"Trade Warehouse" special building. What does it do?

[28rommel]

Probably tomorrow, I will play the "Hunger for Raw Materials" scenario.
I took a quick peak, and noticed that my home city and some of the other large cities on this map have a special building. They are titled "Trade Warehouse" and their description reads as follows ...

"This building secures basic supplies for the city via stable, traditional trade routes."

Before I start this scenario, it would help me to understand exactly what this means. Other special buildings in some scenarios, would for example, absorb all the cars you can manufacture or all the iron or coal you can ship to that city. But this special building does not make sense to me.

Can someone with more knowledge explain this special building to me, and what I need to know about it, as a play this map.
Thank you.

[vezrilx]

This one is a bit of an enigma yea.. it's the only building I've seen so far that does this.

What it *seems* to do is prevent fulfillment of demand from dropping below ~40% for the town it's in. There are no extra goods produced there though, and they have no extra demand for goods. They do not change function during the rest of the scenario.

If you start up a new game and just let it run, you will probably come to the same conclusion about these unique buildings.

So really, they are to maintain the large population centers on the map no matter what you or the AI do.

[28rommel]

Originally posted by vezrilx:

... What it *seems* to do is prevent fulfillment of demand from dropping below ~40% for the town it's in. There are no extra goods produced there though, and they have no extra demand for goods ...

Interesting.
I did let the game run for a short while, and it did seem to keep the city above the 40% F.O.D. declining-population-threshold. But the percentage does not increase to a 61% or larger increasing-population-threshold.

What do you mean when you say "there are no extra goods produced there though"?
And when you say, "they have no extra demand for goods," do you mean I should not waste my time trying to feed cities with these special warehouses with basic goods like Corn, Wood, Meat, Beer (or even Sugar, Vegetables) etc.? Will these special cities absorb/consume goods, If I ship it to them (if I wanted them to grow in population)?

[vezrilx]

In some scenarios, there are other types of unique trade warehouses that either create goods at towns that you can ship, or create demand for goods at towns you can ship to them. This is neither.

Originally posted by 28rommel:

do you mean I should not waste my time trying to feed cities with these special warehouses with basic goods like Corn, Wood, Meat, Beer (or even Sugar, Vegetables) etc.? Will these special cities absorb/consume goods, If I ship it to them (if I wanted them to grow in population)?

What this means is you are not required to send resources to these cities for them to remain at a stable population. If they receive goods they will consume them and this will contribute to demand fulfillment just as normal. The overall demand fulfillment will be boosted but I am not sure how much benefit it will yield if the city is fully supplied with normal goods.

You still should aim to ship goods to these cities for growth if you want it, and of course for payment of freight deliveries. It also means if you purchase and liquidate the AIs really early (you won't.. they grow super fast on this map) then those large towns they control will not dwindle.

Personally looking at the tasks I think growing other towns to 100k will be more important than trying to grow the cities with trade warehouses. But take the easy payments if you can siphon some goods there.