In my current save I have more money than I know what to do with. The game starts to get boring when gold becomes meaningless. Where's the fun in looting dungeons if you can't use the plunder you sell to buy new stuff? I wish the merchants sold a lot more really powerful enchanted items.

The problem is not that merchants don't sell good things, the problem is more that the gold supply in Oblivion is laughably ridiculous.

Fixing this is tricky, too, because the biggest income is from magic items that you find and sell.

If you mod the game so that magic items become less valuable, then buying powerful magic items from NPCs becomes trivial.
If you make the magic items MORE valuable then you get tons of gold too fast.

What I do to fix the gold supply is install OOO (this makes magic items expensive, and makes training skills from NPC trainers much more expensive so there are actual gold sinks). Then, I use a personal rule that I can't sell anything that's worth more than 10x my mercantile skill. So, a potion of cure disease (worth 140 gold) requires a mercantile of 14 or higher to sell.

I find this works really well and makes gold valuable again and fun to save and spend . And the mercantile skill becomes valuable again!

You can never, never, NEVER have too much gold... I've got over 2.2 million in my game right now... it doesn't make things boring. It makes me feel ALIVE. I'm thinking about installing Bank of Cyrodiil so I can start earning interest... *laughs maniacally*

Try checking a "money sink" topic?

I found http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1070986-looking-to-increase-immersion-and-realism-in-specific-ways-mods/page__p__15566891__fromsearch__1&#entry15566891 by just searching that phrase.

While not solving the problem in the way you asks for, Enhanced Economy was designed in order to solve the problem of things getting boring when gold becomes meaningless. It does so in a number of ways:

* Reducing the amount of valuable enchanted loot found
* Reducing the value of the enchanted loot found
* Making merchant prices much harsher
* Making merchants not have infinite gold
* Increasing the house prices
* Adding a weekly tax for the houses you own

The mod does way more too, but those factors are most important for not making you overly rich too fast. And all of them are configurable in the ini.


As said above, that is one of the things EE can fix - reducing the amount of magic items found in the game. I have set up my game to reduce the amount of enchanted rings by 80% (as an example).

I used to have the same problem as the OP, and using the right settings in EE along with a few personal rules makes getting that ridiculous amount of money much more difficult. I also use a mod that lets me drop money in containers to let me do what I propose. One rule I use is that when i die I lose (drop on reload) half of the money i am carrying (which makes it kind of important for me to deposit money in the bank of cyrodiil =p). Another rule I made is that I have to "pay" (by dropping the gold in a container somewhere) for the services of any partner that i "hire" to come along with me (i tend to use a ton of partner mods so this works as a fairly good money sink). The rule of not selling an item worth more than 10x your mercantile level isnt too bad either.

-Ex0dus

Actually, my problem IS that the merchants aren't selling good things. (I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I always only have around 2000 gold, not much more. Which is a good thing - I'm not complaining.)

Since the inventory of a merchant is level scaled, you can never find anything that is better than what you find outside in the wilderness. I think OOO and mods like that make this even worse, because they don't change anything about the merchants' level scaling, but change a whole lot about the dungeon loot, so that it's even more likely to find the good stuff outside in the wilderness.
I can't stand that, and I'd appreciate it if someone could, in fact, point out a mod that changes that. (Also appreciated: Mods that turn Stonewall Shields into a shield shop instead of a generic armor shop with one unique shield for sale. :huh: )

try http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=28010, the MALO - Vendors Additions plugin adds new items to merchants. it has two versions, scaled and unscaled. if you want to find good equipment before available, use the unscaled version, although it may be unbalancing.

it also adds new and more specific items to the merchants, so stonewall shields sells more shields, including enchanted ones.

edit: should be used with another mod that unscales the vanilla items, as it only adds new items and does not unlevel the vanilla lists.

Well if you want merchants to have various things sold that are more powerful/unique, you could always install (and then merge if you already are low on free esp slots) a ton of weapon/armor mods that add items to merchants (most of which add just to the imperial city merchants so it is a little boring) then you can enchant them as you want (most weapons come unenchanted because different people find different combinations of enchantments useful/powerful). Those weapons in those mods are almost invariably available from the start of the game.

To further my selection (and because I am lazy and dont like to add more stuff to real merchants) I also have a bunch of armor/weapon mods installed that put their work into special containers and then just use a droppable gold mod to "pay" these containers what the item is worth, thus treating the boxes as unmanned merchant stalls >_> Of course if you are experienced and not as lazy as I, you could take the items from weapon/armor mods and add them to a merchant of your choice.

-Ex0dus