Ramul is blind!!!

[spamwise]

Ok, so I over refined and found myself without any URO left. I see a juicy trade I want, but it requires URO, not EUR. So, I change my LVO to EUR and go asking Ramul for a single URO. He comes back with this:

In exchange for 1 Uranium Ore, Three-fingered Ramul requests: One Food, one Coal, one Pig Iron, one Steel, one ICBM.

Nowhere in that list did he ask for any of the EUR which I should be offering immediately after my food. What gives?

[thisisactuallyJC]

Is it also your MVO?

[spamwise]

Nope. I tried with both Coal and None as MVO. He kept missing my EUR.

[vilhazarog]

What if you set your MVO to ICBM? Force him to ask for cheaper stuff?

[spamwise]

The moment has passed (and I can't get to the site while at work). However, from my understanding of what was posted in a different thread, Ramul should ask for things in roughly the following order:
Food (unless it is your MVO)
LVO
Coal (above firepower)
Bauxite
Pig Iron
Sand
Uranium Ore
Aluminum
Steel
Glass
Diamonds
Enriched Uranium
Aid
Diamond Drill
Icbm
MVO (which he would never actually ask for)

At the time I had:
1 Food
1 + Firepower Coal
1 Pig Iron
0 URO (hence me desire to trade for it)
1 Steel
Ample EUR
14 ICBM

I wanted to acquire enough Pig Iron/Steel to build and ICBM in the next cycle to allow me to tech up. There was a trade on the board of 4 Pig Iron for 1 URO. So, I went to Ramul, expecting to offer 1 Food and however many EUR it took to get a single URO back (I knew I was going to be ripped off, but I didn't care), but he went after my Pig Iron (which was fine), but both my Steel and ICBM would have been off limits.

I have since acquired the requisite materials and have teched up, but it was still frustrating. Ramul has (or at least had) a bug.

[vilhazarog]

Ah hah, I played around a bit then remembered that this is intentional... someone complained a while back that what's the point of asking Ramul for a base item when he immediately requires the refined item of the same type in exchange? That sends you backwards. This might have been before MVO. So if you ask Ramul for Sand, he doesn't ask for Glass, and if you ask him for URO, he doesn't ask for EUR.

[Rasteroid]

Precisely so, thanks to Vil's memory. So the question is which behaviour should be adopted? As you can see, the system in place does not anticipate wanting to trade down for a material.

Perhaps I'll rethink the black market interface, and allow for greater spec of what is desired to be traded, and what isn't. A table of checkboxes, for example. Then it would be unrelated to LVO and MVO, so you wouldn't have to switch back and forth between screens.

On a related note, while I recognize the demand for the black market, I'm keen to restrict it's use, and to make islanding quite difficult. (But not impossible.)

[jc]

You've made islanding impossible thanks to sea monster attacks, not Black Market concerns

[spamwise]

Good catch Vilhazarog. I remember such a concept coming up in Ramul's infancy (pre LVO/MVO).

A "what you're offering" and "what you're seeking" screen (with checkboxes) would be wonderful. Yes, switching between policy and trade pages to tinker around to see what trade you can get is a hassle. (And, no, this wouldn't encourage us to use Ramul excessively. He's already a punk in terms of pricing, but sometimes, when none of your neighbors are online and you just have to have something, he works in a pinch.)

I'm curious if you might consider an option to unrefine materials? (Break down to base materials.)
I don't know what it should cost, nor how often it might be used, but that was essentially what I was trying to achieve with Ramul with no success. (I suppose it might be valuable to base level tech research... you could store the refined goods until you had enough to break 'em down. So, it shouldn't be free, but I really don't see that as too much of an abuse.)

[Rasteroid]

Yep, I'll see what I can do when there's time.

Thanks for bringing it to my attention.