First you must build a school. Second research Dimplomacy and Trade. Once that is completed build a Market and at least one Cargo Warehouse. Each Cargo Warehouse lets you buy and sell up to 10,000 units of any resource. It takes three ticks to clear the warehouse. the option to research Trade comes up. Once you do this, you can build a market. Unlike Round 4, which had a warehouse cap of 32,767, in Round 5 the maximum is set at 500, giving you total warehouse space of 5 million.

With the market, you can buy or sell Iron, Wood, Food, or Oil for an amount of gold. The value of each resource rises or drops depending on the amount of each that all the uwars players as a whole possess. This means that if you buy wood when everybody has lots, then sell it when everyone has very little, you can make a large profit of gold, which you can then use to buy other resources if you need them. To do this, though, you need a Cargo Warehouse.

Keep in mind that your warehouses take 3 ticks to clear, which means that if you plan on selling 8mil iron and buying wood with the proceeds, you'll either need to use tokens to speed the 3 ticks up, or else spread the transactions over an hour or two!



Straith wrote another of his nice mini-manuals for it.

-Straith's Market Mini-Manual:

What's that in your grain silo? It could be gold!

The Universe Wars Market has changed - now you can buy and sell your food, iron, wood and oil to the vast universe in a new way.

Fluctuating Values
The values of resources are based off of supply and demand. The less of a resource all empires have, the more it's worth. The minimum value is .2 gold.

Efficiency Rating
Your Efficiency Rating reflects how savvy your empire is at buying and selling goods on the market. The higher your efficiency rating, the better your buy prices will be, and the more you can sell your goods for. An empire with 100% efficiency rating will find it much easier to navigate the market for a profit.

Cargo Warehouses
For each cargo warehouse you have, you can move up to 10,000 resources onto or off of the market. You take possession of your money or goods instantly, but the cargo warehouses take three ticks to clear.

Mercantile Skill
Your mercantile skill adds directly to your efficiency rating. If you have, for example, a Mercantile skill rank of 10, you'll get an additional 10% for every trade you put through on the market.

Your Mercantile Skill goes up by using the market. Single large trades are far more likely to increase your skill rank than lots of little ones. Also, there's a minimum amount you must trade to be considered for the next rank. This information is available on your Market page.

Tokens
You can use a token to temporarily boost your efficiency rating. A token can be spent to give a one-shot boost of 20% to the efficiency of your next trade.

The new addition of the market has caused the original trade board to be removed. While this has roused some rabble from Uwars players, Straith assures us it will be just as effective for getting resources, make getting gold easier, and make feeding impossible, all while giving tokens another use. Whether this outweighs the loss of giveaways is your decision. If you think this is a bad idea, post in the beta forums. I'm sure Straith would appreciate your input.