As part of my ongoing interest in caravans (mechanically and conceptually!), I am hoping to get some information/opinions from Traders. I know this has been asked in the past, but I figured it would help to just get a fresh set of views. I make no promises about what can be delivered, or when, but I would like to hear from players about what you guys feel can be done to improve this system.

So let me know what you want to see more of, or dislike. What is stopping you from using caravans, or what would result in you using them more?

caravan trading on the islands.

---

Inside each of us, there is the seed of both good and evil. It's a constant struggle as to which one will win. And one cannot exist without the other. Eric Burdon
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/evil

[fixing formatting]


<rubs hands together>

Oh boy, here's my top 9* list, in priority order:

1. Trading Experience: Create a way to use the caravan to train trading. It doesn't have to be faster than existing methods, but it would be amazing to have your caravan train trading.

2. Crafting: The turn-table should be updated to handle the modern crafting implements. A loom, anvil, cambrinth pyramid, and the like.

3. Travel: Make it move instantly if you have no trading contracts active.

4. Access: I want a way to interact with my caravan box from afar or a way to keep my caravan with me at all times.

5. Hirelings: Hire NPCs to stay with you in your caravan. High level trader ability or even MTX item. Hire a repairer, or an auto-path, or a trade good vendors (consumables you can buy from societies like brushes or yarn).

6. Feeding: Some sort of magical means of feeding your caravan so you don't need to find grass as often.

7. Starlight Aura: I want to install small moongates on the caravan which gives my trader access to starlight aura while I'm underground.

8. Nodes: Turn the caravan interior into a node for exp drain purposes. Always active, or only requires one sacrifice by the trader to activate.

9. Combat ability: I want my caravan to do something offensive or defensive. Maybe run over people on command. For the right price, it should knock them over and make them bleed. [evil laugh]

>PRIMEQ: I would actually try out running routes if the pay were a lot better and I maybe had more options for what to train while doing it.

Can you expand on this? This was one of my motivations for expanding routes. You can do a number of things while a caravan leads you around (or meet it at the destination).

>PRIMEQ: Finally, I loved Socharis's original plan for commodities trading and would totally play with that.

I am also interested in expanding commodities, but I am uncertain of the best approach to doing so, and will also admit that the system is quite complex behind the scenes, and most importantly, 'works as is'. As it stands, more commodity pits would be useful to make it more amenable to use, but the commodity system does operate, and profits can be earned from it. I have had some ideas borrowed from other games regarding possible means for expanding the commodity system, but they are not even in the proposal stage yet.

>SHIFT3: Trading Experience: Create a way to use the caravan to train trading.

Can you expand on this please?

>SHIFT3: Combat ability

What did you have in mind?

Which province do people find they are principally running caravan routes? I deprioritized updating the routes in Therengia in favor of other projects, but have been meaning to revisit it.

>>Can you expand on this? This was one of my motivations for expanding routes. You can do a number of things while a caravan leads you around (or meet it at the destination).

From what I understand, you can juggle, collect(?), perform, work magics, use compendia, and do one of the crafts that lets you carry everything with you (not Forging, not sure about Alchemy/Engineering). That is a fair number, true. But it just takes such a long time to run routes, and I get so much more bang for my buck in combat. I also happen to like to be out in the world harvesting (ore, wood, sigils), and that can't exactly be done while on routes either.

I'm not sure I have a real answer for you here, since obviously it wouldn't make sense to bring combat to the inside of a caravan. But the higher payout, longer cooldown option is one I suggested because it would incentivize me to run a quick route in between other things.

Even better, give me a high-danger, high-payout situation. Maybe I have to navigate a political stand-off with my Trading skill and a minigame, bolstered by Luck. Maybe I'm just sent through a dangerous area or slide down a hill. Maybe I have to ford a river, or someone gets dysentery. ;)

>>I am also interested in expanding commodities, but I am uncertain of the best approach to doing so, and will also admit that the system is quite complex behind the scenes, and most importantly, 'works as is'.

