As far as I'm aware, and assuming that you don't pre-filter Trades by Goods type, the Trader works differently [on browser - not sure about mobile] when accepting Sentient Goods Trades compared with Tier 1-3 Trades. When you accept any given Sentients Trade (e.g. buy X, sell Y), if there is at least one [often still unseen due to list order] reverse Trade on offer which you can newly afford but couldn't afford before taking the previous Trade (because you didn't have enough of the type of Goods you've just bought), and/or when the Trades you're accepting run out unexpectedly (due to inattention, lag, or ? other players simultaneously taking the same type of Trades as you are), then the two types of Goods switch place without warning, so you're suddenly buying Y for X instead of X for Y.
[Wow, what a really convoluted explanation (of something which many Sentient Goods-capable players know anyway...) - sorry about that!]
It can be difficult to stop clicking through the list fast enough to avoid accidentally accepting one or two of these reverse Trades, especially if they are all smaller than the last [intentional] Trade you've just taken; IMO this is largely why 0/1* Sentients Trades are often quite small in size. It caught me out, at first - although I'm now always very careful with Sentients Trades, and I usually pre-filter the Trader by Goods type, just to be sure.
Anyway. I myself don't consider it very fair, co-operative, or helpful to others when some players try to take advantage of this odd behaviour of the Trader in order to get other players to accept, unintentionally, one or more 0/1* Trades which can be both extortionate in their ratios and, at worst, also large in size, too. Because many 0/1* Traders are late-gamers, it seems obvious that they (a) are aware of Sentient Goods issues such as production costs, decay, and so on, and (b) realise that sub-2* Trades are seen by most others as unfair. However, several of these Traders are evidently successful enough that they continue to post daily Trades at 0/1*, sometimes in quite large volumes, and some of them even have very few (or zero) Sentient Manus in their Cities - only Sentients-producing Evolving Buildings, presumably to compensate for Goods usage and/or decay.
While some players do consider sub-2* Trading to be fair in principle, often regarding it as the 'Free Market' reverse of 3* Trading (they're usually supporters of unrestricted supply/demand-based Trade, and thus opponents of Inno's attempt to regulate Trade via the 1/2/3 * system), my best guess - because most 0/1* Sentients Traders very rarely also Trade similarly in T1-3 Goods - is that the majority are just hoping for misclicks caused sometimes by player error and/or lag, but mainly by the fact that Sentient Trades can switch types suddenly during Trading.
I personally can't understand why Inno programmed the Trader to behave differently when Trading Sentients rather than Tier 1-3 Goods - it's certainly quite a surprise for most players who are moving into Sentients Trading for the first time, after Trading only in T1-3 until that point - and I can't say that I find this inconsistent Trader setup to be either logical or useful in any way.
Does anyone actually know why Inno designed the Trader like this? It certainly makes Sentients Trading something of a risky endeavour...!
