The trading system is unintuitive

[inVit]

In my game as sihk empire i have a problem with china stealing my iron.
I'm aware of how profitability is calculated in vic3 and so far I've dealt with it somehow.
But here my head dropped. From the beginning of the game, I can't discourage china from my iron, which is incredibly valuable to me.



Usually trade increases the cost of the goods by about 20%. Here I had a shortage of iron on the market with a price of over 75% and trade to China continued as if nothing was happening. It should not be like that. While in the case of larger economies this problem can be dealt with, in the case of small economies it is almost impossible to play / causes frustration.

As you can see in the screenshot, Qing's iron price is at its maximum. I thought maybe the poor boy just don't have where to buy.

Switched to Qing:



why doesn't Qing use other trade routes?

 

[Sbrubbles]

By stealing you mean buying and paying fair market value for it?

It isn't even a case of them paying way less for the iron than your pops (yes, it's lower, but by very little)

Now, as to "why does the ai buy from me and not britain", it's probably a mix of a) the ai being dumb, b) the ai favors interacting with the player by construction and c) you're closer, so it costs less convoys

 

[_karl_]

Maybe China doesn't have admin power left to create new routes ? You could tag-switch and check.
It might also be that China doesn't have access to many of these markets (ex: does the UK have an interest in China in 1836 before getting Hong-Kong?)

Regarding your market seeing shortages, you're probably victim of some rounding errors and lags: since China itself is very close to shortage, and their economy is much larger than yours, there isn't much space between the market equilibrium and your being in shortage.

Anyway, the game has a mechanism for that: if you don't want China to "steal" your iron you have to declare an embargo. If you're too weak to take the risk of retaliations, then it makes sense that China can "steal" your iron as it pleases them.

 

[BPZ1941]

By stealing you mean buying and paying fair market value for it?

It isn't even a case of them paying way less for the iron than your pops (yes, it's lower, but by very little)

Do you know how trade in this game works? Qing pays the average of pre- and post-trade prices, in this case £49.9 per Iron traded. That is 23.6% cheaper than Sikh gets their own Iron at. That's definitely not 'very little' and it's definitely not fair market value either. Trade in this game is literally stealing in extreme-price situations like these.

 

[Sbrubbles]

Do you know how trade in this game works? Qing pays the average of pre- and post-trade prices, in this case £49.9 per Iron traded. That is 23.6% cheaper than Sikh gets their own Iron at. That's definitely not 'very little' and it's definitely not fair market value either. Trade in this game is literally stealing in extreme-price situations like these.

The "price" the "traders" pay is an unimportant footnote in this discussion. What matters are the final prices in both markets, and those are pretty much the same in the example shown.

 

[MatthewP]

Do you know how trade in this game works? Qing pays the average of pre- and post-trade prices, in this case £49.9 per Iron traded. That is 23.6% cheaper than Sikh gets their own Iron at. That's definitely not 'very little' and it's definitely not fair market value either. Trade in this game is literally stealing in extreme-price situations like these.

It sounds like you may be misunderstanding. There is a trade price oddity, but it doesn’t mean Ming pays the average price, only that their traders do. Ming still pays about the same price as the op. In this particular case, the weirdness of the trade algorithm isn’t really having a ton of impact since ming is just buying goods until the prices in the two markets roughly equalize.

 

[inVit]

By stealing you mean buying and paying fair market value for it?

It isn't even a case of them paying way less for the iron than your pops (yes, it's lower, but by very little)

Now, as to "why does the ai buy from me and not britain", it's probably a mix of a) the ai being dumb, b) the ai favors interacting with the player by construction and c) you're closer, so it costs less convoys

No. I mean stealing because he pays a lot less for the stuff than I do. When playing as a Sikh, iron is essential for efficient weapon building.

Maybe China doesn't have admin power left to create new routes ? You could tag-switch and check.
It might also be that China doesn't have access to many of these markets (ex: does the UK have an interest in China in 1836 before getting Hong-Kong?)

Regarding your market seeing shortages, you're probably victim of some rounding errors and lags: since China itself is very close to shortage, and their economy is much larger than yours, there isn't much space between the market equilibrium and your being in shortage.

Anyway, the game has a mechanism for that: if you don't want China to "steal" your iron you have to declare an embargo. If you're too weak to take the risk of retaliations, then it makes sense that China can "steal" your iron as it pleases them.

the second screenshot is from tag switched. they had admin power as well as convoys.
and I needed them in the fight against the British.

My point is ... China has a gigantic potential for iron, just like its neighbor Russia. and yet for ai, a situation in which my economy depends entirely on such a vital resource is simply stupid.

I did everything to discourage them - raised tariffs and led to a situation where I had a price of +75%, I had a shortage and they had zero stress...

 

[_karl_]

I needed them in the fight against the British

Maybe join either market for now. As long as you are not strong enough to protect your market by yourself. Would China accept you into their market?
Then your prices couldn't be worse that theirs, and you have a gigantic supply of consumers for your industrial goods and opium, turning your issue into an opportunity.
Once you're strong enough you're free to leave the market, and you might not even need an embargo as your GDP will have increased a lot and the relative economic strength of China will be lower.

