Macro Econ in RW: Supply, Value, and Demand

[Copperwire]

As a basic premise "depending on how much stuff you have, raids/etc get harder" is fun and good.  In fact, it is central to RW and where a lot of the fun comes from.

Where it gets ... somewhat wonky ... is RW has a LOT of different kinds of stuff and other core dynamics that have unintended side effects related to wealth.

The primary dynamic where unintended consequences are common is "Trade".  Without getting too lost in the weeds, things were done to minimize how much players could get from trade (selling meals, gear from raids, selling hay, etc) that now create awkwardness. 

Because RW is a complicated system, you get unintended consequences like "its better to wear tainted gear because it drops your wealth so much" and "outlander/pirate raids can escalate and overwhelm you during the launch because they leave so many guns on the ground".

Most of these issues come from trying to address "too much wealth" at the "value" and "supply" side.  A potentially cleaner (in terms of how it effects complexity in the game as a system) solve might be to roll back the clock and deal with players gaining too much "profit" at "demand" instead.

If a trader will buy 1 meal per Pawn in the caravan, that makes sense, story wise, and stops players from trading huge stacks of meals for goods that disrupt the flow of story/experience/progression.  If a town pays less for weapons depending on how many you are trying to sell/they have in inventory, even in trade,  you can avoid having different values for wealth and sale price etc.

Basically, while simulating demand would require some code time/added complexity, it offers a route to "unsnarl" some of the knots that have been woven into RW.

Another issue is sudden wealth changes are not transparent to players; if raider gear is throwing off the scales and there is no clean design way to fix it without disrupting core functions, making how much it matters apparent to players and giving them tools that are not awkward or detracting from the sense of "story" to handle it is an option. 

One way to do this would be to add a function to the history graph which shows the wealth of items by category (food, guns, armor, etc) that is a bit more responsive (a refresh button so you can get a total now rather then in a few game hours) along with a "burial pit" object which acts as a stockpile that takes its contents with it when deleted/has a decay timer.  You could also send a "mail" alert after a battle if wealth post combat is past a certain threshold.  Basically, there are options - and options that do not disrupt the design as a whole quite so much.  You could even explain the issue and how to solve it in the ingame tutorial system (which is pretty clever btw).

"Dealing in Demand" would also provide a tool for balancing other issues - human skin cowboy hats and flake having limits on demand might be a good side effect.  A village charging you a LOT for their one and only Doomsday Rocket or only selling one to you at all if you are allied isn't terrible either.

[NiftyAxolotl]

If prices dip in response to a player selling lots of something, that blunts the impact of any OP money-making strategy. Which is nice from a balance perspective. But colonies funded entirely by drug labs or human leather animal beds are funny. Sometimes lulz > balance.

[zizard]

Player transactions not affecting prices is a good approximation as long as the overall economy is large compared to the player economy.