Lo-Fi Games

I would like to suggest a way to create dynamic economics system based on needs of town's inhabitants.


Brief outlook:

• Citizens have needs and they produce something(production preference is defined for each town, preferably on each game start, with each faction having slight shortage of resources between their cities ).
• Militia, caravan guards, adventurers etc generate demand for weapons\armor.
• Caravans transfer goods in demand between towns - when town got large demand\excess of a certain items, a caravan is formed for goods transfer, amount and quality of caravan guards is based on amount of items for transfer.
• When citizen's demands are met and produced goods are sold, town's population grows, and it shrinks to certain minimum value when the town is starving, more people - more goods to buy and sell.
• Various town events may be tied to town's population and satisfaction values.

Specifics:

• General
• Each town got a local 'hidden' pool of all trading goods
• Quantity of items in pool could be negative (demand) or positive (surplus)
• Various Items in pool are self-produced in town at different rates, forcefully generating local surplus and shortage of goods.
• Production rates are generated on game start, with production between all cities of each faction being slightly lower than demand, even more so for food. Neutral farmer villages (like Fishers) and player's outpost(s) should help here.
  Citizens and production
• Each citizen(including guards\mercenary\militia etc) subtracts some value from food\bread, water, rum, medicines pool each day
• Non-combatant citizens add some amount of resource to the town pool based on town specialization each day, more is added when necessity pool is positive(like, Catan produces weapons\luxury goods at 3x rate when citizens are well-fed, those items are marked as town specialization items)
• Each citizen consumes some amount of luxury items\robotics\other non-necessity goods, more goods are consumed when necessity pool is positive and production pool is not full (demands are met, produced goods are sold)
  Non-food demands
• Common citizens demand non-armored clothes just like luxury items.
• Town, trader guards generate demand for weapons and armor of a certain type. They also have higher medicines\narcotics\booze consumption than common folk.
• When town is able to sell some amount of it's production, demand for higher level equipment for guards is generated based on faction guard preference.
• Town produces one guard set per 3-7 ingame days and, while it's in demand, consumes armor\weapons of desired quality from shop counters within the town. Consumed stuff should be bought for 2x selling price, probably.
  Vendors
• Surplus items are sold below market price and\or sold to other towns via caravans.
• Goods in demand are highlighted in trading screen and vanish from vendor as soon as you close trading window, for weapons and armor faction-preferred type is demanded, with specific quality range
  Town-based Caravans
• When town got their demands met only by 50% or less, or got 1 week worth of production items unsold, it generates a caravan to transfer goods, with destination based on other town's production lists.
• Some or all caravan guard positions are filled by citizens(subtracting population) with low-quality equipment and several town guards initially.
• Amount of caravan guards depends on how dire food situation is and\or how many items for selling is present at the moment.
• Upon each 2-way trip caravan starts demanding better equipment for guards, just like town guards.

Additional applications
(suggestions)

• Player outpost trading
• Player may get an envoy from town that needs resources\got resources for sale, that sets player outpost as a target for a town-governed caravan.
  You can manually offer your outpost as a supplier for town via town governor npc, once every week when you have high enough faction standing(50?)
  If player...
  ...can fully meet the demands when caravan arrives, relationship gets boosted and player will get another goods request next time.
  ...can not meet the demands completely, next 1-4 caravans will go to different locations, depending on amount of goods bought\supplied by the player. minor relationship drop
  ...If player cannot supply more than 10% of the demanded amount quest is canceled until the next envoy arrives (faster with higher standing).
  Probably needs some separate trading post\storage building for this to work. High faction relationship increases chance of envoy appearance.
  
  Town prosperity
• Town that is able to meet it's citizen's demands and sell produced goods adds some value to "Town's Prosperity", that fades over time when demands are not met\production pool is at maximum quantity limit for a few days. The higher the value, the bigger and stronger raids from bandits are spawned. Types of bandits attracted by certain good in a pool, like high surplus of food for starving bandits, or luxury items\booze for Dust bandits.
  Prosperous town gets bigger population increase (up to number of beds present in town, including inns?), with bigger population it gets more guards.
  Town prosperity drops even more when new caravan is created, when prosperity is very low town may be unable to make a proper caravan and will use small, trading squad instead. This group won't be able to transfer as much goods at each trip but is faster and uses less prosperity.
  
  Citizens changing profession(based on prosperity)
• Citizen may become an adventurer, higher chance for poor and average town, weapons\armor demanded quality is based on how rich the town is.
• Citizen may become a wandering trader, higher chance for rich town, weapons\armor demanded quality and amount of guards is based on how rich the town is.
• Citizen may become a mercenary\additional caravan guard, higher chance for an average town with weapons\armor surplus and\or successful caravans.
• A large group of citizens may turn into a group of bandits when the town is extremely poor for a few weeks. Type of bandits may be based on goods that were present in a pool (no food no weapons - starving bandits, luxury items and armor - dust bandits, good katanas - ninjas, etc.) or just classified as a riot.
  
