Trade Improvements 2

A while back I made some suggestions regarding trade in Illy.  Those focused upon the underlying economics of trade and suggested, in part, that the cost of equipping troops was far below the benefits reaped and thus it was better to forgo equipment (and thus lower demand for the goods needed to craft that equipment) and just build more troops.

In this "installment" I'd like to address the problem of trade distribution and hub location.  By trade distribution I mean the tendency of most trading to be done in Centrum and for many, and maybe most of the other hubs to be under-utilized.  By hub location I mean the placement of hubs in arbitrary locations by the game rather than by the players.

There are, I think, a number of reasons for these problems.

First, most hubs are so underused that in many cases they are ignored.
Second, because it costs nothing to store things in Centrum, there is little reason to store anything anywhere else.
Third, a hub may be well placed, but the placement may not be where the players need it to be.

That the hubs are under utilized is obvious if you look at the market.  Almost all buy and sell orders are in Centrum.  Why?  Because that's where the buyers and sellers are.  No player wants to sell something in a hub that isn't being used.  To change this we need a way to drive the buyers and sellers away from Centrum.  This results in the prices for things in other hubs being higher because the competition is far, far, less than Centrum. And since the cost of storage in Centrum is nil there is little to no reason to store anything anywhere besides Centrum. 

To solve these problems we need to force buyers and sellers out of Centrum and give the players a method by which they can move or build new hubs.

Getting the buyers and sellers moving out of Centrum  is the easy part. If we make staying in Centrum more expensive or limit how much they can store there they will be motivated to move.  You can either just plain limit the amount of goods to some reasonably high amount, or charge for anything after a certain amount, with the charges going up as more is stored.  If I have a billion food in Centrum and I'm paying 1 million gold a day for the top 500,000,000 I very well might just move it to save the gold.  This true of every item too.  By limiting, either by a strict limit or by financial incentive, the amount stored at a hum...all hubs I would say...you force those with more to re-distribute their storage.

Second, if we have a mechanism by which alliance can build hubs and declare them to be a hub, we can place hubs where they are needed and wanted.  This is a more radical idea, but say an alliance builds a hub, could they not collect taxes on it?  And if lots of alliances build hubs it would increase the competition between hubs and other alliances.

Thus, to fix the problem of uneven distribution you need to charge for storage above a certain level in Centrum or reduce the cost of storage at other hubs.

To make sure hubs are where they are needed and wanted you could allow alliances to build them.

Those are my suggestions in "Part 2 of 'Trade Improvements"

Let me know what you think.

AJ