buy/sell ?

[El Patron]

Hi guys. Since I bankrupted again out of sudden (my national chest was full of gold), Im trying to figure out some things. Soo how about this. BUY and SELL. My game said there is an expensive thing on my market. I check it. It says for example: you buy wheat for 18, but sell it for 16. So here is my question. Why the hack I should BUY a thing, if I sell it? Why anyone would do that?

[Oaks]

Buy sell is actually supply demand. The expensive thing on the market means there is a big demand for it (usually iron or tools for me) and very little supply of it, so it is super expensive for your government buy it.
Work on getting the buy and sell orders (aka supply and demand) to be close to equal to keep it affordable for you people.

[El Patron]

Originally posted by Oaks:

Buy sell is actually supply demand. The expensive thing on the market means there is a big demand for it (usually iron or tools for me) and very little supply of it, so it is super expensive for your government buy it.
Work on getting the buy and sell orders (aka supply and demand) to be close to equal to keep it affordable for you people.

Well, thats what I thought. So there was a lead expensive. At least my game said so. So I built much more lead mines. And I thought thats the key. Build productions of goods expensive on my market. But at the end of the day, I ended up with empty pockets and bankruptcy on the way.

[Varagix]

You have to be careful with how stuff's balanced though. Cheap goods and resources make the end consumer spend less, but it also means that the producer makes less. If they become unprofitable, they fire people to deal with their (not your) money issues. if you overbuild a lot of things, you'll end up with unproductive buildings that can't afford to hire people, which will result in them not producing the goods that other buildings need, causing shortages and a fall in productivity that can cause -those- buildings to fire people, etc.

you need to balance things out a bit since you're not just worried about things being affordable for buyers, you also need to worry about them being profitable for sellers. That said, you can -get- more buy or sell orders without building new production through the trade system, so if you -do- unbalance things in your nation you can still make things balance out more broadly. Alternatively, depending on your economic law you can subsidize unprofitable businesses to keep employment up until demand catches up to supply.

[El Patron]

Ok I just made a test. Opium. My game tells me, its expensive. So I checked numbers. Differencies between my selling price and buying price was 33%. So I built lot of lot of opium farms. Lot of them. I thought the percentage will fall down drastically. But voila. Now the diffrence is 36%. I dont get it.

[FlameWar]

It depends on he demand, and the imports/export.
For oyur Opium example, can you check from saves how much Opium other countries boguht from you before and after?
Remeber, trade rotues are nto instantant, they start small and scale up over time, so maybe other countreis bought 50 Opium from you initialy, then oyu scaled up production by 250, but in the same time their buy order fortrade routes increased to 300.

[Zorta]

if you hover your mouse over the buy and sell amounts you will get a tooltip that tells you where those orders are coming from which will help you get a better idea of what is going on.

for your opium example i imagine that after you built all those opium farms the price of opium in your market crashed at which point other countries started to import your opium into their markets which pushed the prices back up.

[El Patron]

Well, the only thing I know I am the no.1 world producer of opium. But in other discussion I read, the best option is to produce any goods only amount that my population needs. But how can I compare how much my population needs and how much I produce? What numbers exactly say that? And as for the buy/sell thing. Well, its quite logical. If I make lets say jeans. And I sell them to Charles for 50, Charles sells it to Joffrey for 60 (beause he wants a profit) and Jofrrey comes to me and offers me the jeans for 70. So the diffrence there is understandable. But how do I know if I buy it back? Im the no1. worlds producer of opium. So there is no need to buy it from someone else. But the game says its expensive article on my market opium. Hmm but it doesnt mean I buy it? Or does it? Maybe Im thinking about this in not correct way.

[Kimlin]

Originally posted by Peacemaker:

Well, the only thing I know I am the no.1 world producer of opium. But in other discussion I read, the best option is to produce any goods only amount that my population needs. But how can I compare how much my population needs and how much I produce? What numbers exactly say that? And as for the buy/sell thing. Well, its quite logical. If I make lets say jeans. And I sell them to Charles for 50, Charles sells it to Joffrey for 60 (beause he wants a profit) and Jofrrey comes to me and offers me the jeans for 70. So the diffrence there is understandable. But how do I know if I buy it back? Im the no1. worlds producer of opium. So there is no need to buy it from someone else. But the game says its expensive article on my market opium. Hmm but it doesnt mean I buy it? Or does it? Maybe Im thinking about this in not correct way.

Jeans are $100 baseline.
You produce 100 jeans. There’s 110 people who want jeans the price goes up to $110.

You produce 120 jeans 110 people want them the price goes down $90.

Don’t over complicate it.

[Luckerator]

@Peacemaker To compare pop needs and your production, just look at the buy-sell numbers. If there are more buy offers, the local price rises and you are not meeting needs. You want to keep the buy-sell numbers as close to 1-to1 as you can. If the sell number is too high, export some of that product, before your factories close. As you hover over a potential export partner, the popup will tell you how the price will change in your local market. Selling a small number of opium won't affect the local price much, but selling a vast quantity sure can. Too many local buy orders compared to sell? Try to import that item.

