My Olympia wish list (and gripe list).. LONG From: eh1s+@andrew.cmu.edu (Edwin Huang) Date: Thu, 21 May 1992 23:42:13 +0000 While everyone else is sorta throwing out suggestions for people to code, I suppose I will too. Here goes: I do *not* want food to be coded in. Even as something resembling a merchant food is 1) too complicated for someone *not* interested in the logistical aspect of Olympia. I suppose the easiest thing for one to do if they wanted to simulate seige would be to make it cost more gold to maintain units in a town that was beseiged. To simulate trade being cut off and thus making it harder to feed men as things got scarce etc... I suppose to simulate a seige, one would have to block exits into a province... but Rich just took that out. My current complaint right now is that part of the amount of money you spend on persuading men should be used to maintain them. I just got burned by persuading some men, have them swear loyalty to me and then lose them again in the same round. And personally that just plain sucks. It makes terrorism much more efficient than persuasion in almost all cases. There is also no real way to counteract it since I can't give them money in the good chance they are not convinced. I have wrote to him about the topic but I want something done quick because well... I plan to persuade many units this round what with all of them just sitting there... Subskills are icky. Making people have a skill to help build a house is icky. Icky Icky Icky. Well now to a better argument.... it's this. While subskills allow you to specialise in certain things and advance faster they detract on the immediate ability to use said skill for immediate gratification. This is worse for new players whose units are not up to level 6 of whatever and have all the subskills at automatic whatever. And would those subskills have further subskills? Take Equestrian. Let's say you acquire the subskill train horses. would you then have to use different numbers for each kind of horse you want to train? I don't particulary enjoy the prospect of training for skills to get more skills at 0. It might be nice to pick a subskill specialization right away instead of having it revealed to you. Related subskills could cost less to go up in and other skills might have prequisites. Next on my list is assisting people to build things like ships. AIGH I cannot tell you how long this had been eating at me. I heard rumors that it was taken out but if it is ever considered to be put in again. NO. Don't do it. This is why. Assist with people with the skill should make things go faster but should not. I repeat. Should not be required. Why? First of all it's too expensive... nothing is so hard that on the job training should prevent a task from being done. It doesn't require a degree to build a ship. It requires competetant supervision. If you must make things complicated make a subskill of teach called supervise. Railroads were built with menial labor.. so was the great wall and the pyramids... The people didn't need a degree.. they need to be able to carry heavy objects around. Also this lets me be able to suggest my next idea. If all these units sitting in the cities are WORKing at manual labor, shouldn't other units be able to hire them to build a ship, be stagehands in a world class theatre production, go fortify some building. This is a pure cosmetic change. I mean mostly I want this for atmosphere purposes and cause it makes sense. I mean let's say I don't want to buy a unit off someone or really have to go and bargain with player3... after all he DID send his units to go off and work in the mines or whatever. And the person who works gets a turn report like: >Group of slaves[1196] works for 7 days building Tony's ship[765] >Supervised by Joe [500] with a level 3 in shipbuilding. >Group of slaves[1196] earned 200 coins building Tony's ship[765] which is >86% completed. People who help build a fortress will have some idea of the skill of the creator and the fortifications. People with the building get cheap labor without having to rely on their email diplomacy skills. I see the inplementation be a HIRE [amount of money]. The quality and bang for your buck would depend on your trade skill. There are a lot of ways this can go and I'm not sure all the effects of what I propose but there you go. I also would like to suggest some more leniency on part of the entertainment money generating machines. While they were making outrageous amounts of $$$ for people per turn, i don't like the sheer amount of no money at all that I've been seeing recently. I don't actually see entertainment to be a bunch of fire eaters and jugglers and mimes. I would also classify them as people who sell pasteries, wines, and food. They are the service industry. They cut your hair, tell your horoscope, make your day to day life more enjoyable. They can even be beggars. While I agree 300 mimes wandering the streets of drassa would be tiresome, even a beggar would get a penny here and there. Actually I'm pretty confident most of the people with entertainers have probably lost their units via disloyalty by now. But hey, entertainment was the only skill that produced more money than work that did not require an immense amount of time and money to achieve profits while being able to pay your men at the end of the day. I calculate a sucessful round trip trading mission with 2 markets with the same item should take about 2 months and require 3000 coins. 300 to pay your men. 1-200 more to train them at trade. More if you want them to learn combat as well. then you have to buy transportation so they can get to the next market in a month. Boats & oxen avg. 100 each. Horses avg. 700. Then you need a product to bring in. Now you have to calculate how much you can carry. You can expect maybe a 10% difference in standard prices increased by how much you spent trading and how much productline you move. So if you spent 2500 on trading (that meaning you sell part of your transportation for profit and then buy new transportation which you will then sell for profit coming the other way.) On your first leg, you make let's be generous... 25% profit. You make 625 coins. Add this an reinvest on your trip back and make 781. for 1406. Minus 300 to pay your men. 1106 for 2 months trading with 25 men. Let's say you just made same 25 men sit at home and WORK. You get an average of 2 gold a day. For 60 days. 3000 coins. Minus the 300 for wages. 2700. Sure, those men get no skills but they are safe at home and available as a defensive unit. You don't need any investment. And they make near 3 times the amount of gold. Now by this example I don't mean for Rich to take out work and make it less profitable. (eek!) But I do want to point out the utter uselessness of trading between two places. I know there are much more profits to be made with trading in combination with making items out of thin air. But both equestrian and mining need time (3+months) to get the ball rolling. I thought a courier service would be a mondo cool thing to have for various people who use it. In any case it's hard to pay your guys and make money at the same time, and yet still make more units and train. One reason, I think that banditry has gotten so popular is that you make money. People hate you, put bounties on your head and would like to kill you, but they'll never keep up with the amount of money you generate by laying havok on poor newbies. I'm not not suggesting you do anything to prevent newbies from being killed that's part of the game IMO. It brings about a very medieval feel to the world where if you don't learn the rules fast, you meet a horrid end in a dark alley. But with such a world do you blame some of us testosterone deficient players to go hide in a city and not budge trying to make our entertainers earn us a decent living? I'd like trading to be more profitable *somehow*. If nothing to just give me a reason to go out and explore. Tony Wayland [572] Starlight Courier Referenced By Up