Suggestion for trade treaties

[robc04_1]

The trade treaties are a little bland at the moment and I was thinking about how to spice them up. What if the following changes were made:
- Introduce a new thing to produce, called trade goods. It's production costs would have to be balanced.
- Change the trade treaty so it allows the two factions to sell trade goods to each other. The amount of trade goods that could be sold to a faction would be limited to a number based on their population.
- A faction could earn money by producing trade goods and selling them to the other faction up to the capped amount, instead of just automatically getting some amount added each turn. Then, if a faction wanted to earn extra money, they would have to commit a city to produce trade goods.
- Maybe the trade good production item could replace the produce wealth item, or at least nerf the produce wealth item.
- Maybe have it so if a faction receives trade goods from another faction, it raises their morale to some extent, based on how much of the trade good are bought by the faction.

[jdmillard]

Meh.

I'd rather just have some way to buy/trade food and minerals for when I have excess or in case I ever suddenly need some. But even that isn't that bid of a deal to me.

[Barbariandude]

Seconding jdmillard. Trade goods sounds like a completely unnecesary complication, while exchanging gold for food/minerals would actually be very useful, and might end up as an awesome variant on the economic runthroughs.

[robc04_1]

I agree that it would be good to allow trades for food and minerals.

[SephiRok]

We were thinking of implementing a buy/sell for food and minerals. Imagine buy and sell buttons at the bottom of the economy panel. Sorta like a marketplace; costs could fluctuate based on availability. Can't think of a name of a game that had that right now, but it's been done before. Ah, HoMM I guess is a primitive example.

It's even easy to implement.

[Barbariandude]

We were thinking of implementing a buy/sell for food and minerals. Imagine buy and sell buttons at the bottom of the economy panel. Sorta like a marketplace; costs could fluctuate based on availability. Can't think of a name of a game that had that right now, but it's been done before. Ah, HoMM I guess is a primitive example.

It's even easy to implement.

Excellent! I think that the buy/sell prices should be linked to the current stockpile of the resource your trading available to the faction you're trading with, and require a trade agreement. So basically, the more of a resource another faction has, the lower the price to buy and the lower the price to sell (market saturation).

[jdmillard]

We were thinking of implementing a buy/sell for food and minerals. Imagine buy and sell buttons at the bottom of the economy panel. Sorta like a marketplace; costs could fluctuate based on availability. Can't think of a name of a game that had that right now, but it's been done before. Ah, HoMM I guess is a primitive example.

It's even easy to implement.

Excellent! I think that the buy/sell prices should be linked to the current stockpile of the resource your trading available to the faction you're trading with, and require a trade agreement. So basically, the more of a resource another faction has, the lower the price to buy and the lower the price to sell (market saturation).

Would it be a trade with specific factions? StephiRok seemed to suggest that it's a general global marketplace with prices depending on all the stockpiles. I think I like that idea more.

[robc04_1]

I think it would be cool to be able to put out a bid for resources, say I want 50 food for 500 credits. Then the next turn the factions can reply that they are willing. If multiple factions are willing then give it to the faction who has the best relations with the one making the request. Maybe also give a boost to the chance to get the bid if you have a trade agreement.

[fortydayweekend]

We were thinking of implementing a buy/sell for food and minerals. Imagine buy and sell buttons at the bottom of the economy panel. Sorta like a marketplace; costs could fluctuate based on availability. Can't think of a name of a game that had that right now, but it's been done before. Ah, HoMM I guess is a primitive example.

More recently, CivWorld had almost everything globally tradeable with a marketplace system - food/resources/tech/culture and military units. Being a 24/7 online game with 100+ players there was so much volatility that trading became probably the most important part of the game (and so success was a function of how much time you could spend playing).

I like the idea, but it might detract from the need to expand and/or invade to secure resources, making the game less interesting. So it would have to be quite expensive to buy goods from the market (maybe cheaper than invading a powerful neighbour but more expensive than expansion or invading a weak faction).

Similarly selling surplus goods shouldn't be lucrative. This could be explained as transport being costly to defend against aliens.

Also it shouldn't take up too much of the player's time to come up with a reasonably good trading strategy - e.g. buy/sell could be in bulk quantities so you only need to make a decision every year or so. Along with that, there should be very low volatility in prices (barring a declaration of war). You shouldn't need to tweak things every turn... but given how the rest of the game has been designed, I'm pretty sure that goes without saying!

[HitmanN]

Definitely like the idea of being able to sell/trade excess food/minerals, or buy them if in desperate need.