Patrician 4 style auto trade routes

[iSuck345]

You might be wondering 2 things.
1: WTF IS PATRICIAN 4!?
2: is this any better than ANY of your posts

Answers:
1: It's a trading simulation game, the best game EVER to me about profit, second to capitalism lab.
2: ALL of them are bad, so expect the worst

I'm thinking of trade routes like this:
Goods to buy: the goods that you want your trader to buy

Goods to sell: the goods that you want your trader to sell

Ammount of buy/sell: the ammount of goods the trader should buy/sell

How many must be left: the ammount of a certain good that must be left in a town when purchasing, being aware how much of it is needed and at what point of goods left, you don't want to damage relations by buying all of their food when they can produce none and leave them starve (seriously, they will be quite desperate and pissed off at having not enough metal/food/another good to so then they can have money to buy what is needed to produce the products that they sell.

BE THANKFULL THAT THERE ARE PARAGRAPHS, I RARELY DO THIS!

[Tolwrath]

Uhh wouldn't any sane community refuse to sell you ALL of their goods? I mean you'd expect them to only be willing to sell their excess goods. Also your suggestion reminds me of Anno 2070.

[iSuck345]

Not if you can "speak" in ways that people have never seen, thus convincing them to do it (it's a reference to the bluffing skill, which should be called persuasion skill)

[wolfwood296]

I play this game and its pretty good when you don't want to just kill people (that's when I play mount and blade) and its trading system is the best I've seen so far. you can make your own products and damage rivals' products, you can also create a surplus of goods or so little that people can't get any at all.

[Clawdius Talonious]

I'd want a fluctuating economy before anything like this was implemented, as it stands you could basically suss out the locations where you could buy cheap narcotics/luxury goods/robotics parts and sell them for a boatload then set up auto trade routes that would make insane amounts of money. Leave the PC on overnight and come back to see if your faction survived and you're rich or you need to start a new game.

To me it's almost too much like having the game play itself, but that's just my two cents. I mean, I used to buy Comstock stocks in The Crecent Hawks Inception and leave my machine on overnight hoping for a few million C-bills. I guess it would be a useful feature to have, but really mostly only once the economy is self regulating. Then the ability to control supply and demand on some products to drive up the value of others would be quite useful.

[Tolwrath]

I know it's been said that cities will be randomly generated in the final version, hopefully that means trade prices will be randomized to begin with too. I do hope for dynamic trade prices as well. I believe auto trade routes would help with trade immensely, but that it should eventually lead to trade prices changing as general supply levels change. This will mean that trade routes will have to actually be checked and monitored every now and then. Even the triangular trade (if you're not familiar with it, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade section on the Atlantic slave trade), didn't last forever.

Clawdius Talonious is correct, without a dynamic economy it'll just lead to people leaving their computers on overnight. I know I've done the same thing before in Anno 2070. Assuming we get a dynamic economy to prevent abuse, I support your auto trade route suggestion.

or... hmm... what about making it so instead of them launching themselves, you put a future trade caravan schedule in, where you can only schedule the next 3-5 trade caravans, or something? And you'd have save-able routes with buy-sell rules that you could assign to each caravan. That'd prevent exorbitant benefits of leaving it running overnight, yet make it so you don't have to manually start each one.

[iSuck345]

Now I think that in Patrician 4 they thought about that, and that there must be some kind of solution, like constant dangers. Sometimes, pirates in there wold pillage your ships that either had low protection or had none, so he forced you to take action. Other times a prince wold become unhappy with a town and wold order a siege, the town wold be forced to ask for goods to so then it can appease the ANNOYING prince. We may be able to get something like theese to fix that of the "game playing it by itself". In OpenTTD, industries wold reduce production if not all of their materials wold be transported, other times they shut down, forcing the player to adapt constantly. Other industries could increase production too, so what do you think? Also, totally aprove that of the dynamic economy.

[iSuck345]

Wait is a dynamic economy a constantly-changing economy? Because there were other traders who influenced the economy, and that's it :I.

[Hatsune_Neko]

or... hmm... what about making it so instead of them launching themselves, you put a future trade caravan schedule in, where you can only schedule the next 3-5 trade caravans, or something? And you'd have save-able routes with buy-sell rules that you could assign to each caravan. That'd prevent exorbitant benefits of leaving it running overnight, yet make it so you don't have to manually start each one.

When you can run and attack and be attacked ( when it gets added to the game ) at the same time will nix the leaving your game running all night to make money. for you mite not have a caravan left if you do so
Same went for Patrician games. pirates where nasty if you didn't keep a eye on em.