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DF Suggestions / Quality and Prices Overhaul
« on: July 24, 2010, 05:44:44 pm »
As it stands i think the way pricing and trade happens in dwarf fort needs redoing.
Im not talking about any major system tweaks just some basic data changes. This is mainly aimed at the upcoming caravan arc, as at the moment trading is fairly redundant and you can make extreme amounts of wealth with almost zero effort.
1) The first think i would like changed is the quality system. Again, nothing extreme, but i think there should be different levels of quality, mainly the addition of below-average quality states. Basically if a total novice tries to make a good "normal" should not be the lowest state, there should be values such as terrible, poor, below-average quality etc. which instead will lower the price of the good, even possibly below the basic value of the input material.
The idea for this would be that when you are training some dwarf in a profession, eg a metalsmith, you dont want him to start off making platinum items as you would waste huge amounts of wealth, instead you would be better off selling the platinum bars, or waiting till he is better trained. Also getting a novice clothier to make clothes out of masterwork weaved/dyed cloth would be a waste, you would be better off selling the cloth.
2) The second point is that the quality modifiers should have a lower effect. At the moment well-crafted (level 2 in quality) is 2x the price of no-tag. The rest of the modifiers go 3x, 4x, 5x and then 12x for masterful. This means that even a moderate dwarf at "profecient" is easily able to make goods that will have a 3 or 4x modifier, greatly increasing the price of goods they create. I think that as it stands these multipliers are too high and the uniform steps seem odd, as the biggest jump in % value is from no-tag to well-crafted. I personally would suggest multipliers such as 1.2x, 1.5x, 2.0x, 3.0x and then maybe 5x for masterful ( maybe 0.5x, 0.75x and 0.9x tags if point 1) is added). This keeps it fairly small scale differences at low level, and makes the better quality goods much more noticeably wealthier. This will also makes the material multipliers much more important so even basic gold statues will be more expensive then well done iron statues.
3) Finally the actual values multipliers for certain objects really need to be redone. Making steel serated disks at the moment will net you unbeleivable sums of dwarf bucks with ultimately little effort. Rock mechanisms made from flux by a decent mechanic are equivalent in value to diamonds and star rubies etc, which, seeing as flux is often abundant and the time to craft a mechanism is so short, this is obsurd. Basically i think the values for certain items need tweaking, lowering the price of certain goods, or by making their craft time much longer than other goods if they are represented as being expensive due to needing a lot of labour.
Overall i think these changes could be made with fairly little coding as i would guess it would mostly be number changes than an actual change in the codes. I believe these changes would make trading alot "fairer" and make it harder to make extreme amounts of dwarf bucks as you rarely run out at the moment.
I do not have actual suggested values for individual items and would be up for balancing issues, but as it stands i think the current system is severly broken and would need changing if a caravan arc is to be added.
Any thoughts?
Im not talking about any major system tweaks just some basic data changes. This is mainly aimed at the upcoming caravan arc, as at the moment trading is fairly redundant and you can make extreme amounts of wealth with almost zero effort.
1) The first think i would like changed is the quality system. Again, nothing extreme, but i think there should be different levels of quality, mainly the addition of below-average quality states. Basically if a total novice tries to make a good "normal" should not be the lowest state, there should be values such as terrible, poor, below-average quality etc. which instead will lower the price of the good, even possibly below the basic value of the input material.
The idea for this would be that when you are training some dwarf in a profession, eg a metalsmith, you dont want him to start off making platinum items as you would waste huge amounts of wealth, instead you would be better off selling the platinum bars, or waiting till he is better trained. Also getting a novice clothier to make clothes out of masterwork weaved/dyed cloth would be a waste, you would be better off selling the cloth.
2) The second point is that the quality modifiers should have a lower effect. At the moment well-crafted (level 2 in quality) is 2x the price of no-tag. The rest of the modifiers go 3x, 4x, 5x and then 12x for masterful. This means that even a moderate dwarf at "profecient" is easily able to make goods that will have a 3 or 4x modifier, greatly increasing the price of goods they create. I think that as it stands these multipliers are too high and the uniform steps seem odd, as the biggest jump in % value is from no-tag to well-crafted. I personally would suggest multipliers such as 1.2x, 1.5x, 2.0x, 3.0x and then maybe 5x for masterful ( maybe 0.5x, 0.75x and 0.9x tags if point 1) is added). This keeps it fairly small scale differences at low level, and makes the better quality goods much more noticeably wealthier. This will also makes the material multipliers much more important so even basic gold statues will be more expensive then well done iron statues.
3) Finally the actual values multipliers for certain objects really need to be redone. Making steel serated disks at the moment will net you unbeleivable sums of dwarf bucks with ultimately little effort. Rock mechanisms made from flux by a decent mechanic are equivalent in value to diamonds and star rubies etc, which, seeing as flux is often abundant and the time to craft a mechanism is so short, this is obsurd. Basically i think the values for certain items need tweaking, lowering the price of certain goods, or by making their craft time much longer than other goods if they are represented as being expensive due to needing a lot of labour.
Overall i think these changes could be made with fairly little coding as i would guess it would mostly be number changes than an actual change in the codes. I believe these changes would make trading alot "fairer" and make it harder to make extreme amounts of dwarf bucks as you rarely run out at the moment.
I do not have actual suggested values for individual items and would be up for balancing issues, but as it stands i think the current system is severly broken and would need changing if a caravan arc is to be added.
Any thoughts?