Merchant of the Skies is one of those games where you sail/fly around a map to buy things where they’re cheap to sell them where they’re expensive in order to buy bigger ships and reach more distant locations. As the name suggests, it takes place in a floating archipelago and you have an airship to huck your goods around in. Its distinguishing feature is that it has significant base-building elements. As you explore the (randomly generated) map, you can find the standard collection of cities selling goods, but also several uninhabited islands that have some kind of resource on them: Wheat, wood, stone, whatever. You can build a little base to harvest the resource, and other buildings to process that resource, turning sand into glass into bottles and then supplying an alchemist with both bottles and apples to make apple cider or else with both bottles, tea leaves, and flowers to make medicine. Once you’ve rebuilt the lighthouse and figured out how to build your own recharging towers (all the airships are powered by electricity, even though they’ve got propellors and balloons and stuff) you can buy boats and program them to run routes to do things like ferry your glass bottles from the sand pit where they’re created to the apple orchard where you’ve built an alchemist to turn them into cider, then have the same ship pick up the finished cider to deliver to an inn for profit.
This is a cool idea, although the execution leaves something to be desired. Almost no one sells any resources above the first tier. You can buy and sell sand and wood, but not glass or lumber. If you want to make a killing from your base-building, you have to find a gem island and set up a mine, because gems are a tier 1 resource that regular towns buy but also super valuable. Some higher-tier resources remain useful for the whole game because of how common they’re used for base building, chiefly lumber and bricks, and there’s a set of four (depending on difficulty setting) inns on the map that you can keep supplied with bread (baked from flour that’s ground up from wheat, making it a tier 3 resource) and apple cider (made from glass bottles and apples, making it a tier 4 resource).
Others, however, are useful exclusively for a specific side quest that calls for them: Iron gears are used to repair a lighthouse, which means you need exactly 20 of them ever in the whole game and can pretty much shut down your whole iron gear production facility after you get them. There’s a side quest to deliver two bottles of medicine early-ish in the game, but it hints that you should track down the wise men on their giant flying turtle and buy it from them rather than try to manufacture it for yourself, and medicine will never be useful again, despite being probably the single hardest resource to create in the game. The game really would’ve benefited from somewhere to send your iron gears and medicine (and maybe also bricks and lumber) in the endgame, the way inns take bread and apple cider at a steady rate forever. This is especially true since you can’t just sell these high-tier resources at regular towns, so there’s absolutely no point in making them outside of satisfying quest requirements.
The game also has no combat, which I am pretty confident was an intentional choice on the part of the developer. That’s not a criticism, just something I found worth pointing out, since if I didn’t, someone might reasonably assume there’s some kind of simple system for fighting off pirates and engaging in piracy yourself, because that’s the standard for these games. Closest thing is that there’s a giant octopus who will show up and challenge you to a game of musical Mastermind and mug you if you lose.
If you want one of these ship-trade-y kinds of games with base building and resource harvesting elements, then Merchant of the Skies is the entire genre so there’s nowhere else to go. It does ultimately deliver on both flying around buying and selling stuff and on building up little resource colonies and production chains, and it ties those two gameplay elements together seamlessly, so despite its flaws I do recommend it to anyone who thinks that sounds like fun.
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