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[Konrad von Richtmark]

I suspect this has been asked before, but I swear by Armok, I did a forum search and couldn't find what I was looking for.

In my current game, I'm exporting plate armour en masse. The location is one with iron, coal and flux, and the mountainhome requests armour. So obviously, my export economy is plate armour based. Second year's exports were worth 50.000 dwarfbucks, and the year after that I could have sold 100.000 worth of plate armour, if the Mountainhome would have had something worth selling me.

Is there an effective cap on how much you can actually import? Can a permanent situation occur where further exports are redundant since there's no way you can get further imports? Or, do caravan sizes keep increasing indefinitely? I've understood you can make caravans get bigger next year if you let the current caravan profit greatly, but is there a cap to how far this goes (in terms of increase per year, and maximum caravan size)? I'm happy as long as I can use my excess exports to buy my dwarves outrageous bling-bling, but if there's a cap to what I can import, there seems hardly to be much point playing on once that economic level has been reached.

[Derakon]

I'm trying to remember what the last thread on this issue said. I think it was something in the area of 6-8 wagons plus some pack animals in a single caravan. There probably isn't a hard cap, but I wouldn't be surprised if Toady has coded in diminishing returns (that is, caravan size will keep increasing as you increase their profit, but the amount of profit increase needed to get the 7th wagon is much more than the amount needed to get the 3rd).

[Albedo]

That's what I remember, about 6-8.  And I want to say the person who established that as a "practical" limit had to use some utility to cheat it up to get that much - (but I might be thinking of "starting wagons")

It's not an area that a lot of research has been done on - or at least, not much that has been shared here. Let us know if you notice anything worth comment.

[Magua]

Even in my "buy all steel from the dwarf caravan" moments, I have never had the total of purchases go above 90,000 or so dwarfbucks, even when I would trade 180,000 worth to get that 90,000.  Now, there was other stuff on the caravan -- cloth, leather, etc, that I didn't buy, but if you're looking for a specific category of thing, anecdotally I can report that there is a point where the caravans will not contain any more of that thing. 

[Konrad von Richtmark]

Did you get steel bars worth 90k dwarfbucks? Or, did you buy everything you could get that was made of steel and subsequently melted it?

[Albedo]

I'd bet heavily on the latter, with or without the melting part.

90k of steel bars would be... um... several. Dozen. Dozen*.  Not very likely.

And those wagons don't move very fast.

(*Yes, several gross (144's) of bars).

[Magua]

Did you get steel bars worth 90k dwarfbucks? Or, did you buy everything you could get that was made of steel and subsequently melted it?

The latter.  That is, including things like buying the 10,000 dwarfbucks steel plate mail.

Even with requesting only metal bars from the liaison, even when the humans brought nothing *but* metal bars, I've never seen more than 3,000 dwarfbucks or so in a caravan.  Weight-to-price ratio is just too high.

[darkflagrance]

I have heard of glitched games where, after modding in free adamantine reactions, players would experience massive caravans filled with hundreds of pages of animals in cages, hence screwing over fps and forcing abandonment. This seemed to happen because the fortress had gone from zero value to 2 million in less than a year.

Therefore, caravan size seems to be tied at least partly to the change in created/exported wealth from year to year, not just the wealth itself.

Edit: Yes, what is meant is relativepercent change, not absolute change

[Albedo]

This seemed to happen because the fortress had gone from zero value to 2 million in less than a year.

That's not a huge jump.  You can do that without cheating once you have steel and a good armorer, or veins of platinum and a legendary mason (or, even better, mechanic).

[hillburra]

Not if you think in percentages -embark value to 2mil by the first caravan is retarded growth and would be hard to beat in any way other than mass producing hacked adamantine