Expanded Warehouse: Feedback, some ideas

[Red Ropes]

My basic feedback and personal experience. I really love the idea of it, I love how it could be used, but I've got a few gripes with it.

Critique:
* Really complicated - its got layers, layers, and layers. I am not entirely certain if most of them work either. The whole citizenship / race aspect of it doesn't seem to be functioning at the moment. It takes actual time and experience to understand this thing, there isn't really any good documentation anywhere for it.

* It's connected to the old warehouse / resources system. It makes it sort of weird to do pricing as the tax % of the old resource settlement affects anything connected to the new warehouse system. It can cause awkward situations.

* It's VERY EASY to create feedback loops on accident. Feedback loops are where you basically can make it so a treasury can be drained by making something sell to a city more than you're selling them, letting anyone who is aware of this to take all your city money.


Solutions, Changes:
* If the system was integrated into the old resource system more seamless, and the menu was a bit more straight forward for pricing. I think of tax % didn't affect the set prices that would be a very good step in the right direction and making it so whatever you write down as the buy / sell prices for individual items was exactly that, would be very nice. ie: if I price stone 500 to sell it to 'someone', and that the city buys it for 50 gold, that these are the prices exactly and stone taxes do not affect them at all.

* Feedback loops were made impossible and the menu system would warn you / tell you you have made a mistake and won't let you do it.

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I really like the idea behind the warehouse system, I like the almost strategy game aspect to the resources and settlements thing, but I sort of feel it could use some more polish and maybe just dumbed down a little bit of possible so its more hands on and less needing to spend real life days messing around (and putting your settlement at risk do to a mechanical oops).

Moderon, I think is the one who made it- and you have my respect and admiration with it as its very complex and has a lot of really cool possibilities (being able to blacklist other settlements, races, and the like is AMAZING). I just wish it was a bit easier to deal with as my brain lacks many wrinkles.

[WinkinBlinkin]

I would second this. When I last had access to an Expanded Warehouse, someone accidentally set the prices so that millions got sucked out the treasury. Even when I explained to them exactly what they had done to cause it, and what item had been the culprit, they STILL thought that I was lying ic about it. Part of the problem is that the wording (I think it is "purchase price" and "sale price" or something similar) can be interpreted perfectly reasonably as either being written from the perspective of the city, or from the perspective of the citizen.

I also agree its difficult having the tax calculated in, because it forces you to do calculations to ensure that the outward facing price is the one you want. You either have to undo a % change before you choose your prices, or trial and error the values until you get what you want.

The interface might benefit from entering buy and sell price at the same time, for example in the format [lowprice] [highprice] which only accepted inputs where lowprice < highprice.

[Vodka Musician]

I would concur that the Expanded Warehouse is fairly complicated and can be overwhelming one error can lead to the city suddenly losing a lot of money which is exactly what happened yesterday. Very concerning for someone who has been able to use the Warehouse for the first time even upon taking some tips to close feedback loops and slightly raising prices to incentivize selling to the district. I took pains to cover any 'loops' but raising the prices allows one player who spam the settlement with a resource until so much money is siphoned off using resources from either other settlements that are cheaper to buy the resources or a personal stockpile.

The taxation muddying the prices actually set is something I'd like brought up as well. While I could roughly gauge the effect taxes put it was never an exact science and was a rough estimate that took some messing around to get the 'ideal' prices for buying or selling. Some simplifying of the system would help make it user-friendly and making loops impossible would be excellent. The different sorts of pricing based on race, class, trading partner, etc can be confusing as well and it's ambiguous as to whether or not the prices are set properly since it's hard to test it on your own and the taxes make it more ambiguous without constantly setting the price and attempting to buy or sell to manually ensure everything is accurate.

Some sort of limit on how much the city will 'accept' a resource to prevent resource spamming a settlement out of its money and closing loopholes would be excellent. It's impossible to tell who or what caused the issue because there's no system to show who suddenly sold 2000 of x resource at 5 AM for hundreds of thousands of gold with no way to tell what exactly happened. It is mechanical vulnerabilities like this which is part of why a lot of settlements seem to hide their true accounts off of the settlement in a personal account.

