auto selling as a concept is easy... (that said, haven't tried it, can't imagine how it can go wrong though)
you set a threshold and send off a caravan with any and everything above it to somewhere else to sell.
how does auto buying work?
let's say you set a threshold of 1000 and your region has say 500 stored... so the region will automatically send out a caravan to somewhere repeatedly (1 caravan max per destination at a time?) until the threshold is reached?
Quote from: fodder on June 24, 2011, 08:13:22 AM
auto selling as a concept is easy... (that said, haven't tried it, can't imagine how it can go wrong though)
you set a threshold and send off a caravan with any and everything above it to somewhere else to sell.
how does auto buying work?
let's say you set a threshold of 1000 and your region has say 500 stored... so the region will automatically send out a caravan to somewhere repeatedly (1 caravan max per destination at a time?) until the threshold is reached?
How can selling go wrong? here is an example
I have set my region to sell to the capital whenever I have more then 200 bushels, at a price of 30 gold. I currently have 450 bushels, I am wondering when the hell the caravan might leave my region. The other question when setting these things up is what does the "amount" setting do? I've set it to 1000 for my example. Does that mean I will only send a caravan when the Warehouse has both more then 200 bushels, and enough to make up my 1000 bushel amount? It is either that or I am selling all 1000 bushels for 30 gold instead of the 30 gold per 100 I assumed.
When I look at "Current Caravans" in the "Send Out Caravans Page" I constantly have the following entry, regardless of what amount of food I have stored
Mission Status Destination Current Location
sell (limit 30 gold) journey, carrying 1000 bushels food Askileon Askileon Purlieus
So I am guessing that the problem IS my setting of 1000 bushels. I guess if I want to sell all food above 200 I need to set "amount" to something like 100, and then it might send a caravan every turn till I reach 200-300 threshold.
On Final bit of info
3 Day ago we had the harvest, at that time I had stored 565 bushels
2 days ago two caravans arrived
QuoteOne or more caravans reached your region and traded food:
A caravan from Nid Tek gave 541 bushels of food to our warehouse.
A caravan from Santoo gave 295 bushels of food to our warehouse.
I will assume they sold for 0 gold because I have no buy orders set. On that same turn I checked my warehouse, and had a grand total of 537 food. Now the region needs 28 food per day, so I am really hoping the other 870 is on the way to the Capital.
Going back through my message history, LAST harvest everything worked fine
Caravan Sent to Askileon (16 days, 2 hours ago)
As there was 636 food in the warehouse (436 more than the threshold), a caravan was prepared and sent out to Askileon with the excess food.
Caravan Report (15 days, 1 hour ago)
Your caravan to Askileon has arrived at its destination. 436 bushels of food were sold for a price of 30 gold
Caravan Report (14 days, 1 hour ago)
Your caravan to Askileon (on its return trip) has left Askileon and is heading towards Askileon Purlieus.
Caravan Report (13 days, 2 hours ago)
Your caravan to Askileon has returned home. The trade profit of 131 gold is added to the region's trade balance.
While Caravans have arrived in my region twice since then, I've not seen any caravans leave my region, and I have no idea where the hell the food that is delivered ends up, cause I never see it in my warehouse
With auto buy you do not send out caravans, however will keep open purchase orders until that amount is reached. For example
You have auto buy set to 1000 bushels
Currently you have 800 bushels on hand
A caravan comes in wanting to sell 400 bushels.
You will purchase 200 and send the caravan on its' merry way with 200 bushels plus some gold for what you bought.
@ Delagro - the two caravans that came in it it says right on the message that they gave the food to your warehouse. It was not sold.
eh? for autobuys you don't send out caravans? isn't that counter-intuitive? and redundant? given you can auto set buy offers already when below certain threshold
problem with caravans is that it's far easier for food sellers to sell and cities to just sit around and set autobuy or set offers. thus onus is placed on rurals to send caravans to sell. furthermore that means rurals are essentially forced to have a common selling price because cities can't set differing prices effectively (someone else will pinch the high prices)
the other problems is that dukes having to manually send out caravans (same price, differing prices, whatever, doesn't matter really) to different places would require a lot of gold in hand and have to get timing right. (ie.. caravans arriving smack on harvest time) which is why it just isn't done much.
i thought auto-caravans is a way to help shift the buying/selling balance more towards the middle. but if autobuys aren't sending out caravans, then it doesn't really help anything.
