Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[GavJ]

If magma were more easily available on the surface outside of volcanoes, then I would routinely flood traders with magma to avoid the clutter of all their junk, probably, yes.

Too much effort as is though. And you can't just put a bridge over the whole trading area, because you can't build them over depots. Maybe could rig up pressure plates, but meh.

[Miuramir]

Oh, I *might* be able to clothe my dwarves with no external output, but it's far easier just to trade for the leather.

... too easy.  A tanned hide is what, 10-30 urist?  A gold craft will sell for roughly 1000-3000 urist.  I just buy it by the bin and laugh at the cost.

Somewhere, there's a dwarven trader laughing.  Leather is a readily renewable resource *and* is a consumable in many uses (clothing that wears out); on the other hand, there's a finite amount of gold in the world, and more importantly on your map.  Come a few decades down the road, they will still have more turkey leather than they need every year, the clothes you made will have worn out several times, and they will have extracted the gold from *your* map with comparatively little effort on their part.

Many small colonies jump-start their economy with extractive processes; but if you want to advance beyond third-world status you need an economy not based on digging up things that will run out and selling them to people far away. 

The "economy" in DF is skewed not only by the lack of a functioning economy, which is scheduled to be improved, but because many (most?) players don't play any specific fort long enough to get out of the "gold rush town" mode and worry about sustainable, long-term growth. 

[GavJ]

on the other hand, there's a finite amount of gold in the world, and more importantly on your map.

If anybody here has ever mined all the gold in their map (AND still somehow been dependent on caravans after all that time), please let us know.

Otherwise, this is irrelevant for actual gameplay, and thus shouldn't be designed around. The game needs to make the actual reality of playing it fun, not hypothetical games fun that nobody actually plays.

[Uronym]

The traders are hardly "traders"; they come with wagons full of useless trash you never asked for.

Trade would actually be useful only if you could tell the traders what you want, and, more precisely, how much.

[Putnam]

Yeah, you can tell the what you want.

[Uronym]

Yeah, you can tell the what you want.

Okay, so you tell them that all you want is iron bars, and you want a lot.

What do they bring? A number of iron bars in the single digits, and a bunch of useless trash you never asked for.

[Tacomagic]

The traders are hardly "traders"; they come with wagons full of useless trash you never asked for.

Trade would actually be useful only if you could tell the traders what you want, and, more precisely, how much.

By the same token, they often pay too much for useless crap.  The trade value of large swath of items needs to be reduced, and I'm not just talking bugged ones like trap weapons.  And repeatedly trading the same items should tank the sale price.  Right now it's stupid easy to bung out 100 or so obsidian mugs and buy a whole caravan.  Really, after like 20 mugs they should be like, "Nope, we need more than your stupid stone mugs."

Then again, beyond a certain point, forcing diversity of exports, while more realistic, probably isn't the best thing from a gameplay standpoint.

Though it would be really cool if there was a kind of global economy that you could look at.  You could find long-term production niches for specific goods that way.

[Slogo]

I've traded-by-necessity for the following:

• Lumber (in 40.x having any trees on the map is a lot of lumber, but not all maps grow trees and cavern trees give very little)
• Metals sufficient for armor/weapons, not all maps have iron and/or bronze
• Pig Iron to go from Iron > Steel if you have no flux
• Plaster for casts if you have no gypsum
• Sand & Clay for moods if you lack them
• Animals (said many times before)
• Leather, if you're on a reanimating biome it's dangerous to harvest it yourself
• Silk and Wool cloth for moods if you don't have any webs or animals
• Coal/Coke/Lignite/Bit.Coal since it's faster than Wood Burning logs
• Platinum. Gold may be plentiful if you have resources on high, but Platinum sure isn't. If I want a platinum dining room I'm going to have to trade for it

Just give the traders more junk than they leave behind and it won't cause clutter. They're great for xXTrousersXx.

Also if excessive hauling jobs cause lots of lag try using feeder stockpiles. If you have a 2x2 stockpile that feeds into a links only larger stockpile then the maximum # of hauling jobs you can get for those two stockpiles is 4 at any one time (one job for each tile of the smaller stockpile). You can use this in a couple of useful ways. Namely it prevents your job queue from getting flooded, but it also means your dwarves won't ALL go and haul Pig Tail Socks at the same time leaving all other hauling tasks unattended.

In terms of item worth you could just massively tweak the negotiation #s for short term fix. Right now making what the caravan demands is barely a benefit at all. An easy fix would be if items not explicitly asked for were only worth like 5-10% of what they are now (first caravan and non-dwarf caravans could probably just trade at a flat 50% value of what they offer now and it would be fine). Basically just get players to actually pay attention to the trade agreement and make goods off that list if they want to buy out the caravan.

[Aslandus]

Wow, everyone here seems extremely positive about traders... They irritate me. I don't like how they bring trash to my fortress; if they happen to drop their load, then all my stockpiles clog up, my frames drop, and my productivity crawls due to all the hauling.

I interpret traders as hostiles and treat them as such. In most of my fortresses, I have a tunnel somewhere with a trade depot at the end; when the traders arrive, I wall/shut them in until they die; then, I either forbid all their trash or have it destroyed somehow. Repeat until they stop coming. This has several enormous benefits; aside from getting rid of those annoying traders and the trash they bring, it makes them angry! If I kill them and destroy them and their trash enough times, they *might* declare war, which is far more valuable than "trade"! After all, a siege brings training dummies for your soldiers and spare weapons, armor, clothing and metal for your economy... for free! What could be better?

Needless to say, all of my fortresses are probably more isolationist than North Korea. Kim Il-Sung's ghost smiles at my fortresses, which espouse all of the glorious tenets of Juche. Just like North Korea, my fortresses will simply go without whatever we cannot make ourselves. No iron? No iron; we'll make copper do. No surface cultivation? No surface cultivation. Plump helmets shall pour from our ears before we become dependent on foreign imperialist powers!

Sheesh dude, why do you even build a trade depot if you hate them so much? They won't leave you a bunch of crap if you don't build a place for them to put it...

The traders are hardly "traders"; they come with wagons full of useless trash you never asked for.

Trade would actually be useful only if you could tell the traders what you want, and, more precisely, how much.

By the same token, they often pay too much for useless crap.  The trade value of large swath of items needs to be reduced, and I'm not just talking bugged ones like trap weapons.  And repeatedly trading the same items should tank the sale price.  Right now it's stupid easy to bung out 100 or so obsidian mugs and buy a whole caravan.  Really, after like 20 mugs they should be like, "Nope, we need more than your stupid stone mugs."

Then again, beyond a certain point, forcing diversity of exports, while more realistic, probably isn't the best thing from a gameplay standpoint.

Though it would be really cool if there was a kind of global economy that you could look at.  You could find long-term production niches for specific goods that way.

They're probably paid by the mountainhome to come by and make sure all your dwarves haven't died of starvation and have enough supplies to get by, as well as deliver whatever you're making back to see how you're doing. Which would make caravans less weirdos with a mug fixation and more worrying mothers...

"I know you're willing to pay twice as much for iron, but make sure you take some leather and cloth to bundle up for winter!"
"Sure, thanks CARAVAN!"

[Uronym]

Sheesh dude, why do you even build a trade depot if you hate them so much? They won't leave you a bunch of crap if you don't build a place for them to put it...

The non-wagon traders will still come, and without a trade depot, they'll dump their trash all over the map instead of in a designated incineration room. You can make the entrance narrow enough to turn away wagons to have the best of both worlds (fewer trade goods, all in the same incineration chamber).

[taptap]

I also go with Juche, embarked plantless/seedless and refused to trade for agricultural plants/seeds. The whole agriculture in my current fort is based on the glorious cavern plant gathering during the first year of the fort. And since the fort is rich in galena ore, the dwarves learned to appreciate lead furniture. For luxuries I go with sterling silver and billon. But I am less aggressive towards traders, traders are bad, but invasions are worse for fps, clutter etc. so I tend to send them away with gifts. (I will look for an embark or world without elven/human traders in the next fort.)

The whole tangent about war animals is misleading. The best pets are those you trapped and trained yourself (and you can trade away surplus specimen) - my current fort goes with giant cave swallows and the lovely blue centipedes. Buying animals is good for livestock, you don't find in the wild (milk and wool producing animals mainly), hardly for war animals.

I have traded for gypsum plaster, fire clay, rare metals such as tin and iron, exotic fruits for food diversity, leather (when no domestic leather industry), animals (for zoo, sometimes for wool/milk), wood. None of this was really necessary, but I can buy what I need with bone crossbows and voracious cave crawlers.

[Skullsploder]

I really rely on the caravans in my current fort. Embarked on a volcano at the intersection of three biomes, two had multiple shallow metals, the other had a single type, but it turned out none of those was iron or copper or tin. Just galena. Loads of galena. And zinc. So I have to buy out ridiculous amounts of malachite, cassiterite, and tetrahedrite, as well as any bronze, copper, or tin crafts and bars that the caravan brings, because my civ has no access to iron. If you just use DFhack's search function and search for the material type you're looking for, then make a quick down-enter macro, you can extract a lot of metal from caravans.

So they become super useful when you lack vital resources, but they're still a cakewalk in terms of difficulty.

[Uronym]

I also go with Juche, [...] But I am less aggressive towards traders, traders are bad, but invasions are worse for fps, clutter etc. so I tend to send them away with gifts. (I will look for an embark or world without elven/human traders in the next fort.)

But, my Juche comrade, what fun is a fortress without invasions? The goblins seem to be really, really scarce in 0.40.xx, so I am happy to sharpen my military-industrial complex on any elves, humans, or even dwarves that will offer practice. You do have an excellent point though; if the goblins would come enough, it would not necessarily be the best idea to bring in more sieges. Still, it takes a really long time to annoy the traders enough for them to declare war, so, if the goblins were ever to stop attacking, you would want to have started annoying the traders as early as possible.

[StagnantSoul]

I actually ran out of silver one time. I was in complete shock and awe. "Prospect!" No horn or native silver, no tetrahydrate, no galena... But then I remembered I had around 3000 native gold still out there somewhere. Gold is almost as common as copper. I will aplaud the man who runs out of all trade metals.

[utunnels]

Play on a map which lacks of certain resources you'll know how important they are.
Or sometimes when I'm too lazy to produce certain goods I just buy them from caravans.

I guess it will be better if food industry is not that overpowered. It is like cheating currently. Basically I can buy what ever I want if I have some food barrels.