SP Native Economy Mod Alpha Stage

[falandrew]

Heh, well, I think that for one thing you could raise the amount of items needed to build each "asset" especially some of the earlier ones such as the quarry which currently requires practically nothing, I realise this is only a short term thing and you can't increase the amounts needed too much s it doesn't really combat the rest till evening rest till morning loop.

I think maybe one of the better things to do (although it would require a fair bit of coding) is to assign a few special hero NPC characters, like "Stonewall the blacksmith" or something with which you could take quest to raise his ability in crafting, eg he give more tool etc the higher said NPCs level is, also I think it would be nice if you could maybe have to hire farmers and things to look after your fields and make sure everything grows. Really I think the next stage to go with this is to add more functionality to the add ons themselves, give each a key NPC and some stock quests, like, the mountain bandits are disrupting mining activities go kill (x) number of bandits type stuff. I know again this is hardly ideal.

I think the best way would be (when it's finished) to add Winters crafting mod onto it, that would make it much more fun, then instead of the items magically appearing in the chest you could actually make them, think about it it would actually be really cool, you get the iron bars from your mine which they put in the chest you go collect them, take them to your blacksmith and then you could decide what you wanted to make them into, eg swords armour etc with more complicated stuff being available as you get more experienced with crafting.

This would mean maybe you could add a few more places like a cow farm (not exactly sure what you would name it, ranch maybe?) that gave you fresh beef which would be like a more expensive version of dried meat and leather then you could go to the tannery and turn your leather into armour.

I think that would be the best but of course that relies on outside support of course... And then there is the fact some items are more interesting that others, I mean, who wants to learn cow milking skill, and i suppose "Crafting" cheese would be rather tiresome lol.

Er, another thing, I don't know how much you thought about it but surely you could split like half of the "assets" (why i keep calling them that I don't know, what would you call them?) into Culmar castle as well, this would help clean up the rather cluttered area around radoghir and also it would add a little more depth Apart from anything as it stands some of the positions don't make much sense, I mean woodsman's tent? there are no trees for miles around on that section of map...

Also, maybe you could improve the layout of the "things" perhaps in a little more of a circle around the castle, mainly you would need to move the farms the linen works the brewery and the vintner to "behind" the castle.

Oh, by the way, not quite the end of the bugs currently the dairy farm isn't spawning after being built, it even has the downright gall to come up as an option and make me pay again.

I haven't really had time to check why but I guess you know since it appears to be a similar problem to the one experienced before.


Ha yeah, now I checked, you forgot to put in the enable party dairy farm in, notice you DID remeber the charges though  All you need to do iss add that one thing in the cosequnce box and it'll be fine, as far as I know... (listen to me trying to pretend I know what the hell I'm talking about Most I've ever managed to do was change the starting menu so when you chose squire it gave 100 strength instead of ten 70 int instead of 7 etc lol)

What! the free version had a day limit as well as a level limit    ...Yeah im using the free demo <.< >,> I don't have a credit card so I can't pay for anything online. I had my camp set up really well as well, just needed that second wheat the dairy and i think the brewery and the vinters and i'd of ben done

 

[BobDwarf]

I have to say I'm really enjoying this mod! As has been said before, fusing with crafting mod would be great. hopefully as M & B grows, you'll be able to implement them grapihcally in your castle or on the buildings where they are situated on the map.
Great mod!

 

[Deus Ex]

What! the free version had a day limit as well as a level limit    ...Yeah im using the free demo <.< >,> I don't have a credit card so I can't pay for anything online. I had my camp set up really well as well, just needed that second wheat the dairy and i think the brewery and the vinters and i'd of ben done

Armagan, added a "day limit" in addition to the level limit, since some people were using the character editor (and then the import/export) to "reset" the level of their characters to ZERO so they could keep playing for free.

DE

 

[falandrew]

Ahh, that makes sense, cheers DE!

Wait! why didn't I think of doing that? Because I'm a very nice and generous person... yes that right, because I'm a good boy

 

[Stonewall382]

@  fal--Okay, but what should I require more of?  I'd rather not just require more wood and stone, because that doesn't really solve the problem.  What other materials should be required?

As for quests, I...am not a fan of quests.  They seem boring to me, to be honest.  However, if we could think of some "quests" that could probably happen (like the mountain bandits (though I plan to have raiders and the like in the game anyways)), I might be swayed to put a few in.  Plus, if Winter and I decide to join up, and he wants to put quests in, all the more power to him.  It isn't like I want them out of the game, it's just that thinking of putting them in doesn't really get my juices flowing.

