Trade RoutesTrade Routes

What it is

A personal tournament with no fighting in it. While Trade Routes runs, Mercenary Exchanges appear on the world map, and you send a Captain loaded with Silver to buy mercenaries from them. Every purchase pays trade points, the points are your score, and the top 100 players in your division are rewarded.

What it isn't is a battle. There's no monster to pile onto and no city to break. The Exchange is a shop, and the only contest is the scramble to reach one before it's empty. That single fact shapes the whole event: this is about Silver, speed and being early, not about troops and counters.

One catch is built into the name. You can't shop at home. The exchanges you're allowed to use sit in other kingdoms in your Battle Group, so every trade is a march across the border and back.

How it scores

You score by buying, and a bigger squad is worth more. Each deal at the Exchange pays trade points, shown on the offer before you commit. Those points track the number of mercenaries in the squad, not the Silver it costs. You'll see two offers of the same size at different prices paying the same points, so the thing to chase is the biggest groups, not the cheapest.

Your offers are your own. Each player gets a personal, random list that refreshes about every seven hours, which means your ceiling is part luck: the most you can score is set by the size of the deals you happen to be shown.

The stock is shared even when the offers aren't. An Exchange fills toward 100% as the kingdom buys it out, and once it's full it vanishes from the map. Arrive late and you find an empty stall. If a purchase falls through, the Silver rides home with your Captain, so a missed trade costs you time, not your bank.

No fighting. Just Silver, speed, and getting there first.

How to play it

• Build a Caravan first. No Caravan in your city, no marches to an Exchange at all. It's the one hard prerequisite, so put it up before the event opens.
• Bank your Silver, and set a ceiling. This is the real cost of the event. Come in with as much Silver as you can spare, decide what you're willing to spend, and hold that line. The buy loop is moreish, and the usual way to lose Trade Routes is to drain your Silver and have nothing left to rebuild your army.
• Make your Captain fast. Distance is the whole game. Stack march speed: the Thunder Drum artifact, a march-speed enchantment, the Tiger's Eye gem, and any kingdom-wide speed buff your king is running. The one Hero who changes the event is Ayrin, who ignores the distance cap outright.
• Find an Exchange. It's a small purple building, often near a coastline, in a Battle Group kingdom. The fastest way to spot one is other people: join the Mercenary Exchange chats, watch for coordinates, and share the ones you find. A wall of marches converging on a single point is the tell.
• Keep the march short and the Captain ready. Any trip over two hours can't be sent (unless you're on Ayrin), and in practice you want far less, because the stall empties in minutes. Pre-load a Captain with Silver and leave them idle so you can fire the second coordinates drop.
• Buy big, and buy fast. Take the largest squads on offer, since that's where the points are, and don't sit reading the room. People wait to snipe offers the moment they refresh, so the buy window is no time to chat.
• Come back before it closes. Claim anything you've earned before the tournament ends. The mercenaries are already yours to keep, but the ranking rewards disappear if you're not there to collect.

Deeper in

The Caravan, and the two-hour leash

Two rules decide whether you can trade at all. The first is the Caravan: it's a city building, and without it the game won't send a single march to an Exchange. The second is distance. Any march that would take more than two hours to reach an Exchange can't be sent, which quietly writes off the far corners of your Battle Group. The exception is the Hero Ayrin, whose feature waives the cap, so an Ayrin player can reach exchanges nobody else can touch. Between them, those two things decide how much of the map you can actually shop: a Caravan at home, and either short hops or Ayrin in the saddle.

Points follow the deal, not the price

Be exact about scoring, because it changes what you buy. The points on an offer scale with the number of mercenaries in it. The Silver cost moves on its own, so the same squad size can turn up cheap or dear and pay the identical points either way. When you pick between deals, read the points and the headcount, not the sticker. The flip side is that a run of small, cheap offers is a weak hand however many you clear, and the only cure is to refresh and hope for bigger squads.

Why speed beats everything

An Exchange is one shared stall with a whole kingdom queued in front of it, and it sells out in minutes, sometimes in seconds once the coordinates go public. So the player who places isn't the one with the most Silver, it's the one who arrives first and does it most often. Every piece of the strategy points the same way: short marches, loaded and idle Captains, speed-ups in your pocket, no wasted seconds. The commander you send barely matters, since anyone can carry Silver. The speed setup around them matters a lot.

Finding one is the hard part

The real difficulty in Trade Routes isn't the buying, it's the looking. Exchanges are small and they hide, and by the time you've hand-scrolled a neighboring kingdom the good ones are already gone. That's why the community runs on shared coordinates: dedicated Exchange chats, players calling out spawns, even third-party finder tools. Treat it as a team sport even though the scoreboard is solo. Share what you find, and you'll get more back than you put in.

What the mercenaries are for

Most players are chasing something other than the title, and it's the mercenaries. Every one you buy stays with you whatever the scoreboard does, and they're premium, hard-hitting troops. Their tier rides on your army: the mercenaries on offer run a couple of tiers above your own Guardsmen, so the bigger your account, the better the mercs you're shown. Where they earn their keep is the next event over. Trade Routes runs alongside Rise of the Ancients, the Tin Man fight, and that's where these mercenaries get spent, coming in last and hitting hard while the rest of your stack soaks the damage. So even a middling finish is worth the trip. You walk away with a bench of elite troops for the fight that follows.

You keep every mercenary you buy, win the title or not.

What you're playing for

The headline is a title, and it's worth more than it sounds.

• First place takes Entrepreneur: +25% to your Captains' Leadership.
• Ranks 2 to 100 take Merchant: +10% to Captains' Leadership.
• Both last seven days.

Leadership is the pool that sizes every march you send, so a Leadership title doesn't just sit in a case. For a week it makes every attack bigger, in this event and every other one on the calendar. That's what makes a top-100 finish worth the Silver, even though the mercenaries are yours to keep either way.

Alongside the title, every placement down to 100th pays a four-item bundle: a trade ship (legendary for first, rare for everyone below), a stack of experience, an epic-grade reward, and a clan payout. The amounts slide down the ladder like this:

The weight sits right at the top: first place clears 50,000 of the clan reward where 51st through 100th takes 5,000, so a high finish pays several times over what scraping into the hundred does.

Not yet confirmed

• The refresh clock. Most sources say the offers reset every seven hours. One says closer to six and a half. Seven is the working number.
• Whether a failed march ever costs Silver. The rule is that it comes back with your Captain, but a few players report losing it, most likely an older bug. Assume you're refunded, and keep an eye on your bank.