Crowdfunding is a game function that runs out of the Central Bank and includes pledges of three items. It will always be 100M units of a low tier item, 1M units of a mid-tier item, and 10,000 units of a high tier item. Each Crowdfunding runs for 24 hours and pays you out the amount of cash listed as "Return on Pledge" when it completes.

The way it works is that in order to pledge to each individual product you need to have the required number of items. So in the example here, you need a stockpile of 100M wood, or 1M Zeppelins or 10k Aircraft Carriers to pledge.

When you pledge, the value of the goods you pledged is added based on your local market price at reset, to the "Total Pledged Value" So in this case, with Wood at 117/unit on my local market at reset, 100M wood is worth 11.7B. When I first pledged to wood, it was at 83/unit which is why my Total Pledged Value is 8.3B

This means for maximum payout at the end, you want to pledge products while their price on your local market was high at reset, rather than low. Once you pledge to a given product once, you can then keep pledging to it in any amount any time before the crowdfund ends.

The "Return on Pledge" starts at +0% (+25% in San Jose). For every 10 unique backers of a given product, the return on pledge increases by 5% for everybody regardless of what they've pledged to.

As you can see in the screenshot, all I've done is pledge once to wood, but my Return on Pledge is +120%

The 163 backers to Wood are giving +80% to the total, the 34 backers to Zeppelin are giving +15% total, and the 4 backers to Aircraft Carrier (since there haven't been at least 10 unique backers) are giving +0%

The 25% base I have from San Jose +80% + 15% + 0% is 120% I get the full increase on my return even though I've only backed one of the products one time.


There are two main ways Crowdfunding can work for you. The one you can take advantage of more commonly is "Converting your large stockpiles of junk into cash without having to do it really slowly using autosell"

The highest bid on the player trade market right now for wood is 100/unit. My own local market price is higher than that. It's not beneficial for me to sell wood to that player. So what I can do is pledge it all to the crowdfunding, and already I'm getting +120% of the value. So if I'm pledging at the 100/unit that the player bid is willing to pay me, instead of getting 100/unit from the player, I can get 220/unit from the crowdfund, and that number will only go up if more unique players pledge to the bids.

This is a great way to get some more cash for upgrading and expanding using your stockpiles of products you can't sell for a ton on the player market. But always make sure you do check the player market first. For example, right now there are HUGELY high-priced bids for Books ($100,000/unit) and Fashion ($300,000/unit) that are WAY more than you will EVER get from Crowdfunding. But when Crowdfunding wants Wood, or other low demand items, you can convert to nice chunks of money.

The other use of Crowdfunding is commonly done by later-progression players, which is, basically, "Keep stockpiling huge amounts of high tier products and wait around for the crowdfund to be those products"

Eventually, the high tier product on the Crowdfund will be Skynet, or Social Network, or Space Colony, or another very high tier high value product. When that happens, the players who have spent weeks or even months stockpiling them can flood the crowdfund. They'll put up sales on the player market for all 3 products super cheap to get as many people as possible to pledge, try to push the return on pledge up to +700% or +800% and turn their massive stockpile of top tier items into 7 or 8 times their value in cash.

The obvious downside to this strategy is not knowing exactly how long you'll have to wait for the pledge to come up, but those same players spend the whole time offering very high prices for those products on the player market so they don't only stockpile their own resources, they spend all their cash on getting other players to farm them for them as well, so they can take full advantage of the crowdfunding profits.

So that's Crowdfunding. Partly a good way to convert large stockpiles into cash, partly a way to focus a late-game strategy.

One of the more important features of the game the way it is currently played is the Player Trade system. You can access it via this link at the top of the regular trade center. It allows you to place buy and sell orders, as well as fill the buy and sell orders created by other players. It is a phenomenal way to gain early progress, as there are often extremely high-priced bids on the player market, even for lower tier products, including things like Fashion and Books which can be made early in a run.

Once you enter into the player trade interface, you have a number of options. The top section is for placing your own trades. You can select to 'buy' or 'sell' and then which resource you want to place a trade for in the dropdown. You can only place orders for products you have researched and produced. Once you've picked which kind of order you want to place, and which product, you then need to fill out the number of items and the price per item. You'll notice the "Quota Left" figure in the top corner. This is how many -units- of the selected product you can add to the trade given the price you've already added in. Your quota is an amount equal to 1% of your Market Cap, and the amount of that quota you've used up resets to 0 every two hours when the market resets.

Below that are some options for navigating existing trades. First is a dropdown where you can filter the existing trades by bids (players bidding cash to buy your resources) and asks (people asking a cash price to sell their resources) and also open up a product filter that will let you filter the list to only certain products (The 'filter resources' filter will also only include products currently listed on the trade market. If there are no bids or asks for a given product, it won't show up in the filter list)

Below that, the option 'Better than market price' will filter the list to show you only bids that are offering more than your local market price, and asks that are requesting less than your market price, IE: deals which are better for you financially than buying/selling on your local market.

Underneath that we have 'Automatically fill claimed trades' Normally, if you have placed a bid or ask on the market, and another player fills it, the filled portion will show up at the top of the list waiting to be 'claimed' to finalise the transaction. If you check off this button, completed trades will execute automatically. This is good to do in general, but especially if you've put up a large bid to cover deficits while you're away, so the goods can come in automatically to allow production to continue.

Finally below that, we have the list of existing trades on the player market. These will indicate the product, whether it's a bid or an ask, the player who placed the trade, the total size of the trade in units, and cash, and then whether your action is to 'sell' products or 'buy' products from them. Once you select the 'buy' or 'sell' button, an interface opens allowing you to partially fill their trade, and also choose how much of your own cash/goods you want to spend on the trade. Unit prices in green are better than your local market, unit prices in red are worse.


