I'm sure this has been brought up over and over and many OB mods actually tackled the idea. But what I have seen mostly are mods that make prices fluctuate over time, but not over space. That means, when you go to different towns, you see different prices of the same item, to the point where you are able to purchase from one town and sell in another town and make profit.

I like this because it's what "merchantile" is all about. Being a merchant, buy item from one place and sell in another, is hell of a role play.

What are the challenges in making this mod happen? I'm trying to make a list:

1. what triggers the change in price to happen? First of all, each town/city should have its own specialized products that tend to be abundant around that area. For example, town A has a lot of fish meat produced because it's near a large water body, and thus fish is cheap there; town B is near grasslands so it produces a lot of mutton, thus mutton is cheap there. This doesn't have to change over time.

However, if the price doesn't change over time for the same place then it'll become boring. Maybe when the following happens, the price of a certain product will change at a certain town:
A. a dragon attack halts production, thus increasing price;
B. when player buys/sells the same item in the same town, then the price changes accordingly
C. Price change happens in smaller scales randomly

2. how "active" does this economy system need to be? If you played Mount&Blade w/ Fire&Sword, you probably know how difficult to find a good trade route and how frequently it changes. If it changes too often and player must find new route constantly, it'll become frustrating; but if it doesn't change too much, then players will abuse it and lose its fun.

how do you think?

An important aspect of such a mod would be to decide how you would balance it: do you intend players to fast-travel between towns and instantly start racking up profits? Or would you like to balance the mod with the intention that those who download it will not be using fast-travel?

(( In my opinion, it should be the latter -- in the end, it's up to the player, but I feel the type of person who is going to download a full-scale economy mod for the roleplay is probably also downloading a tweak to remove fast travel options. ))

Skyrim is a PERFECT game for mundane professions, like hunters. This could really tie into the economy. I imagine that firewood would sell much higher in areas with greater elevation, for instance, because of the lack of useable wood in those regions.

I would add in more caravans, if it's going to be possible with the new engine (do NPCs still 'live their lives' -- I have my suspicions they do not, given that I see too many NPCs glitching and teleporting about). To help players find the best deals, they can use speech to learn from other traders about how the winds are shifting, or take queues from hunters in the field about the "lack of game" or somesuch to tip them off about economic changes, perhaps 1 to 2 weeks ahead of time.

I would also recommend that players with a reputation of playing a "trader" may find themselves more often accosted by brigands demanding their wares.

A player should be able to create a bottleneck within different communities so they could (sneakily) control how much certain items are. For example, you have a truck load of iron, you sabotage the nearby mines or destroy the current stockpiles of iron and thus create a demand. Smart, right?

MnM

I would like to see mobile carriages you can load with goods created for this and maybe guild houses. But that stuff is secondary. Your ideas so far are great a mercantile based super mod would be awesome.

lol I actually had that idea too for my carriage idea (I didn't know there was already carriages in the game). basically you go deposit your junk in the caravan and then pay extra price per extra kilo, and when you get to the destination, you can slowly empty the cargo

I would love to see full support like this for RPing a trader. Especially since having a caravan means more challenges in keeping it safe.

That said, I think that if you went with this option, characters will need to pay taxes to any town they bring their goods into. You would also need to increase the amount of gold that merchants actually can use. However, I think at these levels, you're going to need to start implementing major gold sinks.

Nice idea! Caravans stopping to pay taxes..You could make the entire economy very fluid with a system like that. With implications of a truly global system where guards are actually payed by the Jarl...but I'm getting ahead of myself. I really hope we can break some exciting ground with Skyrim.

Personally, I think there was a great mod for Oblivion, called "Living Economy" :

http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=4432

Here is an excerpt:

Also check out another economy mod for Oblivion. Maybe you can get ideas from it too. It's called "http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=25078".
Keep in mind that Skyrim is in a crisis. War and dragons; prices must be sky-rocketed.

One of the things that bothered me in Skyrim, is how easy you can get rich in that game. I love economy mods.

