Suggestion: Dynamic Economy

Sunless Sea
1

At the moment what I observe from Sunless Sea’s economy is that certain places allow you to make more profit than others, but after sometime it depletes. I think, I can consider this a punishment mechanic even though it have good intention of promoting exploration.

I think, instead doing this and get complains from people which somehow concludes you need to grind to get progress, Sunless Sea can have benefit from doing what trading games doing (tradewinds series, spacerangers) which is dynamic economy. It doesn’t have to be that complex though…

Here is what I am thinking:

  • Inn and taverns, including resting in London have chance to give you ‘words of opportunity’
  • You can only have like 3? different ‘words of opportunity’
  • Each words of opportunity basically increase profit of certain item or allowing players to do limited run once more.

Example:

  • &quotI heard capering relicker is visiting London and looking for some sphinxstones&quot for one chance of selling sphinxstone after the quest deplete
  • &quotI heard Mt Palmerson have limited stock of certain item, they are useful to reduce sun menace&quot go to Mt Palmerson to buy certain item that reduces sun menace, only can buy once.
  • &quotI heard Venderbright is running out of wine!&quot for bonus 1 echo per wine in venderbright shop, until you depart from it.

Another idea:
Instead having the limited runs to be completely dry after awhile, maybe makes them faster to deplete but allow them to regenerate overtime? I think it is less disappointing if players know its gonna restock later.

2

SS is very much a grinding game if you want to make enough money to actually buy anything. You can sail back and forth, back and forth, grinding for a paltry sum, with the only things that give meaningful quantities of cash being all time-limited, and once the game hits the stage where the world has become barren of these quests, that’s basically it. It’s not HARD to make money, but it sure is massively tedious.

3

lusername: Last Tour for the Tomb Colonists. Really easy to do while you’re doing everything else. Just putting it out there.

rosedragon: Yup. Makes sense. I like the dynamic nature of it, too. Arguably, the blind bruiser effectively fills that role at the moment.

4

lusername : I don’t grind to single port more than 5 times (5 times for sphinx stuffs, 5 times going to surface with coffee and 5 mirrorsnatch boxes). With exploring 5-7 ports everytime I go out, I can get a lot of help from admiralty for fuels… and then fulfilling the merchant request and do some quests / stuffs that give me items that I can sell to the academic… Basically, I try to ‘multitask’ as much as possible and plot my routes if they are open. Note that before I do this, I died twice to find my preferable class, but only transferred less than 2000 echos. Yes, things goes barren like the color books from venderbright (which is lucrative 1k gems), outlandish artefacts getting rare, no more sphinxstones, even quests are gone…that is when ya’ transfer your stuffs to next captain yes? ;)

5

I had a much more involved idea for a dynamic economy that involved doing a quest for the Masters of the Bazaar, then afterwards they decided that they didn’t like how stable the economy was and so they would allow it to flow more naturally, which created the dynamicism.

Anyway . . . I’m all for a dynamic economy, but what you’re suggesting isn’t very dynamic. Or at least, not as dynamic as I interpret the word &quotdynamic&quot to be anyway. I always read it as &quotDYNAMIC!&quot in my own head.

That is to say, I was thinking along similar lines, but much more varied.

Every time the player gets back into London and receives the &quotA Free Evening Quality&quot, the game would trigger a Market Shift. This would show up in the &quotAnother Day&quot section of the Journal so the player can check on it later.

Market shifts are shortages or surpluses on a particular good.

If there’s a shortage, then the price on both buying and selling that good in ALL shops across the zee goes UP by 50% of it’s normal value. If there’s a surplus, then the price on both buying and selling that good in ALL shops across the zee goes DOWN by 50% of its normal value. Rounding down if you end up up with decimals, and you keep this increase/decrease relative to the individual shop, so if say, there’s a shortage of Fuel, then the price for fuel goes up in London to 15 Echoes, but the price for Fuel at the Iron Republic only goes up to 12.

The one exception to this rule are shops that sell goods for trades. If you traded some coffee for Parabola Linen at Irem, that exchange stays the same. Same as with stories for Mutersalt in Whither. Those are barters, and don’t feed into the normal Unterzee Market system.

