Trade strategies not working

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Hi All,

Trading strategies are not working as expected. Even though my strategy says sell at 295% market price, the game sells only at product quality level.

Corporation selling at product quality level ignoring trade strategy




For some corporations this process is pretty random and corporation is selling very randomly.

Corporation selling at random prices




Andy, - this is serious bug in the game, please check it. thanks

Mndz, with the price at the top limit of 17,516 the first trans of the first corp appears to be right. 17516 X 2.04Q = 35,732.64 because strats won't exceed max price.

The first trans of the second corp looks like an immediate sale.
17516 X 1.97Q = 34,506.52 X 1.5 = 51,759 that's pretty close to what you sold it for. Maybe the immediate bonus is less than I thought.

All the other trans's seem to be selling at either price X quality or price X quality plus around 50% bonus.

It would be helpful for both sales and supply purchases if the 'What happened' showed if it was an immediate.

Hi John,

i am not sure what do you mean by the max price. the price paid should depend on my strategy otherwise trade strategies are not needed at all. i mean that some corporations agree to pay more and some try to sell higher from market price, the actual order is based on these conditions. quality should only multiply the final price paid.

another thing is that i only see spikes only in a single corporation, so if that would be immediate, i could see price spikes in other corporations as well. it seems to me that only Andy can explain or fix this as this is not how it should work.

A good while ago I tracked the sales for a few corps and found that my sales strategy only worked when the market price was below or close to the base price. When the market price rose a bit the strats stopped, so I assumed that there is a hard maximum sales price.

I believe actions in the game happen in a set order every cycle and it starts from the beginning every time, and not picking up from where it left off the last cycle.
I based this on two things that I noticed repeating. New corps in a couple of my countries will upgrade a lot faster than the others and when a product goes into surplus it's always the same counties that have too much unsold product while other countries are selling their product. This is with all the countries having the same settings and pop & indices are close.

Just to make sure where we stand:

there was no change in the way trading takes place for a long time.

Sale strategies represent the way you set pricing and what you would like to see taking place.

This has nothing to do with requests made on the market for the purchasing of products.
The gamemaster has no part in the way it happens. There is no money put it or taken out of the market except for interventions.

If there is no one around who is willing to purchase products that are offered for a high price, than the high price will not be paid.

If you see erratic pricing, it is the result of erratic offerings.

The only change I can see is a growth of the share of C3 countries in the market. They have higher population and they have on average, 2 corporations more than before. The amount of product they produce increased .

Interventions by game procedures are always at market price and they do not cause any shortage to become a surplus. They are not capable of doing this.
These interventions behave like product offerings by players.

In fact, even with some interventions, when the shortage is less than 50% - 70% of the amount of product on the market, these interventions stop.

Computing the expected price is not relevant. The market procedure is a market maker, it tries to find matches and in many cases, when the market is stuck, it forces trading and must find a common ground, despite requests for a higher price.
The difficulty in matching transactions is much more frequent when the price is very high. This is even more frequent in the last months.

All this is as old as the game, except for one round of tuning that took place a long time ago.
Also that change was related to trading at or close to the top possible pricing.

And indeed, immediate purchases also cause disturbances and they are now more frequent than before.

Hi Andy,

this is an old problem I nobody properly explained it to you. I have been here for the decades and this is a real issue which kills one of the most interesting features of the game which is playing with trading strategies. I joined this game in the beginning mostly because of this funny play with trading strategies and many of my friends as well, but this is not working anymore.

In the past the max product quality was 200 and the max price was 300%, but then you have increased the quality to 300 and forgot to increase other limit accordingly. As a result now the max quality is equal to the max price and that leaves no space where strategies could be applied. Simply price cannot exceed the max 300.

simply saying there is no difference what strategy you would be using, the result except immediate offers will be always the same.

Interesting. I just thought it didnt work at all, but in case of surplusses, trade strategies do make sense, as it preserves it stocks untill market prices are higher again.

they used to work under all situations, that is why i think this is related to quality level change.

Thank you Mndz for your hard work to explain what you see.
My take was that the problem is caused by more shortages than before and the market making interventions in the trading process.

You now convinced me to have another look.

This is one of the most complex parts in the code.
Don't hold your breath but I will try to do it quickly.

thanks for looking into it, i really hope you will find the reason

Hi Andy,

have you been lucky to find the truth here. thanks

Not there yet.
I will look into it.