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[Andrew425]

This idea is to to help ease trade in regards to the buying and selling at the trade depot.

All base valued items should be sold in batches rather then individual pieces.

This would save a lot of time when buying and selling these items from the trade depot.

Practically this would involve grouping stock resources together at the trade depot.

Perhaps 20 logs would equal a cord. 10 bags of wheat would equal a bushel. 20 bars of metal would equal a (Perhaps a half ton?)

I think this would be an easy addition to make and it would greatly help speed up the trading process.

Thoughts?

[Starver]

Would that be 20 (or so) logs of exactly the same kind?  Or of exactly the same base-price?  Or (assuming they could differ) 20 logs of any price, but the cord would be given the combined price?

The question means more for bars of metal, given that you don't often get as many bars (of a type, and sometimes of all types) as you might get logs (where even applicable to the traders concerned, of course.)

You don't include Finished Goods, so I won't ask about item quality/improvement collation, but that'd be an extension if it did matter.


I'm assuming that you're thinking that a bit like "bin-load" selection of certain Finished Goods (and whatever else comes in bin-loads/etc), you might have an auto-collation of like (or nearly-alike) products into a zero-value (and 'dissolving') 'container' by the name of "a bushel of cave-wheat", or equivalent.  You could choose this and it'd be all the cave-wheat items that it has decided to contain, and not need multiple selection.  Or you can choose individual cave-wheat items for a finer control (especially if you're not wanting to buy/sell the entire bushel in that particular trade, for one reason or another, like you might select a specific subset of leathers from the leather-bin).

Is that about right?


(If that's the thinking, I could see some marginal speeding up of trading...  Not sure if it would be worth it.  Not sure it would necessarily be a particularly easy addition[1], but who knows...)


[1] Let's see...  Could be pseudocoded as "for item.type (listof.bulkable.items) { if (item.type.total > item.type.bulkable.value) then {bulkitem=create(item.type.bulkable.container); for (1..item.type.bulkable.value) {move(item.type.next,bulkitem)}; repeat } else {/* Not enough items of this type for a(nother) bulk item, do no (more) bulking for this item type*/} }"...  But I don't know how easy it would be to actually integrate into the existing code.  And, again, assuming that this is what you mean.

[Andrew425]

Well instead of being like bins it would be a set amount.

So if you were to buy a cord of oak wood, instead of buying each one either in the bin or the bin as a whole you would just have the price for a cord of wood.

When you take away from the trade depot your dwarfs will carry them as individual logs.

Also this way you could import and export a sizeable amount of materials relatively easily.

For these base resources I don't see why a trader would be willing to sell just one log, they'd probably want to do things in bulk.

[GreatWyrmGold]

A log is pretty big...
Your general point is sound, though.

[Andrew425]

That is true, but all a log does is provide a single piece of charcoal. And now that bars have been devalued you need even more of them.

Much of dwarf fortress is about mass production and it'd be nice to be able to import mass amounts of raw materials for your forges, instead of waiting years to equip your fortress even if you had the money to buy it.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Again, I agree with the suggested idea, but aren't colonies supposed to export raw materials and import goods rather than the other way around?

[Starver]

Well instead of being like bins it would be a set amount.

Ah, good, I did understand you.

And I was imagining that this would be bidirectional (hence the "auto-collation" pseudocode, that could be applied to either side of the trading screen's list[1]).

I'm still sceptical that it would be a big time-saver ("tap, cursor, tap, cursor, tap, cursor, tap, cursor-cursor (to miss an item), tap, cursor, tap..."  Its as easy. as "tap, cursor-cursor-cursor-cursor-cursor...,tap the next 'chord' header") unless you're making it an 'atomic' unit of 20 logs/<N whatevers> that can't be sub-selected (like items-within-bins), which I don't think should happen, because of the introduced inflexibility for the trader on a budget or for the frugal trader who only wants to trade so much for the items he/she wants to exchange, and doesn't want to be tied to the entire multi-log quantity.


[1] Actually, "auto-binning" would be useful, as well, or at least the option to reorganise accordingly.  I mean I try to get my trade-goods into bins before sending them to trade (saves on hauling, traditionally), and I also don't tend to sell the bins themselves, but all those loose rock mugs might be more handy to work with if you could group them together.  Or (far more usefully) pre-binning purchases (not already come in bins, which you bought as a wholesale unit) for easier carriage away from the depot once the trading session has concluded.  In other words, I think you've got an interesting idea, but not necessarily towards solving the actually problem that you started off with.  Styles of play varying, however, I'm only speaking for myself.

[dizzyelk]

I really like this suggestion.

I'm still sceptical that it would be a big time-saver ("tap, cursor, tap, cursor, tap, cursor, tap, cursor-cursor (to miss an item), tap, cursor, tap..."  Its as easy. as "tap, cursor-cursor-cursor-cursor-cursor...,tap the next 'chord' header")

Yet what would be much easier would be "Tap, page down & cursor to the next cord header, tap, etc" which is what this would really add to the game.