Goods priority

[Ulfberht]

If there is a deficit on a good, how is the distribution calculated? Trade routes are eating away a lot.
Does goods going to trade gets prioritized over let´s say pop consumtion? What I mean is, does trade take it´s 100% of need and then the rest get to share the rest?
Or is it just evenly spred, ie if there is a deficit ALL buyers of a good gets equally less? Less for trade, less for consumtion, less to shipyards and so on?

[grotaclas]

AFAIK the game creates goods out of thin air and everybody gets what they want as long as their isn't a shortage. And if there is a shortage every industry which uses the good gets a modifier which reduces their throughput by 1% for each day that the shortage lasted. The wiki has a little more details: https://vic3.paradoxwikis.com/Market

[Ulfberht]

Yes. I would like some explaining about what the deficit really means. Is it just a way to represent supply/demand and it affects price? It does not really matter if there is a small deficit productionwise, it only adjusts price, and if the deficit gets to high then prices are more expensive and pops cant really buy.

Or is for example -50 deficit a shortage in full effect straight away. Ive noticed that sometimes there is a popup for shortage which affect throughput, but that popup comes when deficit is pretty big.

I think its the first, that there is no immediate shortage when deficit is "pretty low". But prices are affected and indirectly this affects pop consumtion possibiliteies.

[grotaclas]

As long as there is no shortage, the deficit only affects the price. The wiki article which I linked explains when a shortage happens and its effects

[Ulfberht]

Yes, keep prices at around baseprice then?

[grotaclas]

Originally posted by Ulfberht:

Yes, keep prices at around baseprice then?

That's what I usually try to do, but I don't know if it is optimal. For example higher prices for luxury goods will impact the standard of living for your richer pops, but it will make the industries which produce them more profitable which can increase your investment pool if the industries are in your country and you have laws which will make these industries contribute to your investment pool. On the other hand lower prices for consumption goods
can (to some extend) raise the standard of living for the pops which consume them

[TasteDasRainbow]

I've found it's generally good to keep luxury goods relatively high for profit/employment until you can establish a healthy amount of trade to export them. You don't want to encourage too much luxury pop growth until you're prepared to almost exclusively build industry and import the raw goods you need.

[The Nichtnochter]

when a good is in demand (negative supply) its price starts to go up as % of base price. This means the industries that require this good will make less profit when they buy the good as their input.

Let's look at the following scenario with 2 factories:

Factory1 is making a 1GBP profit at base price & -1GBP loss at +1% price
Factory2 makes 5KGBP at profit at base price & 4.98K at +1% price

If their input good goes into demand, Factory1 is no longer making a profit & thus it's money reserves lowers as it still needs to pay the same wages to its less productive employees. Once its reserves are gone it will start to fire workers, if the price of the input good does not recover the factory will close once no one is left otherwise it will start to recover employees then money reserves in that order once it is profitable again.

Factory2 keeps its reserves & employees & its owners just make a little less money. That is all that happens to Factory2.

Money reserves are a protective buffer from actually lowering production until employees are fired, it would be annoying if factories instantly fires some employees & rehires next week due to small fluctuations in price; in fact not just annoying, it would be devstating as actual output would be altered thus affecting more prices.

Similarly with end-goods to your populace: the rich can pay for wheat that's high in price, the poor cannot. Thus the poor are first to get angry (radical) & starve. Sounds like a pretty good simulation to me ngl.

[Ulfberht]

Makes sense. The surplus/deficit are just pricemechanisms, unless shortages occur. The factories have some buffers, but cant stay alive for too long.

Since we got this going, gow do you manage trade so that your deficit in the market does not get too big? It seems that when I try to expand for example the logging industry, to meet the deficit, then more trade volume is just added, no matter the tradepolicy for goods - and we are back to same deficit. This way there is always a deficit. How do you handle trade generally? When do you protect and when do you focus export?

Maybe this is just a part of the "free" economy? Tradecenters wants to make money so they buy the logs and export them. Pops have to compete with this - this is "normal"?

