Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Tirion]

Why not just honor trade agreements? Every year the outpost liaison gives you a list of things they want back home next year. Do that, whatever he wants, in the highest imaginable quality- if he wants breastplates, make those out of steel and studded with gold.

[moki]

I did something similar once with weapons. The imagined story was that the mountainhomes didn't have any iron left and my fort was an outpost that only exists for mining and weapons production. I could only keep 10% of all produced metal weapons and armor for my own army and had to sell everything else (and whatever wasn't needed right away) to the caravan. So what if I could only make 20 sets of equipment in a given year? Well, of course, 18 sets went to the mountainhomes and the militia only got 2 to share among the men. At least I could trade the valuable weapons for some food and other goods that way, so it wasn't a true tax. Trading weapons for other weapons was of course prohibited.
Doing the same with food or booze also sounds interesting, though 90% tax seems a bit excessive, especially in the beginning.

Honoring trade agreements is an interesting challenge, too. I only find it annoying when I need to set up a completely new industry every year, just because the king wants soap, cloth and large gems. I rather devote the whole fort to one single kind of product and make that with maximum efficiency.

[Larix]

Having dedicated 'export industries' is an interesting option - have a significant portion of your workforce toil away producing stuff that's not intended for in-fort usage. Weapons and armour are an obvious choice: you get high-value export goods and can make up rules on which/how many of the products may be used by your own military. You can also enact your own export bans, like limiting the materials and qualities you're willing to export to the non-dwarven civilisations (e.g. no metal armour exported to elves, no steel and no masterwork items sold to humans).

Restricting your main exports to half-finished products will ramp up your labour requirements and reduce the gains you can have: you can base your trade on exports of woven cloth only, which produces a lot less wealth relative to work invested than finished clothes. You can of course increase the gains quite a lot by allowing dyed cloth (masterwork blue or green dye is worth 240, masterwork plant cloth 188).

I once tried out a fort exporting nothing but rock blocks and statues. That was quite fun, but i had serious trouble getting all those blocks to the depot in time...

Selling raw food is problematic because often, most of the value in the trade isn't derived from the ware itself but from the container that automatically comes along with it - masterwork barrels are usually worth more than the booze they contain, high-quality bags are more valuable than the two to four units of milled plant inside.