Trading: Global Market

This article was written in 2013 and has been edited for stlye, but not for content.

The global market is one of the features that was disabled due to insufficient server capacity after the game was released. The function of the global market is to adjust the prices of traded commodities according to demand created by players.

The following sections can be found in this article:

How the Global Market works

The Global Market is part of the Sim World panel along with the Leaderboard and Challenges. The image is a pre-release version of the Global Market trade screen, the final version is likely to look different.

The Global Market determines the price of coal, oil, alloy, metal etc. It is supposed to function much like a simplified version of a real life stock market. More buyers will create demand for a particular commodity and therefore the price will rise, more people selling a particular commodity means less demand and therefore the price will fall.

According to Maxis there will be inherit limits within the system to stop players coordinating their efforts to drive prices up or down for particular commodities. At time of writing this feature is still disabled so I can only assume there will also be some sort of mechanism to prevent inevitable escalation of raw materials and collapse of consumer products. After all, aside from building Great Works, no one actually needs to buy TV's whereas there will always be demand for the basic commodities, coal, oil and ore.

How the Global Market will affect Specialisation

Changes to the prices of commodities will also impact on specialisation industries in your cities where you need to import raw materials.

This may be beneficial if the price of a material you are selling rises, Equally it can also have a damaging effect on your economy if the price of essential imported materials rises AND the price of the materials you are producing falls.

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