This is true, but, frankly, it's kind of boring as is. There are only three cities, and there's literally no factor other than "buy low in city X, sell high in city Y." Maybe you can stockpile some supplies for later, I don't recall. My suggestion here would be, if you're really interested, to just build a separate but much more fun commodities system. You can always turn the old one off when it's ready.

>>Which province do people find they are principally running caravan routes?

I don't actually do it, but from what I heard it's nearly impossible in Qi. Therengia is a pain due to the long distances between places like Haven and Muspar'i. I don't know if Hib even exists? Mostly I've heard of people doing Zoluren and Ilithi.


- Navesi

The First Land Herald -- Zoluren's newspaper. https://elanthipedia.play.net/The_First_Land_Herald

<<To the best of my knowledge contract trading doesn't scale at all with ranks or stats. It is scaled based on circle and that alone determines what you end up with for profits.

I'm pretty sure it scales with charisma and trading skill. I don't know if circle factors into it directly or not. Back when I was still an active trader I defintely noticed differences as my trading skill went up, and my trading was well ahead of my circle mostly because I pretty much only ever did contract trading and was only ever held back from circling by armor ranks. Full disclosure: this was before new crafting and work orders were a thing, so stuff may have changed a lot.

<<Contract trading as it stands just doesn't feel like it jives with the class fantasy. It's a very non-interactive system and adding more skills I can script while contract running or making the pay out better isn't going to help that. It is slow but more importantly feels slow. Crafting is also very non-interactive and so command intensive it also requires scripting but at least it doesn't feel as slow as contracts do.

I actually really like contract trading and dislike crafting and work orders. I like the simplicity of contract trading, but I do agree that it is a very one dimensional system right now and the things that are punishing in it are punishing in the wrong way.

<<It also makes me feel very tied to the game. As in if I get distracted or need to attend something in RL I can just log. But with contracts I don't bother to start because I feel like I need to complete my held contracts before I can do that.

This being one of those ways. Contract trading is something that you need to devote hours to if you want to get anywhere with it and a single contract ties you to it for anywhere from 10-30 minutes. More if you're doing inter-province trading. It would be nice if there was stuff you could do to adjust your experience.

Some ideas:

-you could apply for an extension on delivery to give you more time to deliver a contract if you need to log out at the expense of reducing your profit. Or the timer could stop counting down if you exit the game. Or they would still accept an expired contract but at cost.
-you could add a command to have the caravan finish up any contracts for you and then stable itself. The contracts are only turned in at cost since the profits go to the driver instead. The next time you get your caravan from the stable your driver hands you the funds.
-Get rid of the storage warehouse and add it to stables with smaller and simplified storage fees (e.g. if you have crates on your caravan it costs a slightly higher flat rate to retrieve your caravan) so that you can just store your caravan whenever you want.
-Add a command to caravans so that they will stable themselves.
-Add a command to stables to have them transfer your caravan between stables. If there is no crates or commodities on it then the transfer is quite quick and if there are crates then it takes some time.
-Have caravans move a lot faster if there are no crates or commodities on it. Either instant follow or even better multi-room follow like with fams, shadow servants, pets, etc.

> I assume you meant more exp right?

>> Can you expand on this please?

Yeah, I see why this was confusing. What I'm talking about is a verb you can use anytime you and your caravan are in the same room which gives you a small burst of trading experience. Some ideas and other parallels based on existing abilities or actions or awesomeness:

- Whistle concussive => feed caravan. Get a small burst of trading experience when you feed your caravan.

- Appraise Focus Caravan => Works just like today, but instead gives the trader trading experience in addition to appraisal experience.

- Haggle caravan => Works like summon admittance. You can do it anytime. It puts you in a sitting position. Gives you a small burst of trading experience (2/34)

- Analyze caravan => Works like whistle piercing. Gives you a decent burst of trading experience. No RT move, maybe takes a little starlight aura to perform. ("light up the caravan, inspecting for flaws or imperfections)

- Listen caravan => Works like teaching. The caravan driver will teach you some tips and tricks of the road.

