This has a
few immediate concerns.
Firstly, How
do we determine what the market has available.
Secondly, How
do we avoid having players who see the turn post first from having an unfair
advantage and draining the market?
The second
one is important because the kingdom game is essentially run by mail. It’s over
a discord, but everyone of the players is kept in the dark from the other
players.
Now, in a
normal world, markets would run on the basis of demand. So if everyone was
buying subsistence, subsistence would increase. And we are indeed attempting to
increase a scarcity system. We want there to only be a set amount of X
Subsistence and Y Resource available for conversion. So let’s address the
second part first, the first part is relatively easy.
We could
institute a bidding system, but given that the resources and their exchanges
are designed expressly (and tightly) this means that if you bidded up, all of a
sudden conversion through the market would be disadvantageous. So how do we get
to determine who gets first crack?
Dice.
Shrewd &
Ministry tests. 1d10+ministry stat +1/2 shrewd to determine who gets the
material when the amount of material is in contention. You might be as clever a wheeler-dealer as
Klinger from M*A*S*H, but the guy who genuinely understands logistics and
contracts has a major advantage.
Having
determined our tie-breaker mechanic, now we turn back to how we define the
market. I said previously, we’re going to operate it like a kingdom. That means
that it has, for lack of a better term, a workforce, and an allocation
requirement between subsistence and resource. However, unlike a kingdom, they
have 100% spoilage on both resource and subsistence assets. So each month they
have ONLY what they have available that month.
Now, in
addition to that, their subsistence assets are augmented by everyone’s spoilage.
So again we have the ‘benefit’ that the market’s value can only be determined
after all players have allocated their workforces.
The market’s
population/fam value was difficult to figure at first, but for a given region
its equivalent to 25 fams per each active “civilized” kingdom. Civilized
kingdoms are the only ones actively involved in the webwork of ‘trade’ so..
Now, for how
to define what its resource and feed values are.. See, the market doesn’t feed
anybody. So making its subsistence value 2 overestimates available subsistence
(it means you’ve always got several hundred subs available from the market), so
making it 1 seems more reasonable (especially as they augment with all of the “spoiled”
material).
Their
resource value is 3. 3 seems to be a recurring number with resource.
Also, the
market, ironically, does not ‘optimize’ their supply. At least not at this
stage, so we assume they split their families down the middle. Half to
resource, half to subs.
So
essentially..
Market Subsistence
= (((Total fams/2)*1)+spoiled)
Market Resource
= ((total/fams/2)*3)
So, in our
game currently, we have..
Five PC Kingdoms.
Alhaud, Loyalty, Kn’saara, Selu and Kadran.
And
Two NPC
Kingdoms: The Cartesian Necropolis, The Thirteen Angry Badgers.
So our total
market is 175 pops. So 87 subsistence resource available (we round down) plus
spoilage for purchase (plus spoilage) and 261 resource available. The sub value
seems low, but remember that every kingdom is contributing spoilage. As is
obvious, the resource pool is pretty damn big (commodities are what markets primarily
trade in), and the subsistence area is rather cut throat. This is because we
don’t want a kingdom to ideally rely entirely
on resource or gold conversion to stay alive.
Also, trade
will be allowed between PC kingdoms. Because why not? If players want to
collaborate to gain an advantage, that’s what trade is really for.
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