Strat economics discussed after news from chadz.

[ManOfWar]

My suggestions so far:
1. Make each weapon ( weapon type maybe ) crafting tehnique learnable and/or researchable. This will create diversity of demand. For example - you need a Steel pike, but your smith can`t research it`s crafting technology. You heard that is one distant town live a smith you can craft it (and maybe he needs something, that he can`t produce , but what you can offer to him ). So you sent a caravan to him.

2. Make a fair, maybe once a month ( 2 months maybe ). Server will choose map, with selected town and players will spawn without weapons to walk near counters, watch goods, argue with merchants . Town that is holding a fair must make an advance payment for the organization of trade fairs. During a fair town will get some amount of money, from taxes,trades and so on. There maybe a fights on arena like in singleplayer.

neat

[Varyag]

What do you think about this: Allow players to buy houses in cities and villages.

[Sir Henry]

What do you think about this: Allow players to buy houses in cities and villages.

if you could buy houses maybe you could rent them (You set rent to X gold.  if someone stayed there you would get X gold a day)

[Cepeshi]

loving how everyone has tons of ideas, but i believe just a small amount of you, if some, has any idea if and how could this be coded (me including), so could some dev perhaps tell us if those suggestions are like manageable or totally off the "realistically implementable" train?

[Prosed]

if you could buy houses maybe you could rent them (You set rent to X gold.  if someone stayed there you would get X gold a day)

And what if a horse dies?

[Kafein]

loving how everyone has tons of ideas, but i believe just a small amount of you, if some, has any idea if and how could this be coded (me including), so could some dev perhaps tell us if those suggestions are like manageable or totally off the "realistically implementable" train?

Everything that is only consisting of number crunching will be easily doable. Anything requiring complicated heuristics (for example : when and AI should attack), multifactor and abstract evaluations (for example detecting a human faction aggressiveness towards another) or a big amount of game content (new scenes, textures, animations, meshes, texts, maps...) will be noticeably harder.

For example, buying houses and renting them will be easy to implement, although I don't really see the point.

These, however :

My suggestions so far:
1. Make each weapon ( weapon type maybe ) crafting tehnique learnable and/or researchable. This will create diversity of demand. For example - you need a Steel pike, but your smith can`t research it`s crafting technology. You heard that is one distant town live a smith you can craft it (and maybe he needs something, that he can`t produce , but what you can offer to him ). So you sent a caravan to him.

2. Make a fair, maybe once a month ( 2 months maybe ). Server will choose map, with selected town and players will spawn without weapons to walk near counters, watch goods, argue with merchants . Town that is holding a fair must make an advance payment for the organization of trade fairs. During a fair town will get some amount of money, from taxes,trades and so on. There maybe a fights on arena like in singleplayer.

Are way more harder to do. For the first, the code would not be a real problem (just a bit boring probably), but balancing everything will be a nightmare. The second would require a shitload of content, a shitload of headache-prone scripting for spawning the right objects on the right spots. Also, fairs have no reason to exist apart form RP in Strategus. If you can't trade out of fairs, it will likely turn them into complete chaos. Furthermore, you can't make a map for hundreds of players to have stands and show their goods.

[Cepeshi]

(click to show/hide)

Everything that is only consisting of number crunching will be easily doable. Anything requiring complicated heuristics (for example : when and AI should attack), multifactor and abstract evaluations (for example detecting a human faction aggressiveness towards another) or a big amount of game content (new scenes, textures, animations, meshes, texts, maps...) will be noticeably harder.

For example, buying houses and renting them will be easy to implement, although I don't really see the point.

These, however :


Are way more harder to do. For the first, the code would not be a real problem (just a bit boring probably), but balancing everything will be a nightmare. The second would require a shitload of content, a shitload of headache-prone scripting for spawning the right objects on the right spots. Also, fairs have no reason to exist apart form RP in Strategus. If you can't trade out of fairs, it will likely turn them into complete chaos. Furthermore, you can't make a map for hundreds of players to have stands and show their goods.

thanks for insight in the matter

[DesertEagle]

And what if a horse dies?

