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Navigationally-Challenged Merchants & Merchant Timing

Started by salamander, October 05, 2014, 07:12:19 AM

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salamander

This is a loose follow-up on long-ago threads, but instead of waking them up, I'll just refer to them here:

Dismiss Merchant
Dismiss Merchant (Part 2)

For the first time (for me, at least), I have a map (Mingo) where merchants dismissed from a trading post are going almost all the way back to the entry point before turning around, backtracking, and finally exiting the map. 



Back in the Dismiss Merchant (Part 2) thread, @rkelly17 had asked about whether wrong-way merchants would mess up the so-called Merchant Timer (estimated to be 25-35 minutes from dismissal to re-entering the map), or put another way, if it would be possible to have two merchants assigned to the same trading post on the map at the same time because it takes so long for merchants to leave the map due to backtracking.

With Mingo, I did a little more timing of the merchant visits, and the values agree with the Dismiss Merchant thread.  In this case, though, because of the wrong-way merchants there have been several instances where a new merchant entered the map even though the previous merchant from the same trading post was still on-screen.  So, yes, it does seem to be possible.

The upshot, though, is that while having the navigationally-challenged merchants might be annoying, it doesn't seem to cause any problems in how often merchants will visit.

rkelly17

#1
Ah, @salamander, you have discovered the incredible wrong-way merchant! I was playing a wrong-way merchant map the other night (my fourth) I discovered one advantage to the glitch: It is the only way to get two-way traffic on the river. The shot comes from a point when I had 6 or 8 Trading Posts so there was quite a bit of traffic. All merchants did the Wrong-Way Polka, so I assume it is quirk of the map as a whole, not of particular TPs. At any rate, if you didn't watch the turn-around point it actually looked more realistic.


salamander

You know, you're right, it kind of neat to have the two-way traffic on the river -- I hadn't thought of it that way.  There's always a silver lining if you look hard enough.  Since the glitch (if that's what it is) doesn't seem to put you at a disadvantage as far as how often merchants visit, it doesn't really bother me ... except that when a merchant enters the lake moving toward town, sometimes it just keeps going because it's on it second time passing through after turning around.  If I'm really waiting for a merchant, that can be a little irritating.  :D

As an aside, I didn't pay much attention to the map until I started seeing the wrong-way behavior, but it looks like my map has exactly the features you've mentioned -- sharp turn after entering to travel parallel to the map edge, followed by another sharp turn toward the middle of the map.

rkelly17

Quote from: salamander on October 05, 2014, 07:35:58 AM
As an aside, I didn't pay much attention to the map until I started seeing the wrong-way behavior, but it looks like my map has exactly the features you've mentioned -- sharp turn after entering to travel parallel to the map edge, followed by another sharp turn toward the middle of the map.

Yeah, that seems to do it every time.

salamander

Incidentally, I now have several trading posts around the lake, and merchants at all of them do the wrong-way travel.  It really does seem to be a map thing, not just placement of the trading posts, at least around the lake.  If I build some posts on the river either before or after the lake, I'll be curious to see if the same thing happens.

rkelly17

Quote from: salamander on October 05, 2014, 07:42:25 AM
Incidentally, I now have several trading posts around the lake, and merchants at all of them do the wrong-way travel.  It really does seem to be a map thing, not just placement of the trading posts, at least around the lake.  If I build some posts on the river either before or after the lake, I'll be curious to see if the same thing happens.

In my latest map they were on both river and lake. In earlier maps it was all river.