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Gluon
10-14-2009, 08:03 AM
Hi everyone,

I'd like to see an overworld economy in Jade. Perhaps one town (which is lying next to a iron mine) produces plate mails and other stuff made of iron. Those items are in this town really cheap, so you can buy a couple of those and export it to other towns. But you are not the only one, other NPC do this also.
This results in
- the merchant becomes a really interesting class as a merchant is able to gain more profit by export/import
- a town in the mountains might have problems with food, a town in the plains won't have much metals..
- imagine a town with a eternium mine...
- think of towns of different races. A human twon is very different form a drakeling town and needs other stuff to survive (different food etc)
- As you are not the only one inthe import/export business you may meet other merchants on theirs routes to the towns. Those routes should be on roads (No one would like to travel with a horse drawn carriage through the woods). You could waylay them, maybe collect toll at self bulit bridges or let them hire you for their protection
- If you rob them too often at the same place they will change their travel routes or came with a litte army of soldiers to protect them.
- Maybe you could build up your own hideout (ala Robin Hood..) in the woods.

Hope you like those ideas!

pblack
10-14-2009, 05:35 PM
I do like it... like it very much. But it would take a lot of the random factor away from the game, i mean, if there would always be some adamantium mining town somewhere on the world map this would make finding that adamantium halberd in the dungeon somewhat irrelevant am i right?

Perhabs with some limitations to what towns can offer, also, the world map will be randomly generated in jade so it's not really fun to start the game right next to a town that has high end stuff... it's kinda game breaking.

The idea is good, but i guess it would have to be toned down somewhat so that it doesn't become exploiteable.

Perhabs merchant levels in the dungeons would be a better idea. A level with 2+ shops, low monster generation, that sold only specific items at lower prices could be nice. Non guaranteed and all that so any pc that finds one can be considered lucky. Also, eternium shops would have higher DL than iron shops. Or something like that.

Gluon
10-14-2009, 06:50 PM
Well, nobody said eternium items should be cheap, or eternium mine are often. In addition: Robbing a supermarket in a suburb is assumably *much* easier than robbing a jewelery store in the inner city, as the value of the items are very different.
So maybe you can find a store with eternium items, even a mouderous two-handed sword of penetration, but imagine the price...

In my imagination getting to the village with a eternium mine is a lengthy process, figthing through loads of very dangerous monsters-otherwise erveryone had eternium items...

Edit: Same for adamantium items, of course..

pblack
10-14-2009, 07:22 PM
But would those be guaranteed locations or not?

thinking about it, the library has every spellbook in the game for caster classes and spellbooks found at random are still valuable, but books have limited readings, that's why you can never have enough of a good spellbook. But eternium gear is endgame gear, often better than artifacts and if you decide to generate a location where 20 or so eternium items would be generated at once (say, eternium shop) you have a fairly high chance of coming out of there with something ultra powerful, and being a guaranteed location this would probably become one of those must visit places for melee guys, and that's game breaking imo. Even if there would be eternium golems guarding the mines and so forth, you know as well as i do that there's always a way around it. teleportation being the main one.

I like the idea, but unless it has really...really out of depth danger involved in getting to the location (i mean, a true ordeal, like the minotaur maze for example, not just dangerous, but difficult to travel through), i think this would be too exploiteable. But i do like the idea of some eternium golem guardians on the mine and so forth. Also, higer chance for eternium ore when mining there. It's a very good idea for a flavour location on the world map.

Fullmoon
10-14-2009, 08:31 PM
Well, I am personally like this idea about merchant levels and specialized shops very, very much. Maybe it shouldn't be so random? OK, imagine a fair in a small town running only once in 3 months, where you can probably find something rare. Or some medium mountain village (?ADOI), where they make best bows in Ancardia. Or you just found some hut in wilderness, and it turns out there lives famous hermit swordsmith, who gives you a quest to? well, last one is more like quest instead of shop, sorry.

DumbleDoor
10-15-2009, 01:35 AM
Well, considering JADE will have money problems (I think), you won't be able to win just by buying some eternium stuff, and you won't be able to afford it early game.

fazisi
10-15-2009, 02:44 AM
You rob the murderous eternium halberd of penetration from the shop and flee to dive into a dungeon to slaughter creatures gleefully.

