Bay 12 Games Forum

Right now, trade isn't nearly so interesting as it could be, for two reasons:

• It's rarely useful
• It's easy to produce absurdly high-valued objects

To make it more interesting, it should ideally give higher rewards, but at a higher cost. In terms of cost, rather than attempting to completely redesign item prices -- there'll always be something valuable people can make easily -- I think the thing to do is for the traders to present limited markets. Once you've met their demand for a good, they don't want any more. This could either be a hard cap on how much of any given type of good they'll buy, or a diminishing returns sort of deal, where the more a given civilization buys of something, the less they'll offer for the next one of that class. This could also have bleed-over: selling a bunch of dwarven syrup roasts could reduce the value of dwarven syrup roasts by 20%, but only reduce other prepared meals by 5% (or whatever). The prices would gradually reset over time. This way, no single thing will be too valuable.

In terms of increasing the rewards from trading, I figure that each civilization would have its own specialty, something you can't get yourself, at least not easily. Ideally, each race would send a diplomat, so you could make trade agreements in much the same way as outpost liaisons work now. These are just examples of things each race could specialize in: trade with the dwarves could determine the skills of your next wave of migrants (the mountainhomes would send better people to a profitable outpost, the liaison would ask what people you need), the elves could bring valuable animals, the humans could... actually I have no idea what the humans could bring. Maybe they could get stuff off of tall shelves for you.

Am I making any sense at all? I'm going on like 3 hours of sleep here, so I may be babbling.

So a while ago, I was visited by an ambassador from the humans. He was a gopher covered in scales, with a sting. The meeting went well enough. A year later, I was visited by another human ambassador, this one built on more conventionally human lines, which surprised me. I checked the civ info for the humans, and there was no mention of any scaly gophers in positions of power. However, during the meeting, some goblins showed up, led by... a scaly gopher with a sting. I didn't make a note of the original ambassador's name, but I assume it was the same (for lack of a better term) person, driven out and now in charge of the goblins.

I have three questions:

• Am I right in assuming it to be the same entity?
• As I understand it, human ambassadors will warn future human invaders about any traps they know about. As it happens, I don't think the gopher saw any of my traps in his first visit, but if he had, would the goblins have been immune?
• How representative of their kind are these guys? Are they about the same difficulty as their subterranean cousins?

Ah, a lever! Hadn't thought of that. I forgot that nobles can be assigned to that job. That was the problem, I couldn't figure out how to get him where I wanted him.

Enough mechanisms for what?

Metal; shittons of silver laying around.

And you've checked to make sure the jugs are empty? And there's no stockpile set to give to the press?

If I have a nestbox, built on a solid tile but completely surrounded by empty space, and non-flying creatures hatch from it, will they immediately fall down (possibly to their deaths, if the fall was deep enough), or will they all stand on top of that one tile and start fighting, or what?

Noticed something odd when a nearby human civ sent a demon diplomat. It moved quite slowly, so I could see its path in a lot of detail, and I noticed that it seems to use a different pathfinding algorithm than dwarves do. Keep in mind that throughout the following, the mayor was absolutely motionless in his office, waiting for the demon.

The mayor's office is in the northwest corner of a very large, mostly empty room. The stairs are approximately in the middle of this room. The mayor, heading to his office, generally goes diagonally from the stairs. The demon, however, moved in a straight line west from the stairs until he was due south of the mayor, then moved straight north.

There is an alternate explanation possible for this: moving in this fashion took the demon directly to a weapon rack, located about 20 squares south of the mayor's office. Possibly its building destroyer nature made it want to seek out this building, even though it doesn't actually destroy buildings when it's a diplomat? This path also took him over some smoothed floor, but I doubt that had anything to do with it.