That is most reasonably read as 'time and effort'-- you know, instead of generating the extra power of religious or the extra comms of trade, it makes Conquest Pool power.

I don't think you can reasonably read it to say that they just decide to destroy their commodities. I certainly can't.

They don't "destroy" their commodities. They use the commodities to make the Conquest pool.

... so, they produce fewer comms because they are focusing on making the Conquest pool.

They produce less power because they are focusing on the Conquest pool.

And you are trying to argue that it reasonably implies that they are further randomly destroying commodities to make the Conquest pool, too? Despite the fact that it has nothing to do with how many comms they have in their markets (it's a flat rate)?

I am saying that a portion of the tithes that would go to Glomdoring are instead being transfered to the conquest pool.

And what I am saying is that they are not.

Each village produces exactly the same amount of power, regardless of how many comms they have / how many they lost / etc.

Comms also have nothing to do with power so that doesn't even make sense.

Even if that's the RP justification, it needs to go for the good of forgers everywhere.

How's the commodity situation in the last few days? Just want to take a pulse. (It looks good to me but wanted to hear what you guys think.)

Please try not to derail! I am looking for constructive feedback.

Is it still occasionally nearly doubling in price when you buy maybe 10/20% of what's available?

It feels better. I think pricing as a whole is still too volatile, but if you're willing to quest when you're buying from villages and not buy passively produced things right after the weave, the system is very workable.

Is the commodities system working as intented? Yeah, it looks that way.

Are people convinced the new prices on tradeskill-goods are worth paying? No.

Pricing is kind of high, but might be more tolerable as production shifts (which it appears to be!).

I still feel a bit uncertain about poultry. There are rather few chickens in the world with which to affect change, and most villages just don't generate much of it. Milk is also really bad in some villages - Estelbar in particular seems to lose a lot when it tithes. If there was any actual competition for cows for milk production, I think only one or two villages might manage to hold up well (nevermind cows also can be exchanged for leather and meat, and there are other sources for those, but none else for milk).

Neither of these are generally consumed in massive numbers, though, so a very slight adjustment might be all that is needed.

There's about 48 cows over the course of an hour. Should be plenty, considering all the other sources for meat, leather, etc.

?

There's 22 total cows that can be found in Oleanvir and the roads. Do they repop faster than an hour?

I've brought in over 80 cows to Estelbar once, only to see the milk stock get cut in half (56~ lost) at the next weave. It took me four hours to do that. I'm sorry, but that's too much work for milk, so unless that was residual funkiness, or there is an obvious source of extra cows I am missing, I think I'd rather do something else.

Also, without wrangle, milk production isn't the greatest plan ever devised. Sheep tend to take priority for hay.

What I'd like to see considered is the disparity between how much commodity quests matter to different commodities. Most notably wood. If you need a lot of meat comms, and you can gather up 22 or 48 or whatever cows, you can make a lot of meat and drive the price down, and get enough to make piles and piles of food. But even if I had a way to make 48 wood commodities, that's like one sixth of one cabinet. Any way you can balance things around quantities can't help but hurt the larger-comm-investment trades greatly disproportionately.

What's worse, wood is not only in high quantity demand, and also needed by a large number of people for a large number of things (like traps, arts skills, and it's also used in some of the other trades), it's the only one that the vast majority of us cannot do anything at all to produce it, short of raiding inside prime enemy territory. (There's no way that can be the expected method of dealing with a commodity system, particularly not when I'd have to level Glomdoring to furnish a living room.)

If we had some way to produce more wood and affect its prices, the way we do virtually every other commodity, it wouldn't make a huge dent (since you can't possibly make quests produce enough wood to really matter to an artisan without skewing everything for everyone else), but it'd sure be a nice start. Maybe those grotesque ravenwoods could break out of Glomdoring and start wandering the roads and mountains -- Glom would love that, it's the spreading wyrd, and we could all kill the damned things all day long for their lumber.

The communes were always supposed to be where a large portion of the wood supplies came from (makes sense b/c there's a lot of wood in the woods, no?). It allows the communes somewhat of a leg up on wood supplies and it really shouldn't be insignificant. How do communes manage their own wood production? Are sections or areas set aside for wood manufacture? If not, why not?

Yes, sections are set aside for wood manufacture. It kind of gets messed up when someone raids and chops a bunch of saplings or opens gaps in the middle of an area.

The biggest problem is that it takes so long for trees to grow, and even longer for those mature trees to reach a good size for mulching. So it's not a large infusion or easily questable, but a random injection every couple of weeks.

I can't speak for Glomdoring, of course, but in Serenwilde, the trees are considered property of the commune, and it is against the rules for any member of the commune, no matter how much work they do to help maintain them, to benefit from them, not so far as a single plank of wood.

Furthermore, more than half the time, we don't have any way to turn lumber into wood. If we don't happen to hold a village with a sawmill, the lumber just rots unused, and we can no longer even preserve it until we get a village with a mill.

Forests are kind of slow as a means of producing wood anyway. No, that's not really true. If you look at the amount of wood a forest can produce and how long it takes, the amount is about right. What's completely wrong is how much wood it takes to make furniture. Once you take that into account, it takes a forest several real-life months to produce enough wood to furnish one guildhall (and that furniture, being impossible to maintain, will decay almost as fast as the wood used to make it took to grow).

And even if the communes worked out a perfect system where they carefully monitored their trees, painstakingly calculated ways to plant, defend, and mulch them for maximum return, taking into account raids and oversights, able to build their supply of wood commodities...

...where does that leave cities? They must either raid the forests (no commodity should require raiding), or they will be at the mercy of the forests to trade for it, which is exactly what we tried to deal away with when we spread out alchemy and enchanting.

Would the idea of introducing more commodity quests to help bump things like grain, vegetables, fruits, and ores be considered? I mean, I think it'd be dandy if say, maybe the dwarves in the Chancel held raw iron/gold/silver/platinum/marble ores to be turned into the villages to help boost that up a bit without altogether changing the comm quest code and adding shinier mini-stuff to the game.

Same with maybe those trill gardeners/orchard people in Clarramore for raw fruit comms, those elfen in the Dell for hemp (random idea), and maybe the hyfae/kryden inhabitants for raw grain and vegetable comms. I wouldn't mind if some spiders dropped spinnerets for silk either.

Obviously, I'm not asking for -all- of those critters to drop those comms (since that'd kinda be insane), but ways to gather those raw commodities to slightly boost production in our own villages would be nice and good for some questing, I'd think. Well, that and a way of getting them without slaughtering our own people anyway (since furrikin farmers, hemp farmers and dwarven miners are all greedy and kinda need to be killed (counterproductive) just to get the raw comms they hold).