大家好，欢迎来到Grey Eminence的第18期开发日志！

Hello and welcome to the 18th development diary of Grey Eminence!

今天，我们将了解游戏中最受期待的机制之一——贸易。 贸易是Grey Eminence经济模拟皇冠上的明珠——贸易使得一个由不同人口和商品组成的静态世界转变为一个巨大的、相互关联的网络，像一个活的有机体一样盛衰兴亡。

In today's edition, we'll be taking a look at one of the most anticipated mechanics in the game,trade. It is the crown jewel of Grey Eminence's economic simulation - a process that transforms an otherwise static world of disparate populations and goods into a massive, interconnected network that ebbs and flows like a living organism.

发布时间：2023年3月4日17:37，原标题：Dev Diary #18: Trade Pt. 1

副翻译者：Trihex

市场

Markets

贸易系统的基本单位是市场——默认情况下，市场由一个国家在一个地理省份中拥有的所有地块组成。 那些读过我们之前的开发日志的人会注意到，这与我们对政治省份的定义相同——没错，在1356年，市场和（政治）省份是完全一致的。

The fundamental unit of the trade system is the market - by default, a market is composed of all tiles owned by a country in a single geographic province. Those of you who have read our previous dev diaries will notice that this is the same definition as the one we've used for political provinces - and that's exactly right, in 1356 markets and (political) provinces are one and the same.

每个市场都有一个市场首都，市场与外界所有联系都发源于此（稍后会详细介绍），以及一个存有游戏中每种贸易商品的仓储——包括当地未生产的商品。 每个市场都会通过卖出或买入贸易商品到仓储中来解决其组成地块的消费和生产需求，每月一次。 此过程分两步进行：

Each market has a market capital from which all its connections originate (more on that later) and a stockpile of every trade good in the game - including of goods that cannot be produced locally. Once per month, each market resolves the consumption and production requests of its constituent tiles by either drawing from or filling up its stockpile of trade goods. This process happens in two steps:

1. 人口必要需求和建筑生产需求

2. 人口非必要需求

Essential consumption & buildings production

Discretionary consumption

所有需求都按比例满足。例如，如果一个市场的仓储中有 100 份食物，但其人口和建筑分别需要 200份和300份食物，则每种需求都只有20%得到满足 (100 / (200+300))。 还是这个例子，由于仓储中没有剩余食物，因此有0%的人口非必要食物需求被满足。

All requests are fulfilled proportionally. For example, if a single market has 100 food in its stockpile, but its population and buildings request 200 and 300 food respectively, each request will only be fulfilled at 20% (100 / (200+300)). Continuing the example, since there would be no food left in the stockpile, 0% of discretionary food requests would be fulfilled.

延迟非必要消费允许我们确保（有足够钱的）人口在短缺变得极其普遍以至于影响到生产之前不会挨饿或缺乏燃料。此外，这也使生产对非必要消费的突然激增更有弹性。可以防止诸如军队带着战利品回国导致人口奢侈消费激增而使当地产业失去投入品，供应链断裂之类的事情。

By delaying discretionary consumption, we ensure that a population (with enough money) won't starve or be left without fuel until shortages become so widespread that they affect production as well. Additionally, this also makes production more resilient to sudden spikes in discretionary spending, preventing for example an army returning home with loot from starving its local industry of inputs and breaking supply chains due to their newfound lavishness.

The market UI might look intimidating at first glance, but it gives you all the information you might need to know about what's going on in a given market - with additional breakdowns on-hover of most numbers. Selecting any particular row in this UI causes the relevant market overlays (e.g. goods price, stockpile size) to display data only for the selected trade good, making it easy to visually navigate through the local and global economy. We've made numerous revisions to this UI and will likely continue iterating upon it in the future, so the design isn't final.