 

[_karl_]

the second screenshot is from tag switched. they had admin power as well as convoys.

And what are the suggestions of trade routes? I don't remember how it's called in the UI, "great potential for import" or something like that.
This advice is regularly very bad, so that as a human I use them less and less, but it's good information on what the AI would do if he were in your shoes. If iron is not one of the suggestions then it's most likely to be a mere AI failure.

 

[Opanashc]

There's always embargo.

 

[romothecus]

The game is fundamentally busted because the cost of transporting massive quantities of iron or steel is basically zero. Just convoy overhead (and not even that in an example like OP's Sikh-Qing route).

If the economy were designed correctly, every buy order would need to pay cost of Transportation from point of production to point of consumption. Instead everything just teleports, assuming there are sufficient Infrastructure fairies. What are Infrastructure fairies? They're magic, they live in Railroads. You do need enough Railroads for them but once you have that, they can teleport your goods anywhere in the world.

 

[Sbrubbles]

And what are the suggestions of trade routes? I don't remember how it's called in the UI, "great potential for import" or something like that.
This advice is regularly very bad, so that as a human I use them less and less, but it's good information on what the AI would do if he were in your shoes. If iron is not one of the suggestions then it's most likely to be a mere AI failure.

Yeah, the trade route suggestions are more or less based on good balance and not on profitability. If you're lacking enough in a good, it will suggest for you to import it, even if the whole world lacks it even worse and all possible import trade routes have negative profitability

 

[Sbrubbles]

No. I mean stealing because he pays a lot less for the stuff than I do. When playing as a Sikh, iron is essential for efficient weapon building.

Qing PoPs pay pretty much the same as your PoPs for iron. You posted the screenshot yourself. 64.6 vs 65.3, a negligible difference. That's what trade does, it brings closer the prices between markets by reducing available supply in the exporting market and increasing it in the importing market.

Vic3 has a weird thing where prices can, under certain circunstances, be substantially lower in the importing market than the exporting market (which makes no sense), and it also doesn't really take transport costs into account (since sea transport costs are an overhead cost payed for by the government and land transport costs don't exist), but that's neither here nor there for this nonsense "trade is theft" that gets repeated around here.

 

[Oglesby]

If the economy were designed correctly, every buy order would need to pay cost of Transportation from point of production to point of consumption.

Without even dealing with the abstraction where buy orders do not match sell orders, it would be a nightmare to constantly programmatically determine which good should go from which producer to which consumer.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Transport costs should probably be higher in the game. Transporting goods was expensive back then. It is not like today where freighters have a high tonnage and loading cranes at the docks.
Back then only expensive rare exotic goods was brought to Europe from the colonies and asia by ship.

 

[BPZ1941]

The "price" the "traders" pay is an unimportant footnote in this discussion. What matters are the final prices in both markets, and those are pretty much the same in the example shown.

It sounds like you may be misunderstanding. There is a trade price oddity, but it doesn’t mean Ming pays the average price, only that their traders do. Ming still pays about the same price as the op.

OP is playing the Sikh, not the Qing. The people who are buying Iron from the Sikh market are the traders. What they pay in their own market is irrelevant, what isn't is the fact that they're buying Iron at a quarter off to the tune of every single Iron unit actually produced in the market. OP is about 40 units off from an input goods shortage, and the trade route is still extremely lucrative.

Any amount of Iron production OP builds will just cause the trade route to be even more profitable until Qing demand has been satisfied, because the upper post-trade price is already almost at maximum but the pre-trade price will only go lower, allowing traders to steal even more Iron at even lesser fractions of the actual price.

If that is isn't what is important in 'your' discussion, you should probably re-read the thread a few times.

PS: If I'd pay you 30% the market value of your PC and then sell it at full value to my friend, that means I'm not ripping you off right? I mean my friend pays full price so it's fair

In this particular case, the weirdness of the trade algorithm isn’t really having a ton of impact since ming is just buying goods until the prices in the two markets roughly equalize.

Look at the screenshot again. The trade route between Sikh and Qing is at a £23.1 productivity per employee while prices in the Qing market are actually lower. That trade route will continue to expand, as profitable trade routes do. The impact is pretty much a ruined game until Qing finds other avenues to get their Iron from.

 

[MatthewP]

OP is playing the Sikh, not the Qing. The people who are buying Iron from the Sikh market are the traders. What they pay in their own market is irrelevant, what isn't is the fact that they're buying Iron at a quarter off to the tune of every single Iron unit actually produced in the market. OP is about 40 units off from an input goods shortage, and the trade route is still extremely lucrative.

Any amount of Iron production OP builds will just cause the trade route to be even more profitable until Qing demand has been satisfied, because the upper post-trade price is already almost at maximum but the pre-trade price will only go lower, allowing traders to steal even more Iron at even lesser fractions of the actual price.

