Mercatorio season 4
Mercatorio season 4 kicks off on Friday May 16th. The season includes new resources, buildings, products and productions methods. This time it’s especially the forging and textile classes that are expanding.
The medieval trade and economy simulator with true markets is getting more products to produce and trade, new places to produce them, more ways to upgrade buildings and new, more intuitive, game mechanics.
The Season 4 map<img
src=“https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/1 *0vWRz-i7ShY1cIhhuaey0w.png” width=“700” height=“700” />
Season 4 will take place on a new map, with most of the towns located on the two large landmasses in the south and east. Other than a new geography, the new map contains the new resources tin and silver.
Buildings<img
src=“https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1366/1 *qqZDZnLFhavq50wX5yoDrg.png” width=“683” height=“1525” />
With new resources comes the need for new buildings to mine and process them. Along with some expansion of the production chains for existing products.
Updates:
- Added mines for tin and silver
- The foundry splits of processing of ores into the new building the smeltery
- Added alloy smelter for production of bronze from copper and tin
- Added carding and fulling houses for processing wool and wool cloth
- Added tapestry weaver
- Added armoury for production of plate armour
- Added bell tower upgrades to religious prestige buildings
- Flax farm upgrade beehives removed (covered by apiary)
- Pasture fermentory removed (covered by dairy)
Product updates
- Added fleece: wool as cut from the sheep, before carding
- Added raw cloth: cloth weaved from wool, before fulling
- Added tapestries: luxurious fabrics weaved from thread and dyed yarn, potentially incorporating silver and gold
- Added dyed yarn for use in tapestries
- Added tin ore and ingots
- Added silver ore
- Added bronze ingots
- Added bells
- Added plate armour
- Increased unit size for belts to bundles of 5, making storage and transportation easier
- Reduced premium of dyed cloth over cloth, both production and consumption increased accordingly
- Renamed light armor to light armour
Production chain updates
As usual there are many balancing adjustments and updates across all production chains, but as outlined above there are especially two areas that see major changes this time:
- Smelting and casting have many new production methods with the inclusion of tin, silver and bronze. The new smeltery deals with all ore processing (except iron), while the alloy forge alloys copper and tin into bronze. The foundry retains casting functions, including casting of the new bells.
- The textile production chain has been reworked by adding additional (optional) carding and fulling steps for wool, as well as reducing throughput of buildings lower in the chain while increasing garments production throughput
Prestige and worker bonuses
- More tenants from prestige
- Less management points from prestige, making hiring and training apprentices a relatively more important source of management points
- Additional bonuses at high levels of prestige
- Specialist worker bonus reduced from 20% to 12%
Game mechanics changes
Season 4 will also see two significant changes to the game mechanics, relating to production at buildings and operation linked to a warehouse as well as how services and non-durable production function.
Sequential operation
The buildings and operations linked to a warehouse will now consume and produce products in the order they are listed, with outputs becoming immediately available to the operations coming after them. For durable goods this reduced the required buffer somewhat and gives quicker feedback when adjustments are made.
Services are now truly intra-turn
Services and non-durable / perishable products generally can’t be stored or transported, but due to the delayed operation of linked buildings previously, the labour from a farmstead would only become usable the turn after it was produced. This is now changing such that produced labour and other services becomes available for use immediately, allowing adjustments to production to take effect as you make them.
In the case services are produced for sale, this means the production has to be finalized at the start of the turn instead of the end (remember production and consumption numbers are usually projections of what will take place at the end of the turn), in order to be available at the start-of-turn auction. This is the same concept that is already used for transports, which consume their inputs as they move, not at the end of the turn.
How to start playing?
Go to Mercatorio.io to play and join the discord server to meet other players, plan strategies and strike deals.