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[Gumbiss]

I think being able to construct and send out trading caravans to trade with other civilizations would be a helpful and interesting new mechanic to the game. It would add more of a sense of presence in the world and make events outside the fortress much more important, as well as adding a large new level of commerce.   

[bmxbumpkin]

Amazing idea. Sounds like it might be hard to program in though.

[Bumber]

Amazing idea. Sounds like it might be hard to program in though.

Umm... not really? What sounds hard about it?

At its most basic, it's nothing more than a mechantless trade with delayed payment. Wagons can be rented from off-site if need be.

[callisto8413]

This makes perfect sense - they send caravans to us why not us sending them out to other cities and Fortresses?   We can sell them our fine goods or try to see if they will take all the junk we get from corpses or the local dump.   Win/win!   

Of course, caravans would have some overhead - so maybe that would keep people more honest.  You would want to make enough to cover the cost and still make a profit.  Darn, I just shot down my own idea of selling the Elves used clothing.   

[Shonai_Dweller]

Seems like a simple enough thing to implement once the rest of the planned caravan infrastructure is in place. What's the advantage of making your own caravan? And who (historically) owns caravans anyway?

[GoblinCookie]

This makes perfect sense - they send caravans to us why not us sending them out to other cities and Fortresses?   We can sell them our fine goods or try to see if they will take all the junk we get from corpses or the local dump.   Win/win!   

Of course, caravans would have some overhead - so maybe that would keep people more honest.  You would want to make enough to cover the cost and still make a profit.  Darn, I just shot down my own idea of selling the Elves used clothing.   

At the moment outside of fortress mode the minor sites trade with the major sites and the major sites all trade with eachother.  I would gage that the former is to be dealt with in the starting scenarios release while the latter is to be dealt with in the caravan/trader arc.  In that sense we would be sending caravans out to other major settlements and they would be sending caravans to us; as opposed to us trading only with the civilization as a whole (though there is a reason to have a special civilization caravan as well). 

Seems like a simple enough thing to implement once the rest of the planned caravan infrastructure is in place. What's the advantage of making your own caravan? And who (historically) owns caravans anyway?

The advantage is that you get the profit rather than the other guy.   

[Detoxicated]

Seems like a simple enough thing to implement once the rest of the planned caravan infrastructure is in place. What's the advantage of making your own caravan? And who (historically) owns caravans anyway?

This is a good question.
I'd rather see an actual economic simulation there. If you for instance have been selling lots of rock instruments to the humans, a closeby hamlet of musicians would like a steady supply of instruments.  So you basically say yes to this, and the queue starts telling your dwarves to make instruments until they fulfill them. The more caravans you'd have, the more bookkeepers and merchant you would need, and needless to say for the time of their trail, they are not there to work, and also they are unprotected unless you assigned guards.

Sending out caravans could become a very expensive thing to do, only viable in working fortresses of 140+ dwarves I suppose.

[Enchiridion]

I'm fairly certain that this has been suggested several times before and is planned.

[Deboche]

If you become the Mountainhome, you could send out caravans to help out other dwarven regions and make a little profit.

And if you send out 7 dwarves to start a new fortress somewhere, you should have to send them a caravan for help. Not mandatory, just to improve their chances.

But for trading, this doesn't make much sense to me. Why not just trade with the people who come and go anyway?

[GoblinCookie]

If you become the Mountainhome, you could send out caravans to help out other dwarven regions and make a little profit.

And if you send out 7 dwarves to start a new fortress somewhere, you should have to send them a caravan for help. Not mandatory, just to improve their chances.

But for trading, this doesn't make much sense to me. Why not just trade with the people who come and go anyway?

I guess the only reason would be that if you trade with the other people, the other people get the profits from the trading while if you do the trading yourself then the profits of the trading are yours. 

However, so are the costs.  The costs however are relative, if you have an oversupply of what a caravan needs then it does you more good to turn it into a caravan than it does to have it lying about the place.  If what a caravan needs are scarce however, it will never make sense to make a caravan at all. 

[Deboche]

What I mean is the fortress produces goods. People come to the fortress to sell stuff from other lands and to buy stuff from the fortress. Why should the fortress itself send out caravans or, in other words, become yet another trader?

We need to be careful not to start the whole capitalism vs communism thing again here.

