I for one enjoy the trading post; it makes you really think about what your city is making and how you can make gold via that method. The post itself has some issues that need to be addressed.
Getting materials [wood,stone,clay,sand,Iron ore] from the trading post seem to never move from the trading post. I see workers for my sawmill running to the trading post to grab wood and I kind of laugh a bit. Sadly, no wagons come by to move the wood around to my many storage facility’s. I have moved my trading post only to ask what was going on when my wood goes from 3k to 200 then back to 3k after the trading post moved.
The workers who move goods need to be able to move more than 8 at a time. You are walking across town, and you are only getting 8 items. Blink ok. The worker cap needs to also increase.
You are waking a fine line between having the trading post tied to the gobal storage and not and really while having the workers move goods is a good idea; in practice it seems to be clunky. Having over 2k of a good and only have 20 of said good delivered to the trading post year after year gets old. Moving the good, moving the storage closer to the trading post seems to help some with this; sadly, unless you only specialize in one good, they are never going to fill out the 500 every year.
4 I feel that the trading post needs to evolve with tier 4. You need to add additional workers, have it tied to your wagon logistics system or just tied to your global supply of goods. something to make you want to upgrade it to tier 4.
Trading post AI and system is laughable. They say that these guys have ‘hand carts’ to make them faster… ha ha… so they manage 2mph against the 1mph of other builders then? The whole system is an embarrassment… and you can virtually predict that the very minute your visiting traders will arrive these useless two employees will find something else to do either one of both like shelter stocking, fighting a fire, anything but actually working. When they do it’s pitifully slow… even if you arrange advance ‘always in stock’ when traders appear they will still sometimes BOTH be absent at once… I have my TP in a stockade with all the storehouses, vault, root cellars right next to it and still I can sit an entire trader visit and literally nor ONE item will be stocked as the days proceed to the point the visiting trader leaves… All that can be relied on to be sold is the stuff they stocked in the rest of the year.
It needs 4-6 slots for workers
It needs a work locking system that prevents the workers from doing anything else but stocking trading post when traders are visiting, nothing else at all…
They need to have an AI that actually makes sense as to where they source goods from not go half way across maps when stuff is right next to their building.
They need to have wagon access
We need ‘pre-order’ with the visiting traders
The visiting traders never have enough money to sell your stuff to them if you have pre-stocked higher commodities, or the one with money has nothing you can sell them and the one where you have tons of stock turns up with less than 2k gold on them to buy anything…
It’s a mess overall, very frustrating yet core part of the game and essential to town survival yet a measly2 lazy workers who seem to do mostly anything but work.
Yet, I have no problems stocking my trading post in the autumn ready for when traders arrive in the new year. Suggest you don’t wait until traders arrive before stocking the trading post then your trade personnel will have already done their work.
I think, that if the production is not that high, so you can only start stocking in springtime, than it takes often too long to fill the slots for tradors.
REQUEST: The number which can be set for stocking the trading post regularly is not very useful.
I would love to have it the other way round.
to set the limit on storages and everything above goes to the trading post, so I don’t run out of the ressources in town or alway have to check and send it back manually.
I did mention that I already do that fairly well ( " even if you arrange advance ‘always in stock’" ) However inevitably as you will never know what each trader will want to buy or how much money they have or what else they don’t want to buy that you are offering, in order to soak up their money, you end up often requesting more of one item than you had pre-stocked as they buy all your stocked allocation but you still have a lot more of it in global.
It can be infuriating to then sit and watch the days ()up to 40 +) tick by and your traders are constantly busy either doing other things, or just take forever to get this extra requested stock. I’ve do often sat waiting for just ONE category only that I’ve asked them to get more of, with a trader with spare funds only to have them never restock it before the trader leaves with his gold. I stand by the argument that traders need to be 100% focused on trading post stocking only during the time you have to sell goods.
So this map build I made a Dwelling center around the Town Center, and a trade center around the trading posts. Around my trading post are 80% of my storage units, and I have no problem stocking in a timely manner any more.
About stocking the trading post, i think its pretty much unfair when you order a certain supply of goods and the workers go to the markets to get them!
I’ve learned to just leave the workers alone and have the amount of supplies set ahead. If you are storing minerals to trade, the workers may travel all the way to the mines to gather ore, so insure the amount available to trade is never more than available supply.
Just wanted to bring it back up.
This is a must on top of production cap! Always keep in stock button is so useless, it should be replaced by "if qty exceeds (put number in here) - move to trading post!
I can’t believe spendning half of the game in paused trading center menu was the idea.
I think this is part of what needs to be the next major update: overhaul the Wainwright’s Shop to allow it to produce as many wagons as you choose, and allow the player to assign wagons to any profession or individual villager they want, to do their jobs more effectively and reduce the number of supply runs. The wainwrights themselves should not be driving wagons themselves, their job should be to repair damaged wagons of other villagers (Having wagons get damaged and need repairs would just add a lot of realism).
I would want them for traders, but also for nightsoil collectors, grocers and builders who are currently REALLY slow and inefficient at their jobs. I would like specialized transport wagons as well to be customized by the player, so you could for example assign a wagon to several house blocks, have it register what goods they need, and then collect and distribute all those goods, instead of requiring the villagers to abandon their jobs at the other end of the map to go shelter stocking.
If you’re in a big city with a thriving economy, the transport of goods isn’t supposed to happen by small hand carts or baskets, anyone who is in a profession that requires them to transport goods should have their own wagon.
I’m not sure I vote for unlimited wagons but two is too few. A wagon shop or any other shop should not be limited to the point that you have to have four or five Wainwright shops.
I would like to have a way to set the number of items that must be kept in global storage and that number stay the same until changed.
Are the prices based on a supply/demand economy or just random?
That’s why I would keep in the wainwrights to build and repair the wagons, and add wagons getting damaged and needing repairs as a game feature. That way, you would not only have to invest resources to build wagons, but having a lot of wagons would come with the disadvantage that you need to employ a lot of wainwrights to maintain them.
So while you could build as many as you want in theory, in practice you would need to limit the number of carts to the professions that need them most, because otherwise they constantly break down and have no free wainwrights available to repair them.
I think devs already posted they are aware of the “global storage” / magic inventory in trading posts and are looking to address it. The biggest change I’d like to see with trading posts is for the traders to usefully match with the map you’re on, not be random. For example, I am playing a map with only 2 willow on the entire map. I get a trader with willow MAYBE every 5 years. It would be cool to have a mechanism to pay to set up a trade route for critical resources you need. Would be a way to diversify the gameplay based on the map and enhance replayability.
I see that my vault is empty of gold, and keep wondering where all my 1200 (virtual?) gold bars are located, after I transferred them from my trading post to the town. It seems as if the gold remains in the trading post, only to be “transferred” to the town, so that the actual physical transferal of the gold never actually happened, and it remains in the trading post just under the town’s treasury instead.
