So a thought just occurred to me:
Every year the outpost liaison (and if you fix the game up, the Guild Representative from the local humans) gives you a trade agreement showing what they will pay you more for the following year, and most of it is stuff that you either want to keep in your fort (weapons, clothing, booze) or that you wouldn't even bother producing much of anyway (splints). And every year, all the caravans bring a ton of useless crap that most people would never trade for -- rope reed fiber earrings, anyone? -- and it's just a pain to wade through everything to find the 20% of it that is actually useful to you.
But then I realized: Any of the useless crap that you wouldn't want to sell to one caravan is generally the useless crap that you wouldn't normally want to buy from another caravan... but that's exactly the sort of thing that you could just broker off between caravans and make some extra profit* from.
So I was considering running a test fort to try this out. The plan so far is only half-baked, but the idea is that I'd run a self-sufficient, walled-off fort and leave my broker in his own self-sufficient shack with plenty of security and his own little hobby farm. I could airlock in some initial trading supplies, then try to run the entire trading operation on demand-based brokering.
The main problems with this plan are (1) that the necessary profit margin to get traders to agree to a given offer is generally pretty comparable to the extra margin they offer on their demands, so it would take some very careful trading and/or a very skilled broker to make this work, I think. (2) Since the export agreements are only good for one year (e.g. humans, summer to summer) and the import agreements affect the caravan for one year later (e.g. dwarves, autumn to autumn) there's no way to "order in" trade goods from one civ based on the demand of another, so any volume of in-demand goods is going to come in purely by chance.
Is there anything I'm missing?
*Concerning "profit:" the current lack of any properly fungible currency in DF means that the only useful definition of profit in DF is usefulness of the acquired goods. Since the idea (at least for the test fort) is to seal off the depot from the fort proper, in that scenario the "profit" of a given trade is only measurable by the unknowable future demands of other caravans. I suppose eventually you could build a huge stock of random goods and mass-trade it all for desirables, and in an integrated design you could add on the demand-based trades to give yourself more leverage than usual, but given the horrible imbalance of things like prepared meals and trap components, that's unnecessary for a pragmatic fort. Until a proper economy and currency are added back into the game, market-style trading is simply a thought-provoking idea that can be applied in a limited fashion.
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Topic: Real Market trading? (Read 1008 times)