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[obolisk0430]

I allways request fuel, liginite, and coal, if I don't have access to the later two.  I always request cheese, meat and leather.  That's about it.

[Nyxalinth]

Wood, leather, cloth, booze and food, even if I have plenty. Because you never know what can happen.

Flux if I don't have it, high value armor and weapons if I can afford them.  Gems if the map is lacking.  Metal bars if I'm lacking.

Interesting critters if the caravan brings them. I also grab anything that comes in with pictures of my fort's artifacts on them.

[adasdad]

booze, because no matter how many resources I put into booze making, I never seem to have enough. so booze, food, booze, and that's purty much it.

[Sus]

Oh yeah, also sheep, turkeys and dogs, unless I already have plenty.

[Jake]

Let's see...

* Timber. Bad early experiences with fire imps mean that I go through a hell of a lot of charcoal.

* Cloth, wool and leather. It's nigh-impossible to be self-sufficient in any of these when clothing is your biggest export.

* Booze. Self-explanatory.

* Cheese. It's the one foodstuff I can never seem to make in worthwhile quantities.

* Seeds. Can never have too many of them, and if I don't watch my catering team carefully I'll find myself running low.

* Sand and clay. If I don't have any on the map, it's set aside for the odd strange mood or noble request. If I do have sand, it's another cheap bag.

* Ammunition (including gunpowder; see my sig). Can never have too much of this either, especially with universal conscription.

[PsychicKid]

Seeds, plump helmets, booze all get requested, along with whatever random crap I am missing for whatever I happen to be working on. I then proceed to buy out all wood, booze, seeds, meat, cheese, important gems/metals, and the like. I also grab a few bins of leather, cloth, and a few chunks of glass for moods. I always get as much food, seeds, and booze as possible, because to quote a famous story of ye olde times, overconfidence equals starvation. It's weird though, I've yet to really hit situations in my forts where food is an issue, yet I always seem to stick to always amassing these basic items. I usually end up having a dry spell of 3-7 days of not playing due to classes, so I'll start a new fort before my previous fort has gotten into its 2nd or 3rd year. As a result, my experience with things like the military, mega projects of doom, etc is lacking, so I always end up raiding caravans for the bare basics.

That and it's always satisfying when you turn a fraction of the food bought into prepared meals, then trade a stack or two of them for an entire caravan of food and whatever crap they have.

If there's cheap misc. items, like buckets, splints, empty barrels, etc that are reasonbly priced (IE not studded with gold from outer space or whatever), then I'll buy those too just to save me the effort of making that one extra unit of it. What else am I going to do with 5000 metric fucktons of granite/schist/dolomite/limestone/whatever scepters? =|

[orius]

Looks like we tend to follow the same strategies.  My trading patterns are very similar to everyone else's.  I also use the DFHack merchant fix so I can order those humans to bring me what I want instead of what they want.

Early trading seasons, I order up some breeding pairs of sheep once I get some initial pens carved out.  I've switched to pigs instead of sheep on embark because they're lower maintenance.  I also start with geese and turkeys, but order chickens and guineafowl as well.  If migrants bring ducks or peafowl I will order some for breeding, but I don't breed them otherwise.  I also order seeds early, though that's not a big priority, since I start with everything but dimple cup spawn, and early foraging in the first month or so often brings in seeds to start surface crop cultivation.  Eventually, I end up with huge seed surpluses, since they are forbidden to the cooks.  Humans get orders for whips too.

My usual orders:

• Leather of any type.  Butchering doesn't produce large quantities of the stuff and the stuff is dirt cheap.
• Silk.  Harvesting it usually requires the caverns and I haven't mastered silk harvesting.
• Wool.  Tend to run short on this stuff too, especially before I get a good herd of sheep built up.
• Valuable gems.  Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and any of the other relatively high value stones.  No junk gems; they're just used for junky crafts, and I'll just carve up rock, or make them out of glass if I really need more. Plus they look like shit wasted on gold.
• Stone: any of the following not in the embark: platinum, aluminum, gold, coal, iron, flux, kaolinite.  I will order ore for base metals like zinc, nickel, lead, and the like if I don't have them, but only enough to produce some bars for moods.  I will order tin if I don't have it but I have a lot of copper, and little to no iron; bronze is adequate as weapons grade material when there is little else.
• Milk of any available animal.  Then I make it into cheese.
• Cheese.  Dorfs can never have enough.
• Fish from the humans.  They always have access to a lot more than the dorfs, and it gives me lots of food variety.
• Metal crafts and cages to melt down made of iron or precious metals depending on what I don't have.  Tin too if I need it.
• Clay (preferably fire clay) or sand if I don't have it.

I will buy any plant cloth, meat, or wood that's available but I don't go out of my way to order it.  Occasionally ammo. Maybe dyes if I'm short.  I sell meals, crafts, large gems, serrated discs, and clothing if I have enough to spare.

[Sus]

If there's cheap misc. items, like buckets, splints, empty barrels, etc that are reasonbly priced (IE not studded with gold from outer space or whatever), then I'll buy those too just to save me the effort of making that one extra unit of it. What else am I going to do with 5000 metric fucktons of granite/schist/dolomite/limestone/whatever scepters? =|

This, too. Especially buckets and barrels. Also any nice -«*chest*»-s that go towards upgrading nobles' rooms.

Am I the only one to wish that caravans would carry empty bins?

[Himmelblau]

Am I the only one to wish that caravans would carry empty bins?

Definitely not. I used to request every type of barrels until I learnt about rock pots. Currently it's only the bins that I keep running out of.