House, not horse.

but balancing everything will be a nightmare

balancing a fair?) what you suppose to balance?

a shitload of headache-prone scripting for spawning the right objects on the right spots.

this can be done just by creating a fair-version of a town by town-owners.

The second would require a shitload of content

nothing except the standard

Also, fairs have no reason to exist apart form RP in Strategus.

Well, that is partly true, part of idea was about RP.

to have stands and show their goods.

Sellers will be bots - players will be customers.

[Kafein]

balancing a fair?) what you suppose to balance?

About the first suggestion, balancing what items you can craft, were and for how many gold/items.

this can be done just by creating a fair-version of a town by town-owners

With 22 towns to make fair versions of, it's still a big work for map makers. Not to mention that those scenes would need more objects than the usual battle map.

.nothing except the standard

Actually, you're right on this  x)

Well, that is partly true, part of idea was about RP.
Sellers will be bots - players will be customers.

Well I can't think of any manner to implement fairs in a good way. If they are mandatory for buying and selling goods to towns, they should be active all the time. Otherwise the economy wouldn't really be one. Furthermore, towns will be controlled by players and afaik all the economy will be run by players. So I don't know how you could have bot merchants. And finally, most people willing to trade will not like to have to run the game and connect to a server for simply buying or selling something. Forcing this would kill 99% of the player motivation to become an active merchant. So maybe I didn't understood your suggestion correctly but there are a couple of logical flaws in my interpretation.

[Tydeus]

Lots of people talking about not allowing gold from crpg to be transferred to strategus. What I see this doing, is only helping the clans that already have a foothold in strategus and making it impossible for those that don't already hold a territory. How exactly is a new clan supposed to compete when the clans owning territories are the ones setting prices for everything? There is too much talk of exploiting the upkeep system to farm gold for strat and not enough about how to simply fix this problem to GREATLY enhance gameplay for everyone.

First of all, if done right, I don't see how more members shouldn't mean more gold, as someone mentioned earlier. Obviously if you have more members you'll have more expenses over all and you need more gold to balance that out.

If we assume for a second that each player makes just as much profit after upkeep costs, as the next, then no clan should be at a disadvantage. So the fallen clan and all of its archers with low upkeep, won't be the only ones able to employ massive armies with the best equipment. "Playing more" isn't something that only benefits one clan, either. I've never seen a clan that only played on weekends. Roughly every clan averages the same weekly time played per player.


An easy way to get rid of leeching altogether, is to simply not have upkeep for the first 20-30K of someone's equipment cost. This may seem difficult at first but it would be rather easy to code for. For every tick of gold one gets in a server they gain 40-50 gold in insurance for that round, on any items that break. So you're not gaining any gold, you're just not losing the gold either. This way, there would be no benefit to leech or run around naked with only a torch for example. A player with 500 gold in equipment would make just as much per round, as someone with 20K gold. This would encourage players to use equipment and participate in battles. This would increase the gold income of course, but I hear chadz had intentions of lowering upkeep costs anyway. Even so, you could easily just reduce gold per tick by 10 gold per tic and people would be back to where they were.

[Gheritarish le Loki]

Reduce or increase upkeep in crpg will not change anything, individual earnings is the same for everybody, so clan with more members will make more gold anyway.

It´s necessary to find a gold sink inside Strategus, this sink should be scale on members or troops or fief.
More your ¨empire¨ is bigger more you must pay for maintenance, taxes, expenses and corruption.

[Kafein]

If we assume for a second that each player makes just as much profit after upkeep costs, as the next, then no clan should be at a disadvantage. So the fallen clan and all of its archers with low upkeep, won't be the only ones able to employ massive armies with the best equipment. "Playing more" isn't something that only benefits one clan, either. I've never seen a clan that only played on weekends. Roughly every clan averages the same weekly time played per player.

