The more I think about it, the more Inns become central to a living game. Inn's are the first bastion of civilization to return to a dead world, and the last to leave.
Any adventure worth their salt's more then happy enough to bivouac in an open field, but they won't turn down a warm bath and a soft bed either. While dead land can't support a town it can support a single house, defense provided by the adventurers passing through, and food scavenged or bought.
Taking that into account I proposed the following system where the world has a precivilization network or structure of Inns and a collection of Adventures and Heroes that make their way back and forth across the world which serve to advance the storyline and also promote weapons and armuor trade across national borders.
Firstly I am assuming some form of Monster lairs system is reinstated https://forums.elementalgame.com/394330/page/1/ where spawns come out of, and can 'hide' stronger spawn points that only become visible once the upper level spawn point is cleared / destroyed.
Second I am assuming non recruitable heroes and static Inns https://forums.elementalgame.com/396298
Thirdly I am assuming https://forums.elementalgame.com/396348 for heroes to have genuine tasks and jobs related to advancing the adventure tech tree amongst other thing.
Lone Inns in the wild are not just places to sleep, learn about quests, and eat, they are also marketplaces for trading between adventuring parties.
In this proposal Inn's would serve as a type of minor faction, Inn would share a stock of weapons, food, armour, artifacts and global quests as well as each would have a list of hero's who are spending the night, and local quests.
When you enter an Inn you get a popup window asking if you want to trade, sleep(heal like in a town), are seeking quests, or adventures. Seaking quests and adventures is discussed in https://forums.elementalgame.com/396348, but trade is new.
When a hero enters an Inn, everything they are carrying gets added to the Inn's global stock (except food which is assumed spoiled or eaten[unless the mission is to get food]), when they leave they take what they need from the Inn's stock for the mission they are going on, including food (and they won't leave unless they have the supplies they need to complete the missions).
When you choose to trade the Inn looks at it's global supplies and all it's quests and then sets prices based on it' supplies and demand (they change with time). So you may buy from your town a pair of gauntlets for 60 gilder(wow high much, but that may or may not be balanced later) When you get to the Inn they might have a quest requiring defense and not have enough so they would be willing to pay 80 gilder for the gauntlets, but if you had 2 pairs of them the second might only be worth 50 because they already have enough, and then 30 or even 10.
Also if some other faction has say better swords, and they've chosen to sell those swords to an Inn you would be able to buy them, (but if they are good swords they are probably in High demand by the Inn so will fetch a much higher price then they would in your market if you had the technology to make them yourself.), or if Heroes returned from quests and notable locations with superior equipment that equipment would also be available to purchase at a high price.
In this model the Inns would make a small quantity of food each turn, and use that food to complete quests, or might send out quests to go to towns and trade surplus equipment for food. (you might get one of these caravans from time to time, 'An interstate trader has come to our town offering wears for food and gilder, Do you care to inspect what's being offered?'). Furthermore each non recruitable adventure would consume Inn food each turn. At the start Inn food production and Hero food consumption would be close to matched, but as the world population grows the number of adventures would too (say one adventure per 1000 world pop or so. ) so eventually Inns would become net food consumers (and equipment consumers as adventures go out on failed missions and their equipment gets destroyed or lost).
As a last mechanic of Inns. Inns would keep track of who sells to them, and the more you sell to the Inns the more likely the Heroes are going to go adventuring in your lands( and thus the more likely they will awaken nasty and angry things which then go rampaging in your territory.) So now you have a choice . . . do you use the Inns to create money, which you need, at the risk of the heroes being more active in your lands and causing you grief, or do you ignore them, or do you buy from them (both to get special equipment or higher level equipment if other factions are selling higher level gear) which costs you LOTS of money, but reduces the likelihood of heroes making your life difficult. Note that Inns would not keep really need to keep track of how much money they have, it can be reasonably assumed adventures will spend any surplus on Beer and by-the-hour company, food is the primary item of commerce in the Inn marketplace. (Any gilder you spend is assumed to have been in the form of food supplies, or assumed that the Inn will turn around and buy food supplies as soon as you leave.).
What do you think? All that has to be done is create one popup screen, and one extra AI that handles non recruitable heros and has a variable storehouse of supplies and a way to ascribe a price to things it has and things it needs.
Worthwhile??
Robbie Price