I'm up for Winter and me collaborating, but I think we both need to finish our mods more before we start to actually work together.

I'd love to hear ideas for more buildings, as I'm plum out (and there are still resources in the native game that aren't explained at all  ).  A few I plan on including are a grape farm, a vintner (taken out of the alpha, because I didn't get caravans working), a fish pond, and a port/trading post (for spices and the like).  Can you think of anything else?  If I could get someone to put new item meshes in the game (wink wink any of you graphics artists out there ), I could REALLY expand the list of items, and then industries available.  I'd also like to work with sheek and his boys once I get more done here, to see if they'd be interested in making the castle itself more interesting--I really like their ideas of population happiness and such, and would love those to be in the game.  Then, the player could build churches, wells, hold festivals, um...other stuff (I'll get over this hurdle when I come to it), and it would add a whole new dimension to the mod.

I plan on splitting up and overlapping resources between various cities--I'd like for the player to have to take most of the cities available to get to the highest levels of economy (essentially, you'd have to create an empire).  I just wanted to get a lot of buildings out for the alpha, to see what people thought.   If you (or anyone, obviously) have any specific ideas on how to split up buildings and resources between cities (as in, Wercheg is near the sea, so it can get smoked fish and spices (through trade), and, er...the salt mine can produce salt ), please post it here, as I'd like as many suggestions and ideas as possible.

I'm going to work on getting Thorgrim's Map Editor to work (when I tried to move the cities in the alpha, none of them showed up on the map in the Editor ), so that everything looks more like it should (and so that all the towns can be more easily sieged by enemy factions ).

If that's the last of the bugs, then I'll produce a [hopefully] bug-free version in a few minutes.

By the way, how many days is the limit for the demo?

Thanks for well-thought-out post fal.


@  Bob--Well I'm glad to hear that.   As for the graphical changes, I hope to (once the mod is farther along) change the icons to more fitting ones.  I noticed that Dvd is the guy who made the economy threads in the suggestions forums, and he's also the guy who did the various new icons a while back.  Hopefully I can get him to help me out.


I finally figured out (thanks in large part to Winter ) how to work the Python code, and am now adding different parties to module_parties.py.  It's a heck of a lot easier than doing it via the UE (which I still stand by as a great program to get newbie modders more acquainted with the game's mechanics and such).  Hopefully I can catch up to where I was via the UE pretty quickly, and can then go from there.  Weekend's coming up, and I got a whole lotta sittin' around to do...

Cheers fellas.

 

[falandrew]

Hehe, it's thirty days by the away, (game time not real time obviously )

How about stables, could breed horses, obviously it would start out producing sumpter horses and saddle horses but maybe if you figure out a way of coding it it could get better and eventually start producing warhorses and charges occasionally as well as sumpters saddle horses etc.

Or what about being able to build a blast furnace of something similar, it would mean you could take the iron bars you dug up in your mine and manufacture them into steel, (higher sell price. In fact, I don't know how possible it is, but could you add TWO item modifiers, for example you could add bronze as well and then you could make either bronze iron or steel versions of weapons, iron would be the mid range, steel would be lighter and deliver more cutting and piercing damage, and bronze would be the heaviest and deliver the worst damage (not entirely accurate I realise, but for the purpose of the game I suppose it could work) Then there would be the original item modifiers like chipped balanced.. I'm not sure how that could work but still, it was an idea.)

Simple buildings you could make would be a gold silver mine, after all all you need to do would be recolour the iron bar into a silver colour and a gold colour.

Perhaps if you were thinking of changing the layout a little and moving the some of the buildings away from the main castle you could build a "fishing port" or something similar. Since you never see the places anyway it wouldn't matter too much that you lack the resources to put it in, (I suppose if you got someone to design the places for you you could add fishing nets harpoons etc to a plain building, maybe build a wooden bridge over some water but cut it in half to make a jetty?)

Something I noticed, it would become especially pronounced if you did start repositioning the some of the sites, currently the items get from (for example) the iron mine to the blacksmiths pretty much immediately and there is no real transport required, so maybe you could add it that caravans spawn from the iron mine with the purpose of going straight to the blacksmith. This way you would have to hire your own caravan guards to protects from raiders as well as making you keep an eye over your operations and force the player to occasionaly intervene if one of the caravans gets overwhelmed by black khergits or whatever.

Depending on the speed or if the caravan got there at all would mean that the tools couldn't be produced, you would have to program a trigger that meant that the blacksmith could not start the three day counter until the raw material had arrived, which could be confusing, you would also have to set up a way of it resetting with every delivery. Hmm, that would involve a fair bit of coding I guess,
That would mainly be for if the settlements got much more spaced out, as they are now it would be a huge waste of programming time, and there would be little point. I mean all the buildings are within a 1 mile radius of each other.