Two game days pass and at the 00th hour of the next night, you are attacked by hired thugs. However, being that the eternium merchants have made quite a fortune for themselves and the fact they are calculating business men who keep savings instead of blowing all their cash on begger booze and training how to be more stubborn so you can zap wands in a more willful way, they have determined the worth of their weapon to be far more than your life. These hired thugs aren't your average morons who are level estimated. These badass motherfuckers are fully trained level 50 assassin class PCs who do not have the same miscalculation and human-error associated with your run-of-the-mill ADOMite playing his new favorite game at four in the morning. They're twisted minds are controlled by a malevolent force far greater than any ChAoS gOd. They belong to the RNG and they have come to place your name on the high score list prematurely.




Ok, I had a bit too much fun with that but I think this is a great idea to expand more of the JADE world. It is kind of odd to me that the only the sheriff seems to recognize there is another town through the woods or that the leader of the dwarves is oblivious to the raucous cheering of the arena above their cave city. Having connectivity between towns and cities in the form of trade routes is an interesting way to introduce more options in the game. It would also explain why those outlaws are running all over the road... I used to think they just liked attempting to rob chaos monks, only to be reduced to piles of corpses which were ressurected by a wandering necromancer into mindless skeleton armies.

As for actually robbing stores/caravans, I think the lame stores should be the easiest. Robbing the village of hick's grocery store shouldn't be too difficult as long as you can outwit that gungho sheriff. Robbing the pawn shop in the shadiest ghetto in the Chain shouldn't bother the towns folk that much (as long as you don't put him out of business. They couldn't care less about the guy, they just want someone to hawk their booty of dubious origins to) but I'm pretty damn sure that he keeps a shotgun (or at least a heavy crossbow, loaded) under the counter. Robbing the great market of the dwarves gets those lawful stunties all riled up for some painful justice. Stealing from the sole general store within a hundred miles, high up in the mountains, would be quite the inconvinience to a city so well protected. Hell, maybe those useless ratlings actually close the gate and go put their antiquated ass-whupping guarding skills to some use. And as for robbing a casino? There are two things to take into account, house advantage and over paid security.

As for new towns, as previously mentioned, the security and effort taken against a robber PC should depend on several factors. The town's population, the population's average alignment, the location/remoteness of the city, the reliance on that particular store (I still don't see why a village entirely populated by farmers has to sell rations), the amount of money/effort the shopkeeper puts into security, the form of security, and most importantly what was stolen. It's mostly about if the shop has enough influence (money, respect, neccessity or otherwise) to get someone to do something about it. If all you stole was a potion of water and a leather armor because you were too stupid to realize those robes you were about to put on were cursed and had worms crawling all over them but you spent all your money to buy cooked lizards, the shopkeeper might just write it off. But if you slew the respected Waldo and stole Preserver because you were too greedy for your own wallet, not even teleport could help you hide from those dwarves forever. *eyes gut*

It would be a big, no, huge amount of effort to create this though. From what I know of TB's current system of JADE, this would be impossible. However, what he mentioned in his blog a while back about time-continuity programming (or something, he knows what I am talking about) in which events that happen at certain places or to NPCs will eventually affect other places or NPCs. If he were to implement that into JADE, this would definately be an excellent form of displaying it. It is quite possible but as I am sure TB is all too aware makes for some gargantuan if-else trees with numerous variables of events that have occurred and those that have not. It would be something for those thief classes to aspire to, not to be a champion of some lame religion, but to be the most notorious villian to ever walk in your place of business and make off with your wares.
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DumbleDoor
10-15-2009, 10:16 PM
If the shop did have that eternium weapon of epicness, it would have much better security.

Silfir
10-16-2009, 02:02 AM
Fuck, why would that shop even sell this to commoners? That's the kind of weapon that a king would buy.

fazisi
10-16-2009, 02:33 AM
All the more reason to have eternium weapons in the backroom (locked, guarded and possibly trapped) and you have to show the shopkeeper large amounts of money to actually get the opportunity to even look at it. Even more realistically is the weapon hasn't been made yet and you would have to order it's construction (with a hefty deposit of course, people of your profession have a tendency to perish before the item is completed). Both of these would make theft of such expensive items more difficult/impossible.
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vogonpoet
10-16-2009, 12:29 PM
I do like it... like it very much. But it would take a lot of the random factor away from the game, i mean, if there would always be some adamantium mining town somewhere on the world map this would make finding that adamantium halberd in the dungeon somewhat irrelevant am i right?

