Ascendant Dawn is an innovative grand strategy/4X game where you play as a nomadic tribe in a bronze age setting.

One of the most important aspects of the bronze age that is depicted in Ascendant Dawn is trade. The bronze age had the first forms of globalization with a vast trading network especially for resources like tin. This is reflected in Ascendant Dawn with tin and even copper being a rare resource only found in certain locations, this leads to nations and tribes having to create long trade routes to distribute resources. This means that a nation can be completely ruined if its connection to important resources are severed.

Say if a nation is attempting to expand its borders and attacks another it trades with that supplies it with tin the attacker nation will eventually be unable to field high quality units and so would struggle to win a war. This can also happen during rebellions so make sure to prioritize keeping settlements that mine important resources loyal.

Initially, the only thing the player will really have to worry about is trading with settlements as a tribe. This is done through a barter screen. While money is a feature bartering is far more common since especially early game money is quite rare.

You select which resources to trade and swap resources for instance swapping food for textiles. Trading is on the surface that simple, a bar will fill up showing how much the other party likes the deal. If you offer them a bad deal they’ll lose relation and won’t accept if you offer than a balanced deal they’ll accept and if you offer than a good deal they’ll accept and you’ll gain relation. The real complexity of trade comes in with supply and demand. While all resources do have a base price, real price is heavily affected by the supply in the settlement and how much demand there is for it. The town with 4 farms and a ranch isn’t going to value food all that much but a mining town will. On the other hand the mining town might not value silver and copper that highly as they have so much but the farming town does. You can very easily create a system where you buy food at the farming town sell it at the mines and return with metals. This would be highly profitable for your tribe but you must remember that your people do eat food.

However, the towns won’t wait for you to trade with each other especially if they are in the same faction. They’ll set up trade links and both start profiting. But if these towns are at war then manually trading between them yourself would completely bypass the trade link system.