Hmm, I'm not sure how you could implement this but, it would be interesting all the same, perhaps you could do it off a menu with zel, add a research button below the build button, when you clicked on it it would list all the assets you have currently got then you could click on one and it could show a specific upgrade. So for example if I felt that my barley field was not productive enough I could go see zel and tell him to research the horse collar. This would require some materials, eg some leather, some meat some money or something. Then you would have to wait a set amount of time, for something like the horse collar maybe two days? When you go back Zel could say he had been successful and he had invented the horse collar. As a result the farm could produce one extra sack of barley.

Next time you went to see Zel and looked at the barley farms upgrades you might see three course crop rotation, then next time enclosure. And the possibly four course, with added turnips!! Although that would take it a little out of the time farm, but you could maybe add a few of Jethro Tull's little inventions maybe, although again, this is out of time frame.  Researching enclosure would be much more costly and take a lot longer to research but would provide you with many more sacks of barley as a result. You would need to do this for all of the buildings though so, it could be hard to find the necessary upgrades

I would be willing to help find them for example with the stables you could research husbandry which would reduce chances to make lame / swaybacked horses  and increase the chances of spirited heavy etc.

That could be an interesting way of making the game a little more in  depth, you could make it so while there was research and upgrading going on the asset would have to stop producing, this might lead to the player having to use their head and thinking, well, if I stop my mine to research adit mining my blacksmith won't be able to make tools which I need to do the research anyway.

Hmm, perhaps it should be made so that you have to pay wages for your workers and for any asset to work at its highest output it needs a certain amount of peasants/townsmen and say one key NPC type who acts as the overseer like maybe you could make a few characters like master blacksmith etc.

Also, when you make money it is added to the chest beside Zel is it not, but there is no way to make it transfer, at least under the current version, but is there no way to make the money just appear on your own character?

Also, perhaps if you are moving things around, it would be nice if you could move Radoghir castle somewhere else, at the moment, it's in a fairly bleak place, perhaps you could move it to somewhere near the coast close to some trees and perhaps a mountain, so, Ideally, some place around tihr, perhaps about parallel to Zendar but on the opposite bank of the river, the castle could be situated about halfway between the mountains and the river with the port sorta close to the river and the mines on the mountain side and the woodcutters trappers on the edge of the wood, farms and the industries around the castle and filling the gaps, this could keep the castle fairly close together and also far enough apart for the caravans to be useful.

Just some ideas, not all of them are good and yay! python!

 

[sheek]

I'm downloading this...

I'm also redoing my farming mod today, I'll send you the source code so they can be merged.

 

[Stonewall382]

@  Andrew--K & M (and thus dag, right?  It's hard to know exactly who's doing what in that mod, no offense.) have a stablemaster that apparently works.  Hopefully I'll be able to use that so that...I don't have to work harder.

Hopefully Winter will take care of this in his crafting mod, again so that I don't have to try (and fail at) it.

Gold and silver mines would be cool, but I don't know.  They wouldn't really be used in the game except for money (I'm trying to have all the items be incorporated in other industries, in population happiness, etc., so that everything is interdependent, and that to reach the highest levels of technology, one must basically create an empire.), unless you can think of some other way to use them (be great if you could. )

Yep, ports and trading posts will hopefully/probably see some action in the mod eventually, either as a caravan safehaven and/or as a building to get exotic items (spice, wine, that kinda stuff).

I really, REALLY hope to get caravans working in the game, as that would make the "empire feel" so much more complete.  I'll look into these after I get a few towns working.

I was thinking about putting in ways to upgrade things, although if done incorrectly, it could come off as a little gamey.  However, upgrading from iron to steel plows (for example) could be realistic, and that could lead to a more productive farm.  I don't know how to incorporate time into the research though.  I'll ponder that.

Paying the workers a wage doesn't seem too realistic, as they're all your serfs, serving you, and living off your food.  Even if it did happen historically, you would probably then, to balance things out, have to make the peasants pay to get food.  To me, it seems like unneeded complexity.  *shrug*  No worries.

I do, however, like the idea of needing a certain number of workers (garrisoned troops--farmers and townsmen, essentially) in a building for it to work at maximum efficiency.

It's possible to make the money from industries go straight to the player, but I'd like to make it go to the chest, so that recruiting from the castle takes money from the chest, and not the player.  That way, it's not possible for one castle to have all the money of the other castles.  I think I'll keep the player's finances and each town's finances seperate.  What do you think?

