Everyone wants to trade down, and hardly anyone wants to trade up. Someone attempting to trade up, on the other hand, at a 1:2 ratio, gets their trade snapped up instantly.

What I see, over and over again, is a large number of people attempting to trade down at a 2:1 ratio - and the trade sits for days with no takers unless a fellow guild member grabs it to be nice. What do you see when you look in guild trade threads and in available trades on the market? Now let's apply those economic principles to FoE: * Price ceilings cause shortages as people won't produce goods they can't sell at a profit. * Price floors cause surpluses as people produce extra goods they end up being unable to sell. * A fair trade is one in which a willing buyer and a willing seller agree on a price that they think makes them both better off. * An efficient market is one in which all agents are maximising their utility subject to their budget constraints and all markets clear.

And even the supply side is hard to calculate, since a lot of goods are not produced by goods buildings.

Those attempt to calculate the cost of producing goods and so will tend to approximate a fair price based on supply, but they completely ignore the demand side of the equation. There have been attempts to calculate a fair ratio by the costs to produce goods in tiles, etc., but I disagree with those too. There is a strong sense among FoE players that, when trading goods across ages, a fair trade is a 2:1 ratio.

Forge of empires fair trade app