- Turn caravans into portable financed shops and access to your player owned shop. You can enter the private room, deposit or withdraw coins, check for purchases, withdraw pouches, maybe remotely check the status of your shop (balance and ledger). Every action has a small cool down (a couple minutes), and it teaches a bit of trading experience when you do it (5% of your pool for each action). If you're doing this every 10 minutes or so, you could theoretically keep trading locked indefinitely.

- Use the hirelings. You gain trading experience for being in the same room as your hireling. Whether that's an NPC empath, vendor, whatever. Maybe you have to use a "Supervise" verb which puts them in a passive mode. You have some RP messaging, minor fluff, coffee and donuts, and you lecture them on customer service like any good micromanager.

> What did you have in mind?

New speculates (because traders need more non-magical abilities). Abilities using starlight aura / starlight availability as the limiting factor, and all of these could be modified by and teach a bit of trading (because ...

- Speculate defense - aka Circle the Wagons: Create phantasmal copies of your caravan which continuously circle around you. Spells and ranged weapons have a chance of hitting the copy instead of you, destroying the copy. Think an ablative Elision with a physical component (caravan) and charges rather than a continual starlight aura drain.

- Speculate spook - aka Spook the Horses: Create an illusion of the horses running wild, potentially causing creatures in the room to collapse. Fear-based attack causing a knock-down effect.

- Speculate trap - aka Honeypot: Create an illusion of a broken down caravan, a weak and inviting target. Summons 1-4 "rogues" which are flex mobs. Think cutthroats or louts, but flex to the trader who summoned them, very high chance to drop boxes and gems. The caravan continually taunts them to the trader, and they despawn if the trader leaves the room. Does not work in a justice zone. The effect goes off, but they're not summoned. Instead, you're charged with disturbing the peace and there's a message saying the guards quickly rushed in and took care of the threat.

- Speculate intimidate - aka Clown Car or Caravan: Summon an illusionary group of guards which emerge from the caravan which try and intimidate anyone who threatens the trader. Think innocence, but it works on undead and not natural creatures, is weakened but not broken by physical attacks, and it has a steeper check.

> I am also interested in expanding commodities, but I am uncertain of the best approach to doing so

- Remove the buy/sell timer, but add in a grace period for purchases. If you buy a commodity in a pit, you can sell it back to that pit for .95 of the purchase price for an hour after your purchase. This is to allow flexibility without potentially creating a massive amount of plat due to a math bug or clever trader script.

- Greatly increase the volume of commodities in a pit and the range at which pits will buy them. Some pits will never generate certain commodities. Eg: Leth may never create diamonds which makes them a perfect seller of diamonds.

- Make pits always buy back commodities, but at .95 of the floor if they're "capped".

- Add commodity pits to all provinces, at least 3 per.

- Change ceiling / floor for commodities. Each commodity would have it's own ceiling and floor for a specific pit, heavily weighted by province. Traders may want to build caravan routes from theren (low prices on diamonds) to leth (no diamond production, continually a high price).

- Tie prices into the rumor system. Rumors will cause "runs" which traders are alerted to if they have a certain ability up. (spell?)

- Let transfers work FROM a stable rather than only TO a stable. I can be in theren, buy a bunch of local commodities. Go to a stable, transfer my caravan to leth (same fee), hunt for a half-hour, then go to leth and pick it up, sell, buy for theren, rinse, repeat. Makes travel more important, and opens up alternative trading experience options. This should teach enough to keep trading moving the entire time. You learn on transfer, you learn on buy, you learn on sell.

- Tie commodity experience reward to the value of the commodities bought and sold. Right now, it's tied to the act of selling, buying so it's only viable as a training method if you move literally hundreds of commodities one at a time.

> Which province do people find they are principally running caravan routes? I deprioritized updating the routes in Therengia in favor of other projects, but have been meaning to revisit it.

I have literally not run a caravan in Theren in over 15 years. I have never run one on the islands because... islands. The barge took too long then, and it's tainted my view ever since. Shard and crossing are the primary routes IMO. I suspect most other traders (save for that one in Ratha) would likely agree that this time would be better spent elsewhere. The changes already made are fantastic and solve the caravan route problems.

