Mercatorio Season 8
Mercatorio is a MMO economy simulator set in medieval times. It has true markets, where all trades have a counterparty matching the order, and prices are set purely by supply and demand. Combined with historically realistic production and logistics, the economy of the game gets and organic feel, and is shaped by both your own actions and those of the other players in the game-world.
The Prestige Board
The most impactful update in this season is the new Prestige Board that offer you control over the bonuses you unlock as your prestige grows. If there’s a pressing need for more management points, you can now delay other bonuses to get that faster. Or if you need more hands for your massive farms instead, you can get more tenants instead of another bonus you won’t use.
In addition to this, other changes to the prestige system include:
- Prestige gain is shifting such that construction of prestige buildings gives a little less prestige, while operating those buildings give a little more, leading to more steady gain and resource consumption.
- Prestige conversion into Legacy, and thus your place on the Leaderboard, is phased in slower and not reaching full effect until you have 2000 prestige. For the early game this means the conversion will be half what it has been in previous seasons.
- The Church will offer more contracts and renew them more frequently, increasing the potential prestige gain.
Waterpower and watermills
This season introduces a new resource, Waterpower, found where there are strong currents after drops in altitude of rivers.
The new Watermill building takes advantage of this power for milling grain more efficiently.
Other buildings updates
- The new Coinery gives earlier access to minting, or striking as they call it there, of coins. It’s cheaper and easier to construct than the Mint, and can later be upgraded into a Mint.
- The Coinery and all existing “promotable” buildings (those that can be upgraded into a larger version) can no longer be expanded or upgraded in other ways. This avoids the trap of expanding them before promoting, and having to remove those expansions in order to promote.
- The management points use of upgrades to town centre buildings has been harmonized and increased for most buildings. The motivation for this is to make smaller, highly upgraded buildings more relevant as a counterpoint to large “flat” buildings.
- And in truly shitty news, the Muckery can now be attached to Rowhouses to gain access to a previously untapped source of fertilizer for that delicious grain.
- Building renames: The Cartyard is renamed into Portage yard, the Cartshed is renamed into Porter Shed
Product updates
There are no new products this season, but some products are being renamed:
- Carting is renamed to Porterage. This is to improve clarity and separate the terminology used for local logistics versus the inter-town trade and travel performed by the Handcart and Tumbrel. As before Porterage is used to deliver products into the town centre for storage or trade.
- (Raw) Glass is renamed to Glass Ingots
Scoreboards and Badges
A new scoreboard is introduced, Top Traders. This ranks players by total volume of import and export throughout the season, measured by cargo size. The top 3 traders will receive a new Badge at the end of the season.
Other updates
- Production methods are renamed to Production Recipes (sometimes just called recipes)
- Production bonuses from workers has been rebalanced. They now provide +2 production bonus already at the worker level, +3 as journeyman, +5 as master and +10 as specialist.
- Transport cargo slots limit now also applies to manual trading, and base cargo slots have been slightly reduced. The Prestige Board will have a separate track for adding additional slots, and as before Mercantile skill gives bonus slots.
- The Contract cap has been lowered but can now be increased by allocating prestige (up to 400) or by gaining Mercantile skill (+20 for worker, +50 for journeyman, +200 for master, in addition to that from prestige)
Read more about the game and try it yourself at Mercatorio