Seaport

[sami1337]

intestines when cleaned are not gross though. vomit...hehe

[killerdynamo]

By itself, I, too, am not opposed to the "seaport idea" for the purpose of trickling in new features, but the problem with it is what the "trading" should constitute. NPCs, by their very nature, cannot trade, as they have no values -- in effect, it would become trading with us, the developers; but seeing how we are not afflicted by scarcity, we cannot, by definition, trade. The only thing we could do is to try and set an arbitrary "penalty" for the procurement of new items (did someone mention planned economies?). And I don't like the idea of that, even as a temporary feature; it will just lead to odd situations and weird systems being built around them ("malinvestments", to speak in the terms of the Austrian economists; not to speak of the, in all likelyhood, resulting economic bubbles as a consequence of our tweaking and changing the system).

The only new items with which we have some kind of bootstrapping problem are natural resources anyway (since virtually anything else in the game is player-makable), so I think we'll just spread a few of them around seeing how they are, indeed, natural resources.

In itself, though, I like the seaport idea in that it would be possible to get various "colonial goods", which would be very suitable and fitting. If some system of actual trade could be set up, I would consider the idea.

This may be too difficult to set up, but how about this for a substitute for "actual trade"
every so often at the port, an expedition prepares and players place bids to fund it, the highest bidder gets the rights to whatever goods the expedition comes back with. The devs would only have to determine what type of coin the bids would be placed in and the chances of getting the 'colonial goods' since the bidding process determines how much players are willing to pay for whatever the expedition comes back with.

Another option would be to create an expedition ship that works somewhat like the town idol, get 5 or so people together (to simulate the crew) and you can build a ship, (which would need massive amounts of food and water as fuel for the trip), when it gets activated, the ship disappears for an in game month and returns with a random assortment of goods. If you want to keep the number of ships down, make it so that each person can only crew one ship at a time

[moonshield]

What about having real continents and/or different climate zones? ;o