Trading Economics
Desire: Build a system of pricing for overland economics to determine both the relative price of materials and the cost of transportation. This could be merged into an overarching pricing scheme to determine costs, and more importantly what is actually used.
In theory steel and bronze production are based on the availability of at least 3 materials each. Hopefully in the future we will have even more complex metallurgies and constructions. What determines where these are available? Currently everything that is dug out of the ground is mixed up into a big pot. There is no concept of amount of ore available. It’s also possible for forts to import goods from extremely far away without regard for shipping costs.
All that said, there could be an algorithm that determines what civs actually use.
(This is less a suggestion about how things SHOULD be, and more a discussion of how things COULD be, because it amuses me to write it)
Use Cases:
Steel: Steel is produced using fuel, iron ore and flux. All of these are heavy items, so the steel works industry will need ready access to all of these.
Bronze: Bronze is mostly copper. Historically tin was imported to sites with copper in order to smelt the bronze.
Lumberjacks: Logs float on the water and run downstream for free
Power Sources: Water and Magma can’t be shipped. Sites with these are almost guaranteed to be manufacturing centers.
What I’m thinking would work would be a natural increase in the cost of an item based on the shortest distance traveled and weight. The main purpose of this is properly deciding what a civ would use. Say that transferring over water costs 1 dwarfbuck per dwarfpound, roads costs 2, plains 5 and woods/deserts 10. Now find the shortest weighted path.
Take food for example. In a given civ, the peasants are going to predominately consume the cheapest item. They will base all food decisions on the need for variety plus this base cost.
Say that there are 3 foodstuffs produced in a city, but they need to eat a 4th thing to satisfy their need for variety. They’ll import the cheapest thing available to them, but the cost will be modified by distance. It may be cheaper to get the carp burgers from next door than to pay the dwarves to haul dirt cheap plump helmets all the way out of the mountains.
What is the advantage to this? Each city will have it’s own set of goods that it offers for trade and a rational system of wants. High value goods will always have a small cap (for nobles making mandates), but each civ will have a rational trade list that they want from you. Humans will love Plump Helmets because they’re cheap, light and plentiful enough to serve as a good second base for food variety. Visitors to your fort could be outfitted rationally: Not all humans have iron weapons automatically; GCS silk is suitably rare, etc.
While this wouldn’t be 100% useful with vanilla as it stands, think about all the super smelting mods. Sure the human civ has access to all the components of wootz steel, but maybe it’s too expensive to make it anywhere but the capitol, so one city is using bronze off of imported tin, one uses iron, one uses pig iron, etc etc. It’s a free(ish) way to give variety to the plebes of a city without arbitrary restrictions on what gets traded or what is available where.