Ahem... you base all of the following on a terribly false assumption. Clans with a good part of cav (gk, legio, pecores, templars, bandits...) will have an hard time keeping their cav focus if everyone else makes even only 2x more gold in Strategus. People that play cav usually struggle to break even so I don't see how they could earn money without respec or retire and go inf or even better, archer.

Most of the active cRPG clans will want to set foot in Strategus. So cRPG will likely become a goldfarmingfest for those clans, as Strat will likely be very competitive. I want to play Strategus, but I don't want cRPG to become crap because of it.

Therefore, the upkeep dead zone seems a good idea. It's rather silly to have high level people intentionnaly gimping themselves and their team to gain more gold.

I think having very high (somewhat realistic) standing troops upkeep and low recruitment costs would encourage people to make many little wars. If you can keep your army doing nothing ad nauseam, then I doubt people will come up with many aggressive plans. If upkeeping armies is expensive, then people will likely use them as fast as they can, and have as little standing defense as possible.

Imagine two factions start the first war. They both have a good amount of stacked gold. They build armies and fight a little. Soon a fief of the second is conquered by the first and a peace agreement is signed. Now both have big, expensive and rather useless (they are at peace) armies. They have two choices : either decide they have enough cash to upkeep their army a little more and start a new war, maybe against another faction, or decide they are running low on gold, disband a part of the army and start making gold again. If big armies are expensive, then having a small army makes you earn money very fast. So you can very soon have enough gold to build an army and start another war.

Standing armies won't make the game feel medieval, nuff said.

[Tydeus]

Ahem... you base all of the following on a terribly false assumption. Clans with a good part of cav (gk, legio, pecores, templars, bandits...) will have an hard time keeping their cav focus if everyone else makes even only 2x more gold in Strategus. People that play cav usually struggle to break even so I don't see how they could earn money without respec or retire and go inf or even better, archer.

Most of the active cRPG clans will want to set foot in Strategus. So cRPG will likely become a goldfarmingfest for those clans, as Strat will likely be very competitive. I want to play Strategus, but I don't want cRPG to become crap because of it.

Therefore, the upkeep dead zone seems a good idea. It's rather silly to have high level people intentionnaly gimping themselves and their team to gain more gold.

I think having very high (somewhat realistic) standing troops upkeep and low recruitment costs would encourage people to make many little wars. If you can keep your army doing nothing ad nauseam, then I doubt people will come up with many aggressive plans. If upkeeping armies is expensive, then people will likely use them as fast as they can, and have as little standing defense as possible.

Imagine two factions start the first war. They both have a good amount of stacked gold. They build armies and fight a little. Soon a fief of the second is conquered by the first and a peace agreement is signed. Now both have big, expensive and rather useless (they are at peace) armies. They have two choices : either decide they have enough cash to upkeep their army a little more and start a new war, maybe against another faction, or decide they are running low on gold, disband a part of the army and start making gold again. If big armies are expensive, then having a small army makes you earn money very fast. So you can very soon have enough gold to build an army and start another war.

Standing armies won't make the game feel medieval, nuff said.

I actually worded that terribly. I'm well aware that archers have the lowest upkeep cost out of any class and that heavy cavalry and plated infantry are the highest. Though I do see how cavalry clans will run into a problem, but it wouldn't be any worse with my system at the very least, while it would fix active leeching(You'd still have the people who spawn and go afk, but we have QML for that) and strategus gold farming.

I made a thread for this system and I go into more detail on how it would work: http://forum.c-rpg.net/index.php/topic,9782.msg142228.html#msg142228


To the rest of your post:
Having too high of upkeep on troops could make attacking too easy and defending much harder. As a vanguard would only need, say 1000 troops to take a castle of 1500 troops, but on another front, you'd still need to have a significant number of troops positioned there or your territory could too easily be taken. If the upkeep cost is too high and you don't hold any territories your whole clan could just farm gold for the first month or two while not having an army at all and then build the largest force imaginable and take over nearly every territory simply because of your mountain of gold. Now I'm sure this won't happen, as chadz probably has foreseen such obvious events. My point is that you can't also have upkeep too high, there needs to be a careful balance.

