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[Ryo]

This might just be bad luck rather than a bug, but some elves showed up to trade and brought 12 cloth bins, nothing else. The entire caravan consisted of only two elves and two mules.

Though I'm playing as a human fortress, so that may make a difference.

[Zombie]

Bah. You got 12 cloth bins. Lucky. In my dwarven fort, the elves usually bring me berries, seeds, and cloth. Once I got a whole caravan (wagons and all) that only had four bins of cloth. :x

Damn cheapskates.

[MercDraco]

Working on the problem by building a Gaint Washing Machine to drown those elves in a mixture of Water, Soap, and Socks
just drown them for now steal their cloth set up a sock production Factory and prepare a addition to the Drown er i mean Elven Welcoming Chamber

[Footkerchief]

Do you murder/loot a lot of elven caravans?  Supposedly they bring crappier stuff if they didn't make a profit the year before.

[kaypy]

Do you murder/loot a lot of elven caravans?  Supposedly they bring crappier stuff if they didn't make a profit the year before.

On the other hand, if you *do* give them a profit, maybe this is their idea of the best value? Try waving skull totems at them till they leave in a huff, and see if they have a more typical load next year...

[Zombie]

Yeah, the best they seem to have to offer is cloth and cloth-based goods. They don't mine, so you get no rocks. Occasionally they bring caged animals. Berries and seeds, though, are common in my elven caravans. I get cloth, too. On rare occasions, I think they can bring silk... You'd have to get lucky enough for elves to settle in a forest with a chasm, though.

Just bringing cloth, though, is commonplace for me...

[Moogie]

Elves absolutely love skull totems in the current version, though. Infact I use the elves solely to get rid of the things. (More valuable loots go to the Humans and Dwarves, since they are actually useful to me)

[penguinofhonor]

Yeah, elven caravans are almost completely useless. They need to bring rare animals more often.

[Apoco]

i actually had an elven caravan bring me nothing but lumber, it was the first time i have ever seen them do something useful

[Quietust]

A bit of a bump, but this is still a rather serious annoyance in 40d - this year, the Elven caravan brought me 2 stacks of bloated tubers, a stack of muck roots, a stack of wild strawberries, and 69 bins of rope reed cloth (thanks to their numerous camels which can carry twice as much as donkeys/mules). They've been doing this for the past 10 years, and I've been seizing the entire caravan every time, but every year they come back and do the same thing again. When they first started trading, they brought lots of exotic animals (including a male/female pair of giant desert scorpions which I then modded to be breedable), but now they're worse than useless.

Lately, I've been accepting tree cutting quotas and then blatantly violating them (I agree on a quota of 113, then cut down nearly 500) - I can only hope that if I anger them enough, they'll start bringing me "less valuable" goods (i.e. animals); if I'm really lucky, they'll siege me on unicorns.

[Footkerchief]

I thought they brought cloth cause it's LOW-value?  This might not make any sense, but I think it's been established that caravans that never make a profit bring crappy goods.

[Neruz]

They bring cloth because it has the highest value-to-weight ratio they have. Caravans that do well try and bring more valuable goods next year; with the Dwarves and Humies it's not a problem since wagons carry so much, so they stock up on valuables and still have tons of room left for the inexpensive crap that you actually want (like alcohol, plus you usually give the Dwarves\Humans requests for the shit you want.)

But Elves only bring donkeys, and donkeys don't carry much; as a result the Elves go "Oh, we made a big profit last year, the Dwarves will want some expensive goods, Cloth is our most expensive good, lets take that!" So they load up on Cloth, and then the donkeys are full, so that's all they take.


I mean, think about it, a bear inna cage is what, 150 db? Compare that by weight to rope reed cloth and that stuff is so much more valuable it's rediculous.



The two solutions are to drive a really hard bargain and only let the elves get away with absolute minimal profit, or edit the Raws; if you change the pack animal carry weight to the same as that of a wagon then you won't run into this problem (i've done this and it's solved it quite consistantly) as they'll never make enough profit to fill an entire wagon chain with only cloth (at least i hope not.)

[Footkerchief]

Quietust, the person I was responding to, said he's been seizing every elven caravan.  That's about as minimal a profit as you can get.  And they're still bringing cloth!

Although I guess it's possible they still have a crapload of profit accumulated from earlier on, and still consider him a good trading partner.

[Neruz]

Quietust, the person I was responding to, said he's been seizing every elven caravan.  That's about as minimal a profit as you can get.  And they're still bringing cloth!

Although I guess it's possible they still have a crapload of profit accumulated from earlier on, and still consider him a good trading partner.

Most probably; the general response to caravans seems to be 'give em as much profit as possible' which usually leads to obscene profit margins, that result in only cloth.


I mean, i usually give caravans 25 - 50% profit, i've got a fort that's been going for 17 years, i've been giving the Elves about 30% profit every year without fail, and i've never seen more than 3 bins of cloth per caravan.

In another, 7 year fort, i gave the Elves closer to 6000% profit due to a pair of ledgendary stonecrafters and 6 z levels of Obsidian, by year 4, i was getting nothing but cloth.



I don't think the trading balance is designed to cope with that level of profit; it goes all coo-coo.

[Quietust]

My (c)iv screen says I've only exported about 20,000DB worth of stuff to them, and I've easily seized several hundred thousand worth of cloth from them, yet still they persist. Next spring, I'm going to mod my pack animals to carry as much as wagons (not in response to your suggestion - I just happened to come to the same conclusion) - if they then bring five hundred bins of cloth, I'll know something is horribly, horribly wrong.

[edit]

I just replayed from my last Spring autosave with donkeys, mules, and camels set to 10 times their original capacity, and they brought a total of 77 bins of cloth, as well as tons of other stuff (including 70 tame animals and 11 vermin). Either their negative profit is completely offset by my Created Wealth (which only recently reached 9 million), or I managed to steal so much from them that their profit amount went so far negative that it wrapped around to positive again.

Additionally, there's actually a small problem in the "cloth is the best value" theory for Elves, especially when they have access to kobold bulbs - a barrel of Gnomeblight is worth 1010 and weighs less than 100 (and in the above test, they brought 78 barrels of Gnomeblight).

It would seem the problem isn't that cloth is the "most valuable" good they have, but that it's the first item they bring when the caravan arrives, most likely due to it coming in bins (to ensure that all of the bins they bring are 100% full)  - the first N animals will bring nothing but cloth bins, then one will have a few bins of cloth along with various other items, then all of the others bring random stuff; if they want to bring a ridiculously huge amount of stuff, they end up running out of pack animals before running out of cloth bins.