new auto caravans

[fodder]

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?

[De-Legro]

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

One 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.

[De-Legro]

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

[Forbes Family]

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.

[fodder]

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

[Anaris]

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.

[De-Legro]

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.

[Anaris]

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.

[Foundation]

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.

[fodder]

whole new meaning to test to destruction...

[fodder]

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.

[Chenier]

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.

[fodder]

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.

[Chenier]

Not to mention that seasons on Dwilight make it completely unreliable and inadvisable.

[Bedwyr]

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?