auto-purchase trading post

[slink]

I suppose theoretically a person might trade for something when everything else desired has been bought, but I've never used that setting myself.  In fact, I seldom use auto-trade at all.

[Pangaea]

It gives you time to check out the goods they bring first, I suppose, and buy whatever you want yourself. If there is nothing of particular interest, the auto-buying will take place when he leaves.

[assobanana76]

in this case, however, there should be a button to "auto-purchase" to click to activate if the goods are to our liking .. there?

[Pangaea]

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

I tried the auto-trading feature in the test I'm still running on slink's merchant mod. Set it to prioritise fruits, then some tools, clothes and textiles, before coal, iron and stone followed. The trading post happened to have 1300 coal stored. Well, the genius of a game emptied the place of coal.... Yeah, that feature is utterly useless is what I'm thinking. Won't use that again!

As somebody else said, unless you stock it with ONLY goods you can get rid of, don't use auto purchase. Otherwise you can risk the game selling tons of stone, coal, clothes or tools, instead of using more sensible "currencies" like ale and firewood.

Btw, I had 2000 firewood in that place, plus 1000 ale, and only 175 firewood was used, and 110 ale. We should be able to prioritise what goods are used, in which case all 1000 ale would be gone now, and not 1300 coal.

[assobanana76]

I agree .. as it is it is really useless unless ...
it is used in a way like this: "I have all the seeds and then self-produce all the food I need, what I need are tools / clothing / iron / stone ..
then you can set it so .. SELL firewood and BUY gear / clothing / iron / stones.
so he can do no wrong!

[irrelevant]

That's exactly right.

[Pangaea]

Yes, I imagine if you manage to produce so much firewood you can trade away heaps and bounds and mountains of it, and only store that in trading posts, it would work well.

Just to take a common example, though, you can only auto-buy maximum 9,999 fruits for ale making, and if you ordered it, the merchant did perhaps bring 40,000. Tough to manage to buy all that, but ale, venison, mutton, beef and maybe some clothes, and it's not too far off in some cases. However, you can't keep all that in the TP, as next time round you run the risk of buying 500 coal with heaps of food. No good.

At this stage I don't expect the feature to change in the game, and it's probably hoping for too much that it can be modded, so we're stuck with how it currently works. I don't want to think about the prospect of having 40-odd TPs and doing the trades manually each year. Yikes!! 

[irrelevant]

It isn't much fun, particularly when you factor in the lag induced by a pop in the thousands.

[rkelly17]

I can't imagine manually trading with more than 5 TPs, but then I am especially lazy. 

I only auto-trade with TPs stocking one commodity for sale. The incredibly bad judgement of the traders about what to sell first is just too irritating.    I manually trade firewood until I have all the seeds and live stock, then its booze, booze, booze all the way--1000 ale per TP auto-trading for stone, iron and whatever else is in short supply. Lately I've taken to ordering stone and iron from about half the resource merchants to make sure it shows up. If I'm short on cows and/or hunters I'll add leather. If my food producers run behind in any given year I'll manually look for food merchants to make up the difference, then go back to ignoring the bonging.

I've never gone to the giddy heights of population that @irrelevant and @RedKetchup have achieved, but in towns I've built after the trading empire challenge I've found that 10 or so TPs can keep supply levels at a good level and still leave some non-industrial river front. With over 1200-1500 citizens one would no doubt need more TPs to bring in more necessities. I'll also add a TP if my brewmasters are making a surplus of ale--don't want those workers getting too soused to work!

[Pangaea]

I've never gone to the giddy heights of population that @irrelevant and @RedKetchup have achieved, but in towns I've built after the trading empire challenge I've found that 10 or so TPs can keep supply levels at a good level and still leave some non-industrial river front. With over 1200-1500 citizens one would no doubt need more TPs to bring in more necessities.

Not necessarily. I only have four, and had three for a very long time, and with 2000 population that isn't a problem at all. The main issue is getting livestock or seed merchants half the time, but that can now be sorted with slink's merchant fix

[assobanana76]

but Luke has solved the problem of crash merchant with the latest patch..

[Mahnogard]

but Luke has solved the problem of crash merchant with the latest patch..

Not exactly. Luke solved part of the inventory item limit issues, but some of the boat crashes were still happening. I still had to install a fix mod to stop the crashes.

[rkelly17]

Not necessarily. I only have four, and had three for a very long time, and with 2000 population that isn't a problem at all. The main issue is getting livestock or seed merchants half the time, but that can now be sorted with slink's merchant fix

Am I reading @slink's description of her mod correctly that one can add it into a saved game? Does that mean I could (heh, heh, heh) play until I have all the seeds and live stock, then add it in and not have those pesky merchants I no longer need?

If so: 

[irrelevant]

Not necessarily. I only have four, and had three for a very long time, and with 2000 population that isn't a problem at all. The main issue is getting livestock or seed merchants half the time, but that can now be sorted with slink's merchant fix

Am I reading @slink's description of her mod correctly that one can add it into a saved game? Does that mean I could (heh, heh, heh) play until I have all the seeds and live stock, then add it in and not have those pesky merchants I no longer need?

If so: 

Great minds think alike, I was just thinking this exact same thought.

[slink]

Not necessarily. I only have four, and had three for a very long time, and with 2000 population that isn't a problem at all. The main issue is getting livestock or seed merchants half the time, but that can now be sorted with slink's merchant fix

Am I reading @slink's description of her mod correctly that one can add it into a saved game? Does that mean I could (heh, heh, heh) play until I have all the seeds and live stock, then add it in and not have those pesky merchants I no longer need?

If so: 

Yes.