If that is isn't what is important in 'your' discussion, you should probably re-read the thread a few times.

PS: If I'd pay you 30% the market value of your PC and then sell it at full value to my friend, that means I'm not ripping you off right? I mean my friend pays full price so it's fair

Look at the screenshot again. The trade route between Sikh and Qing is at a £23.1 productivity per employee while prices in the Qing market are actually lower. That trade route will continue to expand, as profitable trade routes do. The impact is pretty much a ruined game until Qing finds other avenues to get their Iron from.

Trade routes don’t expand indefinitely as long as they’re profitable. There is a limit based on the production and demand in each market. Ming will not keep importing iron until it’s taking 5x the OP’s production, for example.

In this case, as I’ve said already, Ming has continued to buy iron until the prices in the markets roughly equalized. This is how it ought to work given the lack of transport costs (which is a separate issue).

This doesn’t disprove the existence of the trade calculation weirdness, obviously. So you’re right that it exists and sometimes causes very odd effects. But in this case the effect of it is minimal. The cases that are more problematic are the ones where the buyer’s market ends up with lower prices than the producer’s market, which wouldn’t happen if prices worked normally.

edit: BTW, it's very far from a ruined game. Simply building up domestic demand for iron until the pre-trade price rises would get Ming to stop or greatly slow trade. Basically it's a matter of building a couple construction buildings. Very likely they would look for another trade partner and the issue would be gone. But even if not, having high iron prices because your large neighbor has an iron deficit is a realistic challenge, not a game ruiner.

 

[romothecus]

Without even dealing with the abstraction where buy orders do not match sell orders,

Agreed, this is its own weirdness. Nobody is really "buying" or "selling" anything, so even calling what we have "markets" is itself misleading. It's more like if someone heard about the idea of a "market" being a place where there are "buyers" and "sellers" but without understanding that the buyers and sellers were actually engaging in transactions with one another.

it would be a nightmare to constantly programmatically determine which good should go from which producer to which consumer.

It would be in their current data structure (and by "constantly," it could just be "weekly" absent specific triggers like convoys being raided). So yes, some major optimizations and improvements would be in order. I mean, ideally, the game never would have been structured this way in the first place, but here we are. A likely irredeemable mess.

 

[_karl_]

If the economy were designed correctly, every buy order would need to pay cost of Transportation from point of production to point of consumption. Instead everything just teleports, assuming there are sufficient Infrastructure fairies.

But it's not quite true that the transport free. Except in a few very rare cases where you can trade on land routes. What happens is rather that the state is paying the transport costs of the traders, through the construction of ports and maintenance of convoys, which are actually a pretty expensive thing.
And I think it makes some sense in the current state where the Vic3 economy is already very interventionist: the state subsidies the transport but also decides which routes are opened or not, and it's up to its decisions not to subsidies nonsensical routes.

If we decided to make the traders pay for their convoys (so that the equilibrium prices are not equal prices, but prices whose difference is lower or equal to the transport cost) it would have some advantages but could also come with other issues. For instance in the opposite situation: if you had a shortage of iron and wanted to import it from China at $70 + $6 transport cost, would have to subsidy the trade centre (which I think is not possible currently), since subsidising the transport is not possible any more. In this scenario you would lose a bit in the trade but at least you avoid the effects of a shortage.

I think the question of transport is both not very relevant in this discussion and not obviously going to improve the general situation.
The question of whether the traders should pay this "integrated price" (which could represent some kind of wholesale negotiations, where companies involved in international trade could easily form an oligopoly) or stick to the marginal price (where a global company pays the same price as a laborer going to the groceries) is more interesting. You could indeed make sure turning a trading profit is possible while still using only the marginal price: for that you only have to decide a "fair" profit rate X and modify the pricing formula (which actually means modifying the quantities traded, which in turn will change the price). Eventually there should remain a gap of (100-X)% of the original price gap between the two markets.

 

[Sbrubbles]

OP is playing the Sikh, not the Qing. The people who are buying Iron from the Sikh market are the traders. What they pay in their own market is irrelevant, what isn't is the fact that they're buying Iron at a quarter off to the tune of every single Iron unit actually produced in the market. OP is about 40 units off from an input goods shortage, and the trade route is still extremely lucrative.

Any amount of Iron production OP builds will just cause the trade route to be even more profitable until Qing demand has been satisfied, because the upper post-trade price is already almost at maximum but the pre-trade price will only go lower, allowing traders to steal even more Iron at even lesser fractions of the actual price.

If that is isn't what is important in 'your' discussion, you should probably re-read the thread a few times.

PS: If I'd pay you 30% the market value of your PC and then sell it at full value to my friend, that means I'm not ripping you off right? I mean my friend pays full price so it's fair

Iron producers are paid 65 and iron purchasers are paying 65 in both markets. There is no "theft" here. The traders are receiving wages out of thin air which is why I put "price" in quotes. Their wages are unimportant.

PS: If your friend was selling a PC to you and someone showed up offering 50% more than you, it would be utter nonsense to say they "stole" the PC from you