The problem:
Prices to craft things in Strat are out of balance, causing it to be way more cost effective to use cheap peasant gear. Heavy armor, horses, and high end weapons are a waste to use in battle.
Solution:
Make item prices be free-floating, relative to one another. Basically, this means as everyone purchases a lot of one item, it slowly raises that item's price and lowers the prices of everything else. What will happen is that the overused cheap peasant gear will continuously become more expensive, and the high-end gear will slowly become cheaper. This will continue until people start finding that the higher-end gear is finally pretty affordable and worthwhile. Prices will stabilize at a market-determined equilibrium point.
Now, there are some caveats.
1) There must be ratios that serve to indicate how rare an item should be on the battlefield:
If each item keeps falling in price until people start buying the item, it would eventually lead to there being equal quantities of each item being bought. For example, let's say there are only 2 items, peasant dress and black armor. If each purchase of one lowers the price of the other while raising its own price, the system will never reach a balanced price level until there is 1 black armor being bought for every 1 peasant dress. We don't want equal amounts of everything.
So to address this, we would first determine how regularly we would like to see each item on the battle field, relative to one another. Perhaps we would think it would be natural to have 1 black armor for each 30 peasant dresses used. So we then set a ratio for purchases of the 2 items so that for every 30 peasant dresses purchased or crafted, the price of the black armor falls and the peasant dress price rises. Similarly, each black armor purchased or crafted will lower the price of the peasant dresses and raise the black armor price. Hence the 30:1 ratio.
Now instead of dealing with just 2 item types as in my example, we're dealing with lots of item types. The ratios we determined can be thought of as an expectation of how rare each item should be. We could apply a rarity factor to each item. So if we have 100 item types, we can assign ratios of relative rarity (RRR? lol) to each item. So imagine a basket of 100,000 items of equipment to be used battle. What % of each item should go into the basket for a fun, varied, but balanced battle? 5 black armors per 100,000? 500 peasant dresses per 100,000. Etc.
2) The ratios indicating rarity must be on different tiers of items as groups, not on each item individually:
Just doing it this way presents another problem. That is, this method still forces people to buy each item eventually or else the price of some items would keep falling down to zero. If nobody buys a horseman's kite shield, the price will keep falling until they do buy it, even if they would normally prefer a very similar shield with similar quality. Basically over time, people will be buying every item in roughly the same ratios that we set for rarity. So you will see roughly 500 peasant dresses per 5 black armors.
To prevent this problem, we shouldn't set rarity ratios for each item individually. Rather, we should group the items into different tiers, and then set rarity ratios for each tier. For example, peasant gear can be in one group. Basic militia quality gear can be in another group. Up to the knightly top-class gear at the top. Again, just set ratios for each group so that you will achieve a desired mix of equipment to be used. Maybe 30% peasant gear, 20% militia gear, all the way up to 5% knightly gear.
3) Address worthless items that can potentially hurt the balancing:
Another concern here though, mainly concerning peasant items, is the potential for prices to be manipulated through practically worthless gear that can be bought in bulk just for the heck of it. Like stones, for example. These almost 0 cost items should either be left out of any tier (so their prices never change) or they should have their price raised to be at least in line with the rest of the peasant gear (so that buying in bulk to manipulate prices would never be cost-effective).
4)Additional possibility to further balance prices by having not only value-based tiers (peasant tier, knightly tier), but also weapon classes and armor types.
Lastly, even though these changes would make some high level gear affordable and automatically balanced in terms of price, there still will be imbalances with different classes of items. For example, all horses are currently too expensive to be cost effective for battle. So if the price of plated chargers comes down along with other knightly-tier items, cavalry will still never be affordable since even a sumpter or rouncey isn't even cost efficient.
So to apply this sort of free market balancing to fix this, I think it may be beneficial to also have additional tiers of items based on item classes. That is, horses, bows, head armor, body armor, 2-handers, throwing, shields, etc. each have their own tiers in addition to belonging to the hierarchical classes of peasant gear, militia, etc. So for example, all armors would be balanced so that for every 10000 chest armors bought, there should be 9000 foot armors, 9000 head armors, and 7000 hand armors. And weapon classes might be balanced so that 20% are bows, 10% are cav, 15% are 2 handers, 15% are 1-handers, etc.
Say for example a sumpter horse is in the peasant tier and the cavalry class. With prices horses being so prohibitively expensive, fewer horses will be purchased than expected, compared to other weapon classes (as cavalry should be considered a weapon class). So all horse prices will begin to fall until people find at least one of the horse types to be worthwhile. So basically, this change would force prices to drop until the class become viable.
If they buy a sumpter horse, that would start to push up the price on all horses as well as all peasant gear, while lowering the price of other equipment tiers and of other weapon classes. This means that the price of all horses increase, but the sumpter increases more than other horses since it is in both the peasant class and cavalry class. (Of course it takes a lot of purchases to have an effect though.) Over time, if the entire peasant tier of items were to rise in price because people still favor the value of peasant items highly, it can eventually make it so that the rouncey's price (probably in the militia tier) has fallen relative to the sumpter, so more people buy rounceys now.
What all this means is that things will be very dynamic. For example, bows seem to be dominating in strat right now. But if lots of people buy bows compared to other weapon classes, the bow prices will go up. So people who were perhaps buying more expensive bows may find them less cost efficient and may switch to cheaper, weaker bows. This helps to slightly discourage bows if they are too popular. Or if few people are using 2-handers, the flamberge or whatever the ideal 2-hander is will come down in price. This will encourage more people to use 2-handers. Lots of weaker bows, a few 2-handers wielding monster weapons. It should balance itself as people look for good values.
Comments? Questions? Suggestions?
