Branch Office / Trading

These might technically not count as bugs, but they seem odd enough to me to post them as such in case they are.

First of all, when I was building my branch office, I noticed that the trade tab opened up in the chat window, even though the branch office was not even completed. I would have thought the branch office would have to be completed in order to make trades, but I was easily able to check out the trades listed at the time, even though my branch office was at 60% completion.

I didn't check to see if trades could actually be made with an incomplete branch office though since none of the trades really grabbed my attention, so it could just serve as a preview of what'll become available in the minutes it takes to complete the building, or it might just let you start trading early, not sure.

Second thing was the fact that I could send trade requests to people without branch offices (wanted to test if you could trade with people without them so I sent a trade request to someone on my friend list I knew didn't have one yet). I found it odd that the request -did- go through, but my friend was not able to actually trade (the button for accepting the trade was greyed out apparently).

He cancelled it as a result, though I sent him another to test if the trade request times out after a while or what.

That one might possibly be by design and not a bug, but if it is, then I would suggest removing the ability to send trade requests to people without branch offices in the first place. Right now, when you send a trade request, you actually send the item too, and you don't get it back until they decline the trade request (barring test currently doing about timed out trades showing it does time out and returns you your goods).

If trades -don't- time out, I would also suggest adding such a thing back in. If it just sits forever in someone's mailbox being held hostage because they won't accept nor decline it, that would suck, as you've effectively lost some items.

EDIT: Trades do time out after all, it seems. It timed out sometime in the night.

That said, my friend got enough materials to make his own branch office and he didn't get the trade tab until -after- he finished building. So either this was fixed really quickly already, or -something- triggered it for me last night, and not sure what would cause that bug.

Same, my branch office is just in queue (not enought material) and I can see all offers.

Update: I was able to do a real trade and still not even started to build branch office.

Not able to sent ressources to another player though, but I can place and conclude offers.