<<Around 130ish, I'm seeing 19-26 copper per second,

That seems even lower than expected to me, since that's only 7-9 plat per hour. I was seeing profits of that much with far less stats, skill and circle. Here's my most recent IP contract with relevant stats:

Circle: 55
Trading: 363 19% thinking (5/34) (This is enough for circle 67 for reference)
Cost: 20077 kronar
Sold: 36680 dokoras (50801 kronar)
Profit: ~30000 kronar once ferry and loading fees are accounted for.
Time to complete: ~20 minutes (I don't have timestamps in my log unfortunately, but this is the typical time it takes to travel from Crossing to Shard.)
Average profit: 9 plat per hour. This is slightly more than with local contract trading, but not that much.

The broker plucks a contract from the hands of a passing clerk and hands it to you. "Here we go," she says, "We have charged you the wholesale price of 15249 Kronars for the goods, the receiving guild will pay you full price! Therein lies profit! Also I will charge you 4828 in dues which are owed to this guild, for a total of 20077."

The shipment clerk accepts your contract and peruses it. "Ah, yes," he smiles. "We did order this, didn't we?" With a quick snap of his fingers, he calls for an assistant to help you unload your merchandise for his inspection.

The shipment clerk carefully looks through the inventory which his assistant has placed on a counter.

The shipment clerk finds everything in order with your merchandise. "Marvelous!" he says, handing you your payment of 36680 Dokoras.

So... there's a bug somewhere. Here are a few samples of some of the most expensive contracts in Zoluren, all given in dirge, destined for Leth. I don't see the payment, but it's generally a similar % of the contract price. The contract in shard is making twice as much as the best contract path in crossing at half the circle.

---

This is a contract from dirge to leth when I had 430 in trading, 74 charisma + 7 (5 finesse, 2 ring)

> The minister plucks a contract from the hands of a passing clerk and hands it to you.

> "Here we go," she says, "We have charged you the wholesale price of 4561 Kronars for the goods, the receiving guild will pay you full price! Therein lies profit! Also I will charge you 1310 in dues which are owed to this guild, for a total of 5871." The minister then nods and adds, "Good luck, Tellel."

---

This is a contract from dirge to leth when I had 550 in trading, 75 charisma, finesse on. I didn't see the + in my logs.

> The minister plucks a contract from the hands of a passing clerk and hands it to you.

> "Here we go," she says, "We have charged you the wholesale price of 8853 Kronars for the goods, the receiving guild will pay you full price! Therein lies profit! Also I will charge you 2735 in dues which are owed to this guild, for a total of 11588."

---

This is a contact from dirge to leth when I had 750 in trading, 75 charisma. +17 charisma, 15 from finesse and 2 from a ring.

The minister plucks a contract from the hands of a passing clerk and hands it to you.

"Here we go," she says, "We have charged you the wholesale price of 9396 Kronars for the goods, the receiving guild will pay you full price! Therein lies profit! Also I will charge you 2925 in dues which are owed to this guild, for a total of 12321."

Ohhh, you're doing international contracts. Yeah, I missed that. I may give it a shot, but I'm not sure if the effort is worth it due to how much more plat you can earn from combat.

<<As a general request, could people who are running contracts and who feel like sharing information let me know the following: Which province are you running contracts, approximately how much profit is generated from 1 hour of contract running (projected or actual), what is your trading/circle, and approximate time to lock Trading? Again, without promising anything, I am interested in gathering data to ascertain whether we should adjust some numbers.

I already answered quite a bit of this earlier, but I'll include it here again with the other answers.

Province: Forfedhar (I'm basing this off of memory since I don't have logs of this anymore. My earliest log shows these stats/circle so it's roughly correct at any rate.)
Profit: ~6 plat kronar/hour
Circle: 51
Trading: 314
Charisma: 41
Time to lock: Depends on the contracts, but roughly after about an hour of trading. It never drops below 1 after getting that first contract completed, which is the more important thing.

Province: Interprovincial
Profit: ~9 plat kronar/hour
Circle: 55
Trading: 363
Charisma: 45
Time to lock: It will typically lock after the second contract. Third if you're unlucky and get 3 Haven-Crossing contracts in a row. Experience here is quite a bit larger than local contracts and pulses for a while after completing the contract to help keep it moving on the long trips.

