Give Trader orders for next time visit

[Bolgfred]

Dear colonist society,

Currently I am quite unhappy or bored by social skills. Same am I about Traders. By skill you get mostly +/-10% Price or something, which I barely notice, plus they have many many tings I don't need or care about.

In this way, I think I have a better Idea: Everytime a trader shows up on your map, you can make demands für the next visit in Trading screen. The effectivity and precision of these demands depends on negotiators social skills:

Skill: Description " Example"
1: Pawn can see max amount of items trader is carrying "I am sorry but I don't have so much items with me"
2: Pawn can see quality level "rifle(bad) instead of rifle(unknown)"
3: Pawn can ask for Basic types "More Clothing, Wood, Leather"
5: Pawn can say what he doesn't want next time "No more leather"
6: Pawn can say what he wants exactly "More Panther Leather, No Cowskin"
7: Pawn can demand domesticated animals "Give me a Muffalo, it's my only hope"
8: Pawn can ask for specific items "More Silver Clubs, No Cowskin pants"
10: Pawn can demand quality "no items below masterwork, you peasant"
11: Pawn can demand a "buy-only" caravan, who has no Items, but lots of silver "I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse"
13: Pawn can demand exotic animals "I need an alphabeaver. Don't ask me why"
15: Pawn can sell arts "This Statue is extraordinary. I sell it for 500% price to you, my friend, and I will still make a loss."
20: A negotiator can 'praise' high quality furniture or Art. This will increase their value and beauty effect, but lowers popularity on the other trader. "look this shiny table. It's mine! miinne! miiiiine! and.. no you can't play with it. HAHAHA"

For every point in social one additional demand can be added, up to, you get it, 20 different demands per visit.


Pre-Order Delivery
Additionally to this, a Pawn can be sent alone, carrying silver only to another Camp and buy things, which will be delivered by the trade partner, as soon as they can deliver. In this case prices will be increased or a fix price will be added or something.
By this you can also trade with raiders, but they might have a 50/50% chance or something, that when your negotiator arrives on their map, he will be attacked or talked.


BONUS: Every camp got their own ressources. Not in clear numbers, but in eh... flames, depending on their surrounding.
E.g. if there are mountains 3-5 fields around them, they will have more stones and steel.
In a tropical forest, more medicine. Colder regions more fur / leather.
By this they can fulfill demands worse or better. When you order guns from a tribal they might give you a badly shaped uzi or a rifle, but probably nothing.

[SpaceDorf]

First this sounds really good, even if I can't follow some of your ideas in the skill progression.

Second is just a single word that came out a bit wrong : demand .. sounds to pushy and raidery to me .. make it request,
like you, those towns are no wishlist factory.

Third and final my other thoughts.
Trade delivery : If you buy from pirates or industrials they should be able to send goods per transport pod. this would of course be a bit more expensive due to the extra ressources needed, but this can easily be calculated by the total weight of your order. Maybe you can even "book" a flight back.
Similiar with Tribals, you join the npc caravan for the way back and get to make some friends on the way.

Overall this should not only be based on the Trader Skill in general, but also on your relations with the faction itself.
The better your relationship the more is possible.
For example your pirate "trade" .. a Trader below 15 should not even try .. and the pirates take into account the backup the trader has ..
a lone trader with lots of silver can be as skilled as he wants .. a trader with 6 armed guards is a lot more convincing.

Finally .. I would bet my left eyepatch on the fact that a lot of those Ideas are allready on Tynans gameplan.

[asanbr]

Tldr but I disagree with the first few things that I did read

1) if we could make demands it would practically bring us back to the old game where bulk ships showed up all the time so you could effectively trade anything you wanted at most times.
That was redesigned because reasons, and while uncomfortable at first, I like it now because randomness and scarcity v makes the game more interesting, requires more planning and interesting choices.


2) I don't know if it's 5% or 10% and at what skill level, but that amount on every trade (buying and selling) over a long time makes for a huge amount of money.

I recently realised I could use useless prisoners like the 99% tribals for social training, since they won't convert and will stay around long term.
Until now I've always released them to improve faction .

[NeverPire]

The pre-order delivery is really interesting but has a little problem.
Due to caravan events, send a pawn alone is a hugely bad idea.

Others proposition are interesting but I think about an increasing of the price of 30 % or even more. 10 % is not enough.

[Bolgfred]

I wouldn't go too much into increased prices. It's more about what another colony has available in town. When I ask a mining colony for steel, they won't tell me it's expensive, but throw it a me like hell in trade for food or something.
Same for tribals with fur and leather. I simply like the idea of communication. One example could be, i ask a tribal, located in a tropical forest, for a living panther, grizzly meat and some smoke leaf, the caravan leader tells me that grizzly meat is a problem but that he be back in 20 days. In addition he requests guns in a value of 300$.
In 20 days the caravan arrives, having one panther, 200 smokeleaf and 13x grizzly meat, plus other stuff. If now you won't pay them with 300$ guns, but only silver or something the will be pissed. When the caravan leaves he asks if you need the Sam things again and. Next time there will be more if you deliver guns.
I think it's very important that they a) deliver only if their need is satisfied. And b) the Ressource delivered are not unlimited. There should be a list of items, defined by colony and biome that names the stockpiles and availability, which can be depleted if used too much. In this way the basic trading randomness is still there, but you can focus it partially.

And I love the idea of a mediocre-low negotiator, asking for a wolf and getting wolf meat and fur instead. Or getting a cow instead of a horse :-)

Same would be if you ask for   some bionic arms, and they say okay, but bring us some scyther  corpses and an ai core for that, else we're pissed.
Or it's good for plasters. Lots of Food !