I'VE BEEN ROBBED!

[Tolwrath]

Bandits, squads, and armies should be able to rob your squad after beating them unconscious.

I recently started a new game where I vowed never to purposefully lead enemies to a town to get the guards to handle them. It has resulted in many instances where my men only survive because I made sure to bandage one character, so his wounds will heal because they won't be entirely red, before they all get knocked out. I can't even tell you how many times this exact scenario has happened: My main character comes to, lying in a pool of sand wet with his own blood and thinks, "ow... why am I... where... oh yeah some bandits attacked and beat us all. Oh well, at least I still have all my stuff. Time to bandage the rest of the squad before they bleed out."

That statement should be more like "I'm alive I guess... wait... my weapon is missing! And my shoes!" When your squad is beaten, it's only natural to assume the people who beat you will take some of your stuff (if not just taking an entire person to sell or eat).

Now clearly, taking ALL of your squad's stuff would be too crippling to the player. It should be restricted to only certain portions of your loot with the number of enemies still conscious factoring in. If that's still too crippling than robbing could be restricted to only certain types of items and/or catans.

As a counter to this it should also be possible to get your stuff (and any people that have been kidnapped) back by finding the squad that beat you, and beating them. You could also get it back by happening across a small randomly occurring/generated temporary encampment of the faction that beat you. They might have it in a trunk in one of their tents or something.

[Motocross]

As much as I would hate to have my shit robbed, I guess it makes the game all the more realistic. As long as they don't steal my fucking bandages! :C

[Cat_Fuzz]

Yea, as long as it's not OP (eg. everytime you get knocked unconcious, your going to lose everything you own, even your soul) I'd like it if it were limited to weapons and material supplies, posssibly clothing if it were limited to upper body.

[iSuck345]

It should also depend of the inteligence of the enemy. They might as well steal all of your bandages or substitue your weapons with rusty katanas to so then you can't give them payback, or they will just ignore then and your flashy planks and medium armour and steal gold that was inside a package that belonged to the most powerful person in the land who wold kill them.

[toaster Assassin]

I like Gothic II-III approach, they take the weapon equipped and your money (leave everything else).

[Clawdius Talonious]

I like Gothic II-III approach, they take the weapon equipped and your money (leave everything else).

Yes and no, there would need to be a "money on hand" sort of thing, wouldn't make much sense with your cats being effectively on every member of the squad at once the way it is now. Imagine a solo faction member running about with a heavy pack to build up his str when he is waylaid by bandits and your entire faction is broke. Why did Jimbob the Newbie have all of our money on him!? Heh...

[toaster Assassin]

Ah, yes this was discussed a while back. Physical money would definitely be an issue.

[Tolwrath]

Ah, yes this was discussed a while back. Physical money would definitely be an issue.

There are a few possible ways to handle this.
1. Division of money based on total skill points: the portion of money each character has on hand for stealing purposes would be based on how many skill points that character has out of the total skill points in your faction.
2. Based on rank: assuming a rank-within-faction system is implemented, money on-hand could then be divided up based on rank.
3. Money storage and/or rationing: assuming you get a place to store your money, you can then have characters take specific amounts of money individually, or assign how much money each squad carries, where on-hand is divided within the squad individually for stealing purposes.

[1337]

The third option is the one i had in mind when thinking about having physical money ingame. It is strategically the most interesting imo:
eg.- how many man should i use to transfer that bunch of money from the outpost to the main HQ...
- if the enemy is all over the map and doesn't protect his HQ, you can globally screw him (in a way that relates to economics)
...

the other options you talk about seem to bring a few problems... what if i want to buy sth costly? (building material or such) you would need to bring people together to get the necessary money :/

[Tolwrath]

Options 1 and 2 would not result in any actual limit to what a character can spend, just how much could be stolen from them if they were knocked out. Strictly setting a "how much money can be stolen from them" variable.

Both would result in letting your higher level/rank characters get knocked out be a more costly mistake.

[1337]

I understand what you mean, i was thinking about the possibility of physical money ingame: if you talk about having physical money ingame, you won't be able to buy stuff if you don't have the coins with you or else it would be useless to have physical coins in the first place and it would be pretty unrealistic anyway.

If we don't get physical money in the game, your options are valid (imo).

[Tolwrath]

I assume by physical money, you mean that it's tracked by how much a character holds instead of them all magically having access to the great vault in the sky.

Because without a physical vault to store it in... actually even then, I would hate having money take up inventory space. It was a poor idea in Diablo, and only resulted in not being able to physically carry enough money to buy some items.

[Clawdius Talonious]

Having coinage have actual weight would be a good thing if you ask me. I mean, IRL carrying around a kings ransom wouldn't be something you'd have one person do, several thousand cats would be quite heavy and take up considerable space. The trick would be finding a balance between realism and entertainment value. I would think that having your squad go back to town every time their cash on hand became too heavy would make some sense, but you wouldn't want them to have to go back to your base every time they did any trading, so it would have to be something like 1 cat = .001lbs so it would take tens of thousands before you -had- to bring it to your base to deposit it.