Just wanted to chime in and say that I have no ideas, but you have my support of this. Especially if you rebalance stuff the prices so that most items are more expensive (and weapons/armour much more expensive, due to the war) and in that way reward smithing and crafting of different kinds.

This isn't strictly related to the economy itself. However, I'd like to see the levelled vendor lists gone. Eg, Currently, if you're approx level 15-20 Dwarven gear appears suddenly in the vendors loot lists. When you hit level 25 that turns into Glass & Ebony and so on...

All types of loot should be availiable from the start, but NOT in huge quantities (in respect of the great stuff). Also, for balance' sake the good stuff should be prohibitively expensive from the start.

Ta.

I agree. But don't make the vendors always carry a couple pieces of elven/dwarven/glass/ebony, make it so that there is a always a slight chance to find something like that in the list. I.E. tweak the leveled lists instead of remove them. (Although I think you already meant that.)
And this is a perfect simulation of an economy, sometimes there's an exotic piece in the inventory but mostly there aren't. It would be awesome if the vendors gold amount were lowered if s/he have many expensive wares. To show how they were paid for.

I think the economy mod in oblivion had a limitation that buying prices and selling price of the same item at same location are so different (buying price > selling) there's really no profit to be made if you play a traveling merchant. In other word it's only good for selling loot. Weapons and magic supplies are fine this way, but if we can get the mondane items to have similar buying and selling prices it would be better. This way we will have some use for the clutters!

Oh and another issue is with currency. If you want to trade low price mondane items, with current currency system you only get down to the digit, no decimals. This makes price margin for low price items difficult when everything costs 1 dollar!

I guess the problem is that Bethesda have such flair for business. Considering how well Oblivion sold when they dumbed down Morrowind, they went with the winning formula and dumbed down Oblivion for Skyrim. A few brilliant choices snuck through here and there (alchemy is considerably improved), but mostly they went with the idea that people are purely emotional automatons, which holds true for the vast majority. That is why they spent their millions on graphics, story and atmosphere, not balancing out gameplay mechanics. You see it everywhere these days. In Red Dead Redemption, money has no value. In Fallout:New Vegas, you can go 84 hours without sleep. In Assassin's Creed 2, the best weapon in the game is handed to you after one third of the storyline.

I say let them keep their happy customers and leave it up to the indie devs to cater for the hungry few. And praise Bethesda for releasing their excellent modding tools to the public, so we can sharpen their dull creations to perfection. Now I'm going back to putting buckets on people's heads and stealing all their possessions.

Hey, you know... the latest of the oblivion economy mods, http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=25078 actually did majority of what you are wanting. It's highly configurable, and the prices flunctuate across the cities. For example in Anvil, merchants don't play a lot for where Alyeid artifacts because there are plenty of ruins nearby, but in Imperial city those can be worth a lot more.

It introduced inflation crisis - the more gates were open, the more merchants charged for goods (and opposite, as player closed the gates, restoring semblance of order in the region)

Merchants had more gold in the evening by the end of the day than in the morning to simulate them actually having business transaction.

And many more features...

So, if this was possible in Oblivion, I don't see why not eventually in Skyrim! I'd guess it'll highly depend on scripting capabilities of the construction set and if someone would port over OBSE

I don't think it allows you to buy and sell and make money from the difference in price. Cuz everything has a buying price several times higher than it's value yet selling price is only a fraction of the actual value.

Along with these ideas, I'd also like item values to be changed. Orcish daggers, for example, are worth something ridiculously low like 75 gold.

The only model that'll work for what you want, is something that the game X3 has, or perhaps a few other trading games to.

Simply put, take items like 'apples' or 'fish'.

Say, they can have at most 1000 apples, that is there cap. or 1000 fish.
If fhey have 1000 in stock, they sell them for cheap because they have to many and don't need them.
However, if they have 500, thats the 'market' price, the 'average', If they have 100 or less? They sell for even more.

