How to reliably automate my business?

[a Orc]

I've been trying to automate some of my buildings dut I keep running into problems. I have a farm and an orchard producing grain, honey and fruit. I have a mill turning the grain into flour. And the bakery turns all this into food.

So I tried the manage building option. If I let the AI manage both selling and stocking, I keep running out of stock because my carts are too far away. If I set it to sell only in town it works better but then I get much worse prices. Also, it doesn't keep anything to sell directly from the store, annoying the locals who want to buy their daily bread.

Besides, my farm, mill and orchard produce way too much for my bakery so I want them to sell excess stock. But if I set them to sell, they sell everything, so my bakery has to buy ingredients from the market. Rediculous.

I also tried to use the trade route option, but this doesn't get rid of excess stock because it won't unload at a market, and the trade routes keep jamming because either the cart cannot unload or cannot collect. It is impossible to balance all production buildings and if the carts run in any kind of problem they just cancel their trade route instead of waiting for things to clear up.

Can someone advise?

[=NV=Hammer]

It has never really worked well enough to drive a solid profit margin. Heres to Automation in guild 3 tho!

[cybera]

OK, so I made some tests with the buildings you mentioned and there is a way, the key point for it all to work is to always have a surplus of the raw materials and to not have more open slots than you need in a business and last and most important the distance between any 2 buildings where you make an automated route should be so that 20 of the resource cannot be spend by the time they make a run. I'll try to explain this further at the end.

It still might break but not often as long as the entire machine is working.

I'll build he chain i made from the production end to the begining because its seems simpler to understand like that for me. Also this chain is for level 1 croft and bakery and things will change and a the chain will have to be tweaked with upgrades, but you should get the idea.

Buildings I made the test with are: Croft, Mill, Orchard, Bakery.

The bakery should have 5 slots no more no less, those slots are for: Barley flour, Wheat flour, Honey, Barley bread and Cookies.

You build up 10 barley breads and 10 cookies, than you get a cart and build a trade route with it. Trade route should be pick up 10 barley breads and 10 cookies go to market sell them and reapeat constantly.

That is all you have to do with the bakery.

Now the mill. It should have 4 slots no more no less. Barley, Wheat, Barley flour, Wheat flour.

You set up a trade route that moves 20 Barley flour and 20 Wheat flour to the bakery. The cart will move back and forth constantly keeping the bakery full.

Orchard, same deal as the mill only here we're talking about 20 honey only.

And the Croft you make a route to the mill with 20 barley and 20 wheat.

This automates your whole production cue to the bakery and auto sell what your bakery produces. The problem here is you cant make that kind of routes for the extra raw materials, you need to have extra carts with which to manually sell off the excess of those resources.

You can make automatic routes for any raw material you're producing but not using in any of your production chains.

And last let me get back to that thing from the begining. For example your trade route from the croft to the mill is carring 20 barley and 20 wheat (loaded in that order) if the route is so long that by the time you make one full revolution the mill uses 20 or more wheat but not 20 or more barley, than when it returns it will still have barley but no wheat and by its instruction it will have to load the barley first and end up with 2 slots of barley and no wheat and this breaks the chain.

Its requires a lot of tweaking to make this work but it does save a lot of time. Have fun with it.

PS: Also I'm looking for people to play MP with so if you want add me.

[a Orc]

Thank you for taking the time to experiment and post about it. It is a useful strategy, but as you say it can break if it runs out of materials before it is full. Also it requires manual selling of excess materials, which is fine if you have a few buildings but when you get more will be a hassle.

I made a new system, which is a bit annoying to set up, but works well once it runs. For example barley. I load up a cart with ONE load of 20 barley. Drop it off at the mill and immediately let it pick up TWO loads of barley at the same mill and then drop off ONE load again. This way if there was more than 20 barley at the mill, the excess will stay in the cart. Finally I let the cart drop off the barley at a SECOND farm, which is set to auto sell.

(in case I cannot place a second builing of the same type due to the building limit of my title, I temporarily drop the excess of at my storehouse from where I sell manually).

It works, but I think it is a shame that you have to jump to such hoops to get a decent business running.

[cybera]

lets hope they allow for much more options in setting up routes in the next game. I've seen games with sufficient options to automate everything taking into account prices as well. I'm sure they'll do a better job, I'll check out if I can optimize it even more with a cart for each resources and extra buildings of the same. I'll go the full route for Patron today, grow as much as possible to see if I'll be able to automate everything at the highest level.

[Stryderunknown]

Hopefully in the next version they'll use Warehouses as logistics hubs, to take any overstock from your production chains. Either allowing what's stored to suppliment production when supplies are low or using carts from the warehouse to sell the surplus to market.

[EricTheFritz]

Honestly, although the automations should be better; overall i'm happy you cannot profit as much automated compared to manual work.

[Burgzaza]

Yeah it's so frustrating...I have a farm, mill, barery and an inn, and it's so messy... Trading routes always end up in ineffective loops, with goods they can't unload, or can't sell. I switched up to AI controlled buildings and I quickly made tons of money, but it's still a mess and very unstatisfying.
You work manually for a good while in the hope of setting an effective automated trade, but it just doesn't work.
I'm pretty disappointed, the game has a great start but then everything falls appart.

It's my first The Guild game, are the other ones better in this regard ?

[Fajeth]

Try ThreeOfMe's TradingRoutes Mod (or the MegaMod), it has extended options for trade routes

[Scrubby Spammer]

Upgrade the building to at least level 2 and get horse carts asap believe me it helps. Set buying and selling carts to manual and find that sweet spot for horse carts.

Set it to hold resources for 24 hour production.

Back when McCoy had an expanded inventory mod that allows more resources to be stored in a building (if you could pay for the upgrades) you could tweak it to 48 hour production and it worked great, but for now 24 hour production is the best you can do.

[Burgzaza]

Yeah I upgraded my buildings to the max already, and I have a lot of carts and horse carts. I'll try your settings suggestion, thank you.

I was thinking exactly what you are talking about that mod, just having a lot more inventory storages in the buildings would fix this problem. Is this McCoy mod unusable now ? Is there a way to tweak inventory amounts and/or sizes, in a .txt file or something ?

Originally posted by Fajeth:

Try ThreeOfMe's TradingRoutes Mod (or the MegaMod), it has extended options for trade routes

I only played in vanilla, maybe I should try the mods now... thanks.

[Anderson]

Originally posted by Burgzaza:

Yeah I upgraded my buildings to the max already, and I have a lot of carts and horse carts. I'll try your settings suggestion, thank you.

I was thinking exactly what you are talking about that mod, just having a lot more inventory storages in the buildings would fix this problem. Is this McCoy mod unusable now ? Is there a way to tweak inventory amounts and/or sizes, in a .txt file or something ?

Originally posted by Fajeth:

Try ThreeOfMe's TradingRoutes Mod (or the MegaMod), it has extended options for trade routes

I only played in vanilla, maybe I should try the mods now... thanks.

Imho the mods are still imperfect. But it's worth the try if you have the time.