Fix the Economy by Removing Pack Animals and Bring Back Inventory Management

[Lord Irontoe]

So there's a problem with players becoming crazy rich after a short time and the Devs have been trying various things to fix it like nerfing workshop incomes, tournament winnings and now caravans. It seems to me that they're ignoring the main cause of runaway income: virtually unlimited inventory capacity. Of course we're making tons of money. We get to take ALL the loot from every battle and it turns out that even ragged tunics are worth something when you can sell 50 of them at a time. Baggage getting too heavy? Just buy more mules.

In Warband, you had Inventory Management, which was always too low, so you had to throw away the vast majority of crap you looted. Hell, I used to chart my progression by my rising loot cutoff. When I was rejecting anything less than 500, I knew I was doing pretty well. I've spent an awful lot of time swapping out cheaper stuff so that I could take something a litttle more expensive. And that kept money down to a reasonable rate, because there was only so much you can carry.

Now, we get to take all the stuff. You don't even have to think about it, just hit the "take all" button. It doesn't matter how worthless it is, it still sells for something and you can sell it in bulk for good money. That's why fighting lord armies nets you loot that's, paradoxically, nothing but worthless trash while still selling for a small fortune. The same thing happens in Warband mods that let your companions store things in their inventory. You get to take all the garbage and wind up with unlimited money really fast.

I don't really see an easy fix, though. Pack animals are integral to the design at this point. If they're removed, then you can't carry enough food for the troops and caravans can't carry enough goods to make money. And a utilitarian skill like Inventory Management doesn't fit well into the new skill system. How would you level it? What kinds of perks would it have? I don't know, but I really think the Devs need to find a solution to the unlimited inventory if they ever want the economy to have any semblance of balance.

 

[KarakBol]

Move party size bonus to leadership, add inventory bonus to stewardship i would say. Add food requirement For all animals as well as a speed penalty for pack animals. Same for riding horses used as pack animal

 

[Nalgasucia507]

Move party size bonus to leadership, add inventory bonus to stewardship i would say. Add food requirement For all animals as well as a speed penalty for pack animals. Same for riding horses used as pack animal

I agree with all this points, pretty good to be honest.

 

[SmattlePattle]

I think arguably some sort of food mechanic for animals would go a long way, but implementing it poorly would make the management of cavalry a pain in the ass. Playing 100% Cavalry as Aserai or Khuzait is just stupid fun.

 

[Yakubog]

+1

 

[Pejot]

Lowering your inventory size won't fix a thing cause You'll still get and take the most precious pieces of loot and make millions of them. Adding food requirement to animals would be nice but i think the whole loot generated from battles should change.
Loot should contain more things like jewelry and iron since those were the things that were taken from the dead. Only items made of iron (armor/weapons) and the best leather/cloth/wooden items should get into the loot and everything else should be turned into jewelry, food and iron..
Who would wan't to take filthy cloth shirt covered in blood and sell it? Who the hell would buy it?

 

[JohannTheFirst]

Inventory isn't unlimited, it's a working system that accounts for your party basically being a moving town at certain points of the game. Can they balance around it? Sure. Does any change to the system solve the money economy of the game? No.

There are simply too few things to do with your money during the game. You need to be able to convert that money into convenience features to skip things that you wouldn't do in whatever state of the game you are once you're completely loaded.

A rich mercenary captain, big landowner, count, duke or king wouldn't actively need to manage gaining and upgrading troops. If he wanted to, he'd use money to get whatever is needed. Whatever problems arise with his holdings could be solved by throwing ridiculous amounts of money at them. Then we have the building system that weirdly just indirectly works as a sink, and then just with at that point of the game really small amounts. Buying favor also needs to be more prominent, and more useful during that stage.

If you just remove big parts of the money gain, you'll still get rich eventually, because there's just nothing cool to spend it on. Once you've broken even with your army/garrisons (which you want to be able to at some point, right?) you just don't need any money anymore.

 

[Iberian Wolf]

There's still a lot of balancing to be done, and I'm sure we will eventually get there.
But in this case, I think the best is actually reducing the price of junk bought by cities than changing the mechanism set in place.
Other stuff in the other hand is not right as well...daily upkeep for soldiers is quite low if you ask me. Armies have never been a cheap thing. Heck, not even companions seem to ask for anything, save the signing fee. That should change, we have a severe lack of gold sinks atm.

 

[JohannTheFirst]

Other stuff in the other hand is not right as well...daily upkeep for soldiers is quite low if you ask me. Armies have never been a cheap thing. Heck, not even companions seem to ask for anything, save the signing fee. That should change, we have a severe lack of gold sinks atm.

I agree that we have a severe lack of gold sinks, as posted earlier, but they really shouldn't change the upkeep. Just getting that break-even point later isn't a fun thing to strive towards. Upgrade costs should be the prohibitively high thing. In theory it's cool to get that shiny new troop and save towards it. You're essentially buying a whole set of armor and weapons for 100k with an upgrade that currently costs about 200. That's just weird.

Ideally the whole system should be as dynamic and integrated into the economy as the rest of the supply-demand chain is and not just an arbitrarily decided lump sum, but those low upgrade costs are bonkers with the balancing right now.

 

[Carabus]

Oh please no Inventory Management skill ever again, I hated that I had to either put valuable skills points in it, or risk losing loot from big battle and actually have to go sell loot after almost every battle. Plus the skill made no sense anyway.
The changes to inventory capacity in Bannerlord are great design choice.
Im so glad that loot-sorting minigame is gone for good. It was never fun, just something you had to do...

