Some thoughts about transporters and production

[RainmakerLTU]

AI controlled transporters should BUY goods from market ONLY if there are not built/available production building, which may produce these goods.
For example at certain point in herbalism there are goods which require wheat, but croft as building which may produce wheat is from different profession and might be unlocked/built by player or not at given time. So, IF dynasty owns a croft, AI transporter goes there and loads wheat for free, instead of buying it at market for money. If croft is locked/not built/has no wheat available, then transport buys it at market.

Another thought is about more places to visit in one route. For now I tested is not possible to load, for example, 10 bat blood and deliver 1 to one building and 9 to market. 3 places - one load point and two delivery points don`t work. Transporter simply don`t go to market. To make this work, we need make load and delivery points in pairs. When I loaded 1 bat blood and delivered to building, then i set to go back, load 9 and deliver to market, transporter went to market.
I think this way also might be useful, but simpler way where you load all in one place and deliver to many places, also should be in game.

Also I still don`t know how to forbid certain goods from production. How to produce certain amount or w/o limit is clear. But there are no zero. For example I want to make perfume, but automated workers start gathering biblical amounts of flowers or any other things in that way leaving no storage for other things or production.
It`s clear how to sell things through front store or transport, but not quite clear how to produce only this and that and nothing more. I mean automated production. Manual production is not that good, because it always requires player to keep an eye on ingredients levels and storage space, AND with AI transport who can`t take ingredients from other owned buildings but instead wants to buy everything, it`s simply not profitable.

[Hardy]

I agree.

[Tyleet]

Hi Rainmaker,
thanks for your feedback.
That the automated transporter only moves between the market and the business is intentional, so that if you take the time to manually set up a trade route to handle production you have an advantage. The automated system should never be equal to manually managing your business, otherwise there would be no reason to do so.

I just tested to setup a trade rout like the one you described and you are right, this setup does not work, we'll see that we can fix it until the next patch. Thanks for pointing this out.

Regarding more control over your production:
There is currently a bug where automated transporter do not check what other products are currently set for manual production. We are going to fix this for the next patch. The idea is, if, for example you set 1 employee to produce perfume, other employees that are set to automatic production should try to produce resources for perfume if they are needed and only produce the item the automation wants to produce if all resource requirements for perfume are fulfilled. This way your should have a lot more and easier control over what the main end product of one of your businesses is, without having to micro manage every single production step.

[Hardy]

"the item the automation wants to produce" which item it will be? Like now The most expensive? Imo it could be good to set at AI settings which item we want to produce and when they use all resources just change to produce Them and next back to produce ai set item

[Hardy]

Like clicking on Play button and choosing item from menu or smthg like that

[RainmakerLTU]

Originally posted by Tyleet:

Hi Rainmaker,
thanks for your feedback.
That the automated transporter only moves between the market and the business is intentional, so that if you take the time to manually set up a trade route to handle production you have an advantage. The automated system should never be equal to manually managing your business, otherwise there would be no reason to do so.

I just tested to setup a trade rout like the one you described and you are right, this setup does not work, we'll see that we can fix it until the next patch. Thanks for pointing this out.

Regarding more control over your production:
There is currently a bug where automated transporter do not check what other products are currently set for manual production. We are going to fix this for the next patch. The idea is, if, for example you set 1 employee to produce perfume, other employees that are set to automatic production should try to produce resources for perfume if they are needed and only produce the item the automation wants to produce if all resource requirements for perfume are fulfilled. This way your should have a lot more and easier control over what the main end product of one of your businesses is, without having to micro manage every single production step.

Thanks for answer. Nice to know we think alike. Good ideas.