Trade Caravan upgrades - Dwarf Fortress style requests

[Kaizyn]

So I've lurked on the forums for a long time, in particular the modding area, and something I've noticed is that there are no trade system mods to speak of.   I often see people complaining about a lack of traders (even Tynan himself mentioned them being overly scarce in a13) and I found myself constantly hacking the Storyteller XML files a bit to try and increase traders.

Is there any real reason why nobody has modded the trade system at all?    Seems like something people gripe about often, such that there are mining mods made to give sources of steel once you've exhausted your supply due to the lack of traders (or lack of traders of the type you want/need.) and I've seen people asking about ways to have the storytellers send more, etc.


So, I've started on a mod and just laid the basic foundations for it, but I've been wondering if it's worth fleshing out.    I've thought of doing something similar to Dwarf Fortress for the trade caravans of local factions.    That is, you'd request goods and they'd be more inclined to bring those.

At the moment, what I've done allows you to call non-hostile factions and request them to send a trade caravan.   



Features I was thinking about adding, in the rough order I'd do it:

1) Requesting specific items, similar to Dwarf Fortress (priority based, which also increases the price asked for them).    You can only request caravans from factions over a certain reputation, and you need to trade some minimum % of their goods or they'll leave slightly unhappy.   Probably also have a limit of 1 caravan / season / faction or something.

2) Individualize each faction.   Right now there's hardly any meaning in the factions and which ones are hostile or peaceful to you, as you get the same number of raids/hostile events regardless.    I want to make each faction have specific supply & demand items, so you could have meaningful trade, and you may want to make nice with certain people because they're the only ones with plasteel to trade. 

3) Allow you to send your own trade caravans.    Similar to #1, you could set up a trade caravan with things you want to sell and things you want them to buy, then send them to a faction and they'll trade things you requested to you at better rates (since there would be risks involved in sending a caravan, and you'd lose one or more colonists for a while during the trip).   It'd also require tamed animals trained in obedience as pack animals.



This is just a basic outline of what I was thinking - would there be any particular interest in such a mod?    If so, I'll actually look into making it a bit more of a real thing, rather than just a little personal thing for myself.

[25wes25]

Those are all good points. I'm sure the base game will include in depth trading like this as time goes on, but until then it'd be really nice to get a vanilla friendly trade mod. Most of the mods out there that touch trading aren't the most vanilla styled art wise. I myself am not sure how deep you could delve into trade though, so I have no idea why not a lot of modders have touched it.

[Wivex]

Those are good ideas, i wish you good luck with them.
But as a man who works on trade system overhaul atm (specifically on trading process, where pawns have to actually haul tradeables to the "marketplace"), i'd say that you have to do A LOT to make it work. Starting from getting to know how to use detours for modifying some of vanilla classes and spending around 40-100+ hours to make it all work, depending on your modding and programming expirience.

[Kaizyn]

Those are all good points. I'm sure the base game will include in depth trading like this as time goes on, but until then it'd be really nice to get a vanilla friendly trade mod. Most of the mods out there that touch trading aren't the most vanilla styled art wise. I myself am not sure how deep you could delve into trade though, so I have no idea why not a lot of modders have touched it.

I'm definitely looking to keep it pretty vanilla..   ultimately I'd like to even implement a "supply" thing, where factions would produce a certain amount of surplus of various things, and that's all they would have for trade  (so you couldn't get an unlimited supply of what should normally be relatively rare things)

Those are good ideas, i wish you good luck with them.
But as a man who works on trade system overhaul atm (specifically on trading process, where pawns have to actually haul tradeables to the "marketplace"), i'd say that you have to do A LOT to make it work. Starting from getting to know how to use detours for modifying some of vanilla classes and spending around 40-100+ hours to make it all work, depending on your modding and programming expirience.

From the digging I've done into the classes, it doesn't look like it would be particularly difficult to add some things of this sort.   It took a few hours of digging through the classes with ILSpy to see what was going on, and then all of 30 minutes to make a new class that lets you get new trade caravans coming.    Granted, that's really nothing, but it's a start.

Actually, since caravans were added in A13, the code for generating their goods, AI for moving them around, setting up camp, etc has already been written.    Just pillaging that made it possible.   Were I to make my own caravans, it would have been probably more of a job than I would have been willing to do just as a 'test if it works'  ... but since it was fairly easy to just rework that stuff, I'm guessing tweaking more things (like the trader goods generation to have them carry specific goods rather than the standard bit-of-everything) won't be brutal either.    I've already given it a start.

#3 on my list would be a lot more time consuming though, as I'd like to have you actually load the animals up and go with them.   Doable, but it'd be a low priority... 

My real plan is to just get a simple Dwarf Fortress style trade request system and unique supply/demand goods for factions going.   (In particular I have the "More Factions Spawn" mod in mind to go hand-in-hand, as having more factions would give the flexibility to have more interesting supply/demand for traders)

I always felt like the trading & factions needed a bit more stuff to them...  so why not, may as well do a bit of something with it!

[25wes25]

I'm definitely looking to keep it pretty vanilla..   ultimately I'd like to even implement a "supply" thing, where factions would produce a certain amount of surplus of various things, and that's all they would have for trade  (so you couldn't get an unlimited supply of what should normally be relatively rare things)

That sounds like a good idea to me, it'd add in that extra issue with trade when you end up exploiting cheap prices and end up demanding more than can be produced leading to increased prices. Thus influencing moderate spending and trade with multiple factions, yet another reason to make friends not enemies so you can get those extra trade options.

[The King of Nipples]

Would love this please make it and if not can you upload the parts you have