"The Clerk Urist McDiplomat has arrived."
Ho hum, that means there's a proper outpost liaison from last year somewhere. Looked it up in the unit list and the old liaison had spawned right at the rock face, between two trees. Freed them by chopping away the trees, but 1. diplomats still attach to the expedition leader who has no office and thus holds meetings in the outdoor meeting area _which spawns goddamn "pasture large creature" jobs nonstop_ and 2. they were going to insist on negotiating a trade agreement for the caravan that had already arrived.
So i made the duke the new expedition leader, to get the messed-up useless liaison off the map. In addition, after handing over some garbage to the caravan, i offered them a bunch of unacceptable trades, which got rid of _them_ in record time, too.
I think the pure pathing/placement signal-less logic is rather restricted in its possibilities - reading works o.k., but writing to a circuit is absurdly convoluted[1]. So i revised the memory functions to use difference logic, which seems to work alright - different-weight carts with speed-sensitive pathing, either for memory "read" or to keep read and set carts apart. Add to that use of z-level pathing and the basic memory functions _seem_ to be workable; the resulting circuits are huge and clunky, but at least nowhere near as wasteful and ridiculous as the earlier models.
[1] of course, "writing" can always be done by route management, it's writing by the running machine itself that seems problematic. Which means it should be an acceptable paradigm for ROM.