How to Use The Evony Marketplace

The Evony Marketplace, when used correctly, can be a very useful tool.  Whether you just need a few more gold to purchase a vital research project or you need resources to fend of an attack, the marketplace can help. 

There are two basic functions available to marketplace users:  Buy and Sell.  Buy allows you to spend gold in exchange for resources, and sell allows you to sell those resources for gold.  This guide will explain the use of both functions, as well as a few general tips about market use. 

Selling

Selling resources on Evony is a much simpler matter than buying them.  The most obvious reason to sell is to get more gold for research, but you may also want to buy resources later with that gold.  Either way, there are a few important decisions you must make.  First, ask yourself:  What resource do I need the least?  If you sell all your iron, only to realize you want to buy some swordsmen, it will be hard to get the iron back.  Also, try to sell whatever resource has the highest market price.  In the older servers, wood can be worth up to 30 times what stone is, so it makes sense to sell wood, not stone.  Remember to use your new gold as soon as you can, though, because it cannot be stored in warehouses. 

Buying

To buy resources in Evony profitably takes a bit more skill.  First, it’s important to note that there is a 30 minute delay from when you pay to when you get your resources.  This can be a problem when time in a constraint, so try to buy resources in advance.  When it comes to actual purchasing, don’t follow the crowd.  Generally, wood is the most expensive, so it makes sense to focus on producing wood in your cities, so you only need to buy less expensive things like stone or food.  Food can be obtained in large quantities from NPCs, so only buy it if you need to.  Lastly, it can take a while until the resources you want to buy are available from other players.  You may want to buy resources for a bit above the minimum price, so transactions are faster. 

Marketplace Tips

Pay attention to the market price trends over time on your server.  They generally start low, as creating large armies is not necessary, and gold is more valuable as players purchase new technologies.  As the server gets older, most players have finished purchasing new research projects, and gold becomes much less useful.  At this point, severe inflation occurs and prices increase, because players are also trying to get the resources to raise and maintain armies.  Therefore, a good player will focus on taxing at the beginning, and switch to production later. 

Upgrade you marketplace to at least level 4.  This will allow you to trade all four resources at once, and you will not have to wait for one transaction to finish before starting another. 

Use warehouses.  If you spend all you money on a huge shipment of wood, only to have it plundered, you’ll be sorry. 

Merchant fleets can be useful to speed up deliveries of resources, and they are relatively cheap, but they do require you to pay real world money, which many players (myself included) are reluctant to do.  Even so, you can sometimes get the free, and they are good for quickly building armies during an invasion. 

Do not attempt to “play the market.”  The Evony marketplace is extremely unstable, due to the constant and unlimited inflow of goods, and it is extremely hard to buy and then keep large amounts of resources.  Any attempt to save something with the hope of selling it for more later will fail.

Happy trading!