  Instigating riot\town takeover
• When the town is being extremely poor for weeks you will get the ability to take over the town economically. Poor town with necessities not met will get closer to riot, at some point there will be NPC spawned at town's bar with a quest to supply rebels - money(lots), weapons, armor, medium medikits and double amount of the food shortage, with the time limit. Upon attempt to rebel or if you didn't deliver required goods in time you'll get -100 faction relation. You may tell about rebellion to town governor for some gold reward and a quest to deliver goods in shortage\buy production for a large relationship boost. But you will lose ability to start rebellion for a one ingame year or something equally severe.
• Once the requirements are met, rebel force, additional guards and an army of this town's faction(at the other nearest town of this faction) are spawned. You have to be able to kill guards and recover before the army arrival, army is equipped with high quality equipment and elite soldiers. Once the last soldier in army is defeated, town owner changes to your faction. It will automatically chose possible trading partners according to your faction standings,
  
  Caravan hunters
• Successful caravan runs will increase desirability of it being a target for bandits.
  Some bandit faction(s) would hunt caravans instead of random roams and town raids, launching a group to intercept caravan directly from their camp(not sure if the off-screen combat is supported by the game engine ...though, since those interceptions are not random, it could be simplified).
• Bandits would more likely intercept caravans closer to them with high successfulness and higher amounts of goods transferred, the bigger the caravan guard the more bandits in the group.
• With each successful interception bandit camp threat level increases, the bigger the caravan defeated the higher the threat gain.
• Bandits gets better equipment at higher threat levels
• Bandit camp will get a leader with bounty that gets higher with higher threat
• Town that lost a caravan will spend more prosperity on next caravan to the same destination, increasing number of guards, caravan requires more weapons\armor as well]
• Faction that lost most caravans launches an army raid to wipe out the bandit base when it's threat level is too high(army generates demand for weapons\armor and\or takes some town guards from their posts). There should be a hard limit on how often each faction can gather an army.
  
  Outpost citizens
• Give an ability to make a real town out of player outposts! Once you research saloon building, beds, trading and storage you may turn newly built houses into civilian buildings
• for example, you press the button on house door 'Prepare for citizens' and you get necessary furniture wireframes spawned inside. once they are built by your engineer, make them open for citizens to move in (automatically or by pressing another button, w\e to let citizens in you will need some storage building (probably shared with the building to interact with caravans) and convert medium\large houses into shops for clothes, boots, armor, weapons, trade, saloon into a bar.
• Town's storage building should have interface to view supply\demand, and ability to select which products your town's citizens will specialize at and a shop to buy town's products.
• Allow placing of guard spots that will be filled when you have big enough population, allow equipment selection for npc guards in your town(or at least let player select the type of guards) Guards are outfitted the same way as player towns, via demand for armor and weapons
• You will get additional attention from bandits if you are prosperous, with major factions asking for taxes if your relationship is lower than 90.
• Major faction with negative standing may gather up an army to conquer your town, they have to kill all guards and demolish trading building\town center to accomplish that.
  
  Town developer
• Buy licenses for mining\farming construction inside of the town's area of influence, you may supply the town with necessities this way in exchange for some taxes, supplied town grows bigger and asks for more!

p.s. for an alpha, Kenshi is an astonishing game, with a good battle system, but it does not give any long-term goals to accomplish. I think building a strong, living economy would make this game interesting to play for months or even years, and would make a solid foundation for dynamic inter-faction\faction-player interactions, where a man that once woken up naked in the middle of the nowhere with a stick in hand turned into a powerful faction leader capable of influencing even the most prosperous towns or even factions.

There is a thread with several posts discussing a more reactive/dynamic economy.
Maybe move this post there in addition to the discussion already in place?

Will make a more constructive response when I leave school.

Every thing has been suggested before please use search

I have used search and browsed the thread that was mentioned. Core suggestion touches topic of the 'More in-depth and reactive economy.', but they are about different things.

I have deliberately added theoretical implementations of other people's suggestion within described economics system to show the way i see it - as the foundation to be used for adding complex features seamlessly.

In other words, I think it would be great to make towns themselves have a supply and demand feature, and work from here.

supply and demand has been requested before as has a more dynamic economy.
yours goes into a bit more detail but its still the same thing.

Please post like minded ideas in the appropriate topics already posted.

Hatsune_Neko wrote:Please post like minded ideas in the appropriate topics already posted.

Well, how far should i generalize to find similar topic?
3 out of 4 topics I've seen being somewhat on topic are about dynamically varying vendor prices for better trading, and another is about NPC needs.

TL;DR of the OP is: add global consumption and well-defined production to towns based on amount of inhabitants living in it. If production does not sell and\or town is not getting necessities, it faces the consequences. Use number of inhabitants and their well-being for town-related events.


While it is somewhat related to dynamic pricing, but it is also related to: town sieges, consequences for robbing caravans, basic needs, etc.

I would love to see living town that faces it's own problems, and make it so this group of cannibals roaming the desert could indirectly turn nearby town into a ghost with 1,5 town guards and last citizen dying from hunger.

I've been hoping for a more dynamic economy of some sort since before base building was implemented, and I think this would be an interesting way of going about it. Depending on the methods that are planned for growth of cities and outposts of the various empires, a needs-based system could potentially account for population growth, as well as dynamic NPC outpost construction. In theory it could even help with NPC faction goals, giving a faction a reason to move into a city that was emptied by cannibals.

We've kicked around the idea on the forums previously that we might be able to start a new game, while maintaining the faction we had played in a previous game, along with their outposts and cities. If something like this were implemented it would certainly give the NPC control of a previously player controlled faction a place to start as far as motivation and goal setting.