V-bay
From VoidWiki
V-bay is an ebay-like auction place allowing players to offer their resources in exchange for Voids, the most used (and only :)) currency in Voidwars. After reading this article, you will become a real Ferengi, maybe not with same knowledge of trading, but with the same funny big ears!
Contents |
Basics
Buying
Sooner or later every empire will run out of a certain resource. When this occurs, production, regardless whether it is production of ships, buildings, or stations, will slow down. The consequences can be relatively harmless like your workers playing cards rather than producing anything (see also: Wikipedia:East_Germany :)), but also very harmful like a decaying fleet, because you can't pay the fleet upkeep any longer; actually, the latter is very unlikely to happen, because the upkeep will be paid before all other costs.
To avoid such situations you should always keep an eye on the resources bar at the bottom and if you lack of a resource, go to V-bay and you will see a table similar to the following Screenshot. 
Here you can compare the offers of other players, take a cheap one, and bid for it.
How to Bid
This probably is the optimum strategy for bidding on any auction that bids by proxy (which includes VoidWars and even eBay, but not for example, World of Warcraft)
- Step 1. Bid the maximum amount you are willing to pay, but no more. Type this amount into the Bid box and click "Bid".
- Step 2. There is no step 2 because that's seriously all you have to do!
One of three things will happen:
- If someone has already bid higher than that amount on the offer, then you pay no voids. The other player's bid will automatically be raised to the amount you had bid. That auction now costs more than you are willing to pay (since you followed Step 1, remember?), so find another offer to bid on, or move on. Otherwise, you are now the high bidder, and your name now displays next to that offer (you may have to reload the Finances page to see it).
- If someone else ends up out-bidding you before the auction ends, all of your voids are refunded and you won't win the auction. But that's good, because if you had raised your bid, you would end up paying more than you are willing to. (Since you already bid the maximum amount you were willing to pay, right?)
- If no one bids more than you are willing to pay by the time the auction expires, you will win the auction and end up paying equal to or (much more likely) less than you were willing to pay. Since the system automatically increases your bid only when necessary, you will end up paying only the minimum amount required to outbid the second highest bidder. If no one else had bid on that offer, then this amount is the starting price that the seller set for the offer. The remainder of your bid, as well as the resources that you won, will be instantly and magically deposited in your empire's account.
Note that any voids you bid will unavailable to you until you either get outbid, or the auction ends. This can be inconvenient in some situations, see this bug.
Note that bidding what you would pay for the resources is only optimal if all other bidders use the same strategy, you have sufficient money for all you want, it is impossible to guess what others have bid, and there is only one offer for what you want. In effect you usually have to split your available cash over multiple offers, and others might have to do the same. Furthermore most players do not spend all their cash to vote much higher than the current bid, so you can often get away with bidding less. It is also possible to guess what others have bid, especially if there are more than one offer (just outbid one of the offers, and see what YOUR bid is LISTED as...), so you can either just barely outbid them, or bid exactly what they have bid, to maximize their costs, if you happen to favour the seller over the current bidder.
Selling
If it comes to a situation in which you have lots of resources and can't use them by yourself, or just need some Voids to buy a research project, you may consider selling your resources. To do that, go to Finances->Sell stuff and enter the resources you want to sell. You may consider making several small offers rather than a single big one. This will make your offers to be payable for more players and, by the law of supply and demand, your chances for getting more Voids will raise. After you have entered your offer, your resources will be immediately (magic again!) transfered to V-bay, where they will be stored for the duration of the offer, which you can set to 3, 6 or 12 hours. After that they will either be transferred to the highest bidder in exchange for the Voids you will get, or, if nobody has made a bid to your offer, they will be shipped back to your empire.
Galactic Trading Commission
In the old days, when law and order prevailed throughout the Void, there was a commission which mercilessly sanctioned every miserable attempt to bypass the Terms and Conditions of the Trading Post - today you just don't need to care about that anymore (See also: Developer Laziness).
Fair Exchange Rates
In Game 11, resource trades levelled off at about the following ratios:
- 1 Void for 4-5 Metal or Crystal
- 1 Void for 5 Polomite
- 10 Void for 1 Calanium
However, it has to be added that exchange rates varied greatly throughout the game, with 10,000 Metal being worth from 2,000 to 10,000 Voids.
