Without a doubt the MOST ignored card in the game (i have never seen this card in anyones deck). I've started messing around with it offline and I think for boom civs, it has untapped potential. Most people wait until they are losing and have like tons of food or wood but no gold, then they bash away at the the sell wood for gold button and instantly get gold. (We've all done this at some point! and I bet you felt like a noob when doing it! I know I sure did!)
However how many have actually looked at how the market works? When you sell a resource such as food, the amount of gold you get for selling it decreases by 1, What does this mean? It means by clever manipulation you can influence the buy rate to suit you better in late game. As well as allow you to shift resources from one type to another a lot more cheaply, allowing economical blunders such as mining 2000 gold and not enough wood, to be easily corrected! I have literally just this minute thought about the market usage so I haven't devised any strategies with it, but here is a little thought scenario I just quickly thought of in a few minutes. Since it uses the advanced market card which can be obtained at level 2, I will first practise this strat Start of the game, hunting is the best way to get resources, get the adv market card build a market and second get hunting upgrade asap. using villagers, find a large patch of hunting (far away even) and keep hunting. Get the second hunting up grade. Boom as hard as you can focusing on food as much as possible (age up with 500 food politican). When the enemy hits fortress (usually fast in this FF-crazed phase of aoe3) assuming you focused on food enough, you should be able to just Now think about this. Not only can i Then once my mercs (which i can now obtain without using external mines) have the upper hand (they usually do for me for a brief period until they get cannons) I then focus on gold upgrades and put almost ALL workers on gold (including his gold mines!) and convert gold back to food to maintain TC production (the rate for getting food from gold will dip low enough so that it is about 100 food for 95 gold!) (all hunting will most likely be gone now and gold will be almost as fast as mills!) AND you deplete all his gold mines! Even if he attack your base, you can have villies all over the map leeching gold at an alarming rate! Then you focus on wood and build mills, and trade the food back for gold again! Since the food-> I hope this wasn't too long and complicated but I sure it could spark an interesting debate and maybe different strategies that I haven't though off yet. I think this can help boom civs fend of the rushers better in this rush civ dominated game. [This message has been edited by Ceres629 (edited 01-11-2006 @ 01:24 PM).]