物流

Logistics

当然，市场存在的理由不仅仅是为了匹配当地的供需，而是通过从相连的其他市场进口或出口商品来解决当地的供需失衡，以获取利润。 这就是物流的用武之地：虽然我们假设单个市场中的所有地块都可以作为一个单一经济单位（至少一个月内）发挥作用，但不同的市场需要连接才能相互贸易。

Of course, the raison d'etre of markets isn't merely to match supply and demand locally, but rather to resolve local imbalances by importing or exporting goods from other markets they have a connection with in order to turn a profit. This is where logistics comes in: while we assume that all tiles within a single market can function as a single economic unit (at least on the order of a single month), different markets require a connection in order to trade with each other.

最基本的连接类型——也是我们今天要介绍的唯一一种——是陆路贸易。 这种连接是在市场与其所有相邻市场之间自动建立的。 每个这样的连接都遵循每个市场首都之间的最快路径——值得注意的是，最快路径考虑了地形、气候和基础设施，因此不一定是地理上的最短路径。

The most basic type of connection - and the only one we'll cover today - is overland trade. This connection is automatically established between a market and all its neighbors. For each such connection, the fastest path between each market capital is used - notably, the path accounts for terrain, climate and infrastructure, so it might not be the geographically-shortest one.

基础设施是你与物流系统互动的主要方式之一——修建道路可以让你引导贸易流动的路径（你肯定希望贸易路线远离敌人）。 此外，基础设施大大降低了运输货物的运输成本，从而使贸易更加高效并增加利润。 我们的设计不同于其他大战略游戏，因为我们不会人为地限制可以通过相连基础设施流动的贸易量——相反，我们依靠利润公式来平衡每个月在一个基础设施连接中移动多少商品。 例如，由玩家扮演的俄罗斯可能会在铁路发明之前的几个世纪尝试开发其东部边境，但除非有极高的利润率，用马匹跨越欧亚大陆运送大量商品是无利可图的。

Infrastructure is one of the main ways you can interact with the logistics system - building up roads allows you to direct the path through which trade will flow (which you'll definitely want to keep out of enemy hands). Additionally, infrastructure greatly reduces the transport costs for moving goods, which makes trade more efficient and more profitable. Our design departs from other grand strategy games, since we do not artificially limit the volume of trade that can flow through a connection due to its infrastructure - instead, we rely on the profit formula to balance what amount of goods are profitable to move in a single month. For example, a player-led Russia might try to build up its eastern frontiers centuries before the invention of railroads, but such an endeavor would require exceptional profit margins to make carting tons of goods across Eurasia by horse profitable.

说到铁路，就不能不提及铁路的独特机制，也就是改变市场的结构：任何通过铁路连接的相邻省份都会自动成为一个单一市场的一部分。 因此，一旦你解锁并开始建造铁路，你就可以创建任意规模的陆路市场，大大简化国内物流。 回到我们之前关于俄罗斯的例子，即使道路从莫斯科延伸到符拉迪沃斯托克，商品从一个城市流向另一个城市也需要几个月的时间，因为它们之间有多个省份（陆路贸易系统的每次迭代只能移动商品到相邻市场）。 铁路不仅可以显着降低运输成本，还可以使连接的所有省份成为单一市场的一部分，从而使货物可以在一个月内从符拉迪沃斯托克运往莫斯科。

Speaking of railroads, they provide a unique mechanic that changes the way markets are structured: any of your neighboring provinces connected by railroad automatically become part of a single unified market. Thus, once you unlock railroads and start building them, you can create arbitrarily-large overland markets, greatly simplifying your internal logistics. Going back to our previous example with Russia, even with roads stretching from Moscow to Vladivostok, goods would take as many months to flow from one city to the other as there are provinces between them (since each iteration of the overland trade system moves goods only between neighboring markets). A railroad connection would not only reduce transport costs significantly, but would also make all constituent provinces part of the same market, allowing goods to move from Vladivostok to Moscow in a single month.

