Figured discussing commodities/villages/Trade was worth its own thread.

What I don't understand is the 'stockpiling' issue. Could someone elaborate on what exactly the problem is? Should organizations be offering cheaper commodities?

As Celest's Trade Minister, I sell our surplus commodities at rates lower than the minimum price available in villages. For example, rope is sold at 14 gp, while it is available at 15 gp in villages. I think it's a fair deal and have always assumed that the "stockpiled" commodities were just largely undesirable/had limited usage (e.g. marble) or were produced faster than purchased (e.g. food commodities). Also considering that some undesirable from another organization could just buy your commodities out, I am disinclined to lower prices without that comfort buffer.

So bump on the idea for allowing separate prices for your own citizens vs. foreigners.

Absolutely. Even garden-variety shops allow price policies, it's mind-boggling that city comm shops don't, where the call for such a thing seems far greater since it's officially a state-run organ.

For that matter, also give the opportunity to ban people from buying from there based on org-membership. It is perplexing that any unenemied person can buy comms from the org-comm shops.

Naturally, this won't stop all trafficking. People inside the org can buy comms and sell them outside the commune. But at least then, the blackmarketeer still has an opportunity to increase the cost as they see fit before passing the commodities outside of the commune/city.

Yes please.

I dunno. The more I think about it, the more I think that most of it will end up being a good thing.

The last incident between Hallifax and Glomdoring comes to mind. Glomdoring is all "Noooooo, don't buy our comms!!!!1", when they don't actually sell at a substantial discount for anything. Estarra seems to be right on that count. They had a stockpile, so why stress? It might also get people off of religious governments, which have been the most popular since open beta. Just sell your comms for the price you want to get for them, and all's good.

If you really want to get comms moving, institute organizational inflation: if you have a lot of gold that doesn't move, its relative value goes down (which, for the sake of coding, could be a simple loss of gold). Encourage gold to change hands more and you'll get those commodities dirt cheap.

Wrong.

Glomdoring was all "Don't buy our comms to resell in your market at a higher price" which... is exactly what happens if the price is brought down too low below village rates. The prices were actually quite discounted as such things go. That is, in fact, why they were bought out to resell... (you know, that's the whole point).

The comms don't go out of the economy, they just get moved to another org with a higher price attached so everyone suffers more.

For the record, I actually sold at a loss. I seriously just wanted Hallifax to have a ton of leather so that we could start collectivizing.

About 150,000 gold lost out of a 1.4 million gold transaction (at least, that's what we didn't get back). I figured it had just found its way into someone's pockets, but that's not much of a loss so we didn't make a fuss about it.

Also, you were quoted trying to sell the leather on the Market channel first.

The change is only going to be nominally useful for preventing stockpiling... the same things that aren't being used now (meat, leather, rope, eggs, fish, etc.) are still not going to be used, and will still continue to just sit in the markets gathering dust, and the things that are being used a lot (wood, grain, iron, silk) are going to become even more of a pain to come by at reasonable prices. If it bothers the admin that the numbers are high, stop giving us villages that produce commodities that no one uses or, give us a use for these commodities.

While on the vague subject of Trade and Commodities:

Fix Rikenfriez General Store.

Please.

And Ptoma. And Ixthiaxa.
I'm actually okay with Rikenfriez being in whatever stasis it is... we actually get some wood tithed, as no one can buy it.

I think the better solution here would have been increasing the commodity cap in villages from 250. If it's higher, more comms will be in villages and immediately available, rather than even risking being stockpiled by orgs - not many orgs are going to go around emptying out villages frequently, I expect, except for possibly rare/desirable comms (such as wood for a city).

The other option is too look at the pricing in villages, and how it affects how much cities sell for what price. Someone who's looked at trade economics in more detail could better discuss that.

Tithes are done before it is added to stock - what's for sale in the village has nothing to do with how much the org gets, their political and gov't style does.

Xavius has the right of it - now, religious gov'ts produce power, conquest gov'ts produce feelings/conquest pool, and commercial gov'ts tithe markedly high amounts of commodities.

And there's nothing wrong with Ixthiaxa and Ptoma as far as I can tell, except their max stock is set at 225 instead of 250.

And my comment about tithes and village stocks goes to Esano, too. What the village has for sale and what the commune has in stock have no correlation. Increasing how much can sit in a village will do nothing to address an org sitting on 40k steel, 25k gems, 46k iron, 30k wood, 40k silver, etc etc.

No, but it will markedly reduce the effect of such by reducing reliance upon org-bought commodities, which I can see as the only reason to complain about stockpiling - people require what isn't being put up for sale due to large stockpiles. If more is available elsewhere, less is required from city shops, stockpiling is less of an issue.

I'm not sure how telling us to stop stockpiling is going to encourage people to move to a commercial government. Commercial will just produce more of these commodities, which, according to this post, we don't need.

... no. Villages have been tithing a significantly higher amount when village comms are at 250 for a given comm for ages now. Which makes enough sense - if the village has no other place to put it, they send it to you. If this is not how it was supposed to be, then how villages are supposed to tithe should be outlined somewhere, so people can actually bug these things.

Talan's got a pretty good point here too. Poorly utilized tradeskills result in poorly utilized classes of commodities...like groceries and rope. Targetted improvements to the usefulness of specific commodities might be better. This may or may not be best done through tradeskills.

(Sorry, I know I usually follow something like that up with at least a far-fetched idea, but I'm having coders' block and really ought not to be here. )

Oversupply of rope?



>_>

Nunchaku?

Ninjakari could start using rope chains. Maybe.

EDIT: This problem with the "useless" comms was further exacerbated by the tendency of villages to produce more at the 250 comm limit. You get all this rope and fish that no one wants to buy, and as a reward, you get more of it tithed to you. Lovely.

I'm sure they would love that, with their new 200 commodity weapons.