Not a bad idea about the placement of Radoghir castle.  I'll tinker with it as best I can.

Thanks for the ideas and the post, as usual.


@  dag--   I really don't know my way around Python real well just yet.  If we could talk (I'll work on getting the IRC client working, so that everyone who wants to help (with anything--coding, modelling, or even concept) can talk together), we could talk about what to do with our mods.  However, until then, I'd like you to hold off on giving me your code.  I certainly want to work together, but I need more time to get acquainted with the module system.  Thanks.



Eventually, I'd like to make it so that the number and type of troops available for the player's party is dependent on the buildings in his or her empire (of course, Zendar would be excused, so that you get troops to actually assault a town/castle with).  Then, one would need a strong empire AND a good mind on the battlefield to really do well in the game.  I'd like to include the ability for the player to send raiding parties and siege trains to the enemy, and have it so that enemy and outlaw parties spawn from time to time to wreak havoc on your empire (if it's undefended, that is).  I'd really like to make this into an RTSFPS as much as possible, as I think that'd be a lot of fun.  What do you guys think?




Edit:  What should be the final UE version of the mod is uploaded to Janus' site.  Hope everyone enjoys.

 

[Winter]

@  Andrew--K & M (and thus dag, right?  It's hard to know exactly who's doing what in that mod, no offense.) have a stablemaster that apparently works.  Hopefully I'll be able to use that so that...I don't have to work harder.

Storymod has a working stablemaster, of a sort -- simply a merchant who doesn't charge you for horses and doesn't get any new ones.

Hopefully Winter will take care of this in his crafting mod, again so that I don't have to try (and fail at) it.

All Craftmod smithies will have a forge where you can turn your hand-mined metal ore and coal into finished metals, which you can then use for crafting. I just need the metal and weapon textures.

It's possible to make the money from industries go straight to the player, but I'd like to make it go to the chest, so that recruiting from the castle takes money from the chest, and not the player.  That way, it's not possible for one castle to have all the money of the other castles.  I think I'll keep the player's finances and each town's finances seperate.  What do you think?

Easy. I can help you do this.

@  dag--   I really don't know my way around Python real well just yet.  If we could talk (I'll work on getting the IRC client working, so that everyone who wants to help (with anything--coding, modelling, or even concept) can talk together), we could talk about what to do with our mods.

I hang out in #mount&blade as well, and we could always use more mod talk.

Corpulently,
Winter

 

[falandrew]

Heh, lots and lots o gold  DOES make the population happy makes me happy anyway

OK, yeah, they would mainly be used for money, so, since this is turning out to be an empire building game, how about once you get gold silver mines you get a coiner, who can then produce coins in your own picture, you could make your own currency (god I'd love that ) then you could compare your dollar versus the vaegir crown and the swadian pound. The stronger you get, both economically and in strength the stronger your currency got, so, eventually, as you took more towns over, you could get them all using your own currency.

Just an idea, it could also tie in with something else I read about heraldry, might of been in the suggestions forum, but, maybe you could design your own heraldry that would begin to populate towns as you took them over, also all your troops would wear them as well.

You could take the game from three ways, you could either, join the swadian or vaegir armies and help them take over the land of Caladria , I suppose if you took over that much stuff, you would get promoted to government, or possibly even king, (maybe you could write in some sort of situation where your king is killed and then there is no bloodline and the people call for you to be made king.. or something *shrugs*

Or you could go it alone and try making your own army, your own kingdom, I guess effectively make yourself a king, which you could do, either with terror and force or through culture and economy.

I don't think with the system currently as it is would support that kind of thing though to make it believable you would have to spend a helluva lot of money and make a helluva lot, and you would also need to fight in much larger battles, much larger that the system can currently handle.

Although, I don't know if this was what you had in mind for the mod, it would still be cool though, um, I'll download see if I can find any bugs, I seem to be good at that

 

[sheek]

Yeah go to #mount&blade... much easier to talk there. Of course that only works if you can hang around on the internet all day long. Oh well...

 

[SilentBob]

How goes learning python? *bump*

 

[Stonewall382]

Heh.  Well enough, thanks to Winter.  Too bad I've had so much freakin' homework these past few days...
Anyhoo, I plan on sending myself the python files so that I can work on it over Easter break (though I won't be able to playtest in that time.   Oh well, I'll have to set up all the industries for each city.  I wonder if I can just apply the "castle" menu to each city.  Dunno.  *Wanders off, muttering to himself*).