Author Topic: Reworking Trade  (Read 106635 times)

Anaris

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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #120: April 12, 2012, 02:51:23 AM »
That's an interesting approach. I was always going to go with Food, Wood, Metal and Goods.

I still believe that this approach works better. It is only one additional resource (or two, if we use Stone as well), and it allows the possibility of being better at one kind of production than another, and thus different strategic options.
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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #121: April 12, 2012, 03:33:23 AM »
Why have 10000 resources? Just have 3: Food, Materials, Goods.
And no one else will say "those three aren't necessary, it's these four that are truly useful"? :)
That's an interesting approach. I was always going to go with Food, Wood, Metal and Goods.

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Duvaille

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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #122: April 12, 2012, 09:00:38 AM »
I still believe that this approach works better. It is only one additional resource (or two, if we use Stone as well), and it allows the possibility of being better at one kind of production than another, and thus different strategic options.

It would help in making distinction between forests and mountains. Each of the region types would then have corresponding resource:

Towns and cities:    goods -> better morale
Plains:                    food -> population growth
Forests:                  wood -> production levels
Mountains:              metal -> cheaper troop recruitment and repairs
Badlands:               sorry, your lands are simply bad

Metal could be tied to warfare mostly and wood for the economy in general. The underlining assumption would be that the blacksmiths, carpenters etc. are always able to get the raw materials they need, but they need to pay more for them if they are scarce. So if you (the lord) supply them yourself, you get better deals.

The idea of having goods available for easier morale control is a splendid one. I can imagine your backward and distant frontier region would be much happier if you frequently supplied them with the high quality goods from the city. But that costs you gold. However, the smaller your population / production / morale the less of the stuff you need to grow and maintain the regional stat.

Tom

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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #123: April 12, 2012, 09:18:15 AM »
Doh, I actually forgot stone in there. But apparently, nobody noticed, so maybe it never was as important as I thought.


fodder

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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #124: April 12, 2012, 10:11:37 AM »
well.. it's not unimportant.. it's just that none of them do anything yet.

i mean.. there is/was flavour text about stone/wood for building, metal for repairs/etc, wasn't there?
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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #125: April 12, 2012, 12:03:28 PM »
Doh, I actually forgot stone in there. But apparently, nobody noticed, so maybe it never was as important as I thought.

Stone could be important for fortifications and road maintenance. Again, you could still build forts without it but it would cost you more, and you would still have roads, but to really have them in a splendid condition, stone is needed.

Though I really would like each resource to be tied to the region type for simplicity's sake. Just by glancing at the map you would get a general idea of what is produced where, or what could be produced. Stone and metal would both naturally go to the mountains. I do not know if this is a problem, perhaps it is not, but it would be nice to have just one resource / region.

Duvaille

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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #126: April 17, 2012, 08:48:12 AM »
Why have 10000 resources? Just have 3: Food, Materials, Goods.

This approach has some instinctive charm to it due to its simplicity. Each of them is valuable on its own, each of them accomplishes something meaningful and each of them is straightforward enough to easily grasp. The peasants need food to live and breed, materials to make stuff and goods to make them happy.

There is, however, a way that we could expand the "Materials" resource to comprise of a variety of different kinds of materials. For the sake of simplicity, all materials would accomplish the same. You could have wood (forests), stone (mountains), metals (other mountains) and perhaps even exotics (in small quantities in desolate regions). But if you had more variety stored in your region, less of them would be needed in total.

Say you wanted to upgrade your fort. If you had no materials stored away, let's say the upgrade would cost 1000 gold. With materials you could have 80% discount. So you buy 200 units of wood
with 100 gold, which saves you 100 gold in total.

But let's assume that you buy 100 metals and 100 stone instead. That is 200 units of materials in total. But because having more resources present uses less of each, you would use only 50 metals and 50 stone, so you would actually need to buy only 100 material units in total, saving you 150 gold.

Further, if you bought metals, stone and wood, the amount you need to spend each of them falls further, saving you more gold. So, the more you are willing to work to keep all kinds of materials stored at your region, the cheaper it would be for you overall. Missing one or two resources would not be fatal in any way, as the others would compensate, but those willing to work for the variety would reap the greatest benefits.

In some geographical areas some resources would be more scarce and thus more desired, and would have higher prices. Where there is excess, it would be sold towards the needy regions. Regions in between would profit as trade hubs. Some realms, such as perhaps D'Hara in Dwilight, could truly become realms specialized in trade.

If materials effected the regional production directly, the system could work the same way. To gain the materials bonus, you need to have some materials available. But if you have a variety of them, all types are spent but the overall amount consumed is reduced.

This way there is no need to limit the variety of different materials that are produced. You could have three, you could have thirty. They all work the same way and the only thing that matters is to have as many kinds of them as you can. This would make it possible to make the trader game more exciting without making it any more complicated for the player.

