Trading that isn't totally uninteresting.
Only weeks into playing the game I figured out that the trade agreements were absolutely pointless. The human and dwarven caravans bring some of pretty much everything regardless, so requesting stuff is kinda moot. And when you DO need to request stuff: (say you have no steel and need to import it) you can max out your request for steel bars and have the next caravan bring you a healthy helping of three or so bars. The effects of the agreement are so subtle they make virtually no difference. I should be able to request them to bring 5k dwarfpounds of steel if that's what I need. It could be at an extreme markup, and that be great with me, because that leads into the next point:
Invaders drop so much crap, virtually no fort needs to produce any goods whatsoever. All the different economies are pointless. I dump half the crap from invaders and still end up giving away thousands of dwarfbucks in socks and crap to caravans just to get it off my map.
Right now elves are the only traders that bring any interesting goods period. Exotic animals are the only things that are likely scarce amongst the caravans.
Ideally you could put in requests for specific creatures. You might have to wait years for them to finally catch one and bring it, and the asking price could be something like 10k, but it would be so much more gratifying than any current trade.
For getting steel bars through imports though, I find you're best bet is to max out all three iron ores, iron bars, pig iron bars, steel bars, all the available flux stones, both coal stones, processed coal and charcoal and expect to do some processing yourself. All that stuff weighs so much you won't see much of anything else on a caravan. I'll add the caveat though that I haven't done that in 0.31.* yet, and when I did it in 0.28.*, especially 40d, I had to up the trade capacity of wagons to get enough to keep work going for more than a season (the one in particular I was building a city out of brass another was a citadel of iron... bonus points to any who get the second reference, the first is too easy 
).
Since I'm posting in this thread anyway:
I'm personally in the bugfix, cleanup and optimize before adding more crowd.
Even then it's still not satisfactory.
But really, I think that polishing trade would provide more reward for the least amount of effort than any other pending additions/tweaks to the game (not including bugfixes and optimization).
The good thing about optimizing trade would be that it would bring out maximum use of other features that are already implemented.
Think about the economies: right now they're just kinda "extra." Rarely, if ever, do you actually have to rely on an economy; you can invest into one if you feel like it. Case in point: last caravan I
gave away over 50k of items that were just laying on my map from invaders.
Making it possible to request resources from caravans in large amounts (for a high markup) would make many more sites suitable for a fort. No sand? No iron? No tree? No
stone? Rely on trade, and
need an economy to support it.
As a result, the different economies would have value; you would have to use what your site has to let your fort grow. Forts would be more unique; they would have to really adapt to their surroundings. More, barren sites would be usable.
As far as I know, the things needed to do this are already implemented, the values just need to be tweaked so that it actually makes a difference. Implementing trade agreements with the other races can't be too hard. The result would be a much more fulfilling experience.
Author
Topic: What do you want to see in the next version of DF? (Read 10825 times)