My suggestion would be to have recruitment costs much higher than upkeep as that would force people to plan ahead and not just attack the nearest territory without risk of consequences because they could easily just recruit several more troops if they lost.

[Kafein]

To the rest of your post:
Having too high of upkeep on troops could make attacking too easy and defending much harder. As a vanguard would only need, say 1000 troops to take a castle of 1500 troops, but on another front, you'd still need to have a significant number of troops positioned there or your territory could too easily be taken. If the upkeep cost is too high and you don't hold any territories your whole clan could just farm gold for the first month or two while not having an army at all and then build the largest force imaginable and take over nearly every territory simply because of your mountain of gold. Now I'm sure this won't happen, as chadz probably has foreseen such obvious events. My point is that you can't also have upkeep too high, there needs to be a careful balance.

My suggestion would be to have recruitment costs much higher than upkeep as that would force people to plan ahead and not just attack the nearest territory without risk of consequences because they could easily just recruit several more troops if they lost.

Yes, ofc. everything got to be balanced. Although I don't think that high recruitment costs are a good idea.  Something like recruitment cost = 1 or 2 weeks of upkeep seems reasonable to me. Increasing the recruitment cost/upkeep cost ratio will make the game less dynamic. But as you said, having it too low will turn the game into a big chaos. I don't want people to raise giga armies in one day either. Therefore recruitment speed should remain slow. Not as slow as in the previous Strategus though. If an average army controlled by one player is 100 men, then you should be able to get that many, alone, in 3 or 4 days. But this doesn't take equipment into account, and I don't have any details on how it will be changed.

Your scenario of a landless clan farming gold and building an army very fast is exactly what I want to be possible (although not to the point that you could conquer the whole map ofc. just getting your own share of the cake). If surprise wars are possible, then the diplomacy will be interesting.

[EponiCo]

Lots of people talking about not allowing gold from crpg to be transferred to strategus. What I see this doing, is only helping the clans that already have a foothold in strategus and making it impossible for those that don't already hold a territory. How exactly is a new clan supposed to compete when the clans owning territories are the ones setting prices for everything? There is too much talk of exploiting the upkeep system to farm gold for strat and not enough about how to simply fix this problem to GREATLY enhance gameplay for everyone.

Yeah, that's kind of the point. Large landowning faction should be able to crush random ragtag group from nowhere. Where does the money (or more exactly the gear and troops) come from? Imo all should come from strategus and be conquerable there. Yep, it will make it very hard for newcomers to establish themselves but where exactly is it written that everyone should be able to have land? Heck, I remember back then many people from destroyed factions complained that you were actually allowed to conquer their lands. But what isn't earned isn't worth it (*). I think if it is done right it would be far more interesting.
For example you could strike a secret deal with an existing power that they support you against their rival, or make money by hiring yourself out as mercenaries, etc.
Still it would require some thought to not make it scale linearily but rather give large empires fairly high running costs  to give smaller factions a chance.


(*) This doesn't apply to wine women and w ... tobacco, or generally anything that's fun by itself. And by earned I don't mean "hey, we earned it by playing this game more than the others and had more members" but actually putting some thought behind it so it's an achievement.

If we assume for a second that each player makes just as much profit after upkeep costs, as the next, then no clan should be at a disadvantage. So the fallen clan and all of its archers with low upkeep, won't be the only ones able to employ massive armies with the best equipment. "Playing more" isn't something that only benefits one clan, either. I've never seen a clan that only played on weekends. Roughly every clan averages the same weekly time played per player.

You are quite wrong here. In the old strategus large active clans would make far more money than small ones, differences in gameplay too.