Merchant: Real World Empire3.9.0 - App Store

A calm medieval trade empire, built on the real world.

No timers. No stress. No reflexes. Merchant turns the streets and cities around you into a living medieval economy - and lets you build it one unhurried decision at a time.

Found your first settlement at a real-world location, survey the land, and turn raw resources into refined goods through deep production chains. Connect your towns with trade routes, grow your population, and watch a humble camp become a prosperous empire that spans real cities and regions.

Made for unhurried afternoons - a few thoughtful minutes whenever the day allows. Your empire waits for you.

WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Found settlements at real places - a medieval map grows over the world you already know
- Master production chains - turn wood, stone and ore into lumber, bricks, food, wares, relics and luxuries
- Trade smart - move goods along trade routes to where they earn the most
- Send specialists - dispatch gatherers, carriers, minstrels and more from your caravan
- Barter with Tribes - trade and earn respect with independent settlements
- Grow your Realm - climb from district to city to region, raise your Might Score, earn noble titles
- Play with others - a persistent, shared world of fellow merchants

CALM BY DESIGN
There are no countdowns forcing you back. Nothing punishes you for putting your phone down. Merchant is a slow-strategy, cozy empire builder for people who love economy, trade and tycoon games but not the grind - a location-based game you play entirely at your own pace.

Free to play, with optional in-app purchases.

Merchant uses your location to place settlements on the real-world map. The game is played in English.

Version History More to find on the road, and more company to find it with.

• The Ranger: send him out on a bearing and he walks it for an hour, then reports what is worth the journey.
• The notebook: write down the places you mean to visit, and an arrow on the map points the way.
• Rovers camp in the wild and do not let a caravan pass unnoticed. Evade them, or send up to three soldiers to bring one back as your prisoner.
• The Treasury is now the Courthouse: hand in your prisoners there for a bounty.
• Invite a friend: share your invite code. Every chapter your friend finishes earns you a reward, and three friends who see it through make you a Grand Merchant.
• You can change your name or your gender from your account.
• Pay your respects at a monument, and the stone remembers who stood there.
• A Recent tab in Messages keeps your last 30 pop-ups.
• The map keeps its zoom and mode when you relocate or restart. 3.9.0 Sep 27 Merchant would not open at all on older iPhones. This release fixes that.

• Fixed: on an iPhone running iOS 15, 16 or 17, version 3.8.0 closed the moment you tapped the icon. It opens normally again.
• Relocating is gentler. A reading the server refused used to leave you waiting a quarter of an hour, with everything around you out of reach. It now asks for a second reading instead.
• When the map is not taking part, it says so, instead of letting you find out one place at a time. 3.8.1 Sep 20 Culture becomes something you spread, and something worth competing over.

• Culture rework: spread culture from your Abbey to inspire surrounding settlements. Culture no longer takes a settlement over. It invites, and the settlement chooses.
• You and your followers both benefit, but you might need to sweeten the deal to be the favorable inspiration.
• The Museum: put the artifacts your master gatherer digs out of ancient sites on display. An empty hall is worth no culture at all, and every different piece you add is worth more than the one before it.
• Your Abbey has a screen of its own: the settlements that follow it, what they pay, and what joining another one would cost.
• The Senior Advisor reads your chains and your market. He names the buildings standing idle, the chain that leaves no surplus, and what your trade line actually earns.
• The Greet button became Hail, and you now choose between a greeting and an insult.
• A monument's plaque carries the date the stone was set.
• Text and buttons were reworked across the game: one type scale, clearer roles, and buttons that are drawn instead of pasted.
• We raised our defenses against cheating. Play fair or be banished. 3.8.0 Sep 17 Raise a monument, and it stays standing on the map.

• The Junior Mason erects a stone on empty land or in a settlement, your own or somebody else's, and you choose what it says. Only the merchant who raised it can take it down.
• The Senior Advisor reads your whole realm. He names the best unclaimed land for each commodity, and reports on the settlements you already hold.
• The map now stops at the waterline. Coastlines follow the real ones instead of running on into open sea.
• A district is named after the place that lies there, not after wherever its first settler happened to stand.
• A City Focus can move. Your Castle, Abbey or Metropolis can be handed to another of your settlements while you stand at the destination.
• The Banner screen names the closest arenas to you, with the distance and the direction to each.
• Building a castle now says beforehand what it changes. A castle can be run at a lower rung or switched off, retaking your own no longer needs a purchased title, and what its fall costs you follows the castle's own rung.
• Your influence card names which of your five categories is the weakest, and what to give to raise it.
• Every amount slider takes a typed number and has a Max button.
• The library and the settlement screen say from which level a building becomes available.
• The map starts faster and holds less in memory. 3.7.0 Sep 2 The great arenas of the world have opened.

