Greetings, medievalists!
Let’s continue making the factions a bit more diverse. Right now, faction identity is primarily communicated through lore, ideology, relationships and heraldry. So, when it comes to trading, things are pretty basic - you would send your caravan to a friendly/neutral settlement and hope that once there, you’ll get some much needed resources and potential place to dump stuff that you have in abundance. But the process itself was a gamble - getting a caravan to that location would take time and you didn’t know what was waiting for you there.
So we wanted to give a bit more personality to the factions, by making faction-specific resources. This system should help you answer practical questions such as: Who is most interested in the goods I produce? Where should I look for books, medicine or military equipment? Which factions refuse certain resources? Is this resource exclusive to a particular culture or economy?
Let’s take Faithful Sons of England and Band of the She-Wolf as an example. Looking at their description, they belong to Monarchy. Monarchy factions represent nobility, castles, courtly luxury and organized military power.
If we categorize what they love, refuse and have in abundance, it would probably look like something like this:
Love:
Aged Wine, Lavish Meals, Gold, Silver and Linen Cloth
Abundant:
Weapons, Armour and Shields
Rare:
Advanced scholarly goods
Refuse:
Human-derived taboo goods
And you would immediately know to go to Monarchy factions to sell luxury goods and look to them for military equipment. Instead of giving them one arbitrary resource in abundance, their strongest distinction should be stock variety. Here is a mockup of how that could show on the region map (wip).
Okay, so you figured out to whom you want to sell, based on your settlement output. Another problem we are encountering is a situation where you’ll be mass producing a resource and dumping it to a settlement. It is a system that is abused even now in the current version of the game. Hence why we want to introduce inflation to the game.
The idea here is that each NPC settlement tracks a temporary saturation value for every ordinary trade resource. When you sell a resource to a settlement, that settlement becomes better supplied with it. Further quantities of the same resource are gradually worth less. Here is a mockup of how such info could appear on the barter screen (displayed by hovering tooltip). We would also provide more information for what influences the current value of the resource.
Here is a simple explanation: You sell Honey to the settlement Napsbury. The first moderate shipment receives close to the normal price. A large shipment begins to reduce the average value of the transaction. Further Honey sold to Napsbury shortly afterwards receives a stronger penalty.
But don’t worry! Another settlement maintains its own market state, so the player can take Honey elsewhere or wait for Napsbury demand to recover, because saturation will drop over time.
And visiting merchants will use the market state of their settlement of origin. So this means that selling Honey to a merchant from Napsbury therefore affects future Napsbury merchants as well as direct trade with Napsbury. We’ll even provide more information when the merchant comes about their origin point. Here is one more mockup (it’s going to look much prettier in the game):
So, why this decision? We want for you to be able to get the most out of trading if that is your thing, but we also don’t want to punish you if you choose to ignore this. We simply think that this gives a bit more personality to factions and provides a bit more dynamic to the game’s economy. We’ll talk about it more in the official blog, but for now - let us know how this feels to you? What is your opinion on the current state of the trade? Do you have any annoyances? Let us know in the comments. More MMTs to come. Remember to…
Stay medieval!
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