Now say they 'buy' apples because they 'make' apple pie. (you would almost need to include a script that forces them to make apple pie when they have apples)
Thus they want to buy apples.
If they can have at most 1000 apples, and they have 999 apples, they would buy that last apple from you, the player, at say, 1 gold.
If they have 499 apples, they'll buy it from you for 2 gold.
If they have 9 apples, they'd buy it from you for 3 gold.

If you impliment said system correctly, you could great several 'producers', several 'manufacturers' and of course several 'markets' in which its possible to exploit and of course, allow you to roll in the dough. If I went to Whiterun, and bought tons of Venison because its an abundance and cheap there, Than went up to Solitude because they have crap for hunting, and sell it to a market up there, I'd get far more than in say, Winterhold.
However, a Manufacturer of 'venison stew' might buy it for even more.

Same goes for Ore, You'd have thepeople mining, those making stuff from the ore, and of coruse the markets that buy the stuff they make to sell to the general public.



The obvious problem is, the only way to do it, if Skyrim scripting is exactly like Oblivion/Fallout, than the only way is through Dialgoue and not actually stream-lined through the buy-sell system, which of course would make it over encoumbering imo.

The other problem is, to make a system 'fun', you NEED other npc's going about the same thing you are doing. Those that exploit the market locally, and regionally. (travelling khajit How perfect is that for your long-route delivery?)
People would need to be constantly going, and the local populace would actually need to buy say, Food, to consume daily to make this actually matter... (Thus being able to create 'everything' in game would be a huge Plus to an economy mod).

I would love to see a mod like this.

Early/simple changes?
~Alter the buy/sell spread to something realistic. No one would regularly accept 20% of an item's value and then pay 500% value on something else.
~Change the vendor lists to a "bell curve." Some iron, lots of steel, and diminishing quantities of elven, dwarven, glass, orcish, ebony, and daedric.

More difficult changes
~NPC's should actively buy/sell goods based on their profession. The local mages purchase magicka potions while local hunters buy arrows etc.
~Regional prices. With an altered buy/sell spread, this would make merchant RP'ing viable.
~Caravans which would "compete", if you will, with any player merchant. Successfully attacking the caravan (bandits, wolves, dragons etc) would cause shortages and price hikes at the destination. With enough successful attacks, prices can and should reach "besieged" levels (ie, if you don't want meat from something smaller than a chicken, you need to be rich).

Perhaps impossible:
~Adding silver/second currency. The gold Septim as a unit of trade is probably hard-coded, but the ability to have 20 silver=1 gold would be a significant innovation.

I like it! But may I suggest that if you're going to have player owned caravans traveling about then there must also be ambushing highway men, and NPC caravans as well.

yea when sell and buy, you shouldn't have to pay 5x the value or sell for 1/5 of the value. it's for preventing abusing with high valued items like weapons and gems etc, but for stuff like pelts, cloths, silverware, you should be able to sell/buy for very close to its value.

as for second currency, if we scale up the gold currency to say 100 times, then we don't need a second currency.

I think that a deep economy mod would track (or at least model) individual buyers of each item. Shopkeepers would only buy when they believe they have a likely buyer, and buyers would pay based on prices they could expect to get along with some reflection of the item's value for them. People making good purchases would be achieving better results in other areas which would sometimes open up new markets and close out old markets.

And, for the player -- "fast travel" would still take time. Just because the player only sees a few seconds pass does not mean that no game time passed. The player would have some disruptive advantages, but keep in mind also that some of the people benefiting from this kind of merchanting system would include the bandits and opposing armies and so on...

But doing this right could easily get into deep areas which the game is not prepared to handle... You can do surprisingly well, using a random number generator to model things, but some issues stop making sense if that's all you have in your model of them.

I don't think it needs to make sense lol, I think the weapons, armors, staves, magic items... etc. can stay the same way, but food, ingredients, cloths, animal parts and clutters should be balanced and the price CAN be randomly generated/changed, just as a start. otherwise, this mod will be so complicated and it'll never come out.

Perhaps an optional .esp that corrects ownership issues too, so you can't simply loot and sell the entire Dragonsreach castle after your first quest for the Jarl, for instance.