Post 30 Jul 2012, 05:58 by Lewin
Yes it's an interesting idea, but as Krom said it's not possible to make it work in the space available, and I quite like the simplicity of the current interface.
The fact that you can't easily trade two things at once in the market means there is an advantage to having multiple markets, in the same way that there is an advantage to having multiple schools, multiple bakeries, etc. which adds more variety of tactics available. It also limits the exploitablility of the market because you can't just feed all your excess resources into one market at once. For example in multiplayer games I can mine coal, iron, stone, gold and feed it all into the market to buy weapons, (instead of manufacturing them myself) but I have to have 4 markets to do that, (much bigger investment) or feed the resources separately into one market, (slow) so therefore tactics like that are less exploitable. If I could feed all of those different resources into one market at once, it might become more effective than manufacturing weapons which would mean we'd need to increase market prices since we want manufacturing to always be more effective than trading in the long term (but the market is quicker and cheaper to build than the full manufacturing process, so it can pay off for a short period or quickly help out in crises like food shortages)