I've been noticing this on odd occasions : a gold bar fleet runs for several trips, then on one, it fails to sell its cargo in the chosen port and returns with it, even though the global price settings have not been compromised and there was thus no reason not to complete the sale at the port.

I'd rather not, for obvious reasons, give full info on the specific route here., but if you need it, I can send it by PM

I had that problem as well. So I just I gave up on gold bars.

It can happen when you start the route... sometimes it doesnt load the bars on the first run : but this is on a route that had been running for some time

As I said in PM, we have noticed this before. We inspected the code - but - it is a huge code, the automatic trade routes one. Nothing obvious seems there. We specifically checked for an issue when the fleet has danger and is waiting for it to drop.

At these cases, the fleet that is waiting for the danger drop, MUST be ready to go. Which means that the fleet must have finished all needed trading with the port market/warehouse. If it hasn't, then it will not.

Please let us know if this is not the case as then we will know the cause.

Again, the code here is huge so we need more help to determine when this happens.

That does fit with the case I noticed when a fleet had just arrived as the hour turned and set off back without unloading : in the more detailed case I sent you, alas, I didnt see when it arrived in port, I just noticed it was returning still laden with bars. I'll keep an eye out, but its so random its hard to anticipate and record as it happens..

We have extensively checked this issue with no findings [We could not reproduce it]. We do think there is something though.

This is why we improved the intelligence of automatic trade routes in case this was the reason. At some cases, through manual intervention (new destinations from player) trade routes ended up asynchronized. From now on, they will synchronize immediately (they used to take time to syynchronize, if they ever did).

I will flag this as resolved and not as Fixed as we are not sure of the impact the AI improvement will have at the reported issue. Feel free to post here again if you notice this happen again.