[Balance] The Item Shop is Broken

I like this idea a lot. Changing the shop to a more forge type area with associated flavor would go along well with this. Perhaps as you tech up in various lines more graphics/animations are added like larger forge some weapons lying around as you research higher weapon tech, or an alchemist is added when you research magic artifact tech. Bring the looks from a really basic blacksmith type area to a massive alchemical forge where you create legendary gear.

Minor factions can keep their shops probably and maybe even act as a way to acquire more resources like their intended implementation was most likely.

I think one problem is, that there are so many npcs at the start of the game, that you can mostly rely on them for your military. and then you can outfit them all with whatever you can buy from the hop in mass quantity.

Buying a few weapons and armors for gold instead of resources is fine. there may simply be a few items around in shops from whatever source you can think of (scavangig, import from other (independent)nations ect...).

So there are a few possibilites:

limit the amount og npcs that spawn, but make the flow steady.

shops only get a limited supply of items and only restock them slowly.

rename the shop to forge and make us pay in resources. even though i would like my sovereign to have better equitment than my soldiers.

What about a marketplace for trading one resource for another - so resources could be exchanged?  It could be so the population of the city/kingdom/empire determines how good the exchange rate is, but the exchange rate would never get to a stage where you're getting more value for the final result as you exchange initially.

Best regards,
Steven.

Or spell/s, at a reasonable amount of mana (a bit like the alchemy spell than turns mana into gold) for exchanging one resource for another?  The world is about magic, why not use the notion of magic to integrate the transmutation from one resource to another, with appropriately magical graphics to boot?   This would fit in nicely as long as it is properly balanced.

Best regards,
Steven.

I agree with changing the Item Shop to a Forge. I would further suggest that a level 3 city building called "Bazaar" (Empire) or "Marketplace" (Kingdom) would enable mundane items to be bought for gold instead of their material cost. The Bazaar/Marketplace would also provide some additional items that can only be bought for gold, not materials (rare books, magical jewelry etc). Also, you would need an Arcane Forge to get some magical, more rare items that have exotic materials in their price.

And just like that we have

1) Fixed the early game balance

2) Retained that you can still use gold to buy items at some point

3) Added a few buildings to make the citybuilding more interesting

Yes this is a problem. At the very least the elementium items actually need to cost at least one elementium. Magic items should cost crystal as well.

@Sir_Linque: Both Bazaars and Marketplaces already exist. Although Bazaars are basically never built becasue they are level 5 buildings that give a boost to gold.

Well you could switch the name or give them an additional function like described above. And drop/up the level to 3.

The problem is heroes are too powerful rather than the equipment, they're a viable military in their own right. It's too much like MoM, the only reason to train military units once you have a decent party of heroes is to act as garrisons.

I think perhaps some kind of bonus to groups when attacking single figure units would be a solution. Heroes would still be a viable force in the early game, but once factions started hitting the group techs they'd be reduced to more of a supporting role on the battlefield (which would also open up the area for General style heroes who have supportive abilities for accompanying troops rather than special attacks and the like) - no more taking out entire armies with a single merchant and his legendary equipment. The NPC's and quest locations never seem to have groups spawn, so it would still be a viable route for heroes. Only possible issue would be taking your own grouped units to quest locations, but I suspect that'd only really be an issue in the mid tier.

In fact if you could base the bonus on the number of troops in one group versus another (say for example +10% damage per member of the attacking group beyond the number of the defenders, so 3 vs 1 would be +30% damage) then you could even add a little more depth to the group combat too.

Heroes:

-No Train time

-Require nothing but gold to buy and upgrade

-Can upgrade

-Levels up all stats not just hp

-Can become channelers

-Have special abilities

Units:

-Can be purchased in groups to make them tougher.

-Can be built anywhere and you don't have to find them

Thus you can see heroes are better then units in every single possible way except that units are easier to mass and late game units can be built in groups. This is compounded by two facts. The item shop as mentioned earlier, and how hard it is to get squads and such now. Two easy fixes are a item shop fix as mentioned above and a squad fix. I like the new building requirements for squads but needing new ones and tech for every level of squad is not necessary. Once you get squads you are constrained by resources, squads are bloody expensive especially in materials and iron. Two things heroes don't even need. So they should remove the other techs and buildings for companies etc. I have won several games without either getting the tech for companies or being able to afford more then a few plate squads.

I've always had a problem with the concept that the Boar Spear I just bought in the shop costs the same (Gildar-wise) as say 25 Studies...

While this would involve a MAJOR rebalance, I think that shop costs should scale to the appropriate structures (taking into account that materials are also involved for units and buildings).

I.e. your thought process should be: "Well, I have 25 Gildar, do I buy a Spear for myself or invest in that Granary I always wanted?"? Not "Well, Granaries only cost 3 gold, so as long as I have the materials onhand...".

While I do think that the prices are strangely scaled, I disagree in making heroes any weaker than they currently are.    They're heroes.   This game has RPG-inspired bits, and this is an important part of it.

In the 1.0x era, heroes, especially the "increased movement" ones, were basically completely useless facilities that cost far too much gold for what was basically a single unit of equal or lesser ability to a single produced unit.  And by the time you could afford to equip them well, you could make groups, of the worst of which was better than the best equipped hero.

Nowadays, they can stand toe-to-toe in a lot of combat situations (but not all), and while not overpowered, are actually worth their weight on the battlefield.

Dsraider posted a list up there as to why heroes are better than units, and while accurate, there's one key differentiator there.

Heroes cannot be replaced.   

