>I think something needs to be done in general to improve the economy
>in Oly. I believe that most of the "trade" income in Oly is actually
>from people cashing in large amounts of trade goods they've captured
>from monster lairs, and not from actually city-to-city trading.
Agreed. And even where you do see city-to-city trading, the most
efficient way to do that is by taking a shortcut through Faery, which
is pretty inaccessible to anyone who isn't either a member of a
certain alliance, or is very powerful. All in all, I'm afraid trade is
fairly disappointing in its current incarnation.
>However, the perrenial shortage of nobles is an underlying problem.
>If you're up against your limit of NPs, are you really going to expend
>NPs to run a noble back and forth between two cities?
Feature, not bug.
Empire-building players would benefit the most from your proposal.
A player who wanted to do just trade would be likely to have plenty of
NPs to conduct trade with. The whole point of NPs was to prevent
players from being able to do everything... a player with too few NPs
left to trade has chosen to not trade.
-- greg, wearing his designer's hat