When a village gets to ~1500 villagers, you often have a large surplus of goods to sell, quite often meaning you just move over the maximum 500 items of a certain type goods to the trading post. A situation then arises where the two trade guys really can’t keep up with all deliveries. This means you will have to pass on most traders witing for the goods to arrive. IMHO I think the game would be more fun if the logistics of getting goods to the trading post wasn’t the biggest issue of getting good trade.
EDIT: Note that this also is true for gold, i.e. money to buy things from traders. You may have a business generating 25.000+ a year and transferring gold to the market place to buy things for, but as the gold is just another commodity to trade, the gold transfer has to wait in line for its turn, often creating the situation that the gold will not arrive in time to use it.
Thinking of solutions: maybe at tier 4 unlock a second trade center?
Or maybe at tier 4 you unlock an upgrade with more workers or a higher unit cap?
My town has hardly 500 people and i find that selling my products is bottle-necked by the trade center max volumes and max workers. I often have 2000 beer & 2000 cheese to sell, but only 500 of each will fit in the trade center, so 1500 of each has to be collected during the time the trader is there
When laying out my town plan, I try to have a point about mid-way between the concentration of houses/markets and the Trading Post, where I can put a set of storage facilities for stuff I want to sell in quantity that is excess to hat the housing needs. That usually means Warehouses for Clothes, Pottery, Baskets, Candles, Soap, Furniture, Tools and Heavy Tools, and Honey at least. Keeping the travel time down for the Trading Post workers is key to keeping the Post stocked. I also try to have the Vault(s) with all the gold nearby also, so any transfer of Gold in or out of the Post doesn’t take a lot of travel time.
If you can cut the travel time in half with close-by storage and cobbled roads, you increase the efficiency of the Trading Post stocking more than if you added a third Worker to the Trading Post.
Perhaps I should clarify a bit, Medea. I do buy backs all the time to increase the goods flow and maximize the benefit of every trader. An example of what I mean by that could be that, lets say a trader has 2000.- I will sell him/her goods for 2000.-. I will then buy something I need for a few thousands, which I can then get back by selling the tradesman even more stuff. Lets say I have 3000 of some goods. I have pre-loaded the trading office with 500 which I sell first to get the 2000.- I then need to get 500 more to sell again. But there will not be any time for the refill of goods. Do you se the picture?
The tradesmen are so poor and have so little cash to buy things for so this is the onely way I have found to increase the sales to a level needed.
One way of seeing this limit is as a form of balance/challenge. Because the throughput of the trader is limited it means you can’t rely on it so much in the endgame and are forced to instead build a more internally self sufficient economy. The real strategic depth in this kind of game comes from needing to use varying strategies throughout your playthrough to succeed.
Imo, trading is an overly powerful band-aid strategy as it is, which is a pity because it means players aren’t forced to really engage with the interesting mechanics of making their internal production more efficient. In my games I generally delete the trader before the endgame to make the challenge interesting, and it feels anyone who isn’t doing that is really missing out on some very interesting gameplay.
Totally agree. I will go a step further and say it ruins the game because it is not only monotonous but makes the game too easy gold wise. I am drowning in gold and why I stopped playing about a month ago. I’m waiting for 9.1 before I give it another go.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the workers in the trade center will complete orders in the order you give them, so if you’ve selected to always keep 500 logs in stock, as soon as you don’t have 500 logs in stock anymore, they will drop whatever order they are working on and go back to bring in 500 more logs. I use the time after the last traders have left for the year and go through to place orders in my trading center to keep the workers busy for as long through the winter as possible. Usually, they’re finishing by the time someone new comes the next year.
