Reworking Trade

[De-Legro]

eh? so your army walks around, loot.. and then it just appear somewhere? region where you have an estate? (what if you have no estate?)

don't mind.

The current idea is to abstract away caravans. It would be assumed that some of the camp followers that every army has could handle shipping the food back.

[fodder]

sure.. i get that.. it's just the details that usually messes things up

[Peri]

Just a comment: Tom I think you did a good thing by warning the continents of the imminent change. I believe this should be done rather regularly to allow people which do not read the forum to a) be aware of what's going on b) provide feedback. Too often in the past as ruler I had been engaged in several ooc exchanges with people that were completely unaware of the changes to explain them what to do and so on, and this means they had no idea what was supposed to work how, and in turn couldn't really help with finding bugs.

[Chenier]

Could the grace period cover a few weeks *after* the change as well, and be executed a bit later? In D'Hara, caravans take weeks to reach their destination, and then weeks to come back. Imports we require. To cancel caravans over a mere few days notice could cost us hundreds or even thousands of gold and good amounts of food.

I have relatively few right now, only 250 gold's worth of goods, but it wasn't rare for me to have 1000 gold or more on active caravans at the same time, as mere lord of Paisly. I have no idea what the other lords are doing.

A few days is not warning enough. Takes forever to get anywhere on Dwilight, and my caravans aren't due back for 3, 9, and 10 days personally.

While I understand that changes always cause such issues, is there any reason to rush this if it's going to cause caravan losses? Or could you make all lordly caravans auto-arrive before getting rid of them all? Because if our current caravans are deleted, it creates a gap in shipments that will be felt only in weeks, and not immediately.

[Tom]

I will accelerate caravans just before the change. Those already on their way should be fine, but you shouldn't send out any from now on. No guarantee for those.

[Lorgan]

What would the trade skill do?

Because I think it might be interesting to make the range of traders dependent on their trading skill. Aside from maybe keeping the exotic goods thingie etc...

[Indirik]

IMO, that's a good idea. Higher trader skill = higher range for finding deals.

[Tom]

IMO, that's a good idea. Higher trader skill = higher range for finding deals.

That is exactly what it does already.

[Indirik]

Yeah, I noticed about 10 minutes after I posted that, but forgot to go back and change my post.  :-[

[egamma]

Should we all scrap our caravan builders, to lower building cost for marketplaces? or will our existing buildings be converted over in some fashion?

And, warehouses will just be renamed granaries, right? no need to build anew?

[Tom]

Should we all scrap our caravan builders, to lower building cost for marketplaces? or will our existing buildings be converted over in some fashion?

And, warehouses will just be renamed granaries, right? no need to build anew?

I'll be taking care of granaries in a minute. Marketplaces have always been around, so very likely there is nothing you need to do. I've not decided what's going to happen with the caravan builders.

[fodder]

... i'm very tempted to black market something... smack in ally territory...

[songqu88@gmail.com]

On that note, what happens if we still have caravans with food in them, and no way to sell off the food so that we can drop the caravans? As long as a caravan has food in it, it can't be dropped, so until a manual change poofs those caravans, they're dead weight.

[Tom]

I'll remove them from the game when they no longer do anything.

[D`Este]

Will there be anything to prevent traders from buying all food of a realm without having an agreement about it?

For example, a trader with decent trading skill sits in Port Nebel and snipes the moment he sees a buy offer in Luria Nova and thus instantly buying all food that is available there. This will the offer in Luria Nova is only posted to allow transportation of a rural to a city and not to sell to person that comes first.