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[tahujdt]

Yes, but the caravan will bring less stuff next year.

[MenacesWithSpikes]

Who BUYS cloth?  Farms are small, free, and produce unlimited goods

I do... leather too.  I want a large surplus of cloth/leather early on to train my leatherworkers, weavers, clothesmakers, dyers, etc. on.  This early on, I haven't even breached the caverns... and my current embark appears to have no access to rope reed seeds, even through traders.  My herds won't be at the size I want them at for a few years.

[NW_Kohaku]

Who BUYS cloth?  Farms are small, free, and produce unlimited goods

I do... leather too.  I want a large surplus of cloth/leather early on to train my leatherworkers, weavers, clothesmakers, dyers, etc. on.  This early on, I haven't even breached the caverns... and my current embark appears to have no access to rope reed seeds, even through traders.  My herds won't be at the size I want them at for a few years.

Then you clearly aren't brewing enough pig tails to get your seeds back.  Set up more stills.

Rope reeds are found in any non-freezing, non-mountain anywhere within 2 tiles of water (that's what WET means).  There shouldn't be any trouble finding some unless you have an absolutely dry, freezing, or mountainous biome.

Also, seeds are cheap.  What else are you going to embark with? 

[MenacesWithSpikes]

Then you clearly aren't brewing enough pig tails to get your seeds back.  Set up more stills.

Rope reeds are found in any non-freezing, non-mountain anywhere within 2 tiles of water (that's what WET means).  There shouldn't be any trouble finding some unless you have an absolutely dry, freezing, or mountainous biome.

Also, seeds are cheap.  What else are you going to embark with?

Stills:  Fair enough. 

My current embark (34.06) is on a split joyous wilds temperate forest/rocky wasteland with a brook running through it.  No native WET crops at all.

[wierd]

Seriously.  Nothing beats the 5 finger discount.

Price: 0 urists.

Profit: entire caravan, including guard's weapons and armor.

Method: D, B, D + rectangle over depot. Turn off all labors with therapist.
Watch the shearing commence!

 While that does have a sort of cathartic appeal, it's not really producing anything yourself.  I'm talking about creating wealth, not stealing it.  And besides, that method's STILL inferior to LSSDs over time; the average caravan brings far less than a million dorfbux' worth of items.

That is assuming you employ it exclusively.  Properly employed, it keeps the size of the caravan in a sweetspot on the production curve.

That is to say, you juice up the caravan. It brings more stuff. You rob it blind each year until it returns to unjuiced status.  You spam deport your refuse, throwing your trade balance into neverland. Caravan is big again. Repeat cycle.

By not exporting *every* year, you keep the caravan size and ease of being pleased at more manageable levels. Remember, the formula is more a ratio for how much you spend over what you buy.  By cyclically neutering the caravan, you drop the available goods. This also drops the total worth of the caravan to easily saturatable levels. This makes it easier to saturate the caravan's disposition with nothing but your collected garbage for the x seasons you used the 5 finger discount.

By totally blasting them with overunity ever x years, when they are very easily impressed, you get a greater roi over time.

[Girlinhat]

...what's LSSD?

[wierd]

Large serrated steel disk

[MenacesWithSpikes]

Large serrated steel disk

I'd rather save steel towards the circus than export it.

[Fnear]

...what's LSSD?

Deadhead with a stutter?

[SkyRender]

 I find that caravan robbing has a relatively low ROI even with such optimizations, particularly in terms of investment of Dwarves versus outcomes for those Dwarves.  Producing LSSDs trains up at least one Weaponsmith and any number of Furnace Operators, which is excellent for future weapons development.  Steel is not exactly hard to come by on maps that support it either (even with scarce metal deposits, every cluster of magnetite you find is another 200+ pieces of steel and every vein of limonite/hematite is another 15 to 30).  In efforts to increase productivity, it's all about getting the best ratio of inputs to outputs, and it's important too to measure all inputs and all outputs involved.  Caravan robbings are a poor choice for productivity since they only show up once a year per species (you'll have cleaned their leavings out long before the next caravan arrives with a decent-sized hauling staff), and since hauling produces no value to your Dwarves' future potential usefulness.

 Remember, kids: productivity is not about efficiency!  It's about getting the best possible returns of output for your input in as many meaningful measures of output and input as possible!

[wierd]

You presume that I don't enhance the 5 fingered merchandise before offloading.

Metal toys, crafts, and unusable tools make good fodder for smelters.
Large clothing, wooden swords and armor, etc make good candidates for being library pasted with cabochons to improve jewelers, clothiers with images, etc.

This reduces the number of masterwork cloth items getting base level images, etc.

[Sus]

If you embark upon any single production line you can buy out every caravan wholesale.  Food, clothes, metals, rocks...

Not the case with these basalt mugs (and various other basalt and andesite trinkets) I've been churning out of tree craft shops for a couple of years now. Even if you add no-quality mechanisms into the mix, you're hard-pressed to produce more value than a single -«+cave spider silk sock+»-.

and my current embark appears to have no access to rope reed seeds, even through traders. 

Obviously, those damn Elves (and Humans) have figured out how colonialism works: Always sell the finished product, never the means to produce said product. This way, you can keep exploiting trading the same fort limitless amounts of -rope reed fiber cloth- for all your +«*andesite mug*»+ needs. 

[SkyRender]

You presume that I don't enhance the 5 fingered merchandise before offloading.

Metal toys, crafts, and unusable tools make good fodder for smelters.
Large clothing, wooden swords and armor, etc make good candidates for being library pasted with cabochons to improve jewelers, clothiers with images, etc.

This reduces the number of masterwork cloth items getting base level images, etc.

 Hmm, interesting.  Nonetheless, that is a LOT of hauling.  I think some calculations are in order...

 Each LSSD generates a total of 18 hauling jobs at worst (15 to make the steel, 2 to make the disc, 1 to carry it to storage), and generates a minimum of 3780 value (and a max of 45360).  The average over time will favor towards a higher value (legendaries never produce below 3x value), so weighting at 18900 per disc over time is fairly accurate.  That makes a total value of roughly 1050 dorfbux per hauling job average in that worst-case scenario.  Best-case (no bar stockpiles), the hauling jobs drop to 8, and the value rises to 2362.5 dorfbux per hauling job average.  I could factor it further based on distance of hauling average, skill boost average, etc., but we'll leave it at that for now.

 Your turn.

[SharkForce]

You presume that I don't enhance the 5 fingered merchandise before offloading.

Metal toys, crafts, and unusable tools make good fodder for smelters.
Large clothing, wooden swords and armor, etc make good candidates for being library pasted with cabochons to improve jewelers, clothiers with images, etc.

This reduces the number of masterwork cloth items getting base level images, etc.

it is essentially trivial to produce enough "wealth" out of your garbage to buy everything you could possibly want from the caravan ime. stealing stuff for reasons other than annoying a civilization seems kinda pointless to me.

[wierd]

It has... fringe benefits.... yes.