Actually, nobles can can act as a broker, bookkeeper and manager. My countess was our fort's manager, broker and bookkeeper since my fortress was started, and was promoted to baroness at around year 5 and countess at year 6. I'm not sure if the case is that her previous occupations override nobility.
Technically, a bookeeper and a broker are nobles. Would strike me as odd if they didn't interchange their roles, although a bookeeper can stand on a chair forever trying to update records.
Quietust did a post somewhere, where he mentioned how the game checks for minimum amounts of stuff of certain types, per dwarf. Traders will bring less cloth or clothing if you already own lots of it (per capita). Similar for wood, food, other items.
Will look for it in the future. Quietust does seem like one of the few to disassemble and divulge the game's mechanics.
Which mechanics are you thinking about?
I had a problem in the beginning years (mostly because I hadn't yet realized how much wealth a 20-dwarf fortress can produce in a year) and I wanted to understand the mechanics behind demand (e.g. how much more are you willing to pay for, when you speak to the liaison) and offer (what they actually bring the following year).
There was nothing in the wiki (that I regard to be one of the main resources for information in the game) about this or how demand and quality of items brought are related.
I was able to test and find some things resorting to DFHack and some scripts I found here:
- If the caravan doesn't bring item
x then even with demand upped to 200% they will at most bring 5 items. I didn't actually checked for intermediate values, as the value didn't allow to distinguish from an exponential or a linear relationship.
- After upping the demand the first time, they seemed to bring a lot more items regardless of only upping the demand for one item, as they took more time to unload.
- I suppose that upping demand for something the caravan brings the first time will bring more items (more than the 5 items I assume).
All this was done with a virgin, unmodified fortress, where the dwarves just sit and waited for the caravans that were coming roughly every month.
As usual in any scientific process, one goes around to find out what was already done, so that one does not repeat needlessly what has been done. I felt like this would be of some value (particularly in the beginning years), hence the question.