This thread is for the hedonist economy lovers who take pleasure in text-based, poll-free topics.

First off, I didn’t play the previous games with economy mods so I don’t know how those work or if they worked at all. I’d like us to discuss about how we want vanilla Skyrim’s economy to be.

Second, although it’s natural pointing at Oblivion’s economy for comparison, since it is the latest installment in the series, I’d like us to take into consideration all the games out there that have a built in economic system. I’m always of the opinion that developers should not hesitate to copy the good parts of other games. So if you know other games that did economy better than TES, share the ideas please for those who didn’t play them.

Last but not least, I can see people who don’t care too much about the economic balance after all, we have enough to struggle with economic issues in real life, why would we bother in a swords and magic game too. To those I’ll point out some gameplay advantages of a coherent economic system that would benefit all, not just the greedy wealth freaks.

Here are some features that I consider making the whole economy better:

1. Increased difficulty in accessing the resources
Supposing we start as a released prisoner again, I would like a little bit of a tough time at the beginning. No friends, no gold, poor clothes, I would find it natural that nobody gives a damn about you. Yes, you will be able to hunt, to steal, to learn and practice professions, but the curve of converting your work into wealth should be a little more difficult. As a newcomer, people may be cautious when doing business with you. Some of the traders won’t even let you enter their shops until you can be trusted. To learn a money-making profession, you’ll first have to persuade a cook/blacksmith/whatever to take you as apprentice (Gothic 2, brilliant). I know for a fact I wouldn’t let a prisoner wander around my shop. You gotta earn some local trust first, alongside personal trust that may be obtained via quests. Furthermore, the prices that you will get for the stuff you sell will be considerably lower at the beginning of your career. Most of the traders tend to speculate someone's weakness dont they.
Now why would I want that kind of difficulty, am I a masochist or what. Well, for the sake of progression and reward. Being weak at start means you’ll feel more accomplished when you get rich. It’s the exact same thing with combat. The weaker you are as a rookie, the more pleasure you’ll take later kicking the butts of the enemies that were once too strong. I don’t know, maybe it was all about the capital of the flourishing empire and its surroundings being richer, but I felt it was way way too easy to get good armor and loads of money fast in Oblivion. Combined with the endless money merchants had, this made money trivial, which is not good for role playing.

2. Banks
The word says it all. They lend you money. You have to pay back. With interest. Saw a shiny in the armor shop that you want badly and can’t afford? Try the bank. Gameplay advantages? You can’t/don’t want to pay? The law will come after you. You get arrested, your goods are confiscated, even your houses if you borrowed big. I’d also like an alternative underground lending system. Shady lenders. They don’t send the guards if you don’t pay. They send thugs. Many of them, repeatedly. At some point you’ll prefer to pay or kill the lender rather than being ambushed everywhere you go. Or perhaps you'll like being chased because you're dependent on adrenaline and you think that life within cities is too peaceful. Killing the lender will be hard because, you know, shady lenders are usually heavily guarded. As any respectable lender, he won’t have you killed on sight when you enter his hideout. Perhaps you came to pay. And if you want to pay, you pay. Everything is reversible according to what you decide. Endless possibilities. If you screw the same lender more times he may not want to have you as client any more.

3. Real time transport
Hell yeah! Those roads must be full of carts and caravans. The more wealth they transport, the more guards they’ll have. You can choose to rob them and let them live, because the “guards” are not suicidal fanatics, they are just mercenaries that have been paid to escort the trader from x to y. They will flee for their lives if you defeat them, so a successful assault will let you and the trader alone in the end. They may willingly give you their possessions to let them go. There are two important matters here:
- the merchandise must be there! Not just a cart that seems full of merchandise. The cart should be an object with inventory that you can open like any other body. And yes, the objects will be there available to take, loads of them! Some very precious, some common, depending on the trader’s wealth. Will you be able to loot everything? In theory, yes, but limited to your carrying space! You’re limited to what you and your horse (and your cart?) can carry. If you can't carry all and come back later for the rest, you may find nothing left, because many people passed by meanwhile.
- how can the game be balanced so as not to exploit these assaults and get rich very fast? Now comes the good part: the greedier you are, the more risk you assume and the chance to trigger some events will reflect that risk. There may be a matter of time until someone alerts the guards about the robbery. Perhaps one of the fleeing caravan members. Or a neutral witness. Gameplay advantages? You’ll have to premeditate on how, where and when you do the ambush. Some places are darker than others, some roads are less patrolled than others, etc. You’ll spend time observing. So, if you are greedy and fill all your bags/horse/cart, the game knows it and might have some kind of trick to make things difficult for you: a wheel of your cart may break because of the weight, or a patrolling guard may be suspicious and want to check your stuff, or may be your turn to be a a victim of a band of robbers etc. The more you are a “reasonable” burglar and only take a fraction of the loot, the more chances you have to escape with it all. Sometimes you may have the surprise that the caravan’s guards are way stronger than you expected, so many of the attempts will end in fleeing or being arrested. Talk about diversity and gameplay choices and consequences. Time will play an important part in this too, because the better your timing is, or the better you can fight, the faster will be the assault. If it takes too long there is a good chance that a patrol will be passing by and this is bad. Add the possibility to hire thugs to help you in the process.

