How does trading work?

[Davor]

I believe I know if I want something how to trade for it, but say I have extra of a resource, how to I export it? The stuff I am not using how does that get traded?

[glythe]

The TLDNR version is that if you have lots of materials people will eventually trade you for them (and give you a civilian factory as payment for 8 units of each material).


You can force people to trade with you if you start cornering the market on materials. Never trade for an excess amount of material to corner the market.

You can get more materials available to trade by increasing the infrastructure of a state that makes resources.

Chromium is generally plentiful early war as not many people are using it (and if so only for heavy ships). You can conquer turkey if you want to get a huge chunk of the market. Later on you need it for tanks too

Tungsten is for making artillery but later on it is needed for jets and tanks. You can get a ton from Portugal. As time gets closer to WWII people will be trading for more and more of this material. If you trade for it early on (and were using it/needing it early) you can keep it out of the hands of others. An example is Sweeden when you are playing Germany. Trade it for long enough at the right time and you have more trade influence. If someone has stronger influence they will get priority.

Oil is valuable as it is needed for many things (trucks, planes, tanks, ships). You can get quite a bit from Romania.


Try not to trade for 8 units of an item if you just need 1 unit. Lower production or re-order your production. For example say you need 1 more oil but you look at your production and realize you are making trucks with three factories. Put that as the lowest oil using production line on the list. Now it gets a slight penalty. It will probably be fine.

[Davor]

Thank you both of you guys. I greatly appreciate the help. Watching Youtube videos is getting a bit tedious since I am having a hard time remembering everything and want to play. No videos explained what both you said. Great to know. Hopefully this game will click in for me.

[drewbstar]

Originally posted by Davor:

Thank you both of you guys. I greatly appreciate the help. Watching Youtube videos is getting a bit tedious since I am having a hard time remembering everything and want to play. No videos explained what both you said. Great to know. Hopefully this game will click in for me.

Some other things:

-There are some embargo options (like USA stoping Japan's oil imports)

-You can get free civ factories if people are 'buying' your trades. Can be very useful. But, keep in mind you'll be sacrificing civ factories to trade for things you need as well.

[Enola Gay]

Trading works quite badly I find. You have no way of making it so that your factories get priority. So exporting will always be the default priority no matter what. Logically paradox would have made it so that you only trade the excess of what resources you have after fufilling all your country's needs.

That's how it used to work in HoI3. I have no idea why they chose to make the current system worse than that 1.

[Bramborough]

This looks like a relevant and recent enough topic to tack on a newb question. Only a slight necro/hijack.

In my production window, the lowest-priority items are stalled out for lack of resources. Yet, up at the top, I'm "in the green" for all six major resources. If I currently have a surplus in, for example, both oil and rubber, then why are some of my oil/rubber-using military factories starved for those resources? I understand that if resources run dry, then the lowest-priority production lines suffer first; intuitive enough. So I took some steps to address (synth plants, trades, taking over Rumania lol) and got more resources, but those lower-pri lines aren't coming back online.

I've poked around a few online guides, wiki, etc, and haven't found this specific situation explained.

ver. 1.5.4 with all DLC to date.

[Rodi]

Either your newly acquired ressources are being exported away from your use in hihh enough numbers so your prodcution doesnt benefit or the combat has damaged some military factories, meaning that those unusable ones were assigned to lower priority lines, stalling your production.

You can prevent the latter by not preplanning your production or by reparing factories with priority.