Re: Money (and Charisma)

On 2007-11-29 02:34:59, camlost <joshua.middendorf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd wrote:
On 2007-11-28 19:30:41, camlost wrote:
1) At some point, late-game staples need to start regularly appearing
in stores. Right now, !Heal doesn't ever start becoming regularly
available, which restricts gameplay, in my book. You just have to
hope it shows up in a random restock, which takes forever. It's great
that you can invest and hope to find some *Heal* or whatever, but

Both what normal stores stock, and what monsters are on dungeon levels, should
react to the past history of the player somewhat.

Could you elaborate?

I'm not clear on what I want to do for my variant here. The store part would
almost certainly break the current config file structure.

For monsters, stock the level on creation normally. Thinking of restocked
monsters as an "inverse Word of Recall", one would think a relatively high kill
count would inhibit restocking with that monster.

Tweaking the rarity on-the-fly could be done without messing with the
monster.txt file. Build the candidate list normally first, then do a
"rareification" pass. For monsters with neither FRIENDS nor MULTIPLY with base
rarity 1, something like:
* 0-9 above minimum killed: no adjust
* 10-99 above minimum killed: rarity +1
* ...
* 10000+ above minimum killed: rarity +4

If we had a working monster power rating function, that could be added in as
well.

For stores:
* new internal data: store-rarity and base price multiplier (scaled).
Always-stock items have a special rarity value.
* pay attention to what the player is buying and selling. At next restock:
** If the player ignores an item you've stocked: increase store rarity (reduce
chance of stocking in future). If the base price is above normal, reduce the
base price.
** If the player buys an item: temporarily force restock and increase base price
in proportion to how much the player bought. (Make the player think twice about
storing 99 Beginners' Handbooks in the home...price reacts up to where they're
not a cheap expendable slot anymore pre-statgain).
** If you don't have an item in stock and the player sells it: increase base
price.

Actually, what stores need is the option to place special orders. Say 10% down,
with a guarantee that the item will be in stock at your next visit after an
appropriate not-random delay. For V...say "next sunrise if light, next sunset
if dark" for basic items.

FAAngband does this with its travelling merchants. I'm not sure this
isn't so different from NPP's store services.

My proposed minimum delay of 5,000 normal-speed turns may be a a critical flaw,
but I can't really tell this without implementing it.

As the damage potential of weapons is critically dependent on class and stats: a
properly fitted price scheme would increase weapon prices as stats increase. It
would also account properly for the bow multiplier.

I'm not sure I agree. Presumably, the price should be independent of
stats, but make some assumptions about what stats players will have when
they find the items in determining the weapon value.

At the very least, relative prices should change. The shopkeeper has no
obligation to quote the same price to everyone.

The value of special abilities also needs some gross retuning.

Agreed. For instance, why is a Crown of the Magi with ESP cheaper than
crown of ESP? This is especially bad with forged items in S.

Ideally, get rid of base value boost of ego items outright, then if you want
external config of value do it by ability. Then strictly dominating items will
automatically have consistent relative prices.

Extra Attacks/Shots and Extra Might complicate things (these should be
post-multiplied, rather than added). +To-hit/To-dam/To-AC are currently
hardcoded, but these should not be linear; the failure rate should be included
in the valuation.
.

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