The interface will show the trade's price per unit, and the current total value of the trade to you along the top, and your total stockpile of the product and the amount you're filling along the bottom. Once you've set the bar where you want it, you just hit 'ok' and the trade will execute.

Filling the trades placed by other players doesn't consume quota, and so you can fill as many such trades as you have the goods or cash to fill.

A warehouse is a structure that you can research in the research lab that allows you to build warehouses onto the map. Once you build a warehouse you need to set up 'routes' for it.

In the warehouse interface there are a few important elements. To set up a route you click the "Add Route" button and then select the source building you want to pull in items from. This will add the route to the list of routes.

The total amount of resource per second that the warehouse can take in is shown in green and increases as you level up the warehouse, and the total throughput is divided equally among each route. So in the screenshot the 500/second is being applied fully to the one route. If you added a second route, they would each input 250/second, three would be 166.6 each and so on.

By shipping items into a warehouse, you save on the fuel cost of shipping them directly to their destinations. The fuel reduction is shown here in yellow, and increases as you level up the warehouse.

The fuel savings is applied to trips both into and out of the warehouse, so you don't need to put the warehouse anywhere specific in terms of the route. But if you're going to be routing in goods from all over, somewhere central probably minimises the total length of the trips, which also saves fuel.

A common confusion about using warehouses is that it can seem like a warehouse actually increases your fuel consumption instead of decreasing, and in absolute terms, it can. What's happening is that if you imagine a glass factory that was using that silicon mine, and pulling 50 silicon per second from it, if I route that silicon into a warehouse closer to the glass factory, the warehouse is able to pull 500/second, and so as long as there's at least 500 silicon on the mine, it will pull 500/second every cycle, so at first I'm moving ten times the silicon!

But you're not only saving fuel overall because of the warehouse's fuel reduction, it's also cheaper in terms of fuel to move one large amount than several smaller amounts (500 once uses less fuel than 50 ten times) and if the warehouse can pull more than the source produces, the stockpile on the source will eventually run out, and it will slow down how often it can pull the full amount.

So they can be tricky to keep working right away if you build one and immediately level it up a lot, or if you're not splitting the input among a large number of routes, but they can be useful to centralize your resources, which can keep production running more smoothly.

It's generally accepted that they're not good enough to use up an entire building permit, especially since you could use that permit on a Resource Booster to increase fuel production so the fuel savings matter even less, but in the first DLC (Purchaseable for $5) there are two policies that can also help make them more useful:

"Warehouse Permit Act" causes every 2nd warehouse you build to refund 1 building permit (essentially making them cost 0.5 permits each)

"High Speed Warehouse" causes warehouses to pull in 2x the inputs, and move goods 50% faster at a cost of using 2x the power.

You've seen this symbol on a structure and clicked on it to see what it says, and it tells you that the building is losing money! The profit margin is negative and it suggests you might want to shut it down. So what does it mean, and what should you do? The main answer in almost every case is "Not much and nothing."

Being a market game, it wants to give you as much information about prices as possible and this is an example of that. It's good information to have but in most cases you're not going to take any action.

Shown here is one of my glass factories with a negative margin. -24.8%, Oof that's pretty awful. But it's important to know what this number actually MEANS so you can decide what to do about it. Look down at the bottom of the panel for the Glass factory. It's taking in 655..5 Silicon and 327.7 Coal, and producing 327.7 Glass.

So what the profit margin is comparing is "The price of 655.5 Silicon plus 327.7 Coal" to "The price of 327.7 Glass" and expressing the difference as a percentage. So when you have a negative profit margin, it means "The price of the Silicon and Coal is higher than the price of the Glass"

If you're not autoselling glass, this basically doesn't matter at all. If you're using the glass to make another object, like say Screens, and those are profitable then it doesn't matter that Glass is not profitable either. If you are or were autoselling the glass, the negative margin implies that you could make more money selling the silicon and coal instead, but since both of those are being created basically for free by your mines (minus costs of fuel) you don't really need to worry about it.


Since every building follows the base ratios listed in the product list, it's really easy to look at your trade center and do this math yourself. A glass factory is 2 Silicon + 1 Coal = 1 Glass. My current prices are
37.1 + 37.1 + 59.2 = 133.4 for materials, and 100.3 for the glass. 100.3 is 75.1% of 133.4, thus, my -24.8% margin.

So does this mean I shouldn't be selling glass? Maybe. The more important information isn't the profit margin, it's where your prices fall within their possible range. I keep a spreadsheet for each city where I track the lowest and highest price I've ever seen for each resource.

To use our Glass example, in Toulouse I have seen Silicon from $31 to $118, Coal from $26 to $117 and Glass from $109 to $469. If Silicon and Coal are both at their lowest price, the cost is $88, so even $109 glass will have a positive profit margin (23.8%) but that's the cheapest possible price for my glass. Selling it at that price seems like a bad idea even though it "turns a profit"

Conversely, if Silicon and Coal are at their highest possible price, the cost is $353, and if my glass were at say, $300, that would be a -15% profit margin, the game would say I should shut it down, but I could sell glass for 275% the actual money as the previous example that had a +23.8 profit margin.

So in closing, negative profit margins are only important if you are selling the product with the negative margin, and could effectively sell the components instead by swapping your autosell. And even then, it's more important to be aware of whether the current price is near the top or the bottom of the possible range for your city.