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[mathzip]

Hey
In every fortress, after a year or two, trading becomes
1-too easy because I can buy every caravan 10 times with crates of trinkets
2-useless because i can produce everything easily on my own

Maybe you could make resourses scarcer in regions so trade and diplomacy with neighbors would take a more important partin building a fortress
and also either raise prices or lower the value of produced goods so I can t buy one steel anvil for 100 times it s price just to get rid of all the valuable goods that clutter my fortress.

[breadman]

I'd personally prefer something more automatic, which ends up solving your problem from a sideways direction:

Let the broker handle the actual trading, instead of doing it yourself.  You can mark certain items for trade (preferably through a flag on the stockpile), and set priorities for each item category (through an interface like the one used to request items from the mountainhome), and the broker automatically attempts to purchase the highest-priority items available until running out of time or items to trade.

The broker isn't going to be nearly as skillful a trader as you are, so your resources don't get quite the same bounty in return.  Micromanagement is reduced, but replaced by the risk of letting priority settings become less appropriate as years roll by.

A really poor choice of broker might have a chance of offending the merchants, perhaps about as often as an experienced player currently misclicks the seize key or offers something wooden to the elves.

Meanwhile, it sounds like Toady has plans to let a simulated economy determine prices for the caravans, which may also ease the strain on your credulity.

[GavJ]

Yeah this would be nice but it seems a little wasteful of effort if complicated dynamic economies are on the horizon undoing the effort later

[Alev]

It is also somewhat useless considering you can deconstruct the Depot to get free stuff. (Unless Toady fixed that)

[Bumber]

It is also somewhat useless considering you can deconstruct the Depot to get free stuff. (Unless Toady fixed that)

There's nothing to fix. You can seize goods just as easily.

[Alev]

It is also somewhat useless considering you can deconstruct the Depot to get free stuff. (Unless Toady fixed that)

There's nothing to fix. You can seize goods just as easily.

Doesn't your dorf civ get pissed off at you if you do that, though?

[Bumber]

It is also somewhat useless considering you can deconstruct the Depot to get free stuff. (Unless Toady fixed that)

There's nothing to fix. You can seize goods just as easily.

Doesn't your dorf civ get pissed off at you if you do that, though?

Don't they either way? Any value that doesn't leave the map is considered stolen.

[Alev]

It is also somewhat useless considering you can deconstruct the Depot to get free stuff. (Unless Toady fixed that)

There's nothing to fix. You can seize goods just as easily.

Doesn't your dorf civ get pissed off at you if you do that, though?

Don't they either way? Anything that doesn't leave the map is considered stolen.

Oh.

[GavJ]

And thus ended Alev's life of crime.

[Alev]

And thus ended Alev's life of crime.

The fortress I first used that in starved to death, the second one died by a tantrum spiral.

[MightyEvilPunk]

Hey
In every fortress, after a year or two, trading becomes
1-too easy because I can buy every caravan 10 times with crates of trinkets
2-useless because i can produce everything easily on my own

Maybe you could make resourses scarcer in regions so trade and diplomacy with neighbors would take a more important partin building a fortress
and also either raise prices or lower the value of produced goods so I can t buy one steel anvil for 100 times it s price just to get rid of all the valuable goods that clutter my fortress.

Why not just add the unique goods for each race, that you cannot obtain any other way, than trading? Not ones, you cannot survive without, but ones, which you would like to have.
1) Initial embark screen has too much goods to buy. Why dwarves should have cows, horses and other animals, who generally use to live outside? Why not leave just pigs, chickens, cats, dogs and other animals, who able to live in tight spaces and undergrounds. Also food choice is also too abundant.
2) Elven and human caravans can bring some unique items. Elves can have some herbs, that used to make medicines, or medicines by themselves. Why not buy a potion, that will reduce the chance of gangrena for your dwarves? Or will give them temporary protection from bleeding? Humans in other hands can sell you the rest of animals, that are not common for dwarves. As a seafarers, they can bring you some exotic things, Like spice, that your dwarves can like or something else.
3) Why not buy military aid somehow? Squad of heavy armored humans or elven archers, that you can call if you are besieged. They might not solve the problem, but will add fun.