This would affect the following market goods - Fuel, Mushroom Wine, Darkdrop Coffee, Royal Blue Feathers, Romantic Literature, Prisoner’s Honey, Stygian Ivory, Zzoup, Parabola Linen, Spider’s Silk, Foxfire Candles, Crates of Human Souls (stamped) and Mirrorcatch Boxes.

It wouldn’t affect the illegal black market trades other than the Romantic Literature, since that can at least be approved and sold in London and through the one legal component of the sunlight trade - Mirrorcatch boxes - whose shifting price could make Sunlight more or less profitable at any given time.

Past that, you’d see the game roll to see which good shifts and whether it’s going up or down on any given day. Once one good’s price shifts, all prior Market shifts reset to their normal price point, so there’s no true craziness with floating price points or anything - there’s just a single hot or cold commodity at any given time.

This would allow for some real variation, but it would also allow for an emergent set of stories to occur.

I mean, you might have to seriously curtail an upcoming voyage if the price of fuel shoots up, but you could save a LOT of money if there’s a surplus of of it. If there’s a shortage of wine, then making wine runs to places other than Godfall becomes more profitable (since that’s at a fixed rate). If there’s a surplus of Coffee, then selling at Vienna will recoup your investment (since that’s at a fixed rate). The Spider-Silk trade at Nativity become VERY interesting if there’s a fluctuating price on the silk, and so does the Coffee-Parabola trade when there are fluctuating prices on both silk AND coffee.

Importantly, by tying it to the &quotA free evening&quot quality, then there’s going to be a new Market shift when you get back to London - so you might be hauling a bunch of coffee for sale in London, only to find that there’s now a Surplus, and it’s now a bad deal. Do you sell now to recoup part of your investment? Or hold onto it trying to wait for the market to shift back in your favor?

This volatility, once introduced, would be something that would make the game a lot more interesting, but also potentially more frustrating. Hence why I was thinking the player had to &quotopt in&quot through some other manner, primarily a quest. To help though, I was also thinking another reward for the quest would be the expansion of the &quotAssay&quot function, so it told you the price of goods at London and it’s Highest Market Value shop.

6

It would also be nice to have a gold rush occur occasionally. I mean that it would be nice for a specific common trade good to become cheap at a specific port for 10 or 20 days, and the event would activate at london along with recent news.

For example, a shipment of coffee from the elder continent makes Carnelian coffee now cost 10 echoes. A new shipment of dice (from hell?) halves the price of dice in Palmerston. And so on.
edited by lexiconical on 3/14/2015

7

[quote=lexiconical]
A new shipment of dice (from hell?) halves the price of dice in Palmerston. And so on.
edited by lexiconical on 3/14/2015[/quote]

The Brimstone Convention is an enemy of Hell–being the ousted former rulers of it–so that’s unlikely. :P

8

Sunless Sea isn’t a trading game. Admittedly, it is very easy think that it is, but it really is not; the game even blatantly says you will be unlikely to make much profit from trading. Sunless Sea is about exploration & stories first and foremost. Improvements on trading is unlikely to even be a tertiary concern for the development team.

9

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

10

Sunless Sea isn’t a trading game. Admittedly, it is very easy think that it is, but it really is not; the game even blatantly says you will be unlikely to make much profit from trading. Sunless Sea is about exploration & stories first and foremost. Improvements on trading is unlikely to even be a tertiary concern for the development team.[/quote]

Here’s the problem with this:

Architect: I am starting on a new project that will take inspiration from dog houses, but won’t be a dog house itself. I repeat: IT’S DEFINITELY NOT GOING TO BE A DOGHOUSE!

*Architect then proceeds to make a building that combines many different styles, but is 3 feet tall and only has an entrance 2 feet tall and a foot and a half wide.

Sunless Sea not only has every basic feature of a trading game - multiple locations with different sets of goods, different prices of these goods so profit margins can exist, and a progressive increase in profit per unit that favors larger cargo holds over time - trading is a solid way to make a profit as long as you stick to it. It’s also slow paced with a de-emphasis on combat, which most trading games are as well.

Sunless Sea is a trading game.

It looks like a trading game. It has all the basic features of a trading game. It’s a trading game.

This is despite the fact that FBG don’t want it to be a trading game, and have done as much as they can to diminish this aspect (hence the way port reports work and the weak profit margins).