---
the other thing is.. caravans can't give food away. or at least it's not meant to. min price should be 1 gold. if 0 gold works, then that'll explain all those error messages as they refer to 0 gold transactions, if i remember correctly
Quote from: Forbes Family on June 24, 2011, 06:17:17 PM
With auto buy you do not send out caravans, however will keep open purchase orders until that amount is reached.
If this is the case, that is a bug.
Quote from: Forbes Family on June 24, 2011, 06:17:17 PM
With auto buy you do not send out caravans, however will keep open purchase orders until that amount is reached. For example
You have auto buy set to 1000 bushels
Currently you have 800 bushels on hand
A caravan comes in wanting to sell 400 bushels.
You will purchase 200 and send the caravan on its' merry way with 200 bushels plus some gold for what you bought.
@ Delagro - the two caravans that came in it it says right on the message that they gave the food to your warehouse. It was not sold.
Your point being? Sold or given the food isn't there.
Found the problem with food vanishing. Some stupid dev (and I wonder who that might be? ::) ) was setting a variable to 0 before he was through using it.
Fixed in rev. 5482. Tom's away till Friday evening, so it won't go live till at least then.
Quote from: Anaris on June 29, 2011, 03:37:18 PM
Found the problem with food vanishing. Some stupid dev (and I wonder who that might be? ::) ) was setting a variable to 0 before he was through using it.
Fixed in rev. 5482. Tom's away till Friday evening, so it won't go live till at least then.
It's okay Tim. It tells the players that testing is just that, testing. :P
whole new meaning to test to destruction...
apparently something is still not working with auto trades (and i don't know what)... anyway... back to questions on buying.
ie.. how is it meant to work?
take 2 regions next to each other, if region 1 sets autobuy from region 2, does it send out a caravan if the threshold condition is met and there's no caravan sent already on that route already?
ie.. does it send out caravans non-stop even though there's nothing to buy (because it's already bought everything in the 1st day of the harvest period, for example)?
any plans to add an option (for non-dwi islands where harvest period is fixed... if dwi is still on variable harvest periods) to auto send caravans to buy from a particular region every X days?
auto sell every X days might be useful too, though that would be more for rationing than anything.
--------
incidentally, should there not be an option for a floating threshold? ie... currently we can set to sell at say X gold if there is more than Y bushels in the warehouse. but that threshold remains the same over a harvest period, which means you would have a big chunk of "extra" food on the last day of a harvest period that can't be sold.
to make it more clear... let's say a region consumes 200 food over a period of 10 days and has an excess of 200 food. it's set to sell when >200 bushels.
so on the 1st day, it'll have 200 bushels to sell
on the 2nd, 180
3rd, 160, etc, etc.
even though it still have the same 200 extra bushels lying around.
Can't it sell all our excess food like was done with the ox carts? I'm *really* disliking this new system. It's really inefficient.
well, as far as i can see:
auto sell offers has a static threshold at pre-set numbers. <--- that was my complaint really... because I'm trying to get people to come and buy, rather than me going out to sell. trying to get the culture to shift if you like. so i guess that's technically not the auto-caravans.
auto send caravans to sell theoretically (no idea, haven't tried) allows you to send out caravans if you have more than a certain amount which would mean you can essentially set it to sell any excess (+ whatever safety margin you want) on the day when harvest comes in. but it doesn't take into account situations where your warehouse can suddenly have a ton of extra food shipped in from elsewhere on a day that's different to the day when the harvest comes in.
Not to mention that seasons on Dwilight make it completely unreliable and inadvisable.
What about the "amount needed until next harvest" threshold checkbox? Admittedly, I wouldn't want to use it in winter (sometimes even spring) for auto-sell offers, but doesn't that accomplish what you want?
i don't know what that does.. all i know is that it shows the same number everyday (which is the total consumed per harvest) and that's for auto caravans.
and in all honesty, you would want to have a setting that gives you a safety margin (eg.. min req + 50 bushels or whatever number you can set manually)
in any case, there's no such tickbox in the "Automatic Trade Offer" section.
