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Auto-trading 101 (for unattended running overnight)

Started by irrelevant, September 10, 2015, 04:16:29 PM

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irrelevant

I've learned a few things about auto-trading; I've used auto trading in a number of towns, but I relied on it heavily in Gopher Prairie, my 1000 year town. I thought I'd share my thoughts with you all here. Note that much of the following is mainly useful for letting your town run unattended for several hours at a time.

When doing autopurchasing (AP), keep things as simple as possible. Don't try to make steel tools or warm coats; make iron tools and wool coats, and buy steel and warm if you want them. If you are making ale for trade (and you definitely should be), standardize on a single type of fruit.

It's a good idea to have a good number of forest circles, with a gatherers' hut in each one. Gatherers are important for ale production because of their berry harvest; a decent supply of berries will keep your guys from eating all your fruit that you want to use to make ale from.

Never buy coal. Ever. Your guys will just burn it to heat their houses.

Don't rely on mines. They will exhaust themselves in the middle of the night and you will run out of tools and then you are screwed.

Make sure you have plenty of markets, barns, and stockpiles. If those fill up in the middle of the night, you are screwed.

Do not rely heavily on trading away tools or coats, unless you have a huge inventory of them and are producing tons of them. If you run 20 years overnight, you could easily trade away all your tools or your coats, and then you are screwed. Trading away all my coats was what started the chain of events that killed my town totally dead the first time.

Same goes for firewood.

I would say that you should keep no more than one year's worth of production of tools/coats/firewood in your TPs, and you should have three times that amount in your general inventory.

Your production limits are nearly as important as your APs and your orders. If your production limit for, say, tools is set too high, you may wake up in the morning to find all your barns full of tools, baskets of food lining the roads, and all your guys dead.

Study your inventory and your charts. The better you understand what is happening in your town, the more likely you will be to have success with AP. If your inventory of logs has been trending down over the past 30 years, you need to do something about it.

I kept a mix of goods in the TPs for trading; some firewood, some beans, all my mushrooms, all mutton, all venison, all leather, all ale.

Place orders for everything that you need. The general goods vendor is your go-to guy. He's the one who will bring you 1200 logs, 600 iron, and 8000 apples all on the same boat. Don't bog him down with orders for things you only need to buy 50 of per boat. If you need to buy things like wool, steel tools, warm coats, and iron, buy them from the resource vendor. Although I was buying iron from both the resource vendor and the general goods vendor. Iron for tools was definitely the biggest challenge. Too much and you fill up your stockpiles, not enough and you run out of tools.

Turn every vacant 2x2 (or larger) space in your town into a stockpile.

Try to keep your APs the same at every TP. The same goes for merchant orders, standardize! Otherwise you will never be able to keep track of what is going on.

You will need to tweak your APs often. When you make changes, keep them small. If you have your auto-purchase amount for iron set to 120, and your inventory is declining, change it to 130 or 140, not to 200.

Be ready to jump in and do manual purchasing if necessary. If you are low on iron, you don't necessarily need to go through and change all of your APs, you can just buy a few hundred iron from the next few merchants who show up.

If you find yourself doing lots of manual trading even though you have APs going, you should set your APs to take place "when the merchant leaves" and not "when the merchant arrives." If you are set for "when the merchant arrives," the AP may trade away all your trade goods and you have nothing left to buy what you wanted to buy manually.

Fruit for ale will be another big challenge. This is because the largest quantity you can set for AP is 9999. This is not nearly enough; the food merchant often brings 30,000+. In addition to ordering your fruit from both the food merchant and the general goods merchant, you will want to monitor trading periodically, and manually buy every fruit that shows up.

Do not let your guys eat any meat. It is too valuable for trade. Put all your meat into your TPs, and order/AP nuts. You can buy three nuts for one beef/mutton/venison, and your guys will be just as healthy.

There is a mod that stops seed merchants and livestock merchants from coming; with this mod you get just resource, food, and general goods merchants. This mod is essential. it is here: http://worldofbanished.com/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=16 You can add it to an existing game at any time with no problems.

If you are doing AP because you want to put some years behind you by letting it run overnight, be sure to go into options/game and click off "auto slow down on disaster."

