Agree, getting a high level of Trade is painful if you care about roleplaying and you do this the intended way. However, if you don't care about merchant gameplay and just want to get it levelled fast, there is nice exploit for it, check out this madman:
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA
So let me get this straight:
- The profit margin tracked by the Trade skill is set by the last transaction you made
- The XP is given even for profits that a town/caravan/village can't afford to pay
- Apparently prices by villages/caravans are linked to the closest city
- But those trades don't affect the city's price, so you can sell high to a caravan + sell low to a city + buy back low from the caravan + buy back high from the city + sell even higher to the caravan
- Also the prices for all crafting metals + all packhorses + all riding horses + all warhorses are linked, which lowers when you pop one sub-unit to the left for sale and pop another sub-unit to the right for purchase, but doesn't remove the discount on the proposed transaction if you pop the sale horses back to the right before hitting OK
Does this sound right @SadShogun? Also, can you specify what you meant by this:
Do you mean that production supply is factored into the demand/price equation? Or did you mean there's a hidden minimum cache of goods that players can't buy? Both? Both would seem ideal.The "supplies" are already not updated immediately and they instead slowly follow the actual supply in the market. In a sense this acts a store, and protects against the shocks created by looting, caravans/player buying a lot of goods in a short time etc.
Here are my proposed fixes to these specific exploits:
- Obviously, the item-price bug needs to be fixed by recalculating all prior proposed trades every time the transaction changes
- It'd be really nice if the same system that applied to staple foods? Ideally, only for base demand but not luxury demand? (I mean, it might already do that and I just haven't seen it)
- The inventory of a village and the inventory of a caravan should be counted - for demand/supply price equations - as part of their host town's inventory
- Workshops should reserve or purchase a week's worth of input supply in advance
The only player exploit this might create would be buying low from a caravan and selling high to a city it's going to, but that could be compensated for by increasing sell prices on caravans OR tagging the Sell price to the city it's going to but tagging the Buy price to its host city (OR ideally make it buy at the lower of the two prices but sell at the higher of the two).
This would also mean more sensible caravan behavior, as they'd exist first-and-foremost to sell the host town's products and buy the host town's needs.
AND it would lead to semi-realistic price shocks in host cities as caravans or villages are raided. For instance, a host town for a silver mine would not panic-buy silver from caravans if its supply has largely run out but there is plenty of silver in the village. The panic would start when the villagers are intercepted and their silver is stolen by looters. This way towns would be much more resilient to supply shocks and less vulnerable to player abuse. Similarly, capturing the castle of the silver mine would cause prices to sharply increase as their supply disappears.
One larger thought for you @SadShogun: One thing I noticed looking at the pricing equations from last year is that goods seemed to reach market price at slightly less than one week's supply. This means that a town with enough goods to reach "market price" will run out of EVERYTHING it has if it receives nothing for a week. This appears to be intentional.
I don't know if the pricing equation has changed in this aspect since then, but I suggest that doubling or even quadrupling the multiplier so to reach market price at a 2 week or 1 month stockpile would not substantially affect the simulation...
BUT it would make players' lives a lot easier by allowing for a greater range of trading opportunity and less room for the econ simulation to collapse.
This issue is probably why it's difficult for players to make profits. Because even a town with ZERO supply will only purchase enough to get them through the next week before heading into the discount zone.
Here's the proof in the pudding demonstrating market prices for all goods (Price Multiplier = 1) means about 6-7 days of supply: