The TradingRoutes mod introduces quite a few features that will make your Guild 2 life much easier. These are invaluable once you own several businesses since they enable you to manage a large number of buildings on your own.
I will give some base information on the features and state a few examples. I'll include the German translations for specific actions where appropriate.
Global route settings
The first dialog allows you to set global options and add new buildings/waypoints (Gebäude bzw. Wegpunkte) to the route. This is also where you finish the setup.
The sale threshold (Verkaufsniveau) is set to 0% by default. This value is used for sales at the market. If the current market value of the goods is lower then this threshold, no goods will be sold. I rarely use this since market prices tend to drop eventually once your business is going well or taxes go up. I recommend marking the market as "not important" when using this feature.
Most of you will know the interval setting from the Vanilla routes. I made only minor changes to this feature:
- The available options include "Just once" and the 4/8 hours wait has been changed to 6 hours/12 hours.
- The cart will now wait at the end of the route, not at the beginning. This allows for the cart to get going right away.
Setting up a waypoint
Whenever you stop at the market you get the usual two options "Load" (Einladen) and "Unload" (Ausladen). Both options ask you to select the item type and the amount of items you expect on the cart. This is somewhat different to the Vanilla routes:
- If you load 20 wheat at two different waypoints there will only be 20 wheat on the cart. Load 40 wheat at the second waypoint to get 40 wheat onto the cart.
- When unloading, make sure to select "0" if you want to sell all items. This is the amount that remains on the cart.
One of the most wanted features was "Resupply" (Versorgen) for workshops. This will drop as many items as necessary to reach the specified amount in your workshop -- and not more! There will usually be items left on the cart after this action -- sell them, store them or wait.
Important or not important?
It would be quite annoying if your carts kept going back and forth without anything useful to do (say, at night). That's why I introduced the "important" (wichtig) marker at waypoints. Let's look what that does to the actions:
- Load: The cart will stay until it contains given amount of items. This is useful for buying rare ressources at the market (i.e. leather) or waiting for production to finish.
- Unload: The cart will stay until everything was sold as requested. This is only useful if you are using a sale threshold.
- Resupply: The cart will stay until it runs out of items to resupply. Note that this overrides load and unload -- if the cart runs out of items it will not wait for the other load/unload actions to finish.
Warning messages
Whenever a cart is unable to finish a waypoint for more than 12 hours, a message will pop up to inform you. These are the options you have:
- "I will take care of it!": Gives you time to get production going again. Next warning will pop up in 12 hours.
- "Send it on rightaway!": Overrides the important marker for now. The cart moves on to the next waypoint.
- "Never mind, he is used to that!": Increases time until warnings by 12 hours for this route.
- "Why do you bother me? Please refrain from warning me!": Disables warnings for this route.
Examples
Supply a tavern from market:
- Stop at the local market (important waypoint).
- Load 20 wheat.
- Load 20 sugar beets.
- Stop at your tavern (important waypoint).
- Resupply up to 40 wheat.
- Resupply up to 20 sugar beets.
This will regularly keep your tavern inventory at 40 wheat and 20 sugar beets -- as long as those are available at the market. The cart will stay at the market as long as it takes to fill up to 20 of each. It will stay at the tavern as long as some goods are still on the cart.
Supply a tavern from your farm and sell the rest (horse cart):
- Stop at your farm (important waypoint).
- Load 40 wheat.
- Load 20 beef.
- Stop at your tavern (not important).
- Resupply up to 100 wheat.
- Resupply up to 60 beef.
- Stop at the local market (not important)
- Unload all wheat.
- Unload all beef.
This will regularly keep your tavern inventory at 100 wheat and 60 beef. The cart will stay at your farm as long as it takes to fill up each slot. It will drop as many goods at your tavern as are needed to reach 100/60. This may empty the cart or not. The cart will move on right away, sell any remains at the market and return to your farm.
Note that if you set the market to important and also set a sales threshold of 150% the cart will remain at the market as long as it takes for prices to go up. This may never happen due to taxes. I set it to "not important" since my goal is to supply my tavern and make sure the farm does not overflow.
I'd be glad to see your examples for trading routes! Ever tried to trade the rare goods from counting houses this way?
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