Set it and forget it?
Automated convoys are one of the most powerful wealth-building tools in-game. They allow for a bunch of different strategies. Collect goods from all of your businesses in 1 or several hubs (then distribute them to surrounding cities), straight up carry everything on your back, and haggle throughout the world or anything in between!
One of the problems with convoys has been that after creating your route, you were a bit in the dark in regards to exactly what happened while they were trading. That stops today!
Granularity first
The new system registers up to 11 trading runs, with each one of them ending after the last city on your list is visited. In these runs, you can see where the convoy has stopped, what goods were bought, sold, loaded and unloaded, how the total cargo capacity changed, etc.
You can even filter your view to only include 1 single good! Moreover, you're only shown goods that have actually been traded in that run. This will help you debug your routes and ensure you buy/load exactly what you need and sell as much as possible, for the best prices!
Here's an example: I have a route where I buy every single production bonus good from every city I visit, and then try to sell them everything else.
Here's what I mean:
Here's how I've been doing in my latest run on Iron bars:
Bought:
Sold:
As you can see, I managed to load up on 10 bars on this run (in Pellin and Alemstra), and sold all of them by the end (and an extra 4 crates that I picked in a previous run!). Pair this info with my convoy's hold having no more bars, it's a pretty good indication that there's good demand right now! I might increase the prices a little bit or pick up more bars to further increase my profit.
What about available cargo space?
My convoy has about 650 total cargo capacity, and the max I reached in this run is 368. I'm good for now, I don't need to add any more ships in, I could even pull a tinier ship or 2 into some other convoy!
What is profit after all?
You might notice there's a couple of different ways profit is presented. That's because you can look at profit in different ways!
If you just look at all of our income and spending, that's the simplest way to consider profit! We sold stuff, bought more and then repaired our ships. Simple enough, right?
Well, what happens with goods you already had on your ship? What about those loaded or unloaded in different ports? Deciding on profit for those is more complicated.
The 2nd profit formula looks at individual sales and what cost you to get that product. Say you had 10 crates of Iron Bars on your ship and got those for 185 coins per crate. When you sell them, the profit (or loss!) will be tracked. Adding the profit from every single transaction (and subtracting ship repairs) gets you the 2nd profit type!
In the example above, the simple profit is lower. That's because we loaded up on some goods that we didn't sell! We'll sell them eventually & then the simple profit will be higher!
More convoy updates?
Yes! But after the new UI gets implemented. There's still a lot of stuff that's too complicated, especially when setting up trade routes. I think you'll love the new UI. I actually started working on its design. Leave a comment if you'd like a sneak peek, or would prefer to be surprised.
Until next time,
Happy trading.
Lexy.