Economy is problematic

[Ukas]

I'm playing B18, but I'm curious if some of these issues are solved in 1.0.

Pricing: Economy model in B18 reminds me of something like an inflation crisis of a developing country. Price of food is very high, but price of other every day items remains pretty low. Comparatively selling value of good quality parka is about the same as purchase value of one pawn's meals for two days. Price of medicine is suprisingly cheap. Building materials as wood and steel are very cheap, basic furniture very cheap, as also building a house. Rare items & glitterworld items can be quite pricy, but some maybe not high enough, as getting rich in the game doesn't require that much. I do like how the item quality is modelled though, and when you look at the trade screen, differences in price and quality of items seem to be in healthy relation.

Manhunter events: These are often exciting and can be a lot of fun storywise, especially if another event like raid or friendly caravan happens when manhunter siege is on. But in my last two games I've experienced mostly big animal events, which means lesser threat and bigger reward, as you'll get a huge storage of meat & leather in nicely packed form of a animal corpse. Because of easy hunting and steady flow of manhunter events, I don't really need to breed cattle anymore, which used to be fun in a way. I didn't expect to say this, but I kind of miss the times of every day hunting accidents.

Ambushing a friendly caravan: Reward depends of the caravan type, but it's easily profitable to ambush a friendly caravan when they visit or when they are called to visit, and then pay for the peace. Caravan's total worth as purchase value can go well over 12k silver, over 20k if it's an independently visiting caravan, and it only takes about 3k silver as payments to reach peace from -100 relations and call another caravan to be ambushed. I don't know if there's a limit at some point, but I did this twice to same faction in one year. Also, paying for peace takes the fun out of peace agreement missions or releasing prisoners. Actually selling value of a prisoner is generally higher than +15 relationships points - as you can get over 1k from a single healthy & skilled prisoner, use that money to buy +33 relationship points, and still earn 100-200 silver. So if you ambush the caravan with maces and capture a bunch of prisoners, your reward can be quite handsome, and you can sell them as slaves while buying the peace the same day. This really feels gamey and unrealistic. At least the reparations could be much more expensive.

Mechanoids: A couple versions ago, dead man clothes were added, I suppose in order to slow the rate of the colony getting rich. This I thought was a great thing, but I've been waiting to see similar done with mechanoids. I get massive mechanoid raids, often, and if mechanoid corpses are processed instead of letting them dissipate under the sun, my colony gets dozens of scyther blades and tons of plasteel. Scyther blade's net worth is 1k, and you get something like 7.5-8 silver for a single piece of plasteel - this makes both very valuable as trade items even though player gets plenty of both. Because of mechanoids it's really hard to keep the colony from getting too rich. Now it would be cool to make money by selling something I've produced, like high quality clothing, leather and wool, art, smokeleaf joints and yayo etc. but mechanoids force themselves in the map and really just make much of this creativity unnecessary.

Rarity of necessary items: The pawns (also all animals) seem to hurt their eyes permanently more than anything else. While I don't have a problem with it per se, it does create a problem. There seems to be just sufficient enough supply of bionic legs and arms, but eyes are really rare. In other words demand is really huge but supply very low and highly arbitrary. Would be better, if all bionics were just more expensive, instead of this rare. To lower my colony's wealth last caravan left with 26 scyther blades, 2k smokeleaf, 3k plasteel, 15k silver etc. and for such a caravan it's about a year long mission to go around and gather worthwhile items in trade. Would be great to spend all that money to bionic eyes, but I just can't find the damn things.

[NeoSono]

I never played beta 18 so I can only say what is true for unstable 1.0.

I don't have that many manhunter events and mostly need to go out hunting for meat. So I don't know if they have been toned down.
You can't buy relationship with silver anymore. You have to gift them something and it's not that cheap imo. Calling a caravan also costs 15 relationship + the huge loss if you kill them. Also you can only call them when they are allied afaik so +75 relation. So if you have them as enemy faction because you killed their caravan you either have to send a caravan to them to ift them or use pod launcher to send them gifts.
Mechanoids give some resources but certainly not that much. Also scyther blades are not a thing anymore. You only get the mechanoids corpses and thats it.
Bionics have been integrated into the research tree and can be build later on so you can help most problems yourself later on.

[Injured Muffalo]

I haven't played much lately, but I can tell you scyther blades no longer exist and there are tons of new bionic this and that. Now how common they are I don't know; crafting is now also possible.

In terms of economy another major thing is expendable stuff. Traps are now expendable; you have to build a new one. Guns need new barrels which costs various resources. So you might be buying some steel or uranium in 1.0 that you wouldn't in B18.

And then obviously prices changed about 50 times. Everything works a little differently.

[Ukas]

Thx for replys. This is good news, seems like 1.0 solves quite a few of the issues I was talking about.

[5thHorseman]

Also, traders won't buy things that perish (though they do sell them), so you can't sell lavish meals made out of raider or insect meat.