If there are problems with money they should balance economy and selling prices. Prices should drop considerably if you sell too much of one item.

 

[RobustTurd]

Move party size bonus to leadership, add inventory bonus to stewardship i would say. Add food requirement For all animals as well as a speed penalty for pack animals. Same for riding horses used as pack animal

+1

We need a real tradeoff between inventory capacity and speed. These two solutions jointly, with proper balance, would make large inventory capacity the hard choice it should be.

 

[ShadInqu]

Inventory manangement was the absolute worst part of the original, no idea why anyone would possibly want it. Pack animals are a good solution to party weight. If anything is needed is some small upkeep for animals to make sure, they are not completely free.

 

[Lord Irontoe]

Nobody likes Inventory Management. But we need some kind of mechanism to limit how much we can carry around or the economy will always be broken. Maybe it just needs to be harder to maintain a giant herd of animals. They're supposed to slow you down if you have too many but it doesn't seem to have a big effect right now. And they probably should need to be fed.

 

[Pejot]

Nobody likes Inventory Management. But we need some kind of mechanism to limit how much we can carry around or the economy will always be broken. Maybe it just needs to be harder to maintain a giant herd of animals. They're supposed to slow you down if you have too many but it doesn't seem to have a big effect right now. And they probably should need to be fed.

We have this mechanism right now. It's not unlimited. And lowering it won't change a thing cause the ****ty part of loot makes something about 10% of income. Right now i'm getting Swords in loot that are sold for 30K while the rest of loot makes 3K. So even if i can take less i would still take those few items that make 90% of my income.

 

[ShadInqu]

Nobody likes Inventory Management. But we need some kind of mechanism to limit how much we can carry around or the economy will always be broken.

The economy isn't broken by the player carrying those looter upderpants and smelly socks. The bulk of the sale value is the expensive stuff. In Warband, you collected a few expensive pieces, but they accounted for like 90% of the value of the loot.

The economy is broken due to massive passive income letting players become millionaires early on, which is what TW is trying to nerf.

Maybe it just needs to be harder to maintain a giant herd of animals. They're supposed to slow you down if you have too many but it doesn't seem to have a big effect right now. And they probably should need to be fed.

As I suggested, add a small cost (maybe 1g/day for pack animals and mobile food, and 2/day for riding horses) for every animal (goats, mules/horses) in the inventory.

If it's not enough, increase the speed penalty for having too many animals.

 

[Lord Irontoe]

We have this mechanism right now. It's not unlimited. And lowering it won't change a thing cause the ****ty part of loot makes something about 10% of income. Right now i'm getting Swords in loot that are sold for 30K while the rest of loot makes 3K. So even if i can take less i would still take those few items that make 90% of my income.

Sure, but I think those items are priced so high because the Devs want us to spend all of our money on them, and then we just get them in loot and sell them for stupid money because they arent good in the first place. I think if we could limit what we can carry, then stuff wouldn't need to be priced so ridiculously.

 

[JohannTheFirst]

We have this mechanism right now. It's not unlimited. And lowering it won't change a thing cause the ****ty part of loot makes something about 10% of income. Right now i'm getting Swords in loot that are sold for 30K while the rest of loot makes 3K. So even if i can take less i would still take those few items that make 90% of my income.

Well, dedicated pack animals slowing you down a tad more could be an ok-change. I agree that it doesn't solve anything, and making inventory really limited, as some of the posters here are suggesting, will just lead to you spending 5 more seconds in the loot screen to sort by price and manually looting.

Another ok-change that doesn't solve anything would also be to not make sumpter-horses, mules and camels cost as much as a sack of grain.

Adding upkeep also doesn't really do anything except make the break-even point come up a bit later.

But once again, none of that will solve a thing unless you actually want to use that money for something.

 

[MBeagleguy]

My post is probably more appropriate for the Perks and Traits thread, however I have to say I'm disappointed that the devs didn't have your attributes have any meaning whatsoever.

Like Vigor should contribute to your carrying capacity. Intelligence should allow you to allocate extra points elsewhere.

 

[Randlocher]

With me it is currently so that in cities there is sometimes only 1000-5000 money. So I can't sell much anymore.

I don't know if it's the same with you. But this is a good solution to my problem. You can't make much money if there isn't much money.

 

[Pejot]

Sure, but I think those items are priced so high because the Devs want us to spend all of our money on them, and then we just get them in loot and sell them for stupid money because they arent good in the first place. I think if we could limit what we can carry, then stuff wouldn't need to be priced so ridiculously.

I think that You should be able to gear up Head to toe with medium lvl gear for about 1000 gold but this 1000 gold should be an enormous amount to get. The being rich part should start when You have Your own fief or workshop and caravans.
That means that whole economy and prices should be rebalanced to match the cost of unit upgrade.
Upgrading unit should cost the sum of gear cost + some additional price. We can go two ways with this:
using current prices as the values to calculate unit upgrade cost or lower the prices to find some balanced level when upgrading is affordable but not cheap. Second option must include additional balancing on income so both player and lords can afford upgrading but getting high tier units is not affordable for some noname who chases looters only.

Also the loot system is ubalanced cause You're getting items that are currently overpriced. As i said in previous post gathering looters pants and some hammers is ridiculous. Loot should be converted to goods that it's made of but not all.
For example if You get a sword, spear, and cloth shirt You should be able to take sword, turn spear into iron (if it' not some precious spear) and never even get a chance to take the cloth shirt. Also they could add mechanism that will turn the amount of defeated enemies into jewelry (simulating stealing jewelry form the dead after battle). This will change the things You get and lower Your income but still let You take the best pieces.