Weapon´s sale

[U7]

One thing i dont like or it will make Ultima VII more interesting and complete is that you cant sale the weapons you get from creatures or that you find in chests, etc.

I thing SI has that, but only leather armor.

NO RPG game is complete without the option of saling the weapons you get.

[nex666]

Ultima 7 is one of the best games around, it is complete. You can't say no RPG is complete without the selling or "saling" of weapons. Ultima 7 did a really good job, I didn't even think about selling my weapons. Too easy to get money that way. It would effect the gameplay too much doing this.

[Beryllium]

Shortage of funds is a feature of U7. Some of the sub-quests are so you can earn a few gold. So introducing a new source of cash would change the game-play.

Such a thing could be done in a mod, but it would have to be accompanied by other changes to the economic system so as enhance it rather than simply making it easier and maybe unbalanced.

[Alun Bestor]

Yes, I've been thinking the same thing about gameplay balance. The problem is that you get a cartload of chain mail and two-handed swords etc. from random encounters throughout the game, which would amount to thousands of gold pieces if you could actually sell it all.

U7's cash economy was balanced in some ways, especially at the start of the game, but not in others: e.g., you can buy a couple of ships just by nicking all of the Britannian Mining Company's drugs and selling them on for 'research'

I also take issue with the assertion that no RPG is complete without being able to sell stuff. The implementation of it usually ignores the rules of supply-and-demand and often (usually) disrupts the economy of an otherwise balanced RPG. Not to menton leading to pretty absurd situations: "sure, I have a spare 10000 gold to buy that magic sword off you. Let me just check my pockets. Now, can I interest you in the fabled plate mail of Erythnul, God of Slaughter? A snip at 40,500."

[Tristan de Inés]

If you would make it so that you don't get much money of loot, say 20 gold for a two-handed sword, 30 gold for a chainmail, etc. it wouldn't be that disruptive. And low prices would be realistic, considering you took the loot off dead bodies after a good round of bashing.

Prices for spells and ships could also be increased to keep the balance.

On the other hand though, stripping dead bodies of all their armour doesn't seem like the most virtuous thing to do, so maybe that shouldnt be encouraged.

I wonder how it really was. After medieval battles, did the winning side loot the whole battlefield off all weapons, armour and other valuables? I can well imagine, since these things where very valuable, but maybe that sort of thing was below the dignity of warriors, so it was left to the peasants...

[Gerry]

Tristan: If you're talking about the 'Middle Ages' and 'Early Modern period': yes, there often was plenty of looting once a battle was over. The stuff that other soldiers had carried could potentially be an important source of income.

I am not sure what you mean when you talk about 'peasants' and 'warriors', but in many battles much of the fighting was done by people from modest backgrounds. While nobles often played important roles as officers and elite soldiers, in full-scale battles you would still normally require large numbers of rank-and-file soldiers.

Another point worth noting is that nobles were often not above a bit of looting. Whether this extended to pillaging the bodies of other soldiers is something which I am not currently aware of. What is certain, though, is that the troops of Edward III stripped France of many of its riches in the early stages of the Hundred Years' war. Another, rather horrifying, instance is that of the crusading knights who sacked Constantinopel in the early thirteenth century.

Gerry

[Ethan]

In SI, why do goblin corpses have like 10 loaves of bread or some random food/item. Is that a bug or original programming? Just curious.



Ethan

[Debonaire Hero]

While looting weapons may be somewhat realistic (they should still be in somewhat decent condition provided the battle wasn't too intense), it would be unlikely to pull useful armor off the corpse of someone you just killed. No armourer is going to want to purchase a chain mail shirt with a large hole in the middle of it, so whatever you could get probably wouldn't sell for more than scrap metal. I always liked to think that this idea was always implicitly in U7, and that's why you can barely sell anything.
If you still really wanted something like this, it might be balanced if you introduced a wear and tear system a la Ultima Underworld.

[Herben]

Believe it or not, back in the day people used to REPAIR things rather than throw them away and buy a new one(hard to imagine in today's society, I know). Extracting metals from raw ore was alot harder than double-clicking a machine and waiting for a nugget to pop out on a converyer belt. Armor with a big gaping hole would have been repaired, as long as you didn't use a powder keg on the poor bastard you got it from.