More details:
For local contracts, P5 is my province of choice. It's by far the simplest for getting around. Interprovincial contracts are my favorite type of contracts though. I hate trading in P2 since there are way too many chokepoints and it is far too easy to run out of time if you don't go directly between outposts in some cases. P1 is a decent place to run contracts. I used to train in P3, but stopped for some reason I can remember. It was something like profits were too small or the Shadow Clan outpost made it more of a pain or something. I've never traded in P4, but I can't imagine it would be worth doing if it's even possible.

One other thing I've noted is that until you reach about circle 5, it can actually be a loss to run contracts in many cases even if you know what you're doing. The profit per contract isn't high enough to offset travel and caravan costs unless you are efficient with managing your contract routes and do it for at least an hour or two, and if you're still trying to figure out the system you'll likely end up losing money. This isn't a major thing since we're talking around a couple gold at most really, but it is a barrier to entry for someone new to trading.

Oh, I totally just remembered why I stopped trading in P3. You couldn't tell your caravan to lead you to the outposts, so it was bad for training other things while you did the run. I think that may have changed in the recent update, so it's probably a good place to train now.

I decided to run it today, and I removed all of my extraneous xp routines. This is 100% trading, trying to maximize contracting profit. Good news is it seems to be slightly higher than my last numbers (another plateau?). Bad news is that it's still no where near what I can make farming plat by hunting, even without dedicated alts.

Zoluren
Circle: 131
Trading: 782
Charisma: 75 + 17
Appraisal: 800

- Average profit per hour: 10.87
- Total time: 4.5 hours
- Average profit per second: 30.2 copper / second

---

Detailed break down:

First hour: Picked up caravan. Terrible RNG due to startup costs and contract locations.
- Profit four hour 1: 3.5406 plat (9.8 copper / second)
- 10 contracts completed, 5 outstanding
- Average 0.3540 platinum each



2nd hour: Much better, although a bit high due to the preloaded contracts on the caravan from hour 1 and multiple contracts to the same location
- Profit: 19.6659 plat (53 copper / second)
- 12 contracts completed, 3 outstanding
- average 1.63 platinum each



3rd hour: Lucky runs. Two grouped deliveries to stone and leth.
- Profit: 14.0456 plat (32 copper / second)
- 7 contracts completed, 1 outstanding
- Average 2.0065 plat each



4th hour: Low-value, spread all over.
- Profit: 3.4381 plat (9.5 copper/second)
- 8 contracts completed, 2 outstanding
- Average: 0.4295 per contract




It took me a little over 30 minutes to wrap up the caravans since one was in leth. Both contracts were worth about 8.24 plat in total.

Trading experience was slow to start, but then it was basically locked for the entire time. I try to do crafts such as outfitting and enchanting along the route, saving up for WOs later. I could try to weave in work orders for a few extra coins; however, that's a lot of work, and I'm inherently lazy :)

On the flip side, this does offer traders an interesting option to stretch out REXP. Its not ideal since combat is so prevalent in both reqs and game experience, but I can gain about 30% more trading experience per day at the cost of not progressing on the combat side and reducing plat generation. (counter intuitive, but there you go).


Routine:

1. Start in the nearest outpost, most often leth or crossing.
2. If arthe or stone, head out that route, else head to wolf and start the big loop there on the way to dirge, stopping at every outpost on the way.
3. At dirge, repeat the path back heading out to tiger and wolf.
4. Repeat the wolf -> dirge route until I have 3+ leth contracts or a leth contract is within 30 minutes of expiration.
5. Head to leth, grab a contract, and go back to 1.

> You now have a tiger and a wolf contract, but instead of heading back to Crossing on your way to tiger and wolf at this point you should still continue on to dirge to pick one up there.

I don't know if this was meant for me or just general info, but this is what I'm doing and meant by big loop. Wolf -> Dirge -> Wolf, hitting each outpost I pass. Good call out on the inefficiency as we could skip about 10 rooms in arthe and 15 or so in crossing in the case that we have a contract from that outpost and no contracts to that outpost. I don't think it's making a huge difference, but every little bit, right?