[vache]

I always thought that the quality of the trade caravans should be based on your standing with the civilizations, nobles, etc, and you should be able to arrange more complicated agreements.  For example, when your fortress is still just an outpost of your dwarven civilization, they only send the most basic of supplies: basic construction supplies (blocks, wood, an anvil), simple food/drink, and poor (material and quality) armor/clothing/weapons.  As you progress through the fortress titles, more better quality items become available.  You might be able to negotiate to bring certain items above your fortress level, but these are almost always going to be heavily weighted against you.   As an example, say you request high level weapons when you're just an outpost, then you might have to pay triple price for them, or they mandate that you have to purchase so many if they're going to bring them, or they demand a certain number of something you produce instead.  Also, it should be possible, though incredibly rare and expensive, for caravans to bring artifacts created from other forts.  Also, you should be able to trade your artifacts if you want.  Some of this I imagine would be a part of the economy system, as your dwarves will actually have more of a desire for high quality clothing, luxury items, and other trade goods.

[Scruiser]

Maybe you could make resourses scarcer in regions so trade and diplomacy with neighbors would take a more important partin building a fortress
and also either raise prices or lower the value of produced goods so I can t buy one steel anvil for 100 times it s price just to get rid of all the valuable goods that clutter my fortress.

This pretty much involves solving the economy issues for it to work (in a interesting and dynamic fashion).  Search the forums and you can easily find a dozen posts proposing fixes to the economy in fort mode and the world economy.  Most discussion I've read/been in agree some system of variable prices, supply, and demand are needed.  I've read posts in favor of full on bottom-up attempts at economy solely through emergent interactions (basic facts of individual motivations form demand, basic fact of production determine supply, simulate everything up to get economy), attempts at top down calculations of prices (single estimation of demand from collective of dwarfs, single estimation of supply, set price), and everything in between.

[GavJ]

In addition to an actual simulated economy with meaningful supplies and demands and resources that fill the same need and are somewhat replaceable (will use wood not stone for building if stone gets too expensive), and blah blah, you would need additional things as well for trading to really work dynamically in the game in a challenging fashion.

For one, I think you'd need armies to be working, in the sense of being able to command and send out your own raids and to take over settlements and things like that. Otherwise you're just going to get an eye-rolling, annoying situation where some goblins are sitting on one rich gold vein, and you can't make your monopoly, because it's impossible to oust them, even if you're 50x stronger, just because the game hasn't included that feature yet. That would not be fun and it would break the immersion hard.

Secondly, I think you need some concept of trade routes. As in, settlements actually need real, passable paths between them to trade. So that if you block off a mountain pass for instance, you can control trade in and out of the enclosed valley. If prices get INSANELY high, then traders might begin risking crossing the mountains proper to get around your blockade, in a dynamic fashion, but they wouldn't for just medium value or bulk goods, for instance.  Similarly, trade routes should also be able to be disrupted by devoting resources to having armed patrols or armies cutting them off (although your competitors can also assign escorts if they can afford it and see it as worthwhile). Basically a little meta/minigame where traders are like creatures and normal pathing types of things are happening, but the pathing is going on on the world map, not the fortress map.

Third, you need some way to model renewal (or not) of resources. A settlement shouldn't just be able to keep mining iron for 3,500 years in the same spot or whatever, that won't be much fun, and is also unfair/not comparable to your own fort, and breaks immersion. At the same time, this needs to be balanced with the danger of running out of stuff and having a world be unplayable. This balance can be struck by modeling recycling (especially of metals - melting down goblinite type of situation, but considered by world gen). And/or it can be struck by having dynamic "mining costs" of resources. A cost that it takes for a settlement in world gen to abstractly obtain a unit of resources from their environment. Such costs could change over time, getting higher the more you gather, but flattening out for things like trees while not doing so for things like iron. And if the cost is higher than price on the market, the entity stops mining it at all. All helping to stretch out resources longer while still making them more realistically finite or not.

[Scruiser]

Trade routes, army raids (set off by economic events), and resource modeling.  Sound like some good ideas.  As a stop-gap Toady could just put in a list of heuristics and rules for resource scarcity, resource value, and economic interactions.  I.e. double value of weapons during wartime, roughly track mined resources and mined resources available, track deforestation (it already does this for human towns with expansion of planes) and then raise price of wood, raise prices for every x miles goods have to travel on world map, raise prices for goods coming from conflict areas, etc.  I don't think player armies are essential, so much as trade monopolies as a reason for the civ war.  If the player is still stuck on fort mode map, at least the civ could engage in the anti-monopoly war and break up the monopoly.

So yeah, there are some ways of getting to more interesting trading right away, but they are temporary solution.  Toady's methodology seems to be to develop the full simulation and detail, then get playability out of it, so he probably won't take this approach though.