So, why is it a trading game despite all the protests?

Because a trading game makes the best sense for the setting and theme.

Think about it. Sunless Sea really just needed a reason to get the player onto the sea, and the base activity didn’t need to be trading. It could have been fishing. It could have been the whaling. It could have been about naval combat in fleets. It could have been about piracy.

Most of these elements are present in SS, but to lesser degrees than the trading. Yeah, you can hunt zee monsters, but until the late game it’s not really worth it economically as early on you’re really only fighting monsters out of self defense, not profit. You’re not going to start as a whaler. Fishing isn’t in the game at all. Naval combat is in, but it doesn’t play like a naval combat game, and far more like a dog-fighting aerial combat game on a 2D plane (the difference being dimensions of combat factors - Air Combat dogfighting is inherently close range and so only has positioning and speed as factors, Naval combat traditionally has positioning, speed, and range as the three major factors). On top of that, there’s no way to join a fleet or participate in large scale battle, and the game is in no way made around that. Pirating is technically in the game, but has been balanced out in the current builds so that it’s near impossible.

Trading is the only real element present in the game that, even though it’s not great (because SS is a terrible Trading Game) is present and identifiable. Trading is also the most thematically appropriate manner to get the player out onto the Zee and checking into different ports. If the game were about any of the other aspects more, then port hopping, and thus, encountering different available stories and characters, would be de-emphasized.

That’s why no, SS is most definitely a trading game. It’s just a trading game that doesn’t want to be what it is. It’s a self-hating trading game.

Personally, while I understand that the point of SS is the story and all, I rather wish FBG didn’t feel the need to gimp one aspect of their game so much in order to create an emphasis on another. Because I feel that’s what’s happened.

They saw that there was a potential that people might play the game as a trading game, and wanted them to play it for ONLY the story. So they made trading terrible, and made the port report system a better economic choice (even though the main thing the Port Report system does - get players to visit different ports - could have been done through a more robust trading system as well). They didn’t want players to think on economic terms when going to new ports, and instead focus on exploration and story possibilities.

But the problem arises in the fact that they’ve also made such high cost ships and upgrades, and heavy maintenance costs for fuel and supplies, that there’s no way players CAN’T think of economic terms first and foremost. It’s really the maintenance costs on fuel and supplies that are the culprit here. In Fallen London, you never actually have to worry about a cost nibbling away at your progress, so you can focus on accumulation and story exclusively. In SS, the constant costs put tons of pressure on securing economic stability that you cannot truly focus on story and accumulation until you figure out how to stay afloat.

And this is fundamental. Because if they had REALLY wanted to make this &quotnot a trading game&quot then they would have eliminated all the trade goods entirely. I mean, poof! Coffee’s gone. Wine’s gone. Parabola Linen’s gone. You’d also eliminate fuel and supplies and only have terror and hull to worry about. All you’d be doing is going from port to port and entering storylets for the sake of entering storylets. THAT would be a game that couldn’t be considered a trading game.

But then it would feel really weird. It would be like,&quotWhy do I have this big ship? I’m not hauling cargo, I’m not collecting fish, and I’m not pirating or protecting the seas. What point is the ship? Why isn’t this just an expansion to Fallen London?&quot

So trading HAS to stay in the game. But since the desire is to promote players playing in the manner intended trading was made awful.

To me, this is a huge mistake. It’s choosing to deny one audience because you think that by appealing to them you’re somehow diminishing the audience you have. But that’s silly. SS could have an excellent economic game to it, and it wouldn’t at all affect the story aspects in a negative manner (it would require rebalancing, but pretty much every change to a game requires rebalancing). It wouldn’t be detrimental to be able to find success amongst people who want to play the game as a trading game and those who want to play it for its story, it would just be a bigger audience. Considering people who like trading games tend to like slow paced exploration, honestly, it’s an audience that fits with narrative lovers pretty well anyway.

But c’est la vie, so it goes, and all that jazz.
edited by MisterGone on 3/16/2015

11

It’s probably more apt to say that Sunless Sea is not meant to be a trade-focused game, and that the trade features are somewhat intentionally rudimentary and static, because that’s not intented as the game’s core feature.

