Thoughts on shopping

[buzzkill]

After reading this article...

http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2007/11/analysis-of-shopping-in-angband.html

I did a little thinking and...

Has anyone ever tired to implement a supply and demand economy in Angband. Items sold frequently or that are in high supply will sell will buy/sell very cheaply. Items frequently purchased and/or in short supply will cost more. Beyond this, to keep supply in line with players' abilities/level, why not just stock stores with items from the dungeon/wilderness/where ever the player happens to be exploring (literally). With the though of a greater universe, with other (unseen) adventurers perusing the same levels as the player, assume that most items not picked up or destroyed by the player will eventually be found by someone and most will end up being sold to a shopkeeper. Therefore, the items the player is likely to have found (or similar) and will want to sell, will be in stock and therefore be worth less. Items the players hasn't found will likely not be in stock and will cost more. Most often, gold ceases to be an issue when one can sell ego-items and artifacts for huge amounts of gold. But how many times have you passed up a vault of really nice gear for fear of losing your life. What if some of that abandoned loot ended up in the shop. How much would your 'Holy Avenger' be worth then?

Just my 2 cents and 10 minutes, not overly contemplated, poke holes if you like. It just seemed like a pseudo free market economy is the way to go.

[pav]

Supply/demand economy cannot work in a single player game. Basically, loot will soon become unsellable, and WoR scrolls prices would runaway.

[GSN]

Angband is not an economy simulation, nor should be remade into one. Although a Sim-like game in ASCII would be intriguing... but wait, there's already one - Dwarf Fortress.

[PowerDiver]

There's only one thing you really need from the shops, ?recall, and you could fix that by starting the char with an amulet of recall.

If you doubled the size of the home, made humanoids in the dungeon drop what humanoids in the dungeon need [light+books if they cast spells, arrows if they shoot, etc], and made consumables drop a dozen at a time, you might not even need shops, although warriors would be short of ?phase.

Also, the game is improved a lot by removing selling completely, and increasing gold drops a bit to compensate. Not one single person who has seriously tried this has told me that playing with selling is better.

[buzzkill]

Supply/demand economy cannot work in a single player game.

...pseudo supply demand. Obviously you would have to simulate others making sales and purchases. Thus, the savaging dungeons for items and some way of thinning out shop inventory.

Basically, loot will soon become unsellable

Perhaps. More likely if you sell a LOT. In any case, it reduces the availability of gold to the player.

and WoR scrolls prices would runaway.

Exactly my point!!!! at least to a certain extent. Once you ceased buying them, the price would drop. Also, prices would have a tendency to stabilize over time.

This whole scheme was designed to make gold a valuable commodity once again, and it sounds like you're worried about your gold supply. When's the last time that thought entered your mind during a dive.

BTW, I'm not saying this as a good idea, and I take no responsibility for the misery of anyone who might want to implement it. It's just an idea.

[Pete Mack]

Supply and demand don't work the way you describe, at least simple products that you expect to see at the drugstore (ie: WoR and other things available in shops). You should never see prices go too much above the cost of production, else a new manufacturer or retailer will step in. The argent works much better for things like dungeon books and rings of speed, which go from painfully rare to massively common. Still, I'm with Eddie: banning resale and making gold drops bigger is a simpler and generally better solution. The only downside is that you no longer see huge variance in the early game, where reselling a dungeon book or DSM can fully equip your character.

[GSN]

I know it may be blasphemy in the Angband community, but I believe that starting in the dungeon and placing shops there (like in Crawl) would make the game more interesting. Kinda like ironman, except that you can also go upstairs.

Of course this would entail a host of other changes: reducing level size, number of generated monsters (no groups of 5d5 jackals), quantity and frequency of summons, altering item generation probabilities, reducing the number of scrolls and wands to at most two dozen etc.

I have toyed with the idea of making Angband a game that one can beat in hours instead of days, and without the painstaking search for ability potions and resists. Due to my personal situation and commitments the idea will, alas, remain on paper forever.

[Antoine]

I have toyed with the idea of making Angband a game that one can beat in hours instead of days, and without the painstaking search for ability potions and resists. Due to my personal situation and commitments the idea will, alas, remain on paper forever.

It's been done try Quickband

A.

[PowerDiver]

banning resale and making gold drops bigger is a simpler and generally better solution. The only downside is that you no longer see huge variance in the early game, where reselling a dungeon book or DSM can fully equip your character.

That's easily "fixed" by adding 10K and 20K gem drops a la Sangband, either as new objects or as added variance in the money drops. As a personal preference, I think the game is better with less money, but I do see the other side of that argument.

[zaimoni]

After reading this article...

http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2007/11/analysis-of-shopping-in-angband.html

I did a little thinking and...

Has anyone ever tired to implement a supply and demand economy in Angband.

I've done some pseudocoding for Zaiband. The problem is that it's very difficult to convincingly fake buying/selling to the stores without running a number of borgs at the same time as the player.

And that requires fairly extensive rewrites to both the dungeon representation and the store representation, as well as a working borg.

Things already get weird when the stores have a real money limit (I started my prototyping by assuming that the price ceiling is 1% of the total storekeeper's cash).

[GSN]

It's been done try Quickband

I have seen it, but it feels more like a demo version of Angband than a game on its own. I'm talking radical redesign here, getting rid of Vanilla town, persistent levels, and unlimited space in inventory.

[Nick]

I'm talking radical redesign here, getting rid of Vanilla town, persistent levels, and unlimited space in inventory.

This sounds pretty close to Ironband - see Antoine's .sig.

[Antoine]

This sounds pretty close to Ironband - see Antoine's .sig.

Mmm.. different again I think. I never considered trying to implement persistent levels or unlimited inventory.

Un comes close to unlimited inventory with the magic bags, I guess.

A.