Early Game Trading
Early game trading is pointless at this current juncture. No one needs a marketplace place to get the raw resources they need. As mentioned by my guildie, there is simply no scarcity of raw resources. It is far easier to simply ride over, mine the resource and cart it back than to work your way to having a marketplace, farming for gold and carting a fraction of what you can mine yourself back to your city (People simply don't sell enough to fill your cart).
My solution to fixing early game trading :
- Resources should be region locked, only those who are residents in the region can mine it.
- If it can't be region locked for whatever reason, allow defensive structures to be build around the resources so that it works something like a PVP hotspot and you have to fight to gain control over a resource node. City vs Bandits. This will create the scarcity needed for trading.
- As mentioned by others, putting the marketplace behind the tech tree is simply to great a barrier (at least in the early game). It doesn't make sense to trade when the research points needed to get there is that great.
Mid to late game trading
If the design of this current test is to allow everyone to collect all the raw resources but lock the higher tier products behind the tech tree and every city will eventually specialise in something, there are also potentially some issues.
- Cities will go for the meta and produce that higher tier product for themselves. Everything else will be disregarded.
- Larger cities will dominate the market simply because they have the tech points to unlock more tech.
- If all cities grow large enough, trading will die off from mid game to late game. Once again, everyone will produce what they want or need.
Solution to mid to late game trading :
- I don't have one, it is just a hypothesis. I don't even know if we will reach there for the current test. Trading is just dead right now.