Having physical money could enable other aspects of gameplay that could be quite interesting. Banking, for one, might prove to be a lucrative industry. As would *ahem* liberating assets from those pesky vaults. There could be an entire faction entirely dedicated to the banking system. They could provide an enemy equipped with the best gear and quite well trained, to battle once sacking a town becomes too easy. You'd want a couple of other changes to the status quo to really make that the most entertaining it could be I'd think.

For example, you'd want the ability to A) be able to kill downed enemies B) have killing every enemy/witness not result in negative faction reputation and C) some significant self preservation instincts in the AI that would make seriously wounded units flee ensuring it wasn't easy to make a faction lose track of its caravan without having anyone witness the event. I suppose it wouldn't hurt if night time reduced visibility for distant units... Then you'd be able to set up something akin to resupply caravans for the bankers guild. It could be in many ways, just like the Spanish Gold/Silver fleets in Sid Meier's Pirates! was in that game. When you managed to discover their location and loot them, rather than amazing new ships full of gold, you'd receive a ton of cats and some exceptional gear provided they didn't slaughter you or have someone escape to blacklist your faction.

Of course if all of that was implemented how much fun would it be to be able to disguise yourself as another faction, everyone wearing the uniforms of the Holy Empire when attacking the United Cities, and visa versa could generate some interesting and potentially profitable tensions in a region. Hitting a Banker's caravan dressed as Sand Ninjas would be harder because of the lower armor quality, but make any survivors point the blame on someone other than your upstart group.

[Tolwrath]

Actually I'm cool with money having weight on a character, I just don't want to see it suck up inventory space. I also think that weighted money might be undesirable to some players due to the inherent tediousness of managing your money via weight constraints, and should be kept as an option. Kinda like Fallout: New Vegas' "hardcore mode" where they give ammo weight and such, but you still have the option of playing the normal mode where ammo is weightless.

PS: Seriously, in Diablo, Writ has items for sale that you cannot physically afford even if you use the hack that lets you put money in ALL your equipment slots as well as your inventory slots. I mean having to drop that much of your inventory space just to hold onto your money is really crippling.

[Clawdius Talonious]

if money stacked to 10k cats in one, say, 2x2 square chunk of inventory space, and 10 of those let you have 100k cats in one 4x4 chunk in a traders backpack, you would be able to put millions of cats in a traders backpack. However if 10000 cats weighed one a million would be as heavy as a shopkeepers backpack, so really having them take some inventory space isn't too big a deal. It's more a question of exactly how that is managed, I mean if the bankers faction existed you could easily use a writ instead of cash.

But I'm not really terribly concerned either way, I was just brainstorming as to what else could benefit emergent gameplay, so that there could be more value in producing cats as a physical item rather than a faction wide number.

*edit* Changed 4x4 to 2x2, didn't notice my mistake yesterday.

[toaster Assassin]

How about adding, say, 4 extra slots on the inventory window. These four slots would be reserved for money ((piles of money,coin purses, the mini-vault, ect..)only. Now each of the four slots can hold a pile of coins on their own,but the character can purchase a coin purse (The backpack merchant can offer different types). The coin purses would either reduce the weight of the money or allow it to hold more.
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I was thinking of something like above, because it seems that the main issue is where the physical money is held. If a separate inventory slot(s) (or bag) is created for the physical money, then there would be no conflict with the inventory items.

[Scotterius]

I like this idea. I think bandits should take all gear that hast more monetary value than their current equipped gear. (It is really similar to what you do too). It sounds harsh, but having a couple naked survivors returning home is a whole lot better than no one returning home and keeping the equipment.

[RebD]

I'm not sure how the whole being robbed of money thing that's being discussed would work but I have to agree with the OP about gear being stolen. While balance has been mentioned a few times, I don't think it's the main thing to take into consideration.

My first thought when I read this topic was that of course enemies should be able to rob my fallen soldiers because I can rob my fallen enemies. Remember that in Kenshi the idea is that the player isn't special in any particular way. So when it comes to game balance, it needs to be managed around this concept.

It's also worth keeping in mind that because Kenshi is in such an early Alpha, is that right now, once you get started the world isn't very dangerous and this is likely to change. Having soldiers killed and crippled isn't something we're use to yet but once we are, being robbed won't seem like such a harsh penalty.

I think though when it comes to being robbed by an NPC it shouldn't be a matter of they take everything they can carry. Like the player, what they took would depend on their motivation. So if you were beaten by the traders guild who have a lot of backpacks you could expect most of your items to be stolen. Whereas if you were beaten by a patrol they might just take the items of particular value (high end weapons and medical supplies). Starving bandits might not have anyone to trade with and would only take the items they're going to equip etc.

So I think NPCs should be able to rob the player and what they took should depend on what that NPC/NPC faction needs and wants. I don't think this should be affected by what's "fair" to the player.

[Tolwrath]

I didn't think about it until now, but if enemies have the ability to rob you, then some enemies might not want to be considered murderers. Having an alternate option to killing means an enemy might heal you after taking your weapons (to stop you from starting the fight again). Meaning the inherent balance of being robbed could be that you don't get killed.

Well unless they take a person for slavery or food purposes anyway...

[Meynolt]

There appears to be a 'money' item in the construction set. Obviously still on the drawing board, but maybe we'll see physical money at some stage.