Perhaps with some limitations to what towns can offer, also, the world map will be randomly generated in jade so it's not really fun to start the game right next to a town that has high end stuff... it's kinda game breaking.


1/ I don't see why the existence of an actual overworld economy has to be kinda game breaking at all.
2/ Nor do I understand the point of your "always be some adamantium mining town somewhere" strawman.

In reverse order:

2/ Why would an overworld economy force the existence of a guaranteed location? Why on earth would a randomly generated world map make it impossible for the programmer to make an effort to ensure that all PC's start off in a reasonably similar situation (something similar to: create map, check danger levels of all map locations, create potential start locations, multiply distances from high danger level areas by the danger levels involved, identify locations which are on average furthest away from highest danger levels, throw in the RNG for fun, 'n'ame your uncle Bob).

1/ In a truly awesome randomly generated single player JADE, direct comparison between two games would be tricky, and the concept of game breaking much less tangible. An extra dimension might have to be added to the highscore table. To finish the game (will this even be possible, we don't yet know do we, nor do we seem to be sure we want a finishable game) in a relatively poor randomly generated world (all the same bad ass monsters, but not a single adamantium or eternium mining location on the whole map for instance) with a PC you generated on Friday 13th might be much much harder than finishing the game with a PC generated on Thomas' birthday, born into a relatively rich randomly generated world.

Randomly generated artifacts will be much more valuable in a 'poor' world than a 'rich' one.
'Game breaking' eternium gear shops won't actually be game breaking, cos a/ they just aren't that common (generated 0.5% of the time, chances to survive long enough to find them, 0.01%, 1 in 1000 PCs might find one?), b/ every time an eternium economy is generated, eternium weapons and armour are much more common, and lo and behold, every single bloody goblin you meet is virtually impossible to kill without the legendary 'Phase dagger of infinite message spam', so in actual fact, living in a rich world might even be harder than living in a poor world, where the thickness of your skin is the defining factor (gut and Grey would do well here :) )

tl;dr friendly version:

Just cos an idea seems instantly game breaking the first time you think about it, don't make it necessarily so.

Can you tell I'm rather tipsy?

Gluon
10-16-2009, 12:30 PM
Fuck, why would that shop even sell this to commoners? That's the kind of weapon that a king would buy.

So, the weaponsmith has a real job, too. :) Smithing a weapon for the king would be a nice quest (and quite useful for high level chars). In order to make a sword of penetration, one will need XXX (insert rare ingredient here). Or you need to find one of those Alchemists, or whatever...


Those items should be *rare* to find, as JADE will be much larger than ADOM. Who leaves a extremly migthy weapon in a dungeon on the floor anyway?
But when I thougth of economy I mainly thougth about stuff like food, iron items, wood and so on. I don?t think it would be too difficult to determine prices not mainly by cha/app, but by distance to the nearest source of the item (and the danger level of the way).
So, an iron item in the plains is much more expensive than in the mountains (with an iron mine next to it) and a ration of food in a remote mountain valley might be really expensive.

vogonpoet
10-16-2009, 12:33 PM
Just in case it wasn't clear BTW, I am strongly supportive of the idea for an overworld economy of some sort, even if its just a basic one, it will add nice flavour to the game, without turning JADE into a rougelike Elite, which would anyway be awesome.

pblack
10-16-2009, 04:53 PM
Vogonpoet:

I didn't bash the overworld economy idea. The title of the topic is one thing completely different from the idea proposed in the first post. The guy DID suggest mining towns in the game and my only question was: "are those to be guaranteed?" because if so, then the idea would have a much harder time being applied without being game breaking. It doesn't matter how you visualize it, if there's a place in-game where you can find tons of guaranteed eternium gear IT IS game breaking, at least to a point, in the sense that nearly all up-to-mid-level gear you find is irrelevant once you have the means to visit such place. That's why i didn't dismiss the idea entirely and added that in order for it to be applicable, you should have a really tough time travelling to the location.


Just cos an idea seems instantly game breaking the first time you think about it, don't make it necessarily so.

