Consolidated ideas thread for trade and characters

Alright, based on the few games I've played with 3B, some additions to the game that would probably add a lot that I haven't immediately seen scanning the ideas thread.

1) Right now it appears to me that trade consists of a steady stream of income. At least I haven't seen one time boosts every time a caravan comes into my city, so I assume that is how it works. Trade should be a one time boost on each end. This would be more realistic, and allow you as a hostile player to choke trade out at either end more easily, instead of having to hunt down those individual caravans.

2) Tech diffusion via trade. Since tech is so dependent on the sheer volume of territory one occupies now (with the corresponding libraries) a small empire risks by an empire being more numerous and more advanced (with one advantage, why the other?). A good solution for this is have caravans running back and forth between empires carry tech points. If you are a technologically inferior empire trading with a superior one, every time a caravan comes into your city from that more advanced empire you get tech points, scaled on the difference in overall tech levels between your two empires. In return, they could get a slight boost in cash (signifying the greater value of their more technologically advanced goods).

3) I don't think there is enough to do with characters that is specific to them. Adventurers, I got it. But merchant NPC's I should be able to send and form a fast or high performing caravan to another nation. They shouldn't just be some random dude who happens to earn two gildars a turn randomly. Researchers should be able to do something special (create items or something). Loremasters should be able to do magical constructions, or something of that nature. These characters should feel different based on their job, and right now they don't. I think there is room for a lot more depth here, and as I have stated on other threads this part of the game really needs to be expanded, if not prior to release (as we are running out of time) then subsequently.

4) I really like the new economy. That being said, I think there is room for improvement. Right now your characters and NPC's don't play into the economy at all. They should. NPC's who are not under your control should greatly outnumber the ones who are, and they should be doing stuff (adventuring, trading, getting mercenary contracts), and using the money made from that to buy stuff in your cities, recruit your citizens to help them, ect. I've stressed many times how including NPC's into your living world is important, and I stand by that. Once again, something to think about for the expansion.

Anyways, that's all I've got right now. I love the new economy, and I think that spell research is very much heading in the right direction as well. We are a little late to add the last suggestion in, but the other three are very doable (for number 3 getting the AI to work it would probably be difficult, I don't know), but I think all of these things would add quite a bit to the game.

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I'm not sure if it should go here or not but after I read this post I decided to scrible up some ideas. I got quite a few thoughts so I decided I wanted to do a slide in power point and before I knew it I had a few slides filled with ideas. I want to add that these ideas might be unintentionally copied from someone else and If I dont give you credit I don't mean any harm, but since I read quite a bit I might forgot where I got it from.

I got most of my ideas on Power Point and I apologize before hand because I organized them in a hurry, but I just wrote stuff up as it came to mind before I ended up forgetting.

Example of a "Path" for a merchant:

I did several other Paths for different classes but I feel like this is too huge and maybe takes too much space., but this should be enough for now to communicate my idea If anyone else would like to comment on these feel free. As I'm really tired right now and did these in the early morning I'm sure there are all sorts of errors and possible incoherencies and for these I apologize.

Another thing to note is that those talents could also be like WoW, in which you could invest more than 1 point into them, but that would fall into the balance category which would be too much to worry about atm. Thanks for reading!

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Wow, detailed.

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I like that idea. I just think that having each character class play differently, which you showed a good way to do that, is important for immersion. And play differently with how they interact with the world, instead of just how they improve and act when you the player owns them.

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So I was thinking up some ideas for possible talents for champions and me and my brother just kept going and going with new ideas, theres so much potential to be unlocked! Anyways I took some screenshots of the current Level Up UI and modified it slightly to show how talents or "Paths" like im calling them, could be integrated into the lvl up dialog. Here's some more crappy MS Paint edits!

Not much editing here, just switched Ok with a "Next" that takes you to assigning a talent point (shown below).

Here you could assign the talent point when you level up, you could click on the tabs to switch between "Paths" and click the icons to assign points. Very similar to World of Warcraft talents, you could hover over the icons and get the talents explanation, again, just like WoW. In this example I just placed 3 different options in the Path of Riches but of courses theres many many possibilities!

Of course after you level up you might want to check your chosen Path's, so below I modified the status screen to accomodate for the Paths.

As you can see I just added tabs, similar to the Heroes of Might and Magic book. This also could fix the annoying issue of hidden stats that you can only see when you level up. Could add different tabs like "Base Stats", "Equipment" etc.

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