Not really sure how behavior like this was considered "good enough" for release candidate:
Steam Community: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. Economy1
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Steam Community: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. Economy2
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Steam Community: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. "Let them eat sand" - Tais the emir of Hubyar
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Steam Community: Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. Sad market state intensifies
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Two different starving towns, food prices are still at "discount" level. Myzea even has plenty of food on the market, cheap, for some reason.
This is after a daily tick (or several in case of Hubyar). Starving towns, or even towns expected to run out of food in 2-3 days, should immediately attempt to buy out ANY food item still available on the local market (impacting tax gains from that settlements, can't get money from people who just spent a fortune on basic necessities, no matter what my government may think), and apply it toward reduction in local food storage. Pretty ridiculous to see a town starving while 150+ loads of meat are offered dirt-cheap in its markets.
Another major issue I've noticed is that goods consumption is completely off, especially compared to workshop production capacity. Breweries, as the most egregious example in current version, will flood the market in just a few days enough to become unprofitable. There are enough of them on the map to quickly flood the "global" market into long-term unprofitability. Similar issue occurs with most workshops, unless the player spends time fighting against the "economy" with manual good distribution, or is fortunate enough that warfare causes enough disruption and depletion.
On top of that, consumption information is so heavily obfuscated, or completely hidden from the player, unless they are the owner of a town, most of it will be undecipherable.
The leftmost notable should be able to offer a breakdown of economic situation of a town:
"We can rely on our three villages to provide grain, meat, hides, and grapes. Our brewery and tannery produce enough beer and leather to allow trade with other towns. The caravans keep us supplied with Oil, Tools, and Pottery, but it's been some time since we've had Wine and Fish available on the market. People are desperate for Hardwood and Wool."
Or something to that effect. So at least the player has some feedback of what is going on with that town.
Towns should have much higher consumption of... basically everything other than grain, as things are right now. They need to be goods sinks, and a lot of the goods that are not produced locally should near always be in high enough demand to warrant bringing them for trade. 1 unit a day does nothing considering workshop production rates. This consumption should also be heavily dependent on prosperity of the town - the higher it is, the more variety of goods the town requires, and the larger amount of each is in demand. Their cultural diversification of preferences should be a thing as well.
Towns also need to be capable of deficit consumption. Meaning going increasingly into negative "consumed" quantity of a specific good, driving up the price, and lowering tax gains from that town. Also increasingly limiting prosperity gain (but not reducing prosperity unless at some "critical" level of deficit) dependent on the magnitude of the deficit.
At 5000+ prosperity, any goods that are not locally produced and available should only go into positives when a caravan just hits the town with 100+ units of it. And not last long after that, either, since the town should immediately address the deficit "spending" of each good by directly removing required quantities from the market.
Give towns "storage" capacity for goods to match at least expected weekly consumption at current prosperity value. Have them restock from any delivery before the rest is allowed back into the marketplace. Hell, give the player ability to either hire one of the gang leaders to set fire to that warehouse, destroying a portion of the "stored" goods, or do it themselves in some manner of night "stealth" mission, as a tool of market speculation.
Construction of projects (including continuous) should increase desire for specific goods, dependent on the project. Recovering villages should increase price for specific goods, and recover faster if they are delivered by the villager party.
Various cultures should have some secondary goods they consume in large quantities based on specific regional resources, to ensure local production maintains profitability. So that Vlandian towns would consume, as example, a lot of oil and horses. Northern empire towns would use much more silk than other factions, since it's so freely available to them. Battanians would take grape baths, because Battanians.
Provide increased LOCAL consumption to make workshops exploiting local village production profitably operational, even in between caravan visits. Just at lower profit, unless nearby towns are at very high prosperity. This should also apply to breweries, not just "trade" goods.
You're working with settings without global trade network. Goods from another side of the map should always be in high demand. Demand driving workshop profitability should not rely on warfare disruption just so they can start breaking even long-term. High prosperity towns should be near always starved for luxury goods that local production cannot supply. Relevant information should be communicated to the player in a clear way (that's what the NPC interactions should be bloody well used for), not hidden behind "Town Management" panel.
The current implementation is not just extremely unintuitive, it may work well in terms of caravans doing their normalization work, but makes workshops extremely ungainly to turn profitable. Trade in general is nickle-and-diming affair in small quantities, instead of the large scale bulk operation it should be when going from one end of the map to the other. Then again, "trade" gameplay should have included large-scale contracts with town merchants and owners, and storage rights along with associated "roguery" gameplay, but that's another tangent.
At least fix economy so that it doesn't just reflect the period settings, and gives a sliver of local flavor to towns through their consumption preferences (also helping local workshops), but it also doesn't throw conflicting information at the player when it bothers to communicate at all.
tl;dr:
- Towns should not be starving when there's cheap food on their internal market.
- Primary notable should provide breakdown of internal consumption and supply situation
- Towns need much higher consumption values, preferably with increased consumption for goods tied to regional production of each faction, and general prosperity value
- Towns should have deficit consumption implementation, driven by prosperity value, allowing for accumulation of internal "demand" for increasing number of units desired and possible to trade at once
- Towns with high levels of deficit accumulations should have slower prosperity growth than those supplied
- Ongoing town projects (including continuous) should increase consumption of specific goods
- Recovering villages should increase consumption of specific goods
- Towns should "store" portion of caravan-delivered goods for near-future expected consumption, also to prevent immediate market price manipulation by the player