I did edit out a sentence once I thought about a thing for a second - sorry for the confusion.

I think I have the data I need. If you have additional thoughts or further ideas for features to add to caravans or contracts or commodities, please post them. It sounds like there is a combination of issues that make people seek out alternative means for earning coin and training Trading.

I suppose I should kick at financing next. :)

One more suggestion...the ability, through potency crystals, to upgrade our ledgers to an almanac for ONLY trading?

> One more suggestion...the ability, through potency crystals, to upgrade our ledgers to an almanac for ONLY trading?

Ledgers should definitely teach trading.

I think they currently do, it's just abysmal

>Routine:
>1. Start in the nearest outpost, most often leth or crossing.
>2. If arthe or stone, head out that route, else head to wolf and start the big loop there on the way to dirge, stopping at every outpost on the way.
>3. At dirge, repeat the path back heading out to tiger and wolf.
>4. Repeat the wolf -> dirge route until I have 3+ leth contracts or a leth contract is within 30 minutes of expiration.
>5. Head to leth, grab a contract, and go back to 1.

This is how I coded my script I haven't used in 10 years, though I'm not sure I coded for leth contract expiration. I THINK I did.

More specifically, I know my travel flow was to start in Crossing, head north, stopping along the way, then south back to Crossing and then west to Wolf and back. Each and every time it stopped in Crossing it'd check for 3 Leth contracts. I don't recall whether I'd coded up a time check for Leth contracts. I THINK I did.

>Good call out on the inefficiency as we could skip about 10 rooms in arthe and 15 or so in crossing in the case that we have a contract from that outpost and no contracts to that outpost. I don't think it's making a huge difference, but every little bit, right?

Yeah, I did code to check at Tiger Clan to see whether Wolf Clan could be skipped, and the same at Stone Clan to see if it was necessary to go to Dirge.

One thing I did want to do but never got around to it before halting caravan running was scripting up interprovs into the mix when doing a Dirge (Haven) or Leth (Shard) run.

Alright, I'm now motivated to come out of caravan retirement to see what it's like at 170th.

>I suppose I should kick at financing next. :)

Yes, please. I want to get more of the 160% of appraisal cake I can claim as my own.

Naniaki Felyran


"I have faith in the current crop of GMs to not screw people over"

>>Actually an opinion cannot be changed or corrected. Nice try back of line.-VERATHOR
>>But it can be wrong.-Starlear

> Starlight and all assorted magic is awesome. It seems like the experiment was a success, and we could go more into that. Personally, I'd give up Survival secondary for Magic secondary, but that's just me. Starlight Collector definitely seems to need some love, especially since in theory it's a great way to get us indoors to fleece customers, and I know others have suggested letting it work with caravans. (Heck, a skylight also works)

You know, I don't want to give up survival and armor secondary. It's a unique niche. Instead, I'd rather a new lore prime/secondary perk. Lore itself has always been a red-headed stepchild since the beginning, seen more as a penalty tacked onto magic guilds for having access to magic. This changed a bit with crafting, but crafting perks and general usefulness have been quickly losing ground to MTX.

Lore needs something. Maybe it's an REXP buff. Maybe it's something like warrior mages or clerics who have "cheats" to get the perks of secondaries they don't have (SOL/AEG giving larger arm-worn shields). Maybe it's something as simple as a daily ability to get some bonus bits in a skillset of their choice. Maybe it's something new.

> It seems like the experiment was a success, and we could go more into that.

I think it was a good start. There's a lot of room for improvements to trader magic. Clerics have 22 spells. Roughly half of those have little to no practical use in PvE. They're PvP spells or just trainers or otherwise so limiting as to be near worthless for everyday play. Enrichment, regalia, bespoke regalia, AVTA, starcrash, elision, stellar collector, MOM, TURI, and nonchallance all fit this category for various reasons.

I feel like I need to defend this a bit as it may be controversial, so I'm going to make a different post talking about trader magic.

That said, I think we have a lot of solid spells and the bread and butter toolkit is nice. The theme and atmosphere is absolutely on point.