A few suggestions for improving caravaning.

[Tristan]

In no strict priority. It is great that you can now actively play strategus, but micromanagement could reduced a bit with some of these suggestions.

1) Make it so that you can carry more than one type of trade good.
2) Make it so that you can store trade goods in your own fiefs or
3) Make it so that you can rent storage in neutral/others fiefs
4) Make it so that you can acquire some sort of item that allows to carry more trade goods (equus africanus asinuss?? x4 instead of recruits x1. No more equus africanus asinuss than recruits?)
5) Make a notification system that gives the option of notifying the player when he has reached his destination or is doing nothing.
6) Make an auctioning system so that you don't have to sell at a fixed price.
7) Make a way-point system.
8) (as cicero pointed out) Make it so that you can see your faction members trade good.

The following ideas are more twists than something essential (which I actually regard the above as):

a) If have as many horses as recruits you move faster on the map.
b) A sort of smith skill for trade goods.
c) Buildings that improve your fiefs production capability.
d) A tax on all trade inter-players in the markets in the large cities.

[Jarlek]

Please.

1. Being just able to have one trade good at a time really fucks up the clan caravans. Wasn't that the whole point of caravans? To make everyone having to be involved in making gold? Now everyone have to be doing EVERYTHING himself and cooperation is just the old "dump to this guy".
2/3. Remember the Headquarter/guild suggestion I made? This could be instead of it but I would rather have that.
4. Donkeys for more trade goods, but currently there is no limit (if I remember correctly), so wouldn't be needed now.
5. That would be nice.
6. uhmmm. Not sure about this.
7. YES!
8. YES!

[Slamz]

Regarding #6:

Many MMOs have auction houses that are "seller's choice".  When you sell an item you pick:

Starting price AND/OR Buyout price
How long to keep it on the market (there is usually some maximum allowable value)

If you do a start price with no buyout, then it's a full auction.  Highest bidder when the time runs out, wins.
If you do a buyout price with no starting price then it's a flat sale.  First person to meet the price gets it.
If you do both then it's an auction but if someone meets the buyout, they get it immediately.

Pretty standard.  If I recall correctly, EVE was a straight buyout market (I don't recall there being auctions) and POTBS had sort of a weird blind system, which was technically a buyout market but sort of worked like an auction.


You definitely can't go wrong emulating EVE's market, though.


Regarding #5:
It would be interesting if there was a simple API (something else EVE does, to an extent) which allows developers to create programs that query the database.  Then we could more easily develop our own apps to do things like this.  There would also be a potential for someone to create, say, Droid and iPhone apps for Strategus, rather than having to use the web interface.

Pretty sure we can do this anyway by just querying the web page for results but an API would probably save hassle and bandwidth all around.

[Tristan]

http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,18392.0.html.

According to this thread something needs to be fixed ASAP.

Until the tradegoods sell in a foreign village with their originally price tag attached, please rename all the goods to "Tradegood".

And it should really be the goal, that when I produce expensive items in an expensive town, I can sell them expensive somewhere, not just sell them like the cheap ass items of poor villages.

Make poor villages produce poor items (food) and richer villages luxury goods.