You are thinking of the title of the topic and assuming i give a damn about what the idea is called. You are wrong. The idea suggested by the OP IS game breaking if it is applied just "as it is", but the concept is good and that's why i, and others, made suggestions to tweak it into something more fun-friendly and game-friendly. If the idea is called overworld economy or Sugar daddy's doo-doo's and shitmachine, i don't care. What was proposed in the topic had its implications and I reserve myself the right to constructively bash it anytime I want. :) (there, smiley face to make it all better)

fazisi
10-17-2009, 12:24 AM
My instinctive answer is "No" they are not garunteed. This is JADE we are talking about. If we started garunteeing things, many of us would lose a little bit of hope for the true JADE game they were hoping for.

As for this discussion that seems to look like an argument to me... it seems a little retarded. Both of you are misunderstanding the other and while this would be very interesting for me to sit back and watch and laugh (similar to gut's Let's Play thread) I think it would be better for this thread to just be filled with constructive criticism on the actual topic. If you feel you have to have it out with someone, I am pretty sure the Private Messages function works just fine on these forums.

Disagreement about game concepts = good
Disagreement about your interpretation of what someone was thinking when they typed something on the internet = bad.

I think if vogonpoet was slightly more sober or if pblack read the non-tl;dr version, this wouldn't have happened. No one cares what the concept is called and we are all going on the assumption that these locations are completely randomized, just like nearly everything else in JADE.
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pblack
10-17-2009, 01:06 AM
My instinctive answer is "No" they are not garunteed. This is JADE we are talking about. If we started garunteeing things, many of us would lose a little bit of hope for the true JADE game they were hoping for.

As for this discussion that seems to look like an argument to me... it seems a little retarded. Both of you are misunderstanding the other and while this would be very interesting for me to sit back and watch and laugh (similar to gut's Let's Play thread) I think it would be better for this thread to just be filled with constructive criticism on the actual topic. If you feel you have to have it out with someone, I am pretty sure the Private Messages function works just fine on these forums.

Disagreement about game concepts = good
Disagreement about your interpretation of what someone was thinking when they typed something on the internet = bad.

I think if vogonpoet was slightly more sober or if pblack read the non-tl;dr version, this wouldn't have happened. No one cares what the concept is called and we are all going on the assumption that these locations are completely randomized, just like nearly everything else in JADE.

I've read it, even quoted it in case you missed it =P

Vogonpoet misunderstood my earlier posts and what i did was explain what I intended to say. He used not-so friendly words to say it, and so did I. And I would do it again if the need was to rise =P

fazisi
10-17-2009, 01:10 AM
You only quoted the part after the tl;dr. :b Of course you have all the right to post whatever you want and if someone says your wrong you can tell them where to shove it. Just I personally want to see this concept get as much input as possible since I like this idea and would love to see it implemented in JADE in some form.
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pblack
10-17-2009, 01:17 AM
You only quoted the part after the tl;dr. :b Of course you have all the right to post whatever you want and if someone says your wrong you can tell them where to shove it. Just I personally want to see this concept get as much input as possible since I like this idea and would love to see it implemented in JADE in some form.

It's been so long since the JADE idea was published that when and if TB reads this forum section to gather ideas he'll most likely just pass through all the hundreds of topics with a glance at each one. He would have to be a very, very patient man to go thorugh all pages of all threads. He's the one doing the programming so in the end it will be all up to what he is willing to spend time on. I like putting my ideas out there as much as the next guy, but i believe this is all moot apart from the first post =P

(and about the tl;dr thing. Yes, i've read his entire post)

fazisi
10-17-2009, 01:32 AM
I wonder if TB will be taking any assistants. I would love to make any lame classes for JADE if just to save TB's time and effort for areas he would like to work on. And what I expect TB to do is read through the list of first posts and find the ideas he likes, then read through the following discussion on that idea to find out what we like and maybe to energize the creative juices floating in his head.
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Silfir
10-17-2009, 01:15 PM
In order to make a sword of penetration, one will need XXX

... I have a very, very dirty mind.

But seriously, I'm all for a more elaborate smithing system that actually allows you to create weapons. I'm pretty much all for anything. What I'd like is people thinking less of JADE as "ADOM II". It will share many concepts, but it will have its very own game-breaking strategies, and balance will be a minor concern in many of the first playable versions, I'd imagine.

