Ideas/layout for a resource/economic system

[corksacker69]

This kinda system would probabley seem more at home in a Civilization-like game, and does seem kinda complex, but here goes.

The game would have basic resources and processed resources. basic resources would be made already, and would just have to be harvested/mined/hunted or whatever, and processed resources would be made up of basic resources. Basic resources would be things like food, metal, wool/furs and livestock and processed resources would be things like ale, wine, linen, pottery, metal weapons/armor, horses, population, currency, and soliders. Some resources also have upkeep costs, like your population resource would need to be maintained with food, and your soldiers resource would need food and currency.

As citys acquire surplus resources, they put them on caravans to trade to other citys which require that resource, so you would get a dynamic system of trade set up. If a city is deprived of a resource, then they wount produce the resource which required the deprived resource. Being deprived of a resource would have some sort of negative effect on the city, like being deprived of food would cause starvation, being deprived of weapons/armor would prevent you from creating new soldiers, etc.

This system would also get a supply and demand concept going, where being deprived of a resource causes the resources that were produced by the deprived resource to increase in price.

Although its kind of a rough stetch, and i do have some more specific ideas, I just wanted everyones thoughs on this. I think such a system or one similar to it, would have so much potential. attacking caravans would have meaning, running supply quests to replenish resources in a city thats
deprived of resources would have meaning, attacking foragers to deny that faction food would have meaning, and what this game needs most right now is meaning.

 

[Egg]

I think it's far too early to even discuss this. Mount and Blade is currently a fighting game. There are adventure elements being developed alongside it, but people play and stay playing for the very interesting but currently underdeveloped combat engine.

What you're suggesting is a whole new genre, and a dynamic resource system is not just an incredibly complicated system to create, but something that isn't going to add a lot to the game by itself. Yes, you can theoretically interrupt the AI as they go about their business and cause a knock-on effect, but at the moment there isn't even a reason to do that, not to mention the fuzzy logistics of finding out where the traders are travelling in advance.

Maybe in the very distant future, this could be considered. The game's structure is certainly suited to it. But right now there's a very large queue of things that take precedence over large scale ideas where the work can often outweigh the advantages. For a real life example, Hardwar was a game that used a dynamic resource based trading system. Five years after release they're still putting out patches to try and stabilise it.

Rather than trade and carefully balance real quantities between cities (which since you aren't tied to any particular city won't mean an awful lot anyway) you can just as easily randomise the size of cities at the start of the game, and make them vulnerable to attacks that diminish their size and wealth, and grow when caravans arrive. As long as it's a system that doesn't become predictable and give out the same results each time, it doesn't matter how well modelled the steps are to get there.

 

[DaLagga]

I think cork has a great idea. I have also been thinking of something simiar, as i'm sure alot of us have. Something to make the map seem more alive. I think that just randomizing most of that stuff (half-assing it in other words) makes the player feel cheated...its what seperates a decent game from a great game. I know there are time and financial constraints when producing a game, but i like to feel as though there's an actual living breathing word around me, not confined to a box, like in almost any first person shooter type game for example. I brought it up in a previous post, but all i can say is, go play uncharted waters, part 2 preferably. Its for snes, and you could get it on emulator...as long as you delete it within 24 hours to keep from voiding copyright laws and stuff It will give you an idea of just what they could do with this game ESPECIALLY with today's technology.

 

[Sabotai]

There's a great game called New Horizons on the SNES, pretty old, and its set in the 1500s, and you like, sail around trading goods, fighting pirates/being a pirate, etc etc, great historical RPG. Anyway, the blast for me was the elborate trading system, like buying up perfume in Merseilles, or coffee in Mocha, or glass from Venice, and selling it wherever. Basically like the demand/supply system in M&B, but, because every city had multiple demands/needs and also varying degrees of need, it made it more challenging and fun, whereas in M&B, every town has a single good they produce, and a single good they demand, and the merchants will tell you what those are, and even where to acquire the good they demand.

First, I'd suggest their demands should fluxuate. A town's specialty, like the tools of Zendar, should remain constant, but really, why do the citizens of Zendar eat so much salt, all the time? If you saturate the market there, they should start demanding meat, or something.

Also, I love the idea of the dynamic resource system, and I can think of a way to intergrate it with the fighting aspect. Along with my first suggestion, if caravans are making deliveries to cities, they should contribute to the saturation of a market. So, you're basically competing with other merchants to supply while the price is still good. This makes it a little more challenging than simply knowing Tihr demands wool and Reyvadin supplies it and going back and forth. If a city has caravans coming to it to supply it with goods, you can attack them and stop that delivery. So, now you have incentive to attack caravans beyond just looting. Surround a city, deprive it from deliveries, wait till demand goes up, then go in and make a killing, literally!

I would love to see the merchanting system fleshed out a little. There's just no way those guys in Halmar need that much linen, all the time.

 

[Deniz T]

This is really probably for M&B 2, but I'll admit to being another who's thought about adding strategy game elements. Once you get to a higher level, say you're made a Count, you might gain control of a city which might be in itself a money-making opportunity for when need a break from lancing people. You also might be able to increase the size and quality of your manpower by improving your city and so on.

I don't know if its such a strange idea in the long-term. There are plenty of strategy games based on trading, building and resource management that have big followings. A game mixing strategy with and an addictive combat engine could be interesting.

 

[corksacker69]

well, if you go to a point where you can actually start your own empire and take over citys etc, basicly like civilization but where your own character participates in the battles, then thats taking it a little too far.

