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[Melting Sky]

Have you ever wished you could get those pesky elves and filthy corrupt humans to bring you something specific and waited fruitlessly year after year for it to come even though you literally flood them with profit each time they show up in hopes they will bring your coveted item in the horde of trade goods they bring next time?

My suggestion is first and foremost that merchants keep slightly better track of their trading relationship with your fortress. It could be a very simple system where every profitable and successful trading caravan that makes it back from their civilization adds to your fortress's reputation/trust score with them and each negative interaction where say the merchant dies horrible in some flooding "accident" or is offended by bad trade offers will subtract from the score.

The second part of my suggestion is that if your reputation score is high enough after consistently treating the caravan with due respect that their liaison will then offer you a limited version of the trade agreements we have with the mountain home. This trade agreement would be limited to being able to request maybe 2 or 3 items which the caravan will then try to bring you next time if its available to their civilization. It should increase the odds of a higher quality version of those items showing up as well and since these are greedy merchants we are talking about they should of course ask a fittingly exorbitant price for these special orders. 

This idea should be pretty easy to implement given that the mechanics would use already existing game frameworks and it provides a bit of a carrot on a stick for players to reconsider mugging the caravans when they show.

[Witty]

A reputation system like you described already exists in the current version.

And you can already re-add the humans guild representative via modding, since it was removed for Reasons. Although it's just a carbon copy of the same system your liaison gives you. Really, you just need an entity position that has [RESPONSIBILITY:TRADE] to get be able to request specific items.

[newjrmint21]

what reasons were liaisons from other civs removed?
i like this idea... especially because i just recently learned that after you reach a certain point in your fortress, you can become the capital of your civilization... and when that happens you no longer get the option to make those trade agreements and all that.