Tradesmen will not sell their food to my city unless a storage yard is set to store that food item. I don't know if granaries are allowed to buy food from foreign traders, but regardless, for me they don't. My bazaars refuse to get food from any source other than a granary (regardless of distance). Obviously, this is a problem, because all the food I can get is stored in the storage yards. I do have fishermen delivering local fish to the granaries, but it isn't nearly enough to feed my city, and entire housing districts are starting to devolve due to food shortages.

My first guess would be that I accidentally turned on the stockpile option, but that isn't the case. I don't really get what the issue is, but it certainly isn't making the mission any easier.

This is intended, you can order your granary to get maximum/half of that food resource and it will get them from the storage yards.
You sure know the way, rightclick on building and so on.

There are some strange behaviours in Pharao which make it difficult to build up large cities.
What bothers me most is, that storage yards which have the order to get a resource place this goal higher than distributing goods to nearby industry. I would like them to get raw materials from "tradeyards" and distribute it to nearby industry, but this wont work the way I want. They run across half the map to get one missing reed before they deliver one unit to their neighbor papyrus maker.

Plan with the oddities and have fun.

A clarification here: bazaars won't get the primary source of food from anything other than a granary. Secondary and tertiary foods they will take from storage yards, although they'll go to a granary preferentially if the secondary/tertiary food is in a granary.

The primary food source is whatever they get first.

For example, you set up hunting lodges and feed your city using game meat. That's the primary food source and bazaars won't ever get that food from anything other than a granary. For efficiency's sake I usually place hunting lodges as close as possible to the game animals with a storage yard set to accept game meat, right next to them this is important since hunting lodges only transfer food in 100 per cartload increments, while granaries set to get food will pull it in 400 unit cartloads.

Later you import grain, which arrives at a storage yard. That's the secondary food source and the bazaar resource-collecting ladies will make a beeline for the storage yard and grab as much as they can get. However if you set a granary to get the grain from that storage yard, the bazaars will pull it first from the granary, and only go to the storage yard if the granary is empty.

To add onto vossiewulf, be careful when importing certain food types, because Pharaoh has a priority food order so try to avoid importing grain in any form due to it always going out of stock.

That's true, there's a priority in the food people like. I'm sure there's a list someplace but grain seems to be top of the list and game meat on the bottom. If you import grain the bazaar ladies will clean the places out in seconds and get in knife fights with each other.

I'm having the grain issue, In a Cleopatra mission (the first ever mission of the new campaign) I have to import it because Pharaoh asked for 800 units of grain, and I can only import it , I can't produce it :/ Any workaround?

(rather my problem is that even if there are StorageYards that accept up to 1/2 of grain, no grain is imported : I'm exporting and importing other goods correctly so there may be a problem related only to use of grain.

Anyone successfull importing grain on that mission?

Not sure I understand your issue, since the OP simply needed clarification on game mechanics, but are the traders that should sell grain very busy selling other stuff? (Sorry don't remember trade setup in that mission). In that case you might try stopping other imports from there temporarily, that could allow traders to sell grain instead of whatever.

You should consider making a new thread as your issue isn't relevant to this thread.

thanks the problem was that merchants were busy. Stopping trading of other goods did the work. Apparently in that map there are so many sea trade routes that merchants stack up to the dock and while some merchant sell/buy other waits and at some point they leave the dock without goods exchanged.


Also another nice issue I noticed is that when crops are flooded boats are allowed to travel in the crops, if in that moment the flood retreat the ship suddendly disappear O_O