I wrote the other day how I’ve been playing Vox Imperium.

Because the game is in beta, not everything has been fully tested, and there’s still some things (though, shrinking slowly) that people can do to try and get an unfair advantage.

One of the core pieces of the game is the Market – it’s a place where any player can buy or sell their resources. There’s no player-to-player trading or selling, so it’s your main way of converting excess or spare resources of one kind, into gold, which can then be used in a variety of ways (mostly for the purchase of other resources, but it’s also a factor in operating and creating military units).

There are four basic resources – Food, Wood, Metal, and Relic – each of which has three sub types – poor, good, and rare. Creating units requires using two or more types of resources, and buildings are usually a combination of three or possibly all four.

Market prices for resources are based upon a variety of factors, mostly to do with demand and availability. So, if a resource is in high demand – the price for it will go up. Some items are inherently less available, and thus more expensive – plus subject to higher starting prices (Relic, being the most expensive and most difficult to gather).

So, in one game (Game 5) I had a small, but steadily improving empire – but I was hemmed in by bigger players. I got a little above myself and decided to take some territory – and eventually got pushed back by a significantly bigger player.

At that point, I basically gave up all hope of being able to win in that game. All my defensive buildings had been taken out, and I didn’t have any chance of being able to beat off any of the neighbors, should they decide they wanted my small chunk of land.

Those neighbors, however didn’t completely wipe out my empire – I still had a few resource gathering buildings, which had been upgraded during my expansion to produce a small, but steady trickle of income. Luckily, most of that steady trickle was in Good and Rare wood, with an additional small stream of Relic.

After several days, I decided to play around, and see what I could do with the small empire – again, having the expectation I’d be wiped out whenever someone nearby decided to get on with finishing my empire off.

I sold off all my available resources, and invested them in Poor Relics. I had, maybe 20,000 gold worth of Relics. A day later, I noticed the price of Poor Relics had gone up – not much, just 5 gold each, but when I had about 500 relics – that wasn’t too bad at all.
So, I decided to sell out of the Poor Relics, and go grab me some Good Relics, combining it with the few hundred or so I’d managed to grab, and bought about 200 good relics – they were pretty expensive.
Again, a day later – the price had gone up, maybe 10 gold. Not bad, I though – and decided to sell out, and buy some Poor Relics – which had once again dropped back down.

You can see the pattern, right? Buy low, sell high, re-invest in the other cheaper resource. From my point of view, this was just a novel, interesting exercise – I couldn’t see any direct effect.
By the time another day had gone by I had over 100,000 gold worth of Good Relics, I was starting to notice that the price would shift by a few points, every turn (so, every 30 minutes).

A day later, I’d managed to build up about 2 million in gold. I thought that would surely be enough to start rebuilding my broken empire – which I started doing.
I very quickly started to run out of money – all the prices of resources had gone up, as other players battled it out and stretched their supplies thin.
I had maybe 50,000 left, and decided to start doing the investing again. Every 2-3 moves, I’d quickly switch between one resource and another – resulting in the prices of relics starting to jump every turn… first 5, then 10, and quickly progressing up to 50 gold shift – every turn. I could buy rare relics for 173 gold each, and then 2-3 turns later, turn around and sell them for 280 gold each, buying into a cheaper or rarer resource.

Within a period of about 3 days, I had gone from having about 50,000 in resources, to having about 8 million.
I bought about 36,000 rare relics at about 230 gold each (remember that the price drops, if there’s low demand and high availability).
One turn later – Rare Relics were priced at 1,600 gold. I’d made nearly a 700% profit in one pulse. 36,000 rare relics, turned into 340,000 Good relics @170 gold. Another turn later – both Good Relics and Poor Relics were at over 2,300 each, or about 782 million gold.

Now, before you jump on me and say I was manipulating the market unfairly, well.. Yeah, I was. I had also told the game’s creator that I had been able to do this, when I was doing smaller investments. He didn’t seem overly concerned – after all, noone would really be able to use it to much effect.

When I caused the first major shift, I told the game’s admin again – and he stated working on a patch. About 2 hours after that, the patch was in, and my earning spree had come to a sudden halt with the 700 or so million in gold.

‘course, the first thing I did was go on a little raiding… You can see the aftermath of that over on the Vox Imperium forums.

Looking for an online web-based game to soak up some “spare” hours?
Like Civilization?
Like Turn-Based Strategy games?

Go check out Vox Imperium, it’s an interesting mix of the above.

There’s no turns, as such – but resource gathering and building only occurs at each “Pulse” (which occurs every 30 minutes).
You’re free to build/move units between pulses as your resources allow.

Because of the slow pace of the pulses, it’s quite possible to spend a few minutes every night (or two) moving units around, building, etc.
It’s only when you move into latter stages (which I havn’t reached yet) that you’d need to spend more time as you struggle to capture territory and strain your resources.

There’s plenty of room for improvements (A lot of people have suggested Google-like map browsing, which the developer is working on), but it’s quite playable at the moment.