SKM Development: The Market. The Invisible Hand Gonna Smack You Down

Previously, I stated there’d be a limitations on available purchases, by establishing a market.

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.

SKM Development: Resources! Resources! Resources!

The idea behind the Resource type when I devised it was to replace the ‘everything is gold’ aspect of ACKS. The idea I came up with, since I’m too clever for my own good, was that Resource could accomplish certain things.

  Be able to be used for certain set costs.

 Be more versatile then gold or subsistence. Easier to convert.

 Be an inferior commodity to gold and subsistence to make up for its adaptability.

This, notably, has immediate issues.

Which costs, and will this complicate our spreadsheet?

    

More versatile how? It’d be silly to prevent gold for food or food for gold exchanges.

The inferior commodity status means we have to have more of it, otherwise why produce any.

Firstly, I determined the set costs it would be used to defer would be of the ‘establish’ type. Hiring and equipping a soldier, training a soldier, building a stronghold, building improvements, etc.

Secondly, I decided that resource isn’t consumed by upkeep (like gold) and has no spoilage (unlike subsistence).  Resource represents everything from granite blocks to fine silks, so that should work well as an abstraction.

Tied in with that, the idea that the initial cost of establishing a stronghold component or military unit would be cheaper if you used resource instead of gold.

I decided that a resource asset counts for 10gp when producing a stronghold part.  So say a 10,000gp stronghold component would instead cost only 1000 resource since you don’t need to pay to get the raw materials.  You’d still need to pay time based upkeep fees for the process of building of the component, but not the component yourself.   

Similarly, once I get to specific combat units, the resource value that you can get will increase with higher troop types. So say, a peasant is almost all money, but you can defer a lot of cost for say a knight, with resource. Resource representing that you have his horse, metal for his armor, a fine sword, and other fun stuff already on hand.  

As for making it valuable as a resource despite the fact you otherwise can’t spend it, or eat it, we need to figure out some conversion rates.

Here we get a little complicated. See. 1 gold isn’t 1 gold bar, or one ‘gold asset.’ It’s a gold piece. The same that an adventurer gets rifling through an orcs pockets for change.  1 subsistence on the other hand is enough food for a family of five for a month. Let’s assume therefore, using the old mindset that 1 gold piece is enough for a laborer to feed himself on a week, that therefore 20 gold pieces is what’s needed for a five person family (1gp x 5 family members x 4 weeks). Ah, but the subsistence value represents the kingdom’s production so, we need a premium. Let’s make it simple, and up the cost by 50%. So, 30 gold gets you one subsistence.

Similarly, subsistence being converted into gold is tricky. Tricky because the stuff rots and tricky because you want to eat it. Conversion processes both way on gold and food should be a pain in the butt though, so let’s either assume we’re attempting to make money off of our monthly surplus or that we’re literally stealing food from our people’s mouths for it. This means the stuff would be somewhat devalued, so..lets turn things in reverse. I’m going to SWAG that as 1 subsistence gets you 20gp.

We’ve got gold for food taken care of, now we need to move on to wood for sheep. Resource defers gold costs as stated above, 1 resource counting as 10gp when being used for very narrow purposes. However, resource has limited uses and resource has to be better at conversion then gold or food. It’d also be ridiculous to have resource around at all if buying it was more than 10gp for 1. So let’s assume you can purchase 1 resource for 8gp, a 20% cut in price. Resource’s perk is supposed to be easy conversion, so let’s assume it also sells for 8gp.

Now it gets tricky. Resource into food. We decided that 30gp buys us 1 subsistence. We then decided that 8gp buys us 1 resource. So, SWAG’ing it again.. 3 Resource could buy us 1 subsistence. This is cheaper than spending gold (24gp worth of resource, to get us a net of 30gp worth of subsistence). We’d also argue that the conversion back is exactly the same (a perk of resource), so 1 subsistence being sold is worth 3 resource.  

So to summarize.

1 subsistence can be bought for 30gp or 3 Resource.

1 subsistence can be sold for 20gp or 3 Resource.

1 resource can be bought and sold for 8gp.

3 resource can be bought and sold for 1 subsistence.

I might fiddle with those numbers, but it seems pretty solid for the time being.

SKM Development: Complications On Resource and Food

Now that we tackled that, the question is..

What does a hex generate.

We already figured out the subsistence numbers, but now we need to figure out the resource numbers. Resource is as stated, a fancy commodity, that we can convert into either 8gp or 3:1 into subsistence.

This means that if a hex has says 2 subsistence and 4 resource (and assuming 100 pops), then we get the following

50 farmer families nets 100 subsistence.

50 producer families nets us 200 resource, which is 66.6 subsistence or 1,600gp.

If we put everyone on resource production though, we get 400 resources, which is 133.33 subsistence. So we actually get MORE food return if we just make everyone crank on resource. This seems to create a perverse incentive however, where players would be dis-incentivized to produce subsistence at all. But this is because resource, as previously stated is on a 3:1 ratio with subsistence.

Now the question we need to ask is, is this a bad thing? Is having resource be able to be accrued preferentially a terrible thing? And the answer is.. kinda. It’s bad because it creates unrealistic goofy situations.

See, the amount of food is not actually limitless. A person who saves up say 30,000 resource and decides to turn it in for 10,000 subsistence isn’t going to realistically get that much food that fast in a month.

So this is going to result in Spook adding in some additional complexity to himself.

He’s going to add in a market.

How is Spook handling the market. The simplest way possible. He’s making it a kingdom.