定价

Pricing

如果没有现实的商品定价模型来驱动，基于物流的贸易体系将是不完整的——毕竟，价格决定利润，利润推动商品流动。 我们不会详细讨论定价公式和其中的影响因素（这可能是也可能不是另一篇贸易相关的开发日志的主题），但现在我们可以确认商品价格在市场中主要（但不完全！）由供需决定。 我们知道这是常识，但我们觉得值得写下来。

A logistics-based trade system would be incomplete without realistic goods pricing to drive it - after all, it is price that determines profit, and it is profit that spurs the movement of goods. We won't get into the minutiae of the pricing formula and the actors that are involved in it (that may or may not be the subject of another trade-related dev diary), but for now we can confirm that the price of goods in each market is determined primarily (but not exclusively!) by their supply and demand. Not a shocker, we know, but we felt it's worth putting that in writing.

Mod制作

Moddability

到目前为止，我们已确保基础游戏中的每个系统都内置系统级可修改性，贸易系统也不例外。 作为游戏中互连最紧密的系统之一，编辑贸易过程与其他游戏系统的连接方式必须非常严谨细致，但也是可行的。 当然，内容层面的更改，例如添加新商品或调整与贸易相关的变量（比如运输成本），都可以在世界编辑器中完成。

Thus far, we've ensured to create each system included in the base game with system-level moddability built-in and trade is no exception. As one of the most interconnected systems in the game, editing how the processes connect to other game systems will require precision, but is doable. And, of course, content-level changes like adding new goods or adjusting trade-related variables like transport costs can be done inside the world editor.

然而，展望未来，不幸的是，我们将不得不降低Gray Eminence的系统级可修改性。 添加此类功能会使开发时间至少增加2倍——虽然我们为最近的Alpha游戏预告片的反响感到自豪，并且非常感谢你们的持续支持，但如果不减少我们花在可修改性上的开发时间，我们就不能以目前的资源保持可接受的开发速度。也就是说，这并不意味着其它系统将是完全硬编码的——你总是可以禁用我们已经开发的东西，并使用通常的修改范式来自己实现一些东西。显然，这比修改在开发时就考虑到可修改性的现有系统更加困难，但仍然不是不可能的。

However, going forward, we'll unfortunately have to reduce the system-level moddability with which we're building Grey Eminence's systems. Adding such features increases the development time by at least a factor of 2 - and while we're proud of the reception our recent alpha gameplay trailer received and are immensely grateful for your continued support, we won't be able to maintain an acceptable development pace with our current resources without reducing the dev time we spend on moddability. That said, this doesn't mean systems will be fully hardcoded going forward - you can always disable what we've built and implement something yourselves using our usual modding paradigm. Obviously, it'll be more difficult than modding existing systems that were built with moddability in mind, but it's still a possibility.

感谢你的阅读！ 请放心，我们正在努力以尽快准备好封闭Alpha测试。 虽然现在给出具体日期还为时过早（毕竟我们的资源总是在不断变化），但我们希望测试在不远的将来启动。 与此同时，你可以期待4月1日的下一篇开发日志（不是愚人节玩笑，日期确实就是这么排列的），并且你应该加入我们的Discord和Subreddit，并在YouTube、Facebook和Twitter上关注我们。

Thank you for reading! Rest assured, we're working hard to get the closed alpha ready as soon as possible. While it's still too early to give any specific date (since, after all, our resources are always in flux), we're hopeful that it won't be too far into the future. In the meantime, you can look forward to the next dev diary on April 1 (no bamboozle, that's just how the dates lined up) and you should make sure to join our Discord and Subreddit, and to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

请关注我，我将持续发布Gray Eminence的各种消息。

有钱的有志者可在https://www.patreon.com/nestinars资助制作组。

官方Discord服务器：https://discord.gg/greyeminence

官方reddit版块：https://www.reddit.com/r/greyeminence/

对此游戏有兴趣者可以加QQ群：785256043或299380139。