The "amount needed to next harvest" was more useful back when the harvests were different lengths depending on the season. That meant that the amount of food required to get you from one harvest to the next could change drastically, especially when one harvest was in fall ( 5 days) and the other was in winter (15 days).
Now that all harvests are 7 days on Dwilight, that box really isn't as useful as it once was. You should be able to set a threshold to whatever your region requires for 7 days, and leave it.
Quote from: Indirik on August 02, 2011, 02:55:32 PM
The "amount needed to next harvest" was more useful back when the harvests were different lengths depending on the season. That meant that the amount of food required to get you from one harvest to the next could change drastically, especially when one harvest was in fall ( 5 days) and the other was in winter (15 days).
Now that all harvests are 7 days on Dwilight, that box really isn't as useful as it once was. You should be able to set a threshold to whatever your region requires for 7 days, and leave it.
...but sometimes you have a drought. I usually round up a bit.
What would be ideal would be a system that allows you to set a minimum reserve value, a "sell everything else" box, and a minimum shipment value (so as to not send a caravan with 3 bushels in it). In other words: "If there are at least more than 100 bushels over the required amount, then send all surplus to X".
Okay, I am incredibly confused. Don't we have that? You set up an auto sell order, threshold 150 bushels, and the game sells everything above that with (if I remember correctly and am not mixing it up with some of the discussions Tim and I had while he was coding) a minimum shipment value of 10 bushels.
Am I wrong on this?
Quote from: Bedwyr on August 03, 2011, 12:02:13 AM
Okay, I am incredibly confused. Don't we have that? You set up an auto sell order, threshold 150 bushels, and the game sells everything above that with (if I remember correctly and am not mixing it up with some of the discussions Tim and I had while he was coding) a minimum shipment value of 10 bushels.
Am I wrong on this?
That is how it has worked for me, when it actually worked which seems to be the problem. The way I set it up, it would sell all food over 300, to a maximum of 1000 for 30 gold. It appears the Caravan is only sent once every harvest cycle, though I am not sure about that, so if you have more food then the delivery threshold it doesn't send out another caravan. The only question in my mind is if the "amount" shipment setting is the maximum amount to send for sale, or the minimum.
Quote from: Bedwyr on August 03, 2011, 12:02:13 AM
Okay, I am incredibly confused. Don't we have that? You set up an auto sell order, threshold 150 bushels, and the game sells everything above that with (if I remember correctly and am not mixing it up with some of the discussions Tim and I had while he was coding) a minimum shipment value of 10 bushels.
Am I wrong on this?
The minimum is actually 100 bushels, but otherwise, yes. This is how it's supposed to work, and from everything I've seen actual evidence of, this is how it works on testing right now.
There were problems with the transition of the oxcarts to free caravans, so those have been disabled while I work it out, but as far as I can tell, the automatic caravans are actually working just as described.
A De-Legro said, it seems as if they are either activated 1) once per harvest or 2) when the limit is breached. In either case, the shipment is of the set amount, and not "all the surplus".
let me get this straight then... if you set
sell, blank, X price, tick the threshold, Y region
your region will automatically send out caravans to region Y at a price of X to sell everything above the tick box whenever it has 100 bushels or more in the warehouse?
if you set
sell, 100, X price, blank, Y region
it'll send out 100 bushels once per harvest?
is that correct?
does buying work? and how?
----
what about the case I mentioned? your region produces 400 bushels and consumes 200 bushels over 10 days of harvest period (ie.. 20 bushels a day), thus 200 excess normally.
thus you would set a threshold of 250 (leaving 50 as safety margin)
so if it works, you'll be sending out 150 bushels to sell as the harvest comes in.
what happens if more food arrives a few days later?
let's say 2 days later, when the region requires only 160 bushels to last until harvest and someone dumped 200 bushels on your door step.
so you would have 410 bushels in the region in total (250-2x20+200)
would you not want to sell the 200 bushels? as opposed to only 160?
As an example:
Sell - 100 bushels - for 50 gold - with a threshold of 400 - to RrgionX.
I had assumed that this meant:
Whenever the warehouse has 400 bushels of food or more a caravan will be loaded with 100 bushels of food and sent to RegionX to sell it for 50 gold.
