Trade Ministries: Pre-programmed prices

Nizaris

Ideally, cities should operate their comm shops so that citizens are essentially paid to fetch commodities, out of a portion of the city's own profit. This is a win-win scenario: cities get commodities that they need for their citizens, and the citizens that do the leg work get profits that they can use for curatives, credits, lessons, and artefacts. Unfortunately, this is easily abusable, as the rate at which comms spawn in villages is quite high to meet with global crafting needs. The solution then becomes to either: (1) keep up with prices frequently, and manually, in order to avoid over-buying or over-selling, or (2) set prices to not reward commodity trading, and instead have the Minister and aides do all of the fetching.

Therefore: the Trade Minister of cities should be able to setup price profiles for commodities when the stock reaches customized levels. These profiles would automatically affect purchase, sale, and internal prices for each commodity, based on inventory levels. The Trade Minister can already do this by manually adjusting price levels, but profiles would make it automatic for when they are not around. I'm not sure if the commands listed below are the right mix, but here's something along the lines of what I'm thinking:

Commands

CITY COMM BUY <comm> FOR <price> AT <inventory>

-- sets city purchase price when inventory is greater than <inventory>

CITY COMM SELL <comm> FOR <price> AT <inventory>

-- sets city sale price when inventory is less than <inventory>

CITY COMM SET INTERN <comm> <price> AT <inventory>

-- sets internal city sale price when inventory is less than <inventory>

CITY COMM VIEW PROFILES <comm>

-- view price profiles for specified commodity

CITY COMM <comm> DELETE PROFILE <inventory>

-- deletes profile for specified commodity at specified inventory quantity

CITY COMM <comm> DELETE PROFILES

-- deletes all profiles for specified commodity

Blujixapug

Commodities are a total mess. I don't see the point unless it's as part of a total overhaul.

Silas

The system is fine as-is for what it does. Traders satchels have already screwed things up long past the point of salvageability in terms of things like this, but an active trade minister is still quite easily able to keep on top of prices that they want to buy/sell stock for.