Patrizierforum

May I join the Dummies class?

Let me see if I understand this. I set an autotrader holk to buy IG at 400 and wine at 339. I set an autotrade crayer to sell IG at 220 and another to sell wine at 184. They all have 4 or 5 trader captains. The office does not trade. The office keeps 350 on hand at all times.

Why do the sellers have good captains? I thought I read that the captain's skill only helped in the buying.

Why do I need to keep 350 on hand? I know it's the size of the crayers, but they cannot touch it and the regular convoys cannot touch it either. Maybe you keep 350 IG around for building, but I've never been that aggressive. And I do not use wine for building (and don't throw parties if I can help it).

Why can't the office sell? Is it a timing issue? I remember reading that the office only trades once a day; is that it?

Do these convoys have to be tightly in sync?

I have lots of cloth and a cash flow problem; I think I'll try the simpler version (one or two snakkias) and see how it works.

Alan, to answer your questions:

- The sellers don't have to be good traders. They always sell at nominal price.
- There is only a point in arbitrage if you can provide for the good to trade . You can tell the administrator either to sell everything if he gets the money for it, or to keep at least n goods when selling to the market or to keep at least n goods when selling to the market and loading to ships. As you want to automatically load all goods to the crayers/sellers, you can't use the latter version to keep the stock . Therefore, you must tell every automatic route to the town not to load the goods you want to do arbitrage with (this is nothing to tell the administrator, what you might have thought). For a reason I'll tell below, it is not wise to make the administrator to sell the arbitrage goods to the market himself. During arbitrage, the market will keep what it needs.
- If you keep 350 on hand, you'll get maximum profit in case the city grows to a size that it can cope with this amount.
- Indeed it is a timing problem - the office sells always at the same time once a day. The ship trades approximately four times a day, but four trades take slightly more than one day. Which gives the next point
- About synchronisation: In fact it turns out that you'll tie down twice amount of goods in two portions a and b.
1. crayers sell to market (a in market, b in store)
2. hulk buys from market (a in hulk, b in store)
3. crayer loads from store (a in hulk, b in crayers)
4. hulk loads to store (a in store, b in crayers)
5. - 8. the same with portions a and b exchanged.
so you have to start the hulk with buying from market in the time interval after the crayers sell and before they load from the store. There is one point where your competitors can disturb your scheme, and this is when there are quite a lot of cheap goods on the market. So you want to keep this state as short as possible. This means to start the hulk as quickly as possible after the crayers. Once you've started all three trade routes, they'll remain in that sync.

Patrician Jr, in general, your system will work, but in unfortunate circumstances you'll have all IG on the convoy at the moment the crayer wants to load it. Though, this will cost profit of one cycle only.

I thank you all.

I was thinking about the level 1 arbitrage. But it sounds like I did not catch the need for large quantities of goods to force the large price swings.

Well, I've got the snakkias and the cloth, but not enough decent trading captains. I've also got some (former) pirate crayers and cogs, so I may use them. I'm not up to 350 crayers yet. I'm building pretty slow this game.