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[knutor]

I like that Toady uses Pageup and Pagedown, in the latest version.  Its a huge time saver.  Not sure I'm sold on the split stack appearing each and every trade.  Are you?  Just let us open and close their bins, with a + or -, and let us pick the individual items.  We've been buying whole stacks for awhile, without it, wouldn't it look better, if it was a key bind, instead of a pop up, or a subcatagory, subtree.  Part of that division pop up lingers behind in the DF I play, and blocks the mood text of the visiting broker.  Ever notice that?

[Yaotzin]

Yeah it needs to be a different key to buy only part of a stack. Buying up their food+cheese is now seriously annoying.

[Flying Dice]

Agreed. The main advantages of split stacks are in adventure mode anyways.

[Sutremaine]

I would like 'buy or sell the whole stack' to be the default. Leave splitting to the shift key.

[knutor]

@Mandatory Split Popup- If it were not mandatory, we'd prolly not have the lingering wall sprites, that sometimes covers a traders mood.  THUMBS WAY UP for putting it on the shift key.  Great idea, Sutremaine.  That's how many other games do it, and it works for them.

[King Mir]

I have successfully managed to haggle down in a few instances. But in this case, the merchant will either take the slightly reduced deal, or ask for even more goods.

I suspect the reason it works for me is the merchant has a specific profit margin in mind, and will add items randomly until the request exceeds their desired profit. If they happen to choose a high value item as their last item, you can replace that item with something more reasonable. On the other, hand I kinda recall it working when I traded my entire depot for a bunch of items, after the merchant said no deal was possible.

[Dr.Propz]

Turning off truetype helped stop the lingering message popup

At least, it did when I'm using the Ironhand graphic set

[knutor]

Yeah, I'm back to running without Truetype, aswell.  I can't find a fonts.ttf that works with Toady's new spacing, yet.  Maybe sometime, I'll figure out one that is both tall and expanded enough to keep the right aspect.

[talysman]

I think something has changed, because my usual tactic is to add items on both sides until the trader's profit is at least 20% of what I'm trading, sometimes much higher. say I trade something worth 400; I find I can't lower trader profit below 80 or they will get mad. But the more valuable my goods are, the larger the trader profit has to be... On my most recent fort (where I lucked out with a volcano *and* lots of gold, copper, tetrahedrite, and hematite,) I put up about 12,000 worth of gold goblets in exchange for 9,000 worth of booze, food, and miscellaneous goods (trader profit: 3,000 or 25%.) The trader rejected that offer, I tried reducing my demands a little at a time, and the trader got pissed and left. So, no purchases from the first caravan.

I didn't know that trading one crappy item at a time would improve the broker's skills. I guess I'll be trying that...

[robertheinrich]

I have the impression that trading works much better if you start slowly with it until the merchant is already ecstatic. I make a couple of smaller deals and give him all that rock crafting crap for some food or whatever first. It also helps if you donīt have too much valuable stuff at the depot to begin with (if, for example, you put metal weapons, armors or tools onto the depot, the merchant will almost always get greedy and try to add some of them to the offer). Then once he is ecstatic about getting 2k worth of crap for 300 worth of food it will be much easier to get better margins with the more valuable stuff.

In the long run after the first maybe three caravans I usually donīt need anything from merchants anymore anyways. Except for animals maybe... from the last caravan I was lucky to get a pair of tame bears who started breeding right away, such things are always nice.

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, IIRC making a series of small deals will improve the merchant's mood, making it easier to get away with a slimmer loss in the big trade.

Or you can just make a couple serrated steel discs and buy everything you want, including enough steel bars to make three times as many.

[Fratari]

As to the traders from other civs "haggling up" in their counter-offer (counter offer specifically, not simply refusing): I don't think they are doing it for a higher profit margin. They are doing it to get higher quality stuff instead of the crap that you randomly trade because it's first in the list. Next time it happens, take a look at what items were added by the counter offer, i guarantee they will be exceptional or masterwork for the most part. Just try cutting the lower quality stuff from your trade until you're back to a comfortable profit margin.

[Eagleon]

There's no reason they shouldn't demand a reasonable amount of profit. Look at it this way - you take a guitar to a guitar store, looking to sell said guitar. You demand $80 for said guitar, which will sell for $85 a couple of months later. Guitar store goes out of business and the owner starves, because rent, food, and sunglasses are not $5 a month. If it had a high enough volume and enough customers, sure, maybe the guitar store/traders could pull it off, but considering the traders have probably spent days if not weeks traveling to your fortress, and during all that time they had to pay/feed their help/animals, it's absurd to expect anything close to a 1-1 trade.

If anything, unless you're trading coin or better equipment than what the escorts have (which is probably more acceptable to hired help than dwarven quarry bush leaf and sweet pod sugar roasts, no matter how masterful) it should be closer to 1/6th or 1/8th value, haggling down to what we have now.

[Radiant_Phoenix]

Look at it this way - you take a guitar to a guitar store, looking to sell said guitar. You demand $80 for said guitar, which will sell for $85 a couple of months later. Guitar store goes out of business and the owner starves, because rent, food, and sunglasses are not $5 a month.

They probably aren't $85 per month either.