• Four hundred and six real arenas, across nine countries, now fly a Banner of their own. Pledge to one, and what you carry there is what raises it. You are free to leave for another whenever you like.
• Five kinds of support hold a Banner up: People, Food, Arms, Building and Luxury. The weakest of the five counts most, so a Banner is only as strong as what it lacks.
• A raised Banner pays its bannermen every day, in gold and in favors, and the three who gave most are named Champion, Companion and Guardian.
• Castles now climb: Castle, Crown Castle, Royal Castle, Imperial Castle. Each step widens the ground you can hold vassals on, and widens by just as much the ground others may march from to take yours.
• Before you lay siege, the march stands on the screen beside the castle. Your own castle decides how long an army of yours may be on the road.
• A title you earn is put on the moment it outranks the one you wear.
• Smaller comforts: the food market stall shows what your own caravan already carries, the instant sell opens on your largest pile, and a garrison reads as one line for each kind of soldier. 3.6.0 Aug 20 Your land now says what it is good at.

• Every settlement's production chain shows how well that ground carries its commodity, on the same five dot scale the survey uses, with the tile's richness beside it.
• Gatherers bring back more from land that suits the goods, and less from land that does not. Good ground is worth the walk.
• Taming wild animals succeeds more often. Donkeys, horses, camels and elephants all became easier to win over.
• In your caravan, each commodity shows how much of it is already on the markets in range and the lowest asking price, so you can judge yours before you list.
• Gold amounts are written with the coin everywhere, and read the same on every screen.
• Tribal favors, titles and army trades come off cooldown sooner: nothing waits longer than three days now. Tribal titles do keep to that pace, one at a time. 3.5.3 Aug 8 A follow-up to 3.5.1, all about the map camera.

• Tapping a tile slides it to the centre again, reliably. A second touch while the map was still gliding could cancel the slide halfway: the tile stayed selected, but the view froze wherever it happened to be, sometimes half off the map.
• With a Rookie or Master Scout, a selected tile lands exactly in the middle again. Since 3.5.1 it settled half a tile to the south-west.
• The real-map background lines up with the tiles again on Rookie and Master Scout grids. It sat half a tile off, which put streets under the wrong land.
• Food market stalls now list the wares of the four districts next door: north, south, east and west. A corner district is not next door, and eight districts made one stall read like a whole city. 3.5.2 Aug 3 A same-day follow-up to 3.5.0, fixing what that update got wrong.

• Empty land shows its terrain again. Since 3.5.0 it read "Unclaimed", which told you nothing the map had not already said.
• With a Rookie or Master Scout, the map centres on the tile you are actually standing on. It had drifted to the north-east, which made the whole view feel shifted.
• Tiles at the far edge of a Master Scout's range accept actions again. The app was turning them down on its own, before it ever asked.
• The market screen opens the district you are standing in, rather than one off to the west.
• The Metropolis label has gone from the realm and visit cards. The settlement itself is unchanged: the name row was simply too crowded. 3.5.1 Aug 1 A calm update, in the spirit of the game: no timers, no stress.

• Food markets on real market squares: a market hall or weekly market near you can now stand on the map as a stall. It keeps no stock of its own. It shows what the districts around it have for sale in raw food, food and luxuries, and adds a small markup for the haulage. For the seller it is an ordinary sale, wherever they are.
• The Pedia now shows a building's full upgrade chain, with the cost and yield of every step, so you can see where a building leads before you lay the first stone.
• Build cards show where a building sits in that chain, and an upgrade you cannot reach yet is shown as locked instead of hidden away.
• A Castle now unlocks the barracks ladder across your whole empire, not only in the settlement that holds it.
• Soldiers recalled from a garrison march home as the groups you recalled them in.
• Corruption was quietly charged twice a day. It is charged once now, so your daily gold is higher than it looked.
• Building costs read as they are written: three kinds of ten means three kinds of ten, and the invented limit of one Metropolis per city is gone.
• Visiting a tile no longer wipes it from your map, and a purchase queued while you were offline is now honoured. 3.5.0 Aug 1 A calm update, in the spirit of the game: no timers, no stress.

