The goal of this thread is to showcase the actual profit of markets, grocers, and fairs. Unlike most resources (civics, training, etc), money is directly equivalent to resources through market prices. This means that we can get an exact comparison between a worker building the market line for money, versus building stone quarries.
By the end of this thread, I hope to convince you that the market line is actually very poor at generating profit, and should be avoided in a great majority of circumstances.
Scenario: Market then Grocer then Fair
We will assume a single worker. Now the worker can either build stone quarries (basic flat land quarries which have a base of 5 stone per turn) or the market series of buildings. We will run the scenario for a market, a market + a grocer, and a market + a grocer + a fair. In comparison, we will make the equivalent number of stone quarries (including adjacencies as we are making them in a circle). Our goal is to calculate X, the amount of gold per turn our city would need to generate for the market series of buildings' gold boost to be MORE PROFITABLE than our basic 5 stone per turn quarries. We will run the scenario for 50 turns after the last building finishes to give our buildings some time to accumulate.
Getting our Formulas (Heavy Math)
Summary of Results
So now we have our easy to use formulas:
Market Only: X = 25.5*stone price + 18*wood price - 2*iron price
Market + Grocer: X = 37.62*stone price + 20.77*wood price - 2.31*iron price
Market + Grocer + Fair: X = 33.83*stone price + 14.63*wood price - 1.85* iron price
From these, all we need to do is pick the market price of the various resources, and we can then calculate X for that scenario. Lets look at three scenarios (but you have the formulas, feel free to use any market numbers you feel are appropriate):
Market Favorable (we are generally selling our stone and wood at half prices, and iron we are buying)
Stone: 3 gold
Wood: 3 gold
Iron: 8 gold
Common Middle Game Scenario (stone and wood we are generally buying, and the price is starting to go up. Iron is relatively cheap)
Stone: 8 gold
Wood: 8 gold
Iron: 4 gold
Scarce Resources (stone and wood are heavily bought, and up quite a bit in price. Even iron is scarce, and we are buying it as well)
Stone: 13 gold
Wood: 13 gold
Iron: 8 gold
Market Favorable
Market Only: 114.5 GPT
M + G: 157 GPT
M + G + F: 131 GPT
Common Middle Game
Market Only: 340 GPT
M + G: 458 GPT
M + G + F: 380 GPT
Scarce Resources
Market Only: 550 GPT
M + G: 741 GPT
M + G + F: 615 GPT
Conclusion
Frankly, even under market favorable conditions, I have many cities that fall under that threshold. I am literally looking at a game I just finished on the Great Difficulty, so I'm literally seeing the X of each of my cities on the last turn, and 3 out of 8 of them don't even qualify for a Market Only. Now as prices get higher....X gets crazy high, and often only the money capital might have the numbers needed to justify these buildings. You can also see that the Grocer is particularly bad, it costs a lot both in terms of time to build it, and the resources needed to construct it. Compared to just building quarries, it takes a lot of base to make the grocer worth it.
And of course, we are assuming basic quarries. If your workers could choose some mountain quarries, the opportunity cost of just building basic buildings almost doubles.
In general, I believe these numbers show that in general, the market line of buildings are just not worth constructing. If you want to build buildings to generate more money for your civ, building stone quarries is superior in the majority of cases. Lastly, feel free to comment if you think my market prices are "bonkers". If you have a set of prices you see in your game that you think are more realistic, feel free to put them on the thread. We will put them in the formulas and see what your X value is.
By the end of this thread, I hope to convince you that the market line is actually very poor at generating profit, and should be avoided in a great majority of circumstances.
Scenario: Market then Grocer then Fair
We will assume a single worker. Now the worker can either build stone quarries (basic flat land quarries which have a base of 5 stone per turn) or the market series of buildings. We will run the scenario for a market, a market + a grocer, and a market + a grocer + a fair. In comparison, we will make the equivalent number of stone quarries (including adjacencies as we are making them in a circle). Our goal is to calculate X, the amount of gold per turn our city would need to generate for the market series of buildings' gold boost to be MORE PROFITABLE than our basic 5 stone per turn quarries. We will run the scenario for 50 turns after the last building finishes to give our buildings some time to accumulate.
Getting our Formulas (Heavy Math)
Spoiler :
Summary of Results
So now we have our easy to use formulas:
Market Only: X = 25.5*stone price + 18*wood price - 2*iron price
Market + Grocer: X = 37.62*stone price + 20.77*wood price - 2.31*iron price
Market + Grocer + Fair: X = 33.83*stone price + 14.63*wood price - 1.85* iron price
From these, all we need to do is pick the market price of the various resources, and we can then calculate X for that scenario. Lets look at three scenarios (but you have the formulas, feel free to use any market numbers you feel are appropriate):
Market Favorable (we are generally selling our stone and wood at half prices, and iron we are buying)
Stone: 3 gold
Wood: 3 gold
Iron: 8 gold
Common Middle Game Scenario (stone and wood we are generally buying, and the price is starting to go up. Iron is relatively cheap)
Stone: 8 gold
Wood: 8 gold
Iron: 4 gold
Scarce Resources (stone and wood are heavily bought, and up quite a bit in price. Even iron is scarce, and we are buying it as well)
Stone: 13 gold
Wood: 13 gold
Iron: 8 gold
Market Favorable
Market Only: 114.5 GPT
M + G: 157 GPT
M + G + F: 131 GPT
Common Middle Game
Market Only: 340 GPT
M + G: 458 GPT
M + G + F: 380 GPT
Scarce Resources
Market Only: 550 GPT
M + G: 741 GPT
M + G + F: 615 GPT
Conclusion
Frankly, even under market favorable conditions, I have many cities that fall under that threshold. I am literally looking at a game I just finished on the Great Difficulty, so I'm literally seeing the X of each of my cities on the last turn, and 3 out of 8 of them don't even qualify for a Market Only. Now as prices get higher....X gets crazy high, and often only the money capital might have the numbers needed to justify these buildings. You can also see that the Grocer is particularly bad, it costs a lot both in terms of time to build it, and the resources needed to construct it. Compared to just building quarries, it takes a lot of base to make the grocer worth it.
And of course, we are assuming basic quarries. If your workers could choose some mountain quarries, the opportunity cost of just building basic buildings almost doubles.
In general, I believe these numbers show that in general, the market line of buildings are just not worth constructing. If you want to build buildings to generate more money for your civ, building stone quarries is superior in the majority of cases. Lastly, feel free to comment if you think my market prices are "bonkers". If you have a set of prices you see in your game that you think are more realistic, feel free to put them on the thread. We will put them in the formulas and see what your X value is.
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), but those couple of farm yield me a food surplus in the hundreds. And as food can be stored like any other ressource (unlike for example in Imperiums: Greek Wars, where 2/3 of the storage rots each turn), it works as a 2nd currency for me. I don't even need to sell in advance (you can still fill your coffers as needed, if an event shows up...). Even with a ruined price (food quickly sells only around ~1 in my games), it still feels like a good strategy - though I concede that this might be also related to my builder playstyle (I don't tend to have a huge number of military units, at least not from the start on) 