But essentially the "state" usually only needs to invest in trade when it comes to creating new routes or something, such as building a harbour and boats and sending them out to discover america.

[GoblinCookie]

What I mean is the fortress produces goods. People come to the fortress to sell stuff from other lands and to buy stuff from the fortress. Why should the fortress itself send out caravans or, in other words, become yet another trader?

We need to be careful not to start the whole capitalism vs communism thing again here.

But essentially the "state" usually only needs to invest in trade when it comes to creating new routes or something, such as building a harbour and boats and sending them out to discover america.

Let us assume that the socio-economic Status Quo which shall remain nameless is in place in order to avoid any such 'thing' from happening. 

Fortress A produces a caravan which it then sends to Fortress B to trade copper for cloth.  Fortress A wants cloth and produces copper, Fortress B wants copper and produces cloth, which Fortress A wants.  The fact that the two fortresses produce what the other wants means that there is a potential trade route between the two, the question here is why did Fortress A not simply wait for Fortress B to send a caravan to it?

The answer I think is what is called 'First Movers Advantage', once Fortress A has sent a caravan to Fortress B the profits of the caravan trading with Fortress B go to Fortress A and not merely the cloth from Fortress B; it can therefore get more cloth in return for it's copper basically.  However once it has 'moved', Fortress B is unable to recipricate by sending a caravan of it's own to Fortress A because the result is a direct competition between the two caravans.  The act of creating the second competing caravan is Mutually-assured Destruction for both parties, since once there are two caravans both settlements can force eachothers caravans to trade at a loss, since if they do not get what they want from the caravan that visited their fortress their own caravan can buy it from the other fortress anyway.  Complicated isn't it? 

Thing is that in order to make economic sense a caravan must make a profit, that is because the resources and labour used by the caravan would otherwise be employed elsewhere by the fortress whose caravan it is.  The end result of the situation above mentioned, where both settlements send a caravan to eachother is that both settlements end up paying the cost of a caravan and neither settlement can make a profit to cover that cost.  This means that what drives the creation of caravans (or trading ships or river barges for that matter) is a race to 'own' as much of the trade as possible along a particular route because once you own the trade route between two settlements, then nobody can compete with you along the exact same route without the result being thedestruction of both you and them.

A settlement is thus willing to undergo the initial cost of creating a caravan as opposed to waiting for it's neighbor to do so because whoever moves first gets to 'own' the route forever, not in the legal sense but because anybody who invests in setting up a rival along the exact same route stands to ruin themselves.  This means that their is a scramble to snap up as many profitable trade routes as possible, a scramble that could easily result in war; you pay the expense of setting up your caravans in order to grab trading 'territory' rather than allow others to take that 'territory'. 

[Deboche]

How about this? A new fortress is created and people that wander nearby stay at their inn and carry news all around of the stuff they produce. Traders take note of this and stop there on their travels to buy such things and sell others that the fortress might need. Where's the need for a caravan in any of this?

[GoblinCookie]

How about this? A new fortress is created and people that wander nearby stay at their inn and carry news all around of the stuff they produce. Traders take note of this and stop there on their travels to buy such things and sell others that the fortress might need. Where's the need for a caravan in any of this?

The caravan *is* the means the traders use to transport the goods safely and efficiently.  It does however involve things (wagons and guards specifically) that random individuals operating in an adventure mode type setup do not simply have access too.  These things have to be provided by an outside source, aka a fortress has to create a caravan at a fortress mode scale, it does not magically come into existance.

The interesting issue however is that if the goods are light enough then individuals can simply carry them in their backpacks.  They are however a crucial element in the initial situation, it how the information about supply and demand gets about prior to any caravan being created.  The caravan has the advantage however over those individuals because it is more secure from attacks by small numbers of bandits and can carry a greater bulk of goods.  Once caravans exist they render the lifestyle of the small peddler nonviable, because the caravan meets the site's total demands for the items they have on them in bulk prior to their arrival so that they have nothing to offer. 

Basically a single individual peddler can only meet a small amount of the total demand.  A caravan however can meet the whole demand for the year in one go so the peddlers are not able to reliably sell their goods at a price that covers their costs.  Peddlers then are sort of pioneer traders that come first and lay down the ground for the caravan that then ruins them; they will quickly prop up in the cracks whenever caravans are unable to service a settlement with something. 

[bunyy]

This'd be so cool!