When a particular hero dies--one you've spent a lot of time leveling and improving, they're generally gone for good unless you enchant them with that one spell that lets them live through a death.   And if you're able to accrue a sufficient amount of mana generation to enchant every single hero you have with that, you could have probably won the game through some other means anyway.

If Stardock feels they're in need of balancing, I think a fair way to do so would be to either make the AI buy them more (I've noticed that that the AI will sit on huge piles of gold and let heroes wander through their lands to mine, making a disproportionate amount available to me) or to reduce the amount that spawn overall.   But as for their individual power level, I think they're just about where they should be.

The recruiting tech on the tech spawns higher level heroes. Thus you sorta can replace them. While they may not be as tough as the one you lost they still are much better then any infantry you could buy. If you lose infantry you lose the cost of their items and their levels as well.

None of my suggestions would have directly nerfed heroes anyway. I like the tougher heroes too. I think it's pretty reasonable that the elementium items should cost elementium. As it stands you don't need elementium or crystals because the units who use high end items the most(Heroes) don't actually use them to purchase things. This renders these resources massively underused, when they could be adding much more depth to the economy.

My other suggestion would have just been a slight buff to late game infantry.

I really don't think that the problem is that heroes are too powerful, though I do agree that squads and such have a few too many requirements now.  The problem is that the item shop currently allows heroes to completely freaking ignore half the game.  I've tried tinkering with other strategies, but by far the best one that I return to is this:

1) Get gold.

2) Get Arcane Weapons and Arcane Armor (though iron-based equipment would also work fine - the problem isn't the Arcane techs themselves).

3) Equip a hero.

4) Win.

The game is literally that simple right now.  There are no other steps involved.

/agree with OP.

Shops needs to be changed. I always start making my first city a "money city" and just boost all my champions with actual armor/weapon. There need to be some restrictions to the shop mechanic.

After playing this game for a bit, I agree that the suggestion here has some good potential.  Heroes already are fairly powerful without being able to get whatever equipment they want for gold and no resources, especially the channelers.  The resource-free method of acquiring items already exists elsewhere in the game as part of finishing quests and sometimes defeating roaming monsters.

I think that it would be VERY interesting if the merchant's item store, if, implemented with the resource requirement when first getting an item, then allowing for items sold to the shops to be bought back with gold, the resellable items are available globally.  The AI, if they're resource-poor, could buy your obsolete hero equipment, and you could by AI equipment that it discards.  It would be especially interesting if that resellable equipment were actually auctioned amongst the player and the AI - dumping gold at merchants would also be one way to fix any balance issues with more than 1 faction accumulating ridiculous amounts of gold.  The merchants could take advantage of bidding wars from gold-rich factions.

Or, the player or AI could auction items themselves to other players as a way to generate gold.

Well, that's a rather audacious change in the game.  But one that might work well if accompanied by requiring resources to buy not-already-made items from merchants.  Upon further thought, these should be MORE expensive than providing equipment to units, because they're made immediately.  So, perhaps the scheme could be the current gold cost (which is a LOT more) plus the standard resource cost of adding the items to a normal unit.

I think the idea is that items are MORE difficult to get when they cost gold (and this certainly is true at lower levels when gold is scarce). However, the gold inflation goes through the roof and there's nothing to sink the gold back into.

Basically, I think if you increase maintenance enough to make it so that gold is always an important resource, this won't be such an issue. Ideally, I'd still like to see the stuff cost lots of gold AND the necessary resources.

I'd suggest going a slightly different route. Rather than gold piling up into a stockpile like now -- which is the real problem -- it should be treated as a flow resource. You can spend up to the amount you earn per turn, and if you don't spend it it disappears -- lore terms, you give everyone a bonus or something. Works great with other resources in Grand Ages Rome, would probably work perfectly here too.

That way you'd always have to deal with constraints, instead of hoarding until gold becomes meaningless. Mana should probably work that way too, with int lowering the cost a spell imposes on your daily budget.  

I've posted a save here that shows the basic strategy that led me to make this complaint.  It's played pretty sloppily, tbh, but still generated a winning position by 182 (there is no factor that could prevent me from winning that game).  I didn't even rush my neighbor for an easy jumpstart, though I might have been forced to on a higher AI setting.

Excellent post, great idea.

I shall lend my support for this idea as well.  The mysterious black market smuggler who conjures up products from nothing is perplexing and potentially logic defying.  I would suggest adding the non-monetary cost of the item to the items in the shop, rather then outright replacing the money cost though.  And rename/reskin the shop into the forge or something.

I don't think Heroes need a rebalancing, at least not drastic. Let's not forget the days of yore, when heroes were wimpy and not worth anything at all.

Actually, I think a lot of us are pretty happy that heroes are as bad-ass as they are. This is pretty much what we wanted.

The problem now is that there is a 'sweet spot' where it is easier to get gold than any other resource, which makes heroes THE premier unit, because all cities produce more and more gold overtime, whereas resource harvesting remains relatively static.

Also note. Getting stronger, better heroes doesn't require tech, and they can be reoutfitted over time. In contrast, new units need to be researched and built. So there's a choice: do you get 2 levels of equipment higher for your hero? Or get groups?

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This could be solved two ways:

Improved Scarcity:

-Hero equipment should cost gold AND appropriate materials.  

Improved Abundance:

-Iron, Crystal and Elementium production is increased linearly with population like gold. 

-Allow gold to be traded for materials in shops

-Alchemy lines of spells allows gold to be converted into other material types.

Something like this can easily be rebalanced in a mod.