As your settlement gets larger, trying to produce absolutely everything yourself can start becoming a bit of a problem - maybe your map has plenty of Oil, but not much good land for Wine. Maybe your friend settled somewhere with exactly the opposite problem.
With 1.0 we're adding a global market, which lets you buy and sell goods instead of having to build every production chain yourself.
That means specializing your settlement becomes much more useful. If you've got easy access to something another player needs, you can produce more of it and put the extra goods up for sale. They can do the same with whatever you're missing.
And because friends can join an existing game later, you don't all need to start together or carve up the map perfectly from the beginning. Someone can show up, find a nice patch of land, realize you've already taken all the Oil, and work out another way to make themselves useful.
You can cooperate, trade back and forth, or try to make a very profitable business out of everyone else's poor planning.
And if you're playing alone, NPC trading is still there too! So no, you don't necessarily need to produce everything yourself anymore.
Sometimes your neighbor having Oil is good enough.
FIVE WAYS TO WIN.
One day left.