[Guide] Market - scooping up all the pennies

I'd like to make a small contribution. I think I could make a guide myself on the ingame financial aspects of civworld but I have a rather small attention span so I rather keep these posts small.

You have all seen that as you sell stuff on the marketplace the price goes down, as you buy suff the price goes up. You may also have seen that the ratio between the old price and the new price is a constant. This enables you to calculate how much money you can get from selling commodities, but also gives an indication what is the total amount of money in the marketplace, which I think is welcome knowledge for someone who wants to control the market.

Now I was talking about a fixed ratio, so there is some kind of interest (for the lack of a better proper word), which is the percentage of a price of a comodity to go up if you sell it.

This interest is
Resources: 5% (or 0.05)
Luxuries: 2% (0.02)
Military: 10% (0.1)
Great people: 20% ((0.2)

With this knowledge you can do a lot. I will calculate the approximate (due to rounding) amount of cash in the marketplace.

A = initial commodity price
i = interest
M = total money sold

Each time you sell the next selling price for your commodity is
1-i times the previous price.

The money you get by selling m consecutive times is

M = A + A*(1-i) + A*(1-i)^2 + ... + A*(1-i)^(m-1)

If you would have infinite resources you would have an infinite series. And surprisingly enough this does not give infinite money. As m reaches infinity in the previous series for M, M becomes

M = A / i

So here you have a very easy way to approximately calculate the total amount of money stored in the marketplace. Yes, you have read right, there is a maximum amount of money you can get from any commodity given a certain current price.
To conclude I will give you a very easy to understand way to find the maximum amount of money to get from any commodity, but dont forget due to rounding of the price this is only approximate:

For resources (food, production, science and culture) this maximum money is 20 times the starting price, for luxury products it is 50 times the starting price, for military units it is 10 times the starting price and for great people it is 5 times the starting price.

If people are interested I can delve further into the financial aspects of the game and help people calculate how much their commodities are actually worth if they want to sell everything they have for the moment.
 
This is interesting, but it is only useful if you can somehow divine how willing people are to sell their stuff.

Here's an example: Yesterday there was an auction for School of Confucius, and I had 26k of science, so I really wanted to win it. At the end, there was a bidding war between me and someone who had 15k in cash (I know because I looked to see how much cash she had).

I didn't have anything like that in cash, but winning the auction was really worth it for me because it would give me 26k science AND 66 maze moves which allowed me to get two mazes both worth 13k. So, in the circs, I sold a GP (Builder) to make sure I won the auction.

I won at 16k, which was a bargain for the 52k of science I got. Science was about 700 at the time.

There was no way for the person I was up against to know how much the auction was going to be worth to me, and she stopped bidding when her cash ran out, because she wasn't willing to sell her stuff and I was.
 
...winning the auction was really worth it for me because it would give me 26k science AND 66 maze moves which allowed me to get two mazes both worth 13k.
After you've finished 1 maze, the maze moves will be resetted to 30.
 
I'd like to make a small contribution. I think I could make a guide myself on the ingame financial aspects of civworld but I have a rather small attention span so I rather keep these posts small.

You have all seen that as you sell stuff on the marketplace the price goes down, as you buy suff the price goes up. You may also have seen that the ratio between the old price and the new price is a constant. This enables you to calculate how much money you can get from selling commodities, but also gives an indication what is the total amount of money in the marketplace, which I think is welcome knowledge for someone who wants to control the market.

Now I was talking about a fixed ratio, so there is some kind of interest (for the lack of a better proper word), which is the percentage of a price of a comodity to go up if you sell it.

This interest is
Resources: 5% (or 0.05)
Luxuries: 2% (0.02)
Military: 10% (0.1)
Great people: 20% ((0.2)

With this knowledge you can do a lot. I will calculate the approximate (due to rounding) amount of cash in the marketplace.

A = initial commodity price
i = interest
M = total money sold

Each time you sell the next selling price for your commodity is
1-i times the previous price.