So, if a region has 350 food stored and then harvests 100 food they would have 450 food. A caravan of 100 food would then be sent to RegionX leaving 350 food. If surrounding regions end up delivering 200 more food the next day the warehouse would then have 550 food. A caravan would then be sent out with 100 food leaving 450 food in the warehouse. Then another caravan would be send leaving 350 food in the warehouse.
It would seem that my assumption of how the system is off so I must now wonder how this all REALLY works...
Quote from: Pelgart on August 03, 2011, 03:14:16 PM
As an example:
Sell - 100 bushels - for 50 gold - with a threshold of 400 - to RrgionX.
I had assumed that this meant:
Whenever the warehouse has 400 bushels of food or more a caravan will be loaded with 100 bushels of food and sent to RegionX to sell it for 50 gold.
So, if a region has 350 food stored and then harvests 100 food they would have 450 food. A caravan of 100 food would then be sent to RegionX leaving 350 food. If surrounding regions end up delivering 200 more food the next day the warehouse would then have 550 food. A caravan would then be sent out with 100 food leaving 450 food in the warehouse. Then another caravan would be send leaving 350 food in the warehouse.
It would seem that my assumption of how the system is off so I must now wonder how this all REALLY works...
Your assumption is off. Even your assumption is off. Here it is fixed:
RegionY: Sell - for 50 gold - with a threshold of 400 - to RegionX.
RegionY's harvest comes in, and region has 405 bushels. No food is sold.
Next harvest: region has 505 bushels. 105 bushels are sold to RegionX.
Next harvest: region has 450 bushels. no food is sold.
Next harvest: region has 550 bushels. 150 bushels are sold to RegionX.
Quote from: egamma on August 03, 2011, 03:22:59 PM
Your assumption is off. Even your assumption is off. Here it is fixed:
RegionY: Sell - for 50 gold - with a threshold of 400 - to RegionX.
RegionY's harvest comes in, and region has 405 bushels. No food is sold.
Next harvest: region has 505 bushels. 105 bushels are sold to RegionX.
Next harvest: region has 450 bushels. no food is sold.
Next harvest: region has 550 bushels. 150 bushels are sold to RegionX.
Actually, I think it does send only the amount specified in the auto-caravan order. So in this case, it wouldn't send more than 100 bushels in any given caravan.
Of course, it will never send less than 100 bushels, no matter what you specify. Hm. That should probably be made clearer in the page.
The whole caravan/food system needs overhauling, not how it functions but how the player can use it.
For starters put all caravan options and information on one page, not two...
And as others already said, the auto caravan form could use more simple interface, i see most players not even understanding it enough to try it.
if BM is designed as a lightweight then stuff like this is very important.
This combined with more complex region stat effects(like tmp and estate system) is also moving more and more players to never appoint new players(who have never held a region before) to a region, only in very small (starting)realms it is comon for new players to get a chance to become a lord, ever.
Quote from: Nosferatus on August 03, 2011, 03:27:05 PM
The whole caravan/food system needs overhauling, not how it functions but how the player can use it.
We are working on that. Gotta get some behind-the-scenes stuff ironed out first, but I've got an overhaul of the food-management interface nearly done.
Quote
For starters put all caravan options and information on one page, not two...
No: that would make the one page hopelessly cluttered.
We will be keeping the same 3 pages—Caravan Missions, Trade Offers, and Warehouses—but they will be organized better, and the functions will be more sensibly distributed between them.
I'm seriously considering changing the behaviour of the "needed for harvest" checkbox, too: if it were modified by the "Threshold" box, so that you could say, "needed for harvest, plus X bushels", that would probably make a lot of people very happy.
QuoteThis combined with more complex region stat effects(like tmp and estate system) is also moving more and more players to never appoint new players(who have never held a region before) to a region, only in very small (starting)realms it is comon for new players to get a chance to become a lord, ever.
That's just not true. I've seen pretty new players get lordships in relatively large realms that I've been in. You just have to be in the type that aren't full to the brim with people who've been in the same realm since 2002.
In other words (and at the risk of oversimplifying, 'cause I know it's not this simple): get off of Atamara, the Colonies, and the EC, and you'll have a better chance at it.
Quote from: Anaris on August 03, 2011, 03:44:56 PM
In other words (and at the risk of oversimplifying, 'cause I know it's not this simple): get off of Atamara, the Colonies, and the EC, and you'll have a better chance at it.