[Blood on my Lips]

I also agree its difficult having the tax calculated in, because it forces you to do calculations to ensure that the outward facing price is the one you want. You either have to undo a % change before you choose your prices, or trial and error the values until you get what you want.

There's actually an easy setting in there to help with this but I can't remember it off the top of my head. Being that I'm not currently managing any one's warehouse I can't look and tell you.

[Blood on my Lips]

Some sort of limit on how much the city will 'accept' a resource to prevent resource spamming a settlement out of its money and closing loopholes would be excellent. It's impossible to tell who or what caused the issue because there's no system to show who suddenly sold 2000 of x resource at 5 AM for hundreds of thousands of gold with no way to tell what exactly happened. It is mechanical vulnerabilities like this which is part of why a lot of settlements seem to hide their true accounts off of the settlement in a personal account.

For the Expanded Warehouse only 100 of each resource will be accepted with the exception of coal, which accepts 200.
Not all resources overflow into the city's stockpile, so if you are worried about the situation you have described, an easy fix is to set the buying prices for city's stockpile low enough that the settlement can't be bankrupted through excessive selling of the resources that do go into the stockpiles.

I've worked with the Expanded Warehouse in several settlements over the past few RL years. The system can seem overwhelming and confusing at first, but once you figure it out and read the information on the forums that Moderon has posted regarding the Expanded Warehouse system, it's not as complicated as you think.

Critique:
* Really complicated - its got layers, layers, and layers. I am not entirely certain if most of them work either. The whole citizenship / race aspect of it doesn't seem to be functioning at the moment. It takes actual time and experience to understand this thing, there isn't really any good documentation anywhere for it.

I agree with this completely. The documentation is minimal and vague in several areas.
It's hard as a Trade Minister to even test to see if the citizenship/race aspect of the warehouse is working correctly.
I never did figure out the "Trade Partners" portion of the warehouse.

[TimeAdept]

Is the Trade Partners the bit that lets cities trade for resources to avoid going into resource debt? I think that's the only thing it affects.

I would agree that the warehouse is complex and relatively poorly documented, but I never came across a setting that flat didn't work outside of being unable to buy/sell a few specific products like Healing Draughts. Anything else, like infinite loops or etc, was due to user error - or deliberate input to allow the loop to happen IC.

Bankrupting a city with resource splurging is almost impossible and costs along the lines of 10s of millions to bankrpt a settlement w/ only a few hundred thousand, due to needing to buy resource at a cost of 999% and then sell it at a cost of ~50 to 200%, depending on how generous the settlement is being. Often it's 10% or less. (unless you mean item-things in which casse my bad I thought we were discussing the "RTS" resource stockpiles vs warehouse items a la granite etc)

I would agree with taxes being more transparently added in, so that whatever price you add in is the final price shown and received, with taxes being automagically wiggled around it. No clue how hard that is to code, but it would ease the pain for people not willing to sit with a calculator and 2 buddies and guess and trial and error to a degree.

[Morderon]

Trade partners in context, and pretty much every other context in the settlement system, is either a settlement your trading with, or the citizens of said settlement.

As far as knowing if purchasing or selling is from the citizens PoV or Settlement PoV

If you see the response 'Match Stockpile prices' your on a Purchase from the settlement PoV page. This option is also a good starting place when setting purchase price.

If you see 'Multiply by Tax Rate' and 'Divide by Tax Rate' you're on the selling page from the settlement PoV. Taxes are only taken out when a citizen is paying gold.

Multiply by Tax rate is the option you want to hit after you set the price to what you want the settlement to receive. And if you don't know what the settlement is receiving from selling an item you can divide by tax rate, just remember to set it back.

[Baron Saturday]

It seems as though the system could use some sort of tutorial conversation available to settlement officials that contains this information, if nothing else.