It’s great that people have this much enthusiasm for the trade idea. It really is. It’s just not the centerpiece of the game nor of the game’s development. I’d say this is a feature better for someone to make as a mode than an actual core piece.

12

Exploration, discovery and story telling are present and identifiable. They are the core aspects of the game. There are lucrative non-mass cargo based means of making echoes (and fuel and supplies) which are completely exploration and story based, and you learn about them by exploration and the unlocking of story lines. Some of them are finite while others are inexhaustible. I think this is what the developers want to continue to and should focus upon in further developing the game and adding content.

[li][/li][li]
edited by Dagmar on 3/17/2015

13

Exploration, discovery and story telling are present and identifiable. They are the core aspects of the game. There are lucrative non-mass cargo based means of making echoes (and fuel and supplies) which are completely exploration and story based, and you learn about them by exploration and the unlocking of story lines. Some of them are finite while others are inexhaustible. I think this is what the developers want to continue to and should focus upon in further developing the game and adding content.

[li][/li][li]
edited by Dagmar on 3/17/2015[/quote][/li][li]
[/li][li]Those aren’t reasons for the player to be at sea within the logical context of the universe, which is what I was referring to with the prior paragraph to that one. I.E. generally no one hires a sailor to go tell stories. They hire them or pay them for hauling freight, catching fish, or defending territory. Some find profit through piracy. Very few found money through &quotexploration and Discovery&quot and most of those were at very specific points in history.
[/li][li]
[/li][li]
[/li][li]Ugh, these dots again. I don’t know what causes this.

[/li]

14

Yes, and Sunless Sea is deliberately set at such a point - a new Age of Exploration, on a sea rich in uncharted lands like no lands have ever been uncharted before.

15

Yes, and Sunless Sea is deliberately set at such a point - a new Age of Exploration, on a sea rich in uncharted lands like no lands have ever been uncharted before.[/quote]

Sort of.

Every port you visit and come back to the Admiralty already knows about and has been to before. Sailors have been to all the lands too. If we’re comparing this to history, Sunless Sea is more set in a Mediterranean whose geography shifts, and getting to the New World is never really seen or an active gameplay element so much as a game ending amazement.

Because the whole game of the game consists of traveling to the places already known. Several of which are territorial waters of factions already known to the powers within the game. The places that are truly unknown are beyond the borders of the sea, the places off the map. THOSE are places that could be considered part of a new age of exploration, sure. But getting outside of the map to go in those directions tends to end the game seeing as it accounts for two of the game’s endings, or causes a massive penalty that can quickly kill your captain.

16

By your logic, any game that contains objects which can be exchanged for some form of currency would be a trading game. I won’t say that you have no valid points. However, attempting to make appeals that run counter to the developer’s clear intent for the overall design is simply childish–&quotI want to play your game, but I don’t want to play the way you designed it.&quot

I apologize in advance if you take offense to that, but I will not apologize for saying it.

17

Let’s keep this civil, folks - if you’re needing to hedge your opinions with apologies, perhaps you could simply word them more politely in the first place.

[quote=MisterGone]
Sort of.

Every port you visit and come back to the Admiralty already knows about and has been to before. Sailors have been to all the lands too. If we’re comparing this to history, Sunless Sea is more set in a Mediterranean whose geography shifts, and getting to the New World is never really seen or an active gameplay element so much as a game ending amazement. [/quote]

I grant you the historical parallel isn’t exact, but if it’s a Mediterranean, it’s the Mediterranean of The Odyssey - with gods and monsters behind every headland, and such adventures to be had for the bold explorer as a poet could go down in history by putting them to verse.

18

Not really (baring, of course, the fact that you will likely repeatedly turn in the reports, though the text doesn’t change), but there’s quite a few port report responses where their reactions suggest complete ignorance of what’s going on, or at least very sparse information (eg Pigmote Island, most obviously, but also the fact that they actually believe you when you tell them there are no spiders in Saviours Rocks, or when they will freak out by the tense your Irem report will have been written in. Whereas they have a ‘yes this happens a lot’ reaction to the Iron Republic reports, which are honestly weirder.)