Ps. the numbers I used are mock numbers meant to illustrate a point. The benefit of multiple resources should probably not be quite that strong.

Tom

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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #127: April 17, 2012, 09:39:28 AM »
I kind of like the idea of an "exchange rate".

Basically, the idea would be roughly(!) like this:

  • construction of something (a building, a fort, a road, whatever) has a cost in materials, but they can be satisfied from specific materials, generic materials or gold
  • let's assume you want to upgrade your fort and the block costs 100 wood and 100 stone.
  • you can provide 100 wood and 100 stone - done
  • you can also provide 300 wood or 300 stone, because materials can be exchange for each other at a 2:1 rate (or 200 wood and 50 stone, or whatever)
  • you can also provide 100 wood and 100 gold, because materials can be ad-hoc bought at a 100-gold-per-100-units price (twice the maximum price the market allows). Or 100 stone and 100 gold. Or just 200 gold. Or 50 wood, 50 stone and 100 gold, etc.
The part about this that I don't like is that it makes things fairly complicated. But I wanted to throw it out there.


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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #128: April 17, 2012, 09:48:28 AM »
When you say you can exchange or buy materials, where are they exchanged or bought from?

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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #129: April 17, 2012, 09:56:09 AM »
not really complicated...

You need Wood and Stone.

If you do not have enough wood or stone you can replace that with 2x of another resource or replace it with equal amounts of gold.

I think you just have to many numbers on the screen and that makes it look complicated.
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fodder

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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #130: April 17, 2012, 10:19:00 AM »
When you say you can exchange or buy materials, where are they exchanged or bought from?

some random npc. you don't need to buy the stuff personally from the npc before hand. you gather what you have, then the npc fills in the rest and gives you options.

won't even see the npc outside of the building screen no doubt.
firefox

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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #131: April 17, 2012, 10:46:44 AM »
Then why would you ever take the 300 wood option? You end up paying 50% more than you would if you just bought the extra 100 stone. Only reason I could see for it was if you were drowning in wood and had no gold. Seems unlikely for most realms.

Duvaille

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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #132: April 17, 2012, 11:27:51 AM »
I suppose much depends on how much importance you want to give to the resources. The more important they are, the simpler the design ought to be. If the resources are both important and complicated, it forces the game towards TradeMaster, as it is economics at the end that wins wars. If they are, instead, of marginal importance, some players may choose to dive deeper to the nuances of the trading business but it is not absolutely essential to do so.

Personally I don't mind either way. If trading were to grow in importance I know I would enjoy it. But I am not so sure for the majority of the players.

As for the actual uses of each individual resource, I can imagine it would require quite a bit of careful balancing. Should each resource have roughly equal demand in average game environment? How much and what type of resources does temple upgrade take? Roads? Tournament Grounds? Recruitment Centers? Do archers take more wood than cavalry does? All that has to be thought of, balanced, tested and adjusted. Some realms may gain significant advantages over their neighbors due to controlling a key resource.

Now compare that to having a possibility to replace 20% (or 33% or whatever) of the gold cost of any construction etc. with materials, no matter which kind, where more variety is better than less variety. On micro level you would still have materials and food flowing to cities and goods from cities to the provinces, as well as the provinces trading their surplus materials for what they lack. On macro level you would have currents of surplus materials traveling towards areas that lack them, food included.

I just wonder if additional complexity is really worth the effort.

Tom

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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #133: April 17, 2012, 01:23:45 PM »
Then why would you ever take the 300 wood option? You end up paying 50% more than you would if you just bought the extra 100 stone. Only reason I could see for it was if you were drowning in wood and had no gold. Seems unlikely for most realms.

It depends on what you have available. If you have surplus wood, but are poor in gold, then that would be the best option. Likewise, if you have tons of gold, but few resources, then paying everything in gold might be your best option.

Finally trading for the resources is guaranteed to be the cheapest option - but you may or not be able to find the deals you require.

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Re: Reworking Trade
« Reply #134: May 04, 2012, 02:03:59 PM »
I understand the benefits that can be provided by having different materials, like wood, metal, stone. Just as you could have, instead of food, cereals, livestock, and fish.

The more resources there are, though, the more difficult it is to balance, and the more effort is demanded from the players to manage all of it.

My proposition was for 1 important resource (food), one useful resource (materials), and one luxury resource (goods). That way people can get away with continuing to manage just 1 resource without crippling consequence, or deal with two to optimize efficiency, or deal with three to maximize everything and make more profits.

If you blow up the resources into wood, stone, and metal, then instead of doubling the number of resources you need to manage to run everything smoothly, you multiply it by four. Lots of people hate the trading game already, and as such I don't really think that quadrupling the amount of time people have to spend on these (and more, since these resources probably won't be as common in all realms as food) is going to make things more fun for people.
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