Artifact Merchants
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Building cost: 10000 
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Buildings required: Marketplace.
Artifact Merchants is a building that can be constructed in Tower, Dungeon, Conflux, and Factory . It enables visiting heroes to buy or sell artifacts. The set of artifacts available for sale are the same in every merchant, regardless of the town, the town type or the player. The available artifacts contain three treasure artifacts, three minor artifacts, and one major artifact. Once an artifact is purchased, it is gone from all artifact merchants. At the beginning of each month, the set of artifacts available for sale is renewed.
The adventure map equivalent is the Black Market.
Price of artifacts
Every artifact has a so called basic cost, from where the sell price and the buy price is determined. The price depends on how many marketplaces the player owns. The rule of thumb is, that the more marketplaces, the cheaper are the buy prices and the higher are the sell prices. For example, with four markets, a Ring of Life with a base cost of 5000 can be bought for 14286 gold, or sold for 1750 gold.
| Operation | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buy | 500% | 400% | 333% | 286% | 250% | 222% | 200 | 181% | 167% |
| Sell | 20% | 25% | 30% | 35% | 40% | 45% | 50% | 55% | 60% |
PRICE (buy) = 5 × B / (1 + (M - 1) × 0,25)
PRICE (sell) = B × (1 + (M - 1) × 0,25) / 5
where B = basic cost of an artifact
M = number of marketplaces (max. 9)
Exploit
If the player owns zero marketplaces, but accesses an artifact merchant through a town owned by an ally, artifacts can be bought at a price of zero gold. This is fixed by the HD mod and Horn of the Abyss.