Automated trading - Caravans

[Tallsword]

I'm pretty sure this was mentioned already, but it's kinda hard to search this kind of topic among all the automated systems that were mentioned recently.

I know what you are about to say, I know, game's still in development and there are more important things, but having something extra in mind while developing might pay off on the long run.

Now, first of all I'd like to mention an old game series dear to me, Port Royale and Port Royale 2. These games had a really nice automated trading system, you could create a "fleet" then make a trade route between the discovered cities. You could control which commodities would the fleets pick up, what's the max amount they'd pick up, what is the max price they'd pay, min price they'd pay at, the game would also let you do loops with perfectly customized commodieties (for example: pick up 50 corn in port A, pick up 50 cotton in port B, drop 25 corn in port B, ...) which was really useful when you started to build your commodity generating buildings.

How do I think something like this would be possible in Kenshi? I think something really close to this wouldnt be too hard to create. First you assign a squad as a caravan, then assign a building as trading headquarters. The caravan squad has two types of units: the traders and escorters, the reason to split them is simply to prohibit the escorters from picking up commodities. There'd be a need for a dedicated Caravan tab, but might be possible to integrate the current map tab into this - the next step would be to select a route for the caravan, simply clicking on the city icons on a map.
Next up is picking up materials from the headquarters, possibly the easiest way to do this is to give players a button on containers saying "empty this" or "for trade", but this wouldnt allow them to customize the max amount to pick up and values to trade at, but having a dedicated panel where players can customize the value they'd trade commodities at might be a little bit too much to request.

Here's a simple design inspired by the game series I mentioned, but quite far from being alike, due to Kenshi having a much different feel to trading and this way it would support future commodities as well:

http://i.imgur.com/tFzdVCj.jpg

Yeah, I'm terrible at drawing. I'm glad my life does not depend on it being pretty.

Before I finish this I'd like to say that I did not discuss the safety of caravans, because I think it goes without saying that they could be "ambushed" anywhere on the road and that might result in only a few survivors regrouping in the next city (unless the dev team can make some neat tricks with the AI, maybe let them be assigned as medics, looters, which are actually present in the bandit AI, that'd be real amazing, but it might get buggy).

Feel free to post your idea(s) and / or opinion about automated trading. I understand that some of you are uninterested or dislike this suggestion, but I personally think this would be a quality of life change