New store inventory management

[etaomyx]

The buyout button assumes an effectively infinte supply with high variance in availability.

Indeed. I can see that there are good points about both strategies; it really just comes down to which produces the best gameplay. My main problem with the "buyout" mechanism at the moment is that it does not make intuitive sense. Consider the following compromise. Each shopkeeper maintains a revenue counter that is incremented whenever their wares are sold (either to the player or to other invisible customers that are triggered at certain intervals). When the revenue reaches a certain level, the shopkeeper uses that revenue to buy up new stock of equal value. A buyout-like mechanism is still possible, but there's a good explanation for it, and it does not preclude the possibility of also allowing for variation in price with demand, as in the geometric model.

EDIT: I should probably clarify this further. One could at the same time increment the price on items the player buys repeatedly. Then when the shopkeeper has accumulated enough revenue and re-stocks, they could be made to be more likely the re-stock the price-inflated items, thus adapting to player demand. So it could contain the good points from both systems, without needing to fix the inventories in any way.

EDIT 2: An indirect benefit of such a system would be that the size/diversity level of the store's inventory would be kept roughly constant.

[Cauldron]

If you want an economic simulation, you could always go play WoW. Angband is more about making do with what you get. The whole random element is what makes the game unique, as well as viable, which is why so many games duplicate it. Angband's uniqueness lies in the fact that drops have a huge variance in utility, from any critter. Once I sold an unIDed potion dropped in town: Experience. This is what makes the game fun, at least for me.

Although I wish I'd stop losing characters at stat-gain depth all the time. My personal hurdle.