And a note on looting: the spoils of war have been enjoyed alot more recently than the Middle Ages..

[Alun Bestor]

Back to game mechanics - if someone did implement weapon and armor sales, then a) they would have to be at substantially lower prices, b) selling of magic stuff should not be possible, and c) some sort of supply-and-demand system would really help. This latter is doable via the newly-implemented static variables, which could keep track of how much of a given item you have sold that person.

After a certain point, a merchant will get less and less interested in buying pre-loved two handed swords, chain mail or leather boots off you - there aren't that many buyers for arms after all, especially battleworn ones, and they're trying to sell their own new stuff too. There comes a point at which they should say "sorry, my stocks are already full".
Making this return to normal after a while would be substantially harder, unfortunately.

[drcode]

I like the idea of having the demand go down. You could also make some ammusing conversations, like "You again! I'm starting to wonder if thou art a thief!". As for returning to normal, there are some timers you can set with Usecode intrinsics.

[marzo]

DrCode beat me to it, but yes, you can do it using the UI_get_timer and UI_set_timer intrinsics. Both take a parameter (the timer number), and UI_get_timer returns the number of hours since UI_set_timer was called - and better make sure that UI_set_timer *was* called before UI_get_timer.

For reference, the timers that used in BG and that should be avoided are: 0 to 6, 8, 10 (0xA) and 11 (0xB).

You know, there really should be a section of the phorum to discuss usecode...

[Alun Bestor]

Aye, I do know about the timer functions - but I'm a bit wary of them since I don't know how high the timer ID range actually goes (do we have 32 timer IDs to play with, or 32768, for instance? But then there's how to *use* the timers to achieve this effect. I suppose it could work as follows:

1. You talk to a merchant. His stocklevel timers get reset.
2. You sell something to the merchant. His static stocklevel variable for that item gets incremented by one. After a certain allowable stocklevel, his payment for that kind of stock (or indeed whether he'll accept it at all) is inversely proportional to his current stocklevel.
3. You go away and come back later.
4. You talk to the merchant again. The code checks the value of the timer, and subtracts an amount off the stocklevel variable based on how many hours (ok, more like days) have passed, then resets the timer again.

[marzo]

Searching again in the Exult code, it seems that we have 20 timers (total) to play with (if I am wrong, I'd appreciate being corrected...). Bug we can always bug the devs to increase the limit

Your idea for the stock function seems fine. I think that we could do it another way (since this would require a rewrite of all merchants anyway), which would end up with a more realistic economy, though: borrowing an idea from Morrowind (ES3), maybe each merchant could have an amount of gold. If you buy things from him, this amount increases, while it decreases when you sell. After a certain amont of time (few hours, days) he gets a random amount of gold proportional to the elapsed time since you last talked to him - representing things like sales to other people.

What do you think?

[Aracadion]

That sounds like a really good idea,
I like the idea of selling armor and weapons at a very very low amount of gold.

[MkM]

I would like that some certain merchant would be richer than other or would own bigger store for weapons and thus he would buy more weapons than other merchants. (And different prizes for all, of course.)

[Alun Bestor]

That sounds like a good idea too Marzo, but (for the sake of argument) why not combine both techniques? After all, a merchant is still going to run out of interest in buying certain goods even if they haven't run out of money yet.

Mind you, then you have to ask the question: who's going to notice this level of detail? It's different in games where you see the actual inventory of the storeperson, but in the case of U7 I doubt people would notice the merchant was running out of cash (unless he said so, and what merchant will admit to that?

[marzo]

Hehe, that is a good point. OK, better go for the general lack of interest in the items being sold.

[Skutarth]

I think that if there was something to the effect of that, you would have to have a per-store limited gold supply system like in Morrowind. That way, you could only make a limited amout of gold off of the shop-keeper, and the only way you can get gold from him after that is to buy things from him. That, and have the shopkeeper -slowly- regenerate gold (there ARE other people that buy things from them, after all). This way, everything would keep fairly balanced. I personally like doing quests and gambling for money. What's life without a little action?