A caravan exists to carry things somewhere and sell them. It turned out that
the selling did not work - and had never worked - for any load bigger than a
saddlebag.
Every city held a figure for how much of a good it kept in stock. For a good
the city makes itself, that figure is large: Samarkand sits on hundreds of
bolts of silk. For a good it does not make, it is small - and that is right,
because it is what makes a source city worth the walk.
The same figure was also used to decide when you had flooded a market
by selling into it. Ötüken does not weave silk, so its figure for silk was
three. Three. Walk in with a hundred and twenty bolts on the backs of your
mules and the market counted you forty times over its own depth, the price
hit the floor after the first handful, and the rest of the load went for about
a quarter of what it was worth.
Measured across the goods list, at forty units a load still just about paid.
At a hundred and twenty it lost money. At four hundred it lost a third of
everything you had spent. Not because of raiders, or weather, or a bad road -
the arithmetic did that on its own, in an empty bazaar, on a good day.
A city's supply and its appetite are now two different numbers.
How much it has to sell you is unchanged. How much it can absorb before the
price collapses is now a real figure, drawn from how big the place is and
whether the good is a stranger there - because a town with no silk of its own
is a town that wants silk, not a town with no use for it.
What that does to a trade, measured on the same goods and the same road:
So a full hold is worth carrying, and there is still a point past which you
are carrying too much of one thing to one city. That was always the intention.
It simply never happened, because the ceiling sat at three.
The knucklebone in flight had six frames. They were one flat shape turned on
the spot, which is what it looked like.
It now has eight, and they are the same bone seen from eight directions - it
has a front and a back, it catches the light differently as it goes over, and
it lands the way it was thrown. Same game, same rules, same throw; it just
looks like a bone in the air now instead of a sprite being rotated.
Four numbers that decide how dangerous a road is and what a letter of credit
costs were written into the scripts where nothing could reach them. They are
in the tuning data now, at exactly the values they already had. Nothing about
this build plays differently because of it - it means the next time these
need adjusting, they can be measured first instead of guessed at.