Thanks to the new updates to hearths on Unstable (A24.2), we can now make a SERIOUSLY powerful trading town… but progression in this method is very slow. One thing i noticed was that gold production is very fast, but far and away outpacing food production. A simple way to balance this out, and make an impact for those of us that play the game as if gold solves all of our problems, would be to make a trader that is specifically for food (and maybe a general goods trader as well who doesn’t focus on a type of good but rather has a chance to carry anything, maybe at 10% higher rates with a decreased inventory of items, a la stardew valley’s gypsy trader).
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I second this notion, if trading is supposed to be even better in the future, buying food is a logical step toward trading being a valid method of progression. It will let anyone who has a glut of income and a lack of food production supplement their food production temporarily, as well as give people a good gameplay reason not to pick the more military focused options.
While there is no equipment upgrading based off of quality, it seems like when that inevitably is added to the game the production of gold in any town will likely be somewhat higher (people making more gear to try and get third or fourth tier gear) so this sort of a money sink will be very beneficial. There’s already a food merchant, I know I’ve gotten them with Reyya’s Children but as the Ascendancy they seem far less likely to show up or else in this build they’re not showing up properly.
I’d propose giving players both a food specific merchant stall, and opening the food merchant visits to the Ascendancy as well as Reyya’s Children. There’s also a randomness to the rotation of merchants, but I managed to get the stone merchant a dozen times in a row. Having weighted likelihoods based off of prior purchases (I never bought anything from the stone merchant, so he shouldn’t have kept coming back) would mean that merchants you frequent would be more likely to return.
Being able to build a shop, even if it required an entire building, would be an awesome addition to the game IMO. Perhaps a set of requirements for the building so it wasn’t limited to one premade structure, but with the correct furniture you could put in a permanent shop for one of the merchants. This way you could keep the stone merchant or food merchant or whoever you did business with the most in your town.
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The great thing about the extension to this idea is that said building would be easily changed to one more fitting of a role in multiplayer, as there have been talks on that subject. You could have, say, a shop counter to handle local trades from village to village on a local map, as well as a counter for trading to npc traders. You could then more managebly work in an idea of linking a temperate map with one or more acendancy towns on it, to a dessert map with one or more nomad towns on it.
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How much population do you have problems with eating?
After some small amount of testing, my population growth starts to slow down at around 13 to 16 pop. It slows to the point that I get a new pop once every other day to once every couple of days. This slows down my progress in every other category in a cascading effect. If I could trade for the food, it would allow me to reserve one of my Craftsmen to do nothing but make trade goods, which would save the better part of my town from being over run with the strain of trying to keep up. The other problem we run into here is that if the cascade effect happens to a bad enough degree, the town can’t keep up with the demands of not only the townspeople, but also the goblins, and eventually the goblins wipe out the town. This has happened to me only about 10% of my games, with a few other factors adding to it, like how much body stat the pops I do get show up with, affecting how much they can carry and therefore how efficient they can be.
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i was suggesting “the introduction of the church of plenty into a bigger plot”.
like irl you can donate to church and boost your towns hearthling morale and maybe bring more merchant travelers in knowing how rich your town is because you donate to the church.
that’s one way to throw out excess gold i guess lol.
perhaps you can also set the amount of donation per day.