Epythic
10-18-2009, 12:37 PM
All the more reason to have eternium weapons in the backroom (locked, guarded and possibly trapped) and you have to show the shopkeeper large amounts of money to actually get the opportunity to even look at it. Even more realistically is the weapon hasn't been made yet and you would have to order it's construction (with a hefty deposit of course, people of your profession have a tendency to perish before the item is completed). Both of these would make theft of such expensive items more difficult/impossible.

And of course you'd have to supply the smith with raw eternium and possibly tools hard enough to forge an eternium weapon and a fire hot enough to melt the raw eternium...

Might be easier (though a lot more expensive - and if you do a wrong step, lethal) to look at the black market.

vogonpoet
10-19-2009, 09:55 AM
Gaa, sorry pblack, seen in the sober light of a new day, the language was a bit on the harsh side... although really, the whole 'guaranteed' issue still looks somewhat strawmanish - Gluon's "imagine a town with a eternium mine..." doesn't sound much like guaranteed... Anyway...

The longer we go without a JADE beta the more and more text of pure speculation we generate, and the more time passes for Thomas to completely change his mind about stuff he might have posted in the past about JADE. I vaguely remember the whole point being nothing was to be guaranteed.

Loads of these posts in this part of the forums talk about JADE using ADOM-based assumptions, which is fair enough to an extent - ADOM is the only game we have from Thomas so far, ADom and jADe are both related roguelikes etc... but as Silfir said, JADE is not ADOMII. Hopefully :) Nor is their much chance of the first beta of JADE not having game balance issues - I don't want to wait that long.

ADOM and JADE compraisons:
Like the Hobbit and LotR? In the same universe, one is much more complex and involved than the other. Or Wolfenstein 3D and Doom III? More of the same, but technically much much better.
Or a sparrow and an Airbus A380? Share one key feature, not very comparable otherwise.

To try and return to the original topic of the thread (I tried to say this before, but perhaps it got lost):

If eternium swords exist in a game, it would seem to make sense that the technology exists inside the game universe for the creation of eternium swords. Are all weapons to be assumed to be gifts from the gods?

IF JADE is going to be open ended and massive, and IF different metals exist, some of which are harder to work but make better swords than others, then how is it game breaking to have a place which can make swords without having them faxed down from the gods? What does game breaking even mean? Possible to all of a sudden complete a game we don't yet know will have an ending, due to having a shiny sword, when all the other monsters in the game also have shiny swords? No longer fun, because your sword is significantly shinier than everyone else's?

Still in response to original post as far as I can see:

The main thing an overworld economy would do to the game is provide a background - if the JADE engine generates a town someplace (on a river, on the coast, at the foot of a mountain pass, etc) then it makes some basic decisions about why the town is there, and generates town content based on those decisions...

pblack
10-19-2009, 03:55 PM
The reason i'm taking ADOM as a base of comparison is because there's no other way to think about it. Sure JADE might be something a LOT diffferent than ADOM but we won't know exactly how different until (and if) it comes to see the light of day.

I'm not about to suggest anything that is a wild speculation on my part just to have the entire idea dismissed in the future because i speculated that JADE would be something that it ain't. That's why I take ADOM as a base of comparison when making criticism or suggesting new ideas. But as I said, this whole discussion is probably moot because if TB ever reads this, he's most likely just gonna read the first posts and get the hang of the idea so that he can tweak it to fit the gameworld better.

DumbleDoor
10-28-2009, 01:36 AM
You drink a potion of insight you found in a potion shop and the potion shop and POTIONS OF WISHING!

You have the RNG's good luck
You have the RNG's revenge

Next level? "The greater moloch attacks you! You die..."

cyks
11-06-2009, 06:20 PM
A black market sounds fun too.

A mining town, or any town with a strong economy, should have a black market that may be able to supply.

To speculate, imagine the master thief in ADOM. Let us say that a PC completes a challenge quest like improving his/her skill (or simply kills the master) and joins the thieves guild. In JADE, what if a mining town had a underground guild with illegal mines, sinister metal smiths, stashes of stolen items, etc...

Someone wishing to steal an enternium item could risk one big job, or they could simply show their colors to the underworld economy in hopes to score a equally valuable item for far less risk or gold.