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[wesai]

So, why are spiked wooden balls so expensive when trading? I can buy-out entire caravans just with those spiked wooden balls alone, they are easy to mass-produce as well. Sorry for asking such a trivial question, but why are their values way high?

It almost feels like cheating when I mass produce them for trading, or am I wrong and they aren't actually that expensive, specially if you consider they can be made in early fortresses? Again, sorry for asking. I'm just a new player. :p

[WoobMonkey]

If you think spiked wooden balls are OP, try making lavish meals.

[Garath]

some items are very expensive when trading, to an absurd degree. Aside from lavish meals (cave crocodile egg roasts and similar can reach values well above 20.000 dorfbucks) most glass items are expensive, which is ridiculous since glass, if you have sand, is almost as easy to make as the wooden stuff. Try making glass serrated discs. The game is still under development and some things, like these, are unbalanced. Maybe once the economy gets reworked it'll change. For now, I just don't intentionally produce those goods just for trading.

[Bumber]

If you think spiked wooden balls are OP, try making lavish meals.

Especially in quarry leaf quantities.

[Girlinhat]

If you think spiked wooden balls are OP, try making lavish meals.

Especially in quarry leaf quantities.

cave crocodile eggs, quarry bush leaves, and forgotten beast meat/fat are very valid.  The value of prepared meals is in their stack size, not their individual worth.  All ingredients are multiplied together by number to get the amount of meals produced, and each ingredient type is multiplied by each other to determine the value of each individual meal.  It also gets potentially mastercrafted ingredients, which result in outlandishly expensive, massive stacks of food.

[wesai]

Thanks for the replies guys! Looks like I have to avoid trading these so I won't feel like I am cheating the system.

I understand the game is continuously in development and some items might be unbalanced, trading-wise. Hopefully things like that get a deserved look for a future patch. Anyway, thanks for all the replies. <3

[FrankMcFuzz]

Remain true to your dorfly roots and only make rock crafts.

[Girlinhat]

I usually make cloth crafts.  Cloth + Dye + Item all get quality modifiers, and can be produced infinitely, so you can produce a lot of high quality goods that also take a real part of your population to produce!

[Rose]

Remain true to your dorfly roots and only make rock bone crafts.

FTFY

[Larix]

cave crocodile eggs, quarry bush leaves, and forgotten beast meat/fat are very valid.  The value of prepared meals is in their stack size, not their individual worth.

I'd say it's the combination of the two.
As far as i can determine, prepared food value goes like this:
10*quality (entire meal) + ingredient value*quality _per ingredient_. The result is the value of each item in the stack.

For a simple example, let's take a roast made of nothing but lard (a.k.a. pig tallow), all work exceptional:
(10x5 for the whole meal) + (1x5, four times for the ingredients) = 70 per meal, stack size four, 280 for the full stack.
A roast made from nothing but duck eggs (or eggs of another "mundane" bird) would have the same per-item value, but the stack would be much larger, 50 would be quite normal, for a value of 3500 for the stack.

Counterexample for high-value ingredients with lowish amounts: roast from dwarven sugar and dwarven flour:
(10x5 for the meal) + (20x5, four times) = 450 per meal, let's say ten meals in the stack, so 4500 total value. That's already a bit more valuable than the egg roast.

And now to combine the two: a roast of ordinary eggs and _one_ bag of whip vine flour:
(10x5 for the whole meal) + (1x5 thrice for egg and 25x5 for whip vine flour) = 190 per meal, a realistic stack size of 40 results in a full stack value of 7600. More than half of the value is generated by the flour, which could be a single unit.

A quick look into my larders showed as possibly the best combined meal one of three parts dwarven sugar and one large stack of guineahen eggs, coming up at 780☼ per meal in a stack of 20 - the entire stack is valued 15 600, the value of 130 masterwork granite mugs.

I usually don't pay with food, though, it just feels too easy. I'm partial of clay and metal crafts. Those have nice value multipliers, crafts are the best use for soft metals like gold anyway, and they're a good reason to dig for magma.

[vanatteveldt]

some items are very expensive when trading, to an absurd degree. Aside from lavish meals (cave crocodile egg roasts and similar can reach values well above 20.000 dorfbucks) most glass items are expensive, which is ridiculous since glass, if you have sand, is almost as easy to make as the wooden stuff. Try making glass serrated discs. The game is still under development and some things, like these, are unbalanced. Maybe once the economy gets reworked it'll change. For now, I just don't intentionally produce those goods just for trading.

At least glass crafts require some sort of infrastructure: you need to make (or buy) bags (=tails+farmer's workshop+loom+clothier), then collect sand at the glassmaker, then acquire fuel (=wood+smelter), then make the craft.

So, starting from nothing but an axe and some stone, making a single wood ball requires 3 jobs (chop wood, build carpenter, build ball). Making the first glass craft requires (plant pigtail, harvest pig tail, build workshop, process plants, build loom, weave thread, build clothier, make bag, build glassmaker, collect sand, chop wood, build smelter, make charcoal, make craft)=14 jobs. Even if you start with 5 bags (the default), it still requires 6 jobs, and it is more difficult to manage since those bags will be stolen to store seeds if you don't pay attention, and you need to juggle collect sand and make craft jobs. So, it makes sense that glass crafts are more expensive than wooden balls.

(If I were to design the economy, I would use the number of jobs, amount of infrastructure, and scarcity of ingredients as the determiners of value, e.g. every simple wood product made by a dabbling carpenter should have approximately the same value, say 9 for 1 (wood) + 3 (1 building) + 5 (1 job). Quality modifiers should depend on the product, eg a masterwork wooden pipe would by only slightly more expensive than a normal pipe (who needs masterfully crafted pipe?) but for more sophisticated goods such as weapons (utility increases with quality) or crafts/food (happiness boost increases with value) the difference is higher. For example, maybe a pipe or block as x1 for normal and x3 for masterwork, while a craft has .5 for normal and x10 for masterwork. That way, a beginning fortress would be best off selling raw ingredients and simple commodities, while a more mature fortress with a more sophisticated industry would sell crafts and other finished goods)

[and don't get me started on the stack multiplier in roasts. 5 leaves x 5 leaves x 5 leaves should yield 5 roasts, not 125 :-) ]

[fractalman]

[and don't get me started on the stack multiplier in roasts. 5 leaves x 5 leaves x 5 leaves should yield 5 roasts, not 125 :-) ]

Actually...I say we leave the multipliers unchanged, but then change the stack SIZE: higher quality meals should have to throw out more stuff.  then biscuits would still be good for early-fort survival, roasts would still be decent tradegoods, they just wouldn't be so obviously broken for trade. i'll put it into the suggestions forum in a bit.