GOL Cast: Trying to Strike a Profit in Merchants of Kaidan

I talk a lot about Early Access, because the majority of games sent to us are on there. The games there range from awesome to awful, and Merchants of Kaidan has a bit of both.

Merchants of Kaidan by Forever Entertainment is a trading game where you must travel between cities and towns buying goods and selling them for profit. You must also hire people to assist you and man your carts and overcome the tolls, robbers and bad omens that are sent your way on almost every step of the way from one village to the next one.


Merchants of Kaidan is in no way perfect. The idea has been done before and the game has a good foundation for a good trader game. However, the game does some things in a way that makes no sense and I can't help but to advice you to not pick this game up in its current state.

At a quick glance the game appears to work just fine. There are no game breaking bugs, visual glitches and overall the game seems stable. The problems are more in the mechanics and most importantly, in the in-game economy. Economy is the single most important thing for a trading game of any sort. Prices need to be reasonable and they need to make sense. It's also important to have them change based on events in the game world. This is the thing that Merchants of Kaidan fails most at.

First of all, the prices are NOT reasonable. While the game has various different sorts of goods that you can buy and sell, it only makes sense to carry a couple of them. Rest of the goods are always way too expensive to buy and they are sold for a minimal price. The mountain herb in the game is the worst offender. It costs around 100 trigons (the currency in the game world) to buy but not a single town on the map will buy it for more than 30 trigons. You are guaranteed to lose if you buy it. Every single time.

The price differences between towns are also illogical. If you make a trading game you will want to have different towns have different prices for different goods. You might have a town that produces wheat and sells it for a low price but they might lack ores and buy them at high prices for example. This is not the case with Merchants of Kaidan, almost everything is randomized. Sure, some towns might not sell ores or mountain herbs (yuck) but the prices of every-day goods are still very random. There are some events that change prices a bit, like seasons and the occasional storm, but most of the time the changes are just pure RNG.

Because of the random nature of the game, the only way to win the game is to keep looking at a guide that shows you what are the reasonable prices to sell and buy goods and hope the RNG has mercy on your poor poor soul. As far as I know, there is no skill involved and you can't plan ahead and create awesome strategies. And without strategy or skills a trading game becomes just boring wandering from town to town. I didn't have much fun playing this game and I doubt any of you will either. Unless you are really into the knife mini-game that you can play in the taverns of Kaidan.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.