• Trading Post: a new building that puts a slice of your settlement's fresh production up for sale on the district market. Set your own prices and earn gold while you are away.
• Liberate and counter-siege: retake your own occupied settlement, and lay a counter-siege to win your castle back.
• Play streak: returning day after day now builds a streak with growing rewards, and a bundle of Favors every seventh day. A single rest day is forgiven.
• Something at every level: unlocks have been redistributed so that every level up to 29 announces something new — from paying respect at level 4 to the citadel at 22.
• The Ledger Room now tells the whole story: your treasury, your allegiances and your army, in one place.
• Tribes trade like neighbours: trade deals now rest per settlement, so another Selo or Burgh means another trade. Their personal favors remain one audience per day.
• Corruption starts later and gentler: nothing before level 9, and only after two idle weeks.
• Plus Locker status visible from the Empire view, a Get Stock button that only appears when there is something to collect, might rankings that agree across every list, and dozens of smaller fixes. 3.4.0 Jul 24 • Tribal title perks: every tribal title now carries a unique, permanent bonus: stronger production, manufacturing or crafting, cheaper soldiers, richer market payouts, or faster favors.
• Animal market: the tribes will now buy the beasts of burden from your caravan, paying a daily bundle of goods drawn from their own lands.
• Militia: a new weaponless starter unit, the gentlest way to raise a first army before you can arm it.
• Supply your settlements: deposit the goods a settlement consumes so its workshops keep running, collect row by row, and run both master crafters in one place.
• Occupy and revolt: reworked occupation rewards, tribute and corruption, and occupied settlements that can now rise up against you.
• Plus the Emperor on the Rulers screen, a full Titles section in the guide, the exact treasury balance in the Ledger Room, clearer production chains that show where inputs run dry, a rebalanced wood chain, tuned warrior upkeep and specialist training, and dozens of smaller fixes. 3.3.0 Jul 15 • Tribal characters — tribal settlements now hold two ability slots (a trade ability and a character ability), chosen on a new barter screen, and tribes can offer animals for your caravan.
• Carrier overhaul — carrier ranks now differ in what they can do: Senior carriers collect from all your settlements in one route, and Master carriers take remote build orders, give quotes and top up from the market.
• Region capitals — regions now have a capital. See it on the locality screen and get word when your settlement is appointed, or loses the honor. Prestige only, no penalty.
• Specialists rebalanced — minstrels and thieves act once a day for bigger payoffs, gatherers work in shorter, richer cycles, and higher thief tiers finally bring better loot.
• Smoother travel — actions respect your relocate grace window everywhere, with a countdown on the map.
• Plus stationed soldiers now shown on the map, artisan yield bonuses in the production chain, a gentler Prison, tuned treasure hunting, knights from level 15, and dozens of smaller fixes. 3.2.0 Jul 9 Merchant is back!

New in 3.1.0
- UX improvements
- Rename settlements
- Abandon settlements
- Land tax visible on claim screen

We also added some community feature requests
- Notifications to remind you when tasks are finished (thanks to Merno)
- Background music if you like that (thanks to Sentaron)
- Better objectives for new players (thanks to Xtra) 3.1.0 Jun 28 * UX fixes
* Community feedback fixes
* Balancing on game model 3.0.3 Jun 21 * Merchant is back! 3.0.1 Jun 17 * Merchant is back! 3.0.0 Jun 16 - Several improvements to the attack system regarding the assignment of settlement allegiance
- Stability improvements and minor bug fixes 2.0.7 01/15/2015 - Show settlement location on kingdom map
- Minor improvements and bug fixes 2.0.6 12/15/2014 Minor bug fixes and improvements 2.0.5 11/16/2014 - Bug fixes and improvements
- Double tap to zoom in/out
- You will now have to move units in to a castle to take and hold allegiance 2.0.4 11/02/2014 - Bug fixes and improvements
- Enhanced treasure graphics
- Access kingdom map from the surroundings 2.0.3 10/14/2014 iOS 8 bug fixes 2.0.2 09/29/2014 * New clean world
* Open to all players
* Many improvements
* Performance and bugfixes 2.0.1 09/18/2014 Merchant has been rebuild from the ground up. It now supports iOS 7 and retina devices.

New features:
* Hire a gatherer to acquire resources while travelling
* Hire a scout to expand your view on the surroundings
* Hire an artisan and use his knowledge at your settlements
* Build an army to rule your neighbourhood, city and even country 2.0 06/30/2014 The following features are new:

* Enhanced social options.
* The privilege for noblement to organize tournaments.
* The Fighter unit to join these tournaments and win the purse.
* The Minstrel unit and earn your livelihood by performing in other people's settlements.
* New buildings to build.
* Nine new achievements in the Secret Guild.
* New rankings.

But also, there will be corruption spreading through your empire if you don't visit your settlements regularly...

Finally, some bug fixes and usability tweaks. 1.2 06/04/2010