Transition. The intended effect could be achieved via a “logarithmic” exchange rateadjustment, pretty much in the fashion they solved the additional Sheep in Gurjara Mills issue.
This would also lead to a higher increase of buying ressources like Food from the Market if you do it excessively, which ofc would have a negative impact on “low food eco” economies aswell.
A possible Fromula could be:
currentExchangeValue = BaseValue * exp(GT / 100 / 30)
With GT representing the amount of “Gold Traded” for this Ressource via the Market. So if you Spend 100 G + Fee to buy a Ressource this Value increses by 100 and if you Sell the Ressource to get 100 G - Fee this GT Value for that Ressource decreases by 100. GT starts at 0 for all Ressources.
The biggest advantage of this calculation method is ofc, that you can also directly apply it to the currentExchangeValue of each ressource:
new currentExchangeValue = currentExchangeValue * exp(GTinexchange / 100 / 30)
wher GTinexchange represents the Gold Traded in the specific exchange made, not the Full History of it. Ofc the exchanges need to be done in individual steps even if clicked in “packages” with holding shift, othwerwise there is the Potential of exploits. Again, the GTinexchange will be negative when selling other res for Gold.
With the way how exponential functions work both methods of calculation should yield the same results.
I like increasing the market prices for food.
Sounds like a good idea. I assume you skipped the minimum exchange value of 20 for sake of simplicity.
Currently, the formula is:
currentExchangeValue = max [0, BaseValue * 2 * (GT / 100) ],
so that for each buying/selling of 100, the exchange value moves by 2.
With this new formula, it changes by factor exp(1/30) = 1.034 for buying or exp(-1/30) = 0.975 for selling. Therefore the first buying increased by 3.4 instead of 2. If we buy 1000f, the foid cost increases by factor 1.4 instead onf 20. So at the start of the game, food will cost 140g + 30% tax =182f instead of 120g + 30% tax = 156f for non Saracens players.
In total, the player paid 1517g for 1000f instead of 1417g.
Not a huge difference (as 1/30 is quite small), but still a step in the right direction.
That is more how efficient the market is early, as designed to be. Even with equal food and gold gather rates (which they kind of are). You need 130g to 140g to buy 100f the first 5 times, which takes about 5.5 minutes
For farming you need 2.5 minutes for the wood, then build the farm, then 15s to 30s to farm (incl. movevthe villager to the desired location), then 4 minutes to gather 100f.
So in total 5.5 minutes vs 7 minutes. It is unreasonable to double farmers gather rate just to make it faster than early buying.
The advantage if farming gets much better as game goes on.
It doesn’t nerf all civs at all. Market in general pushes the game towards castle age, so nerfing market is just going to nerf civs which are very powerful in castle age but weak before that and buff civs which have bonuses for heavy feudal play.
This isn’t about doing some crazy 22 pop market all-in rushes. Just a general feudal gameplay but players who use the market to go castle age by 5-6 market transactions and clicking up a couple of mins sooner. Like 19 min castle age with 34 vills instead of 21 mins with 38 vills from their opponent. This type of market usage discourages longer feudal aggression, forward towers etc. Its just a balance shift slightly favoring more feudal gameplay for open maps.
I have to make a correction.
With the current Saracen Market there is a requirement that whatever Change in the currentExchangevalue is made, it HAS to be always smaller than exp(1.05/.95-1) . This is about 1,11 or 11 % increase. This would with my calc already broken with about 300 G cost for each ressource.
One way to address this to make the change independent from the traded Gold, just a default multiplicator (like 1.03 or something like this) for each transaction.
Alternatively there could be an upper limit of the buy price (like 500) and an adjustment of the divider (/ 50 instead of / 30). Or ofc something other.
There would also be the option to “correct” for the step over the exponential function. I’ve done this already for my food calculations. It’s possible, but you need to make quite complicated analytic calculation for it. The issue for that is possibly, that it will be lost why we made this correction in the first place and people in the future see an awkward term they don’t get why it’s there in the first place.
Currently it is 100g + 30% tax = 130g for non Saracens players.
I’m not asking to make farmers faster. But tweaking Wheelbarrow can be considered. Also I’d like to see tower defense (not Tower rush) and stone walling a bit more powerful than now so that selling stone can be punished harder.
Overall, I’m a fan of current market mechanic. But it is “Low risk, high reward” situation now. That’s why I want to make early stone more precise hoping that will change market to a “High risk, high reward” strategy.
Market is used by all civs. You stated 1 use for market, there are others. Castle age is generally very strong compared to Feudal, so getting there 1st is an advantage for all civs. Knights, xbow, siege are all much stronger than Feudal units, not to mention castle, monks and UUs. Markets can also be used for balancing eco after a raid or when some resources are under attack by the enemy.
We saw long feudal aggression and tower rushes in tournaments without nerfing the market. We have even seen pros going full Feudal scouts against enemy FC and then eventually win. Hoang rush has existed much longer than the Phosphoru rush and people are comfortable with countering it, even though Hoang also uses the market. Market is not the problem. Market costs 175 wood on top of the resources you want to sell, so it is not easy to justify it in all cases.
Again, it is just a few civs most of which were introduced and/or became popular after DE launched. People are still discovering strats for them that even the devs did not expect when they balanced them.
Yes exactly. By default castle age is very strong but also hard to get by default. However using multiple market transactions, someone can hit castle age very soon. This shifts the balance in favor of civs that have strong castle age bonuses, knights, xbows, uu and against civs which are dependent on feudal aggression. And no one is recommending the removal of markets, but limiting the frequency of buy/sell or profitability of such transactions.
Tournaments use customized maps and scripts for generating more balanced versions of Arabia. Even there you could have seen market being used more often than long feudal plays without a market. If such changes are implemented for ranked, obviously there’s no need to nerf market usage frequency.
Once again I’m not talking about gimmick all-in plays. Even in proper tournament sets, one person who builds like 12-14 farms and then gets a market up sells some wood, buys some food is likely to go up faster and acquire a significant lead. This has a lot to do with farming space and rate of food collection when farms are farther away from tc. And again if you reduce the frequency of market transactions, it doesn’t make it impossible to do such strategies but just delays it. Instead of someone doing a market and clicking up with 35-36 vills, they might have to do 3-4 additional vills and click up a minute or minute and a half later.
It has nothing to do with post DE civs or buffs. Post DE, towers were nerfed and map generations became more compact. That obviously plays a role. But otherwise, several civs use market. Only a few civs which benefit from long feudal play wouldn’t rush castle age.
I just looked at the wiki (Market (Age of Empires II) | Age of Empires Series Wiki | Fandom) and it seems I made a mistake: they say
The game simulates supply and demand by adding or subtracting 3 to the “fair” price of a commodity each time 100 units of the commodity is traded.
I thought it was +/-2.
My 120g was 100f + 10x2f to represent the pre-tax cost after buying food 20 times. The objective of a formula change would be to accelerate the speed at which food gets more expensive, so that the market quickly becomes more expensive (and not worth it anymore for buying food).
But with a delta of 3, it becomes 130f + 30% = 169f, which considerably decrease the effect (182f) I thought the proposed formula would provide.
I dont understand the problem. Where does this requirement comes from and why can’t we remove it ?
I thought you would just multiply the 1.30 (1.15 post guilds, 1.05 for saracens,..) tax factor with the currentExchangevalue… Was the 30 in the formula intended to take the tax rate into account ? I thought it was just a factor to control the price change speed.