I agree, but you just named the two largest(in noble count) Continents.
But perhaps that problem does lay else where. (attitude of players)
Great to hear your even almost finished.
The dev team is putting alot of work in BM latley, though we see only the tip of that iceberg, from what i hear its allot of work.
Respect! ;)
OK. How would one say: Sell all food over 400 bushels each harvest?
1) It's not "each harvest." It's "whenever you have over X bushels in the warehouse." If it were "each harvest," that would cause all kinds of problems with food not being transferred because it didn't quite get there in time.
2) Bearing that in mind, you would set up an automatic caravan order to sell to <destination region>, with the threshold at 400, and the amount being something high, like 1000. If you want to just give the food away, you can now set the sell price to 0, or you can set it to whatever you can see that <destination region>'s offering to buy for.
ok... how does buying work then? does the buyer region just keep spamming caravans even if there's nothing to buy on the other end?
Quote from: fodder on August 03, 2011, 08:44:43 PM
ok... how does buying work then? does the buyer region just keep spamming caravans even if there's nothing to buy on the other end?
Do you mean on the other end of the automatic sell caravan? If so, then just set up an automatic buy
offer.
It sounds like you mean an automatic buy caravan, though. In that case, yes; every time the amount stored is less than the threshold, and there is not currently a caravan out on that route, it will send out a caravan to buy from the specified destination.
However, the idea is that you would either work this out ahead of time with the Lord of the destination region, or pick a region that has an automatic buy price displayed.
how?
let's say 1 city requires lots of food and buys from 4 regions. how does he setup 4 auto caravans routes to buy?
let's say the 4 regions are respectively 1,2,3,4 regions away and assume they all have sell offers set up already.
i don't really think it's possible for the buyer to set any sort of meaning threshold... and it'll just keep spamming tons of caravans to the closest region for no good reason.
Quote from: fodder on August 03, 2011, 11:08:19 PM
how?
let's say 1 city requires lots of food and buys from 4 regions. how does he setup 4 auto caravans routes to buy?
let's say the 4 regions are respectively 1,2,3,4 regions away and assume they all have sell offers set up already.
You just set up four separate auto-caravan orders, with the same threshold if you want, or different thresholds if you want some kind of escalating system, that go to each of the different regions.
so it's
buy <blank> X price Y threshold Z region?
is it ok to leave the amount as blank to buy everything?
seeing as I read that it's not working, is it a case of people not putting the right bits in, or is it a case of it being just plain bugged?
Quote from: fodder on August 04, 2011, 07:28:52 PM
so it's
buy <blank> X price Y threshold Z region?
is it ok to leave the amount as blank to buy everything?
No, you can't leave it blank. You have to tell it a maximum amount to buy. How else does it know how much gold to put into the caravan when it sends it out?
Quote
seeing as I read that it's not working, is it a case of people not putting the right bits in, or is it a case of it being just plain bugged?
I don't know. "I read that it's not working" is so very useless to me as a developer.
If someone can give me facts, rather than rumours, I can try to help.
all i know is what i read in bugtracker. i've no idea if you know whether it's a case of them not ticking right boxes or something else.
ie.. it would be helpful to find out if someone filled in the right boxes somewhere and got it to work.
i'll see if i can't get the duke of rines to get me some details.
----
incidentally,
when you send a caravan out with gold to buy and it doesn't return within the same tax period. where does the gold go?
let's say you have a normal tax week income of 1k gold (minus the other maintenance bits, before splitting with knights, etc)
the day before the tax day your auto caravan went out with 300 gold to buy. does that mean net tax income will be 700?
(probably matters most with high price buying, especially when caravans get spammed and return with no food)
Quote from: fodder on August 04, 2011, 10:15:53 PM
when you send a caravan out with gold to buy and it doesn't return within the same tax period. where does the gold go?
let's say you have a normal tax week income of 1k gold (minus the other maintenance bits, before splitting with knights, etc)
the day before the tax day your auto caravan went out with 300 gold to buy. does that mean net tax income will be 700?
(probably matters most with high price buying, especially when caravans get spammed and return with no food)
The gold is on the caravan, and can be stolen.
I think your net tax income example is correct.