Also keep in mind London only fell thirty years ago, and the Tomb Colonies were discovered about 20 years before the game starts (according to this)

19

By your logic, any game that contains objects which can be exchanged for some form of currency would be a trading game. I won’t say that you have no valid points. However, attempting to make appeals that run counter to the developer’s clear intent for the overall design is simply childish–&quotI want to play your game, but I don’t want to play the way you designed it.&quot

I apologize in advance if you take offense to that, but I will not apologize for saying it.[/quote]

No offense taken. I rarely take actual offense to much of what anyone says, especially if it’s their opinion, as I’m one of those good philosophy students who thinks discourse and argument is the path to truth and understanding (frankly I find it sad that the modern emphasis is that we seal ourselves into little communities of agreement more often than not, eventually surrounding ourselves with only like minds until all potential originality spurred by debate is lost). I do find it funny that you apologized for not apologizing however.

But what you’re describing about my intentions, that’s not what I really mean. Perhaps I’ve not explained myself too well.

On the main page for Sunless Sea, the following games are directly cited as sources for inspiration of Sunless Sea (among others).

Taipan, Elite, Sid Meier’s Pirates, Strange Adventures in Infinite Space

ALL of these games feature trading as a core element. The fact that SS does as well is by no mistake. If you’ve played these games (and apart from Taipan, I’ve played all of them extensively. I’ve informed myself of the basics of Taipan though, and it seems like it fits into a similar mold) this will seem very obvious.

Now, does this mean that it’s a specialized trading game like some of those that also spun off from the same roots? Stuff like Port Royale or the X series? Of course not.

But it does mean that SS is about as much a trading game as say, Sid Meier’s Pirates was, where trading was a secondary but core feature, if not the primary draw of the game (which would of course, be pirating).

Does this mean that improving the trading system would somehow detract from the rest of the systems already in the game? FBG seems to think so. I disagree.

I think it would only make one system have more depth, and while it might mean rebalancing, really wouldn’t harm the exploration or terror aspects of the game. It certainly wouldn’t change any story element.

Obviously, since I’m not the one who started this thread, I’m not the only one who feels this way. I’ve seen others proffer similar opinions about a more robust trading system in Steam reviews and forum posts. I know there is some group of players that have a similar assessment. Does FBG have to appeal to their tastes? Certainly not. They’re free to do as they wish.

Do you have to play the game &quotmy way&quot? Nope. But would &quotmy way&quot harm the way you play the game? Not really.

Heck, earlier in the thread above I suggested a method that would add more dynamicism to the economy without making everything super finicky and overcomplicated. Something that would add more spice to the economy to create the illusion of life without needing to model a full scale &quotliving system&quot that would require a fairly complex cause and effect market simulation to run in the background like some games might do. It’s a pretty modest suggestion as these types of systems go.

I find it frankly strange that there’s so much resistance to merely suggesting, &quotHey! What about adding more to this part?&quot, and especially strange that this kind of mild suggesting is assumed to carry with it the intent of &quotI WANT THIS PART AND ONLY THIS PART&quot entitlement behind it.

I’m not attached to the idea. I don’t care if it doesn’t get added because this is a game in a post release state. I realize that in all likelihood, it won’t. Hence the &quotc’est la vie, and so it goes, and all that jazz&quot at the end of my last wall of text.

But at the same time, I was simply trying to point out that saying the game ISN’T a trading game is patently ignoring the very major and obvious ways in which is most certainly is.

It looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. I’m not calling it a frog.
edited by MisterGone on 3/17/2015

20

[color=#009900]Sunless Sea is not a trading game. [Source: made the game.][/color]
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[/color]
[color=#009900]OK, that’s cheap of me :-) and it’s entirely possible for players to find different things in a game than the things the designer puts in it. But I am raising a eyebrow at the fact that that list of my inspirations is mysteriously missing the two primary ones - FTL and Don’t Starve - which have no trading elements at all. I’d have liked to strip out the markets and replace trading entirely with story-based elements - not unlilke what Rosedragon suggests - but the content budget for that would have been much higher, and the UI would have been a bit painful. [/color]
[color=#009900]
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[color=#009900]MisterGone - I wrote a longish (and slightly supercilious, now I reread it, sorry!) here http://community.failbettergames.com/topic19495-suggestion-give-hearts-an-effect-outside-events.aspx#post97836 about why adding elements can often be more problematic than it seems.[/color]