 

[Deniz T]

Well I didn't mean taking over a bunch of cities and creating an empire like in Civilisation. I just meant controling the economy and manpower of one city. Something a bit like the Paradox games I suppose would be closest to what I meant.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

I agree with the view that trading definately needs to be spruced up. As has been said, at the moment it's all random. I'd much rather intercept that Caravan knowing it's carting some goods which the lack of, will force the target city to increase their prices so I can get a few quick trades in for cash.

I'm not sure whether the idea sketched out here is the way to go but something like it I think would add purpose to the movement in the game a great deal. It'd also make the early parts of the game, where you're doing anything you can for money, more enjoyable then simply running the same trade routes over and over and over.

 

[Manu]

Or even without concern about depriving the destiantion city, I'd like to know that if I attack a caravan headed to Reyvadin from Jekala odds are I'l find velvet in the loot rather than some lousy smoked fish or ale.

 

[DaLagga]

Hey sabotai, New Horizons is the name of the sequal to uncharted waters. Which is exactly what i was talking about. Great minds think alike, eh?

 

[FLank Sinatra]

I like that idea alot, I would love to see a great trading system like the games mentioned above!

 

[Kynes]

while I agree with everything Egg said the dynamic way in which the M&B world works makes ideas like Cork's very tempting and the trade system seems to me at least to be the most readily adjustable aspect of the game world (allthough the sytem of supply and demand Cork mentioned is hard enough to emulate in real life let along a game with a dozen towns).

I'd say the easiet way to make trading more interesting and fun is to complicate things (not so it becomes frustrating however). Ideally you could replace some of the luxury items like linnen and velvet and wool with more generic commodities (like wood, ore and grain) which would incur tarrifs when you imported them into other towns- the further you took the items from the source town the lower the tax* (but higher the risk of being attacked).

*You could also put in a way of making the merhcant reputation mean something. Also having more generic commodites and seperating the buy/sell prices of the Smiths and the Merchants would make things more interesting

And also to echo what Egg said- try to avoid ideas that require a massive overhaul of the existing system. Being able to blockade towns and raise demand for some item would be cool but it would also be virtually impossible to do properley.

 

[corksacker69]

I just wanted to expand on my ideas a bit and show how such a system isnt very complicated to initially create at all, what is exetremely difficult is the balancing.

Basicly, each resource has 6 parameters:

what items count as this resource: example, fish and fried meat count as food, and so on.

basic or processed: wheather this resource is natually spawned (basic)
or created from other resources (processed).

what resources need this resource: specifies which resources require this
resource to be produced, and in what quanity ei: 1 x for every 4 y.

what resources created this resource: specifies what resources this resource was spawned from.

maintenance: an upkeep that is required to keep the resource, or it
dissappears.

special affect: some kind of hard coded benefit to the city that the resource provides.

So youll have resource x, used in creating resource x,y,z, spawned by x,y, costs x to maintain every y days, and provides some sort of benefit.
This makes all resources virtually identical to each other, except for the hard coded benefit/effect. Using this model, youll have a tree, with basic resources at the top, that are linked by what resources need and what its produced by.

Using examples from merchant items in the game, say the food resource, which is spawned, has no upkeep, took no resources to create, used in creating horse, population, ale/wine, and livestock resources, and provides no special affect. Now take another resource, say a population resource, which is used to judge how large a town/village is. it is created from the food resource, takes food to maintain, takes say 20 food to create 1 population resource, and is used to create the soldier resource. as for a special effect, say it generates gold (taxation) for the owning faction, also as a town gets more population resources, it requires more commoditys, such as linen or spice, or somthing.

As for implementation, each town would keep track of how many resources it has/needs, and how often it converts one resource to another or trades the resource would be determined by some admitately complex AI, maybe depending on the citys current situation (at war, under seige, neutral, etc.). and kind of city (villages would most likely trade their food rather then use it to build up population resources).

heres a very very rough sketch/algorithm of how the process of managing resources might work.

1. every x days, tally all the current resources in the city.
2. pay maintenance costs for all the resources, else destory the resources that you cant pay for.
3. determine what resources the city will stockpile/use to create new resources/trade. this would be the complex part, with several factors determining the outcome.

4. repeat steps 1 2 3 for all citys.

5. if the city has decided to trade, find other valid citys that require the resource.

6. if the city is lacking a resource, find a valid city that will trade it the resource.

There are of course holes in this sketch, like what constitutes a valid city, etc. adding even more complexity. And the system would require tremendous balancing, such as how much of a resource should be spawned in a town at a time ,how much of a resource should be consumed and should be traded and so on, so there arnt any natural huge resource inbalances.

Hell, if i was compeled, i could probabley code a rough model of this idea in java, showing how the numbers would change over time and such.

 

[Kashmar]

fried meat

Mmmm, fried meat.

But seriously, I think random generation is not the exact way to go. Neither is a one stop system. Rather, set up the general attributes, but change the specifics of the cities each time.

Example: if Tihr requires x, and sells y, but you saturate the market, it will naturally move on to something else, presumably as far away on the map as possible, as htis makes it more valuable. However, having played this scenario before, without randomisation, the player knows interrupting trade routes at strategic points a, b, and c will cause this effect.
However, if the starting materials (and maybe subsequent desires) of Tihr become assoicated with a different city the next time you start a new game, the player needs to work out a completely different set of strategic points to conduct his 'evil' plan from.