[Luckerator]

@Peacemaker Skipping opium for a moment: for resources that are raw materials for some other building (e.g. iron and wood for tools), if you have too much local production (more sell than buy offers), consider building whatever other building uses that resource, thus creating more buy demand. Also, remember that completing a building does not mean it will start producing at 100%, if there are too few qualified pops looking for work. For a building to produce at 100% it needs both an appropriate labor pool and a market willing to buy the product at a high enough price to cover operating expenses and provide a profit.

[Varagix]

Originally posted by Peacemaker:

But in other discussion I read, the best option is to produce any goods only amount that my population needs. But how can I compare how much my population needs and how much I produce? What numbers exactly say that?

Answering this specifically, I took a screenshot earlier today to explain something similar in a different thread: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885783126

If you click on a good in your market screen, you'll see details on how much of the good is being produced/sold by what (buildings, import trade routes, etc), and how much is being consumed/bought by what (buildings, pops, export trade routes).

All of this is dynamic, so it'll always be a bit of a moving target.

Pops who gain wealth will consume more and different things, with some pops being too poor to consider luxury goods and others being so rich that they see lower tier goods like raw fabric or standard clothes to be beneath them.

Trade routes will buy and sell based on relative difference in supply and demand in -both- markets they act in, seeking to make a profit by buying goods in markets that produce more than they sell locally, and then selling those goods in markets that have lots of buy orders but not enough local production. Making a lot of a good makes your market a good target for traders to export from, but it's still constrained by the demand in other markets too. If the other markets suddenly change, like if they start producing their own goods, they'll stop trading as much with you and your prices will crash down.

Also, it's important to note that, outside of trade routes, there's no simulation of individual prices in your markets. Buy and Sell represents the -amounts- that people want to buy or sell (number of orders), not the price they're buying or selling at. The final market price is calculated by the game as a modifier on a base price, and that modifier comes from the difference between buy orders and sell orders.

[El Patron]

Originally posted by Varagix:

Originally posted by Peacemaker:

But in other discussion I read, the best option is to produce any goods only amount that my population needs. But how can I compare how much my population needs and how much I produce? What numbers exactly say that?

Answering this specifically, I took a screenshot earlier today to explain something similar in a different thread: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885783126

If you click on a good in your market screen, you'll see details on how much of the good is being produced/sold by what (buildings, import trade routes, etc), and how much is being consumed/bought by what (buildings, pops, export trade routes).

Ok. If I get your screen correctly. So your pop needs more food than you actually produce? Is that correct? So you must built more farms to satisfy your pop?

[Mikey]

Originally posted by Peacemaker:

Ok I just made a test. Opium. My game tells me, its expensive. So I checked numbers. Differencies between my selling price and buying price was 33%. So I built lot of lot of opium farms. Lot of them. I thought the percentage will fall down drastically. But voila. Now the diffrence is 36%. I dont get it.

Click the product in question to get more information on it. Left most tab shows you details on your supply of opium as well as your demand for opium. It is a much better gauge for balancing production than using the market price itself, but do not discount the market price all together as others have pointed out you need the price of goods to be relatively balanced to make a profit so you can actually produce them.

Basic goods such as grain, wood, iron or coal are almost always in demand and you can produce as much of it as you want since any excess will by bought up by foreign powers. Beware that unless you control those trade deals you can't later cancel them outside of embargoes or going to war so be sure if you want to corner a certain market that you initiate all the exports before the other party can do it.

[FlameWar]

Originally posted by Peacemaker:

Ok. If I get your screen correctly. So your pop needs more food than you actually produce? Is that correct? So you must built more farms to satisfy your pop?

Pop and Industry, yes.
And you can either choose to build more farms, make existing farms more productive (by switching production methods, tools, etc.), or set up import routes.
Of note in that window, it will list your various producers and buyers individualy (e.g. Subsitence Farms, Wheat Farms, etc.), but wil lump all trade routes together for a single point in that list for each ofthe two sides (sell/buy). YOu can then see who the trade partners are if oyu mouse over the trade routes point, but you can quickly take the total at the top and subtract the trade rotues to knwo how much is internaly produced/demanded.

And also note that you don't have to end up perfectly equal supply/demand. If oyu look into the general market window, every good will have a blue/yellow bar displaying over/undersupply, and a price with a blue/yellow number showing deviation form the base price. You can have up to 50% over/undersupply of a good in your market before you will get any actuall shortages or production cuts because it doesn#t sell. The price of said good will then adjust up/down by +/- 75% of the base price depending on how many % you over/undersupply.

[Linna]

When the game say that a product is expensive you don't have to react each time.
an expensive product may not have an incidence on your cost for example, if artillery is expensive and you don't buy a lot of them do not care.

If you want to be profitable focus on the COST for your government/pop/industry,
for example for construction goods level 2, Iron price has a bigger impact than wood/cloth/tools.

Cost = Price * QUANTITY