The money you get by selling m consecutive times is

M = A + A*(1-i) + A*(1-i)^2 + ... + A*(1-i)^(m-1)

If you would have infinite resources you would have an infinite series. And surprisingly enough this does not give infinite money. As m reaches infinity in the previous series for M, M becomes

M = A / i

So here you have a very easy way to approximately calculate the total amount of money stored in the marketplace. Yes, you have read right, there is a maximum amount of money you can get from any commodity given a certain current price.
To conclude I will give you a very easy to understand way to find the maximum amount of money to get from any commodity, but dont forget due to rounding of the price this is only approximate:

For resources (food, production, science and culture) this maximum money is 20 times the starting price, for luxury products it is 50 times the starting price, for military units it is 10 times the starting price and for great people it is 5 times the starting price.

If people are interested I can delve further into the financial aspects of the game and help people calculate how much their commodities are actually worth if they want to sell everything they have for the moment.

There's an actual floor to items, I tested it out at some point just to see, and after 10/9 buy/sell, it doesn't go any lower, at least not until some drastic amount.. would be interested to see someone test this out!
 
Here's my goal at the beginning, do anything and everything possible to get to 200k. Not only does this A. achieve personal goals for fame, it also achieves era victories for your group. Selling out early also thrusts you into the role of King which then gives you more fame for your buck.

I'll reference game 841 again. I've been as high as 260k, right now I'm sitting on 150k. But I can outbid anyone and everyone for the important auctions. Sphinx for the free great person - I only go up to a certain percentage of the lowest valued Great Person at the time...School of Confuscious...wanna see someone get a tech done in one auction? Have a ton of gold. The 20% of gold turned into production...I've one this one twice now and received over 40k in production both time. Wanna say overpowered military and then some with production left over to sell when people go buy buy crazy? Yeah.

I then turn that over into buying science so I can add more beakers in to getting a tech done faster. No buying 100 science at a time doesn't give you maze moves, but if you're selling production from 900 down to 500 and then buying science up from 400-800 not only are you making a profit but you're also putting in a lot on a tech.

So my advice is sell out early. Buy one of each GP depending on when you join into game, turn all of your original citizens into food gatherers. And then sell everything you don't need. Sure at the beginning of games, I'm not gonna really help on anything but the economic stuff but when you get later into game, I virtually control every aspect of the financial market and can manipulate anything I want for my, and my civs, own benefit.

Another example I had no military in that game until we were invaded by the "strongest civ." I and 2 others decided to wait until last 5 minutes to a. me build a ridiculous army, b. finish off himeji and leonardos and then c. laugh as we 4 to 1'd their attack force. It was to the point where the only guy in their civ retreated his units, left their civ and joined ours. Oh and then we picked up their 7 wonders in the process.

Gold and teamwork are everything in this game. If you can stockpile a TON of gold early in the game, you're unstoppable later in the game.
 
Yeah, in the days of 32 million science, we tested that pretty thoroughly. Never goes below 10/9.
 
There's an actual floor to items, I tested it out at some point just to see, and after 10/9 buy/sell, it doesn't go any lower, at least not until some drastic amount.. would be interested to see someone test this out!

Thats interesting, but in that case the formula is still approximately correct up untill the floor of 10/9.

A way to calculate the amount of money you get from any resource you can calculate with the following formula:

M = A / i (1 - (1-i)^R)

With R the amount of times you can click sell before your resources run out. For Great people, luxuries and units this is the exact amount, for collectible resources this is the amount/100 rounded down.

This formula is only approximate and doesnt work if the price gets around 10/9.
 
Thats interesting, but in that case the formula is still approximately correct up untill the floor of 10/9.

A way to calculate the amount of money you get from any resource you can calculate with the following formula:

M = A / i (1 - (1-i)^R)

With R the amount of times you can click sell before your resources run out. For Great people, luxuries and units this is the exact amount, for collectible resources this is the amount/100 rounded down.

This formula is only approximate and doesnt work if the price gets around 10/9.

Ya, the math isn't too difficult, but also if you're selling it at 9$, you probably don't really care how much you're getting out of it!
 
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