Basic Strategic Help with Trade Nations
Trade Nations is, on the surface, very similar to a lot of the other games on the iPhone like Farmville and City Story. In this game you collect resources and use them to create more buildings, gain more land, complete more levels and slowly improve your nation. Where this game is different is that it focuses on trade which adds a great deal of strategy to the game. If you want to grow faster and become a more important nation than those that surround you can get some help with Trade Nations here.
Citizens
You will begin with a limited number of citizens in Trade Nations, but also a limited number of jobs for them to do. These jobs come in two basic flavors. You can have people who carry things and those who harvest. Since you can touch any resource yourself to move it, the question becomes how much do you want to micromanage? If you are checking it often then having everyone collect resources will be best. On the other hand if it is going to be some time before you log back in, such as overnight, you will want to have some of the villagers carrying goods for you to ensure that the others do not run out and stop working but you need to watch out you don’t run out of space. Early in the game these will be your primary source of income so make certain to have as many villagers as you can on the job and do your best to keep them working on something all of the time.
Shops
There are two things you need to consider about buildings in Trade Nations. You need to get the maximum possible amount of gold and experience over time. In this case the best choice is to choose the items which take the least amount of time to create. For example cookies cost 1 wheat and take 45 seconds and give you ten gold and 5 experience, while the tarts cost 4 wheat and take 5 minutes. This means that for the cookies you are getting about 12 gold and 6 experience per minute. On the other hand the tart gives you 5 gold per minute and 3 experience. The objects you can create later become even worse. Still, While you will earn less per minute on a 12 hour cake if you’re only logging in twice a day you will make far more overall experience because otherwise you’ll only have it working ten minutes a day. So the goal is to pick the amount of time closest to how long it will be before you check again. Since the game can give you messages outside of the app, if you want, then you can make sure to return and start new items as often as possible.
Magic Beans
Whether you plan to spend real life money or not you will have some amount of magic beans and understanding how to get the best value for hurrying this is vital. In most cases it is important to wait to use these, unless you plan to buy more, because there are things you can only buy with magic beans and they are very useful to have. The best value for most people will be the Warehouse which costs 30 beans and has the ability to hold 20,000 storage. It will allow far more trading and more money and can only be bought by beans. This cannot be bought until later in the game though. In the shorter term if you’re going to use magic beans to build something faster decide immediately because there is no change in the cost of magic beans if you wait until it is half done, but you will have gotten half the value.
Trading
One of the fastest ways to make money, and resources, in Trade Nations is trading. One of the most interesting aspects of this game is the market. What makes this interesting is that the prices for both buying and selling for each resource change over time. Learning the average prices can give you a huge advantage because at times the sell price is actually higher than the average buy price. These prices change at 12:00 GMT so if you see any resources which are abnormally high or low you should sell them or buy them near this time. Because many people are doing this the price of very low objects is likely to go up considerably as everyone buys the best deal allowing for a considerable profit.
Wizard’s Tower
As you advance you will be given the Wizard’s Tower. This allows you to improve one type of worker. The cost is generally pretty good giving you an hour’s bonus of 50% for ten coins. In order to get the maximum value from this you will want to pick the workers you have the most types of and consider the cost. The best possible value then is having a large number of either stone cutters or looms as they are the most expensive of workers. Remember though that by working fifty percent faster they will also use resources fifty percent faster so try not to allow yourself to run out of material.
Strategy Conclusion
No matter the strategy or resources you focus on the two most important things in this game are gold and experience. The rest of the resources are simply attempting to earn these two. If you can learn to trade for gold, and use that gold effectively you will go up in levels quickly allowing you access to the most important of the buildings and the chance to make even more money and gain more experience. All of these points should help with this, but the most important strategy of this game is to make certain that every building and every worker is busy all the time, especially when you are not playing.
References
- Source, author’s own experience.
- Images, iPhone screenshots taken from Trade Nations.
- Links, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/trade-nations/id429278822?mt=8
This post is part of the series: Trade Nations Guide
A collection of articles to guide you through Trade Nations for Facebook.
