Black Market

The Black Market is the place to spend geld in Terra, if you think you have too much of it.

As the server moves on and many mages look for goodies on the black market, prices inflate especially on the faster servers. This means that mages that want rare items from the black market, need to concentrate on getting more than usual ammounts of Geld, a dedication also known as Whoring.

Anyway, this is how the Black Market works:

• Items can be sold and bought in the Antique Store of the Black Market.
  • If you sell a Lesser Item, you receive the current base price of the item (shown on Sell Page), plus a little bit more
  • If you sell a Unique, you receive its base price + about 60% of the overbid. UBB thread
• Heroes only be hired (not traded) in the Tavern of Heroes section
• Spells can only be bought (not trade) in the Exotic Mageware section.
  • This includes rare Ancient spells, but excludes the speciality-unique ultimate spells.
• Summonable Units can be bought (not traded) in the Spawning Hatchery
  • This excludes the speciality-unique ultimate units.
• Mercenary Units can be hired through Swords for Hire.
  • These units are only available this way.
• At the Altar of Darkness, devoted mages can buy themselves favours of Gods.

-- see also Players Manual section on bidding --

Bidding

Stuff that you buy on the Black Market, you buy in a flogging. You never know before if your bid will win you the item - it is always possible it is overbid. Pay attention when buying: be sure you bid on the correct item and you enter the correct amount that you wish to bid. You cannot cancel a bid you have made!

• When you place a bid, an amount of geld is taken from your storage.
• The next bid should be at least 5% of the old bid.
• Placing a bid takes one turn (regardless on how many items you do bid) and causes small net power loss.

• Other mages on the server are given 30 minutes to attempt to outbid you.
• If you are outbid you will receive an in-game informing message offering you to quickly re-establish a higher bid.
• Meanwhile, the amount of your original bid is returned to your storage.
  • Net power returns some time after the money is returned, to prevent others from spotting you bidding.

• If your bid wins the goodies, you’ll receive a confirming message and will find them in your inventory.

• Starting bid price goes up/down depending on how many people bid on it as the set goes on.

Pre Orders

• You can set 'pre-orders', this will make an assistant bid a set price for a given item. When it becomes available, if you have turns and geld, no matter whether you are online or not.
  • This setting is temporarily disabled when you are under harmfull enchantments (e.g. Temporal Stasis Field; Meteor Storm; Death and Decay; Frozen Hell; Fury of God)

Extended display time

• When new Heroes, Unique Items, Spells and Units appear on the market, they stay in the market for at least 2.5 hours.
  • Thereafter they are sold, 30 minutes after the winning bid.
    • If nobody buys an item that you put on the market, it gets "sold" after 3 hours anyway and you still receive money(tested on arch, March 2010).

Note: This feature has been enabled/disabled from time to time (developers are trying to make up their mind ;) )

Typical Questions

Too many Mercenaries!!!

Be warned: Troops that you hire this way, occupy population space.

• Be sure to have sufficient towns to house them and sufficient farms to feed them.
• You'll also need suffient ordinary population or a lot of savings to fulfill their geld upkeep.
• When you hire more people than you can host, on their arrival the mercenaries will refuse to work for you - but too bad, you lost your geld.

Why buy spells that you can research yourself?

You may purchase Simple, Average, Complex, and Ancient spells.

• Do not purchase spells that you have already researched, as it will simply be a waste of geld.
• It is rare to find a spell for sale that you are not able to research, but it can be very beneficial to acquire such a spell (because each researched spell increases a mage’s spell level).