[Dirac]

Originally posted by Ulfberht:

Makes sense. The surplus/deficit are just pricemechanisms, unless shortages occur. The factories have some buffers, but cant stay alive for too long.

Since we got this going, gow do you manage trade so that your deficit in the market does not get too big? It seems that when I try to expand for example the logging industry, to meet the deficit, then more trade volume is just added, no matter the tradepolicy for goods - and we are back to same deficit. This way there is always a deficit. How do you handle trade generally? When do you protect and when do you focus export?

Maybe this is just a part of the "free" economy? Tradecenters wants to make money so they buy the logs and export them. Pops have to compete with this - this is "normal"?

The way that trading is currently implemented, it gives an advantage to traders over domestic agents, and this advantage allows them to undercut domestic agents. Your furniture maker buys your wood at market price. But the foreign tradesman buys at a much cheaper price, and the difference is larger the higher is the trade volume. There is a series of tooltips you can go through that shows you exactly how much traders on a particular route are buying for in your market and selling for in a foreign market. In words it goes like this. A trader exporting from your market will calculate:

a = your current market price
b = hypothetical market price in your market if none of the other exporting routes were present but everything else is held the same.

Traders buy the good for (a+b)/2, and they make a similar calculation for selling in the importing market. It is possible in this way for a trader to make a profit by buying from an expensive market and selling in a cheap one. If you look at the tooltips for your exports, it is very likely you will find that a lot of the exports are going to markets that are cheaper than yours, and those routes are making wonderful profits. Very frustrating.

The best counterplay that I have found is to import the exact same good right back from their market. It is often profitable both ways. Alternatively, if you find another large wood producer among the AI nations, you might be able to undercut them. I have found the same as you that expanding supply directly just does not work in the face of the endless trades.

Have fun. This realization has made me put down the game until trade is revised.

[donalddawkins]

Originally posted by Ulfberht:

If there is a deficit on a good, how is the distribution calculated? Trade routes are eating away a lot.
Does goods going to trade gets prioritized over let´s say pop consumtion? What I mean is, does trade take it´s 100% of need and then the rest get to share the rest?
Or is it just evenly spred, ie if there is a deficit ALL buyers of a good gets equally less? Less for trade, less for consumtion, less to shipyards and so on?

So from what i'ev gathered the goods to price system is as follows:

The scarcer the good on the market, the more expensive it is, once the good goes from the grey average price to gold, your industries will start to struggle to buy said good and will begin to lose profts and sack people.

That is UNLESS you subsidise said industry, at which point that industry will buy the good at loss and will continue to function, at the expense of your income. This can be very good for railways where you need workers to keep up market access, but generally i would rather let industries fail then subsidise them, and spend the money building the resource they need instead. if I can't build it then I'ed trade it.

Once a good becomes TOO expensive (it's price icon are gold coins and a red box over th product), the industries simply can no longer access that good on your market, and instead of gradually making a loss start making massive losses and simply stop functioning.

This can work to your advantage and against it; if you're a minor customs partner you can see a gold priced product, build it and make bank. If you're a customs leader then it's worse as you either need to hope your partner meets demand, you build the resource yourself or you can trade it.

There can also be the reverse situation, where too much of a good is on the market (seen with a red coin next to the product) here the product is so cheap that you're industries won't make a profit domestically manufacturing it, and so you either need to make you're industries make a new product, export the surplus good or stop producing more of that good altogether. This is where you start seeing in-game recessions.

Another option if forcing open another market via making them a dominion, and force feeding them you're cheap product.

You can change the production methods and type of product you produce for most industries, and the aim will vary depending on the type of customs partner you are.

[donalddawkins]

If your a major partner, you can change production methods of a rare product to use coal if you have a surplus, to hopefully increase the price of coal and lower the price of you're rare product.

As a minor partner? spot the expensive products on the customs market and build them to make absolute bank, but not building too much as to overwhelm the market with you're cheap goods and lose you;re profits

Really, it's a balancing act of trying to keep everything affordable, but not too affordable.