caravan trades

[songqu88@gmail.com]

When you cancel an offer, it says you get your gold back but the merchants pocket a percentage of the gold or something. Might not be that high, but it's some percentage. And then you say something like merchants could take over the world.

[fodder]

test results:

manual buy offer = 1/100
auto buy offer = 20/100

if caravan sell set at:
1/100 food sold at 1/100
20/100 food sold at 20/100
19/100 food sold at 20/100

.......eh?

[De-Legro]

mmm so it looks like it fills the Manual Buy offer first, IF the manual buy offer is high enough to satisfy the sell order. Next Test I would suggest set the manual buy offer to 5/100 and try selling for 1/100 and 10/100 or something along those lines. It would also be interesting to see what happens the the Manual Buy Order is higher the the auto

[fodder]

well i ain't testing more. only thing i'm really interested in is whether traders will see both manual and auto offers.
the 2 systems should be streamlined to act consistently

[Anaris]

Automatic offers are meant to be more or less a baseline.

If you have an automatic sell offer set at 1 gold per 100 bushels, then no manual offer you set up would ever be used.

It is intended that manual offers supersede automatic offers.

[egamma]

What if you had an automatic offer at 10 and a manual offer at 5?

Basically, will the cheaper food always be purchased first?

[fodder]

here's an odd one... i sent a caravan (20/100) out to a place that autobuys @20...

some of the food was sold.. but most not......  but the next day the place is starving (it might have been starving anyway.. didn't look)

what are the chances that it had both manual and auto @ 20/100...  and the stuff my caravan sold took all the manual... but decided not to take up the auto too?

can't think of any other reason why the auto 20/100 wasn't used..... unless it has a really low threshold...

[egamma]

Here's what should happen:
When buying, attempt to purchase the cheapest food possible. Keep buying as long as there is food for sale under the threshold amounts (gold and food) and gold available.

When selling, sell to the highest offer available. Keep selling as long as you have food for sale, there is an offer to buy it, and that offer meets or exceeds the price you set.

Buy low, sell high. Auto-Caravans should employ merchants who understand that. After all, the concept of "auto" or "manual" isn't something that they should be aware of.

[Anaris]

Buy low, sell high. Auto-Caravans should employ merchants who understand that. After all, the concept of "auto" or "manual" isn't something that they should be aware of.

No, but you're thinking about it wrong.

Lord to his steward: "OK, here's a purse of 300 gold.  Use it to buy food at 30 gold per hundredweight until it's used up.  Once it's gone, I authorize you to buy any other food that comes in at 10 gold per hundredweight, out of the treasury, as long as we have less than 1000 food stored."

Does that make more sense?

[egamma]

No, but you're thinking about it wrong.

Lord to his steward: "OK, here's a purse of 300 gold.  Use it to buy food at 30 gold per hundredweight until it's used up.  Once it's gone, I authorize you to buy any other food that comes in at 10 gold per hundredweight, out of the treasury, as long as we have less than 1000 food stored."

Does that make more sense?

I was speaking about caravan logic, not warehouse logic.

[songqu88@gmail.com]

That warehouse logic makes sense on the trader side too. I believe it means that manual offers always take precedence, and that the manual offer covers up the auto-offer. That means this isn't like an open market where you actually have the option of finding better prices. Well, you could, but that's completely dependent on the lord of the region. In any case, the auto-offer doesn't even come into consideration as a price unless there are no manual offers here. So while buy low sell high works as a very rudimentary sort of mantra, it is applicable for prices among competitors, and not when a price is "hidden" by a single retailer.

[Anaris]

I was speaking about caravan logic, not warehouse logic.

The caravan isn't even told the "once it's gone" offer exists, so why does what they think even matter??

[egamma]

Okay, but please consider the problems reported by fodder in this thread--caravans are not buying all the food they should.

If there's an auto sell at 20, max 200 bushels, and a manual sell at 20, for another 200 bushels, then a caravan SHOULD be able to purchase all 400 bushels, as long as the caravan has sufficient gold and was told to buy at 20.

Is this the way it will work, or will two caravans need to be sent?

[fodder]

eh... it's the other way around... my caravans were selling.

[Vellos]

Solution:

Don't use automatic transfer. It's for weaklings.