Much of the above advice applies only if you are planning to let your town run for some time unattended. If you are doing AP just to save yourself from the drudgery of manual trading, most of the dire warnings do not apply.

If you have any experience with AP, please chime in here with your thoughts.

Nilla

Very good summary! I have done a lot of automatic trading although not much unattended, but I can agree on most of the things you say @irrelevant. I would have done most of it the same way.

But one thing, I'm quite sure I would make differently:
QuoteTry to keep your APs the same at every TP. The same goes for merchant orders, standardize! Otherwise you will never be able to keep track of what is going on.

I think it would be easier to have trading ports buying/selling different things; that it's easier to keep track on everything if you don't have to change the amount in all trading ports, only in a few. Of cause, this needs some more trading ports than normally needed if you trade manual/semi manual, or if everyone is the same, but I think it's easier and more reliable that way.

I don't think I would produce any tools, at least no tools to trade away. One thing less (iron) to bother with. Maybe I would also make some experiments with warm coats for my population and wool coats for sale, but here I'm not sure. It might be better to sell the leather like you do.


Gordon Dry

You say giving them meat is a waste...
How about the chopped meat by the butchers?

irrelevant

Quote from: Gordon Dry on September 11, 2015, 09:51:44 AM
You say giving them meat is a waste...
How about the chopped meat by the butchers?
I'm not familiar with that mod, but if it sells for more than 1, I would trade it away.

irrelevant

Quote from: Nilla on September 11, 2015, 09:27:48 AM

But one thing, I'm quite sure I would make differently:
QuoteTry to keep your APs the same at every TP. The same goes for merchant orders, standardize! Otherwise you will never be able to keep track of what is going on.

I think it would be easier to have trading ports buying/selling different things; that it's easier to keep track on everything if you don't have to change the amount in all trading ports, only in a few. Of cause, this needs some more trading ports than normally needed if you trade manual/semi manual, or if everyone is the same, but I think it's easier and more reliable that way.

I don't think I would produce any tools, at least no tools to trade away. One thing less (iron) to bother with. Maybe I would also make some experiments with warm coats for my population and wool coats for sale, but here I'm not sure. It might be better to sell the leather like you do.

My experience may be overly influenced by having run it for so many years, and also by lack of education. If your town can manage to buy enough steel tools without producing any iron tools at all, that would be better than importing iron. Iron was my biggest headache, year in and year out.

As far as keeping all the APs the same at every TP, it was just to keep things as simple as possible. Early on I did try having different things going on at different TPs, but it was just too much work trying to keep track of it all. I finally gave up trying and just standardized and that made what I was doing so much easier.

assobanana76

Quote from: irrelevant on September 10, 2015, 04:16:29 PM
I would say that you should keep no more than one year's worth of production of tools/coats/firewood in your TPs, and you should have three times that amount in your general inventory.

many very useful tips !!
I believe that in the next town definitely try the "night AP" once obtained all the seeds!
I think the most useful tips for me is the above quoted ..
I have always had a tendency to fill the TP of a bit of everything without apparent logic ..  ;D
sometimes even more than necessary, removing food and / or firewood to citizens ..
I think I'll use the AP in a way .. firewood for food ..
I will aim all of charcoal for heating in order to keep much of the firewood for the TP.
in this regard the recommendation of a year / three years is useful .. I always found it difficult to put the limit to  the tools / coats / firewood
thanks irrelevant!
if you find grammatical errors have to be angry with GoogleTranslate! however, I am studying!!

rkelly17

Excellent review @irrelevant. What has blown my auto-trading mind is the specialized TP mod. I've had to learn to cut back on the resource only TP since two or three can bring in far more stone and iron than I need for a town of 800 or so if I order from the merchants. I've also had to remember to build a general TP or a food TP in case I run a food deficit at any point (you know how it goes: You build new farms to get more food, but those require more houses for workers, but those produce more people to feed, etc. etc. etc.). I've never had the guts to let it run over night.

PS: The nice thing about specialized TPs is that you can destroy the seed/livestock TPs when you have everything you want and replace them with other TPs.