No time to develop, but there are more aspects that deserve attention:
- traders have limited money, some days must pass until they fill the purse again
- town traders will travel to buy the merchandise, so you can follow them and ambush them on the road, or wait and spy on them until they’re gone out of town and then break into their shops and warehouses (this go hand in hand with the announced heritage system)
- organic world that reacts to your decisions: if you want a trader gone on road, you may buy all his wares. The stock does not refill by magic, he’ll have to actually leave and buy some. You can manipulate the market for a specific product. If apples are scarce in a town and you buy the entire stock, the price will go up.
- all the traders buy all the stolen stuff. They can’t possibly know it’s stolen unless they may recognize the items you stole from themselves.
- each trader will react to theft in a natural and convincing way. Ok, you broke into his shop and you stole everything. There is a chance he goes broke. There is a chance he can recover, but from that point on, he’ll always be more cautious. He will become jumpy. He will change the locks. He may hire a night watch. Sometimes you can have the surprise that the trader himself is awake and armed, waiting for the thief to strike again. This is the kind of rare, unexpected encounter that I'd die for. Thieving in Oblivion was not as rewarding as it should due to lack of reaction even for serious business damage
- there should be some extremely expensive properties in the game. Some people like to play for hundreds of hours, and money become useless at some point. Castles, farms, workshops, ships, there should always be a “next thing to buy” available for insane prices
- open air markets, vocal advertising
- traders guild where you do quests and gain reputation

Discuss, please. Before posting the usual "I'd rather they focus on X", please note that this is a discussion for discussion sake about what we consider the ideal economy, not something we necessarily expect to be in Skyrim

i agree with alot of what you say here. im sick and just too tired to write alot, so ill just bump so this thread can continue.

Economic modeling is a big thing. It's the sort of thing you build a game around, not have in as a side-element, it could be far too overbearing.

Personally, I think I'd love it - games like X3 are among my favourites list precisely because they attempt this, but those games are built for it. It might be a little annoying if, say, you need a bit of gold for a quest, so you go dungeon diving, except when you come back you find that the market for various swords and low quality armour has crashed and everything you have is worthless. It could also clash horribly with, say, mark and recall - magical traders would outrank non-magical traders to such massive degrees!

Depending on the depth of simulation, too, you could break the entire game with systematic abuse of your insanely huge gold reserves and send the entire economy into a downwards spiral!

I'd be pleased just to see a couple of changes. Like a merchant refusing to buy the spoons you hauled back from the sewers because he is well-stocked and they came from a freakin' sewer. Or the guards noticing that every house in town got robbed just after you arrived and then you started selling a bunch of stuff to local merchants....resulting in you being arrested or banned from town or at least followed everywhere you go.

And of course weight should be a major consideration making you more inclined to bring back small valuable things from your dungeon diving than hauling back every piece of beat up armor you can find.

I agree that economics are an important part of a game like this and a lot more can be done with it than has been in the past. I also think that it is likely not a priority and probably wont get too much love. I really don't expect much of an improvement over Oblivion, though I hope I am wrong. Bottom line is, "dynamic economy" as a bullet point isn't going to sell more games.

A very well-thought-out discussion indeed!

I wholeheartedly agree on all of the points you have made, especially regarding the travelling merchants/caravans - to be able to do that has been a dream of mine since I played my first RPG. It's real. It's immersive. And it makes sense.

To me, the economy of an RPG ought to govern many other aspects of it - as it would in real life. From the outset, as you say, life should be hard - prisoners aren't just accepted back into society at their release - they work their way back. And it should be more difficult still, considering you've been in there for however long - you'd lose your touch with society. I suppose this depends on the circumstances, but I'm generalising here.

Banks have always been a great idea, and have been successfully implemented by the community into the previous games. And I think you also ought to have the ability to INVEST money (I'm sure you thought of this, just didn't notice it in your post). Doing so would give you credit with the bank, and further establish your trustworthiness. And of course, banks would have ties to the other guilds and factions in a world, and word gets around... Likewise if you steal/default on loans. Cause and effect!

Real-time transport - undoubtedly yes! Seeing merchants and traders going about their errands, and physically replenishing their stocks, that's what would make it. And it opens up a whole new opportunity for quests - you could be hired protection, or perhaps part of a bandit group raiding them. The possibilities are wondrous. And hopefully, you'd be able to experience it from the other side's perspective - going through life as traveling merchant? Could be much fun, given all of the mentioned features are implemented.

Okay, aside from my opinions (and bravo to yours), the best implementation I've seen of this in a TES game is with the Enhanced Economy mod - while not nearly to the scale and scope of this, it did a great job on improving an existing system

Edit: Love the Medici avatar. You, my friend, are a hedonist without equal

I like the mafia/lone shark aspect of the banks you mentioned.

But

You missed the most important part about a bank...robbing it!!!!!

Yep, this is the kind of world reaction the Radiant A.i. should handle. I want to be able to influence a person's life greatly. Especially ruin it ha ha



That felt weird indeed to be able to empty half of the Imperial damn City and nobody notice with all those guards. I would like to see crowd reactions. Angry mob, searching for the thief at midnight with torches! :chaos:

Id say the main reasons for economy problems are..

1 You gain your early levels so fast and loot grows quickly in value.

2 You have little or nothing you are eager to buy. And much of what your buying is cheap and alot of what you find is fairly valueable,



To cure at least some of this we need something VERY spendy we REALY WANT that we have to buy to get. Like the implants in fallout new vegas only alot more expensive and more of them.

Me like this list. I agree.

Very nice post. I agree with a lot of what you are thinking here.

I would love TES V to have a more difficult start and really have to make the Player work hard at being able to make a decent income. I like your ideas about accessing resources.
Raiding merchant caravans would be a great addition and if the guard presence was tough enough to ensure you would have to be a decent fighter or mage, then it would be great.

I would actually like to start Skyrim as a "nobody" with very little resources (even no tutorial would be fine with me) and have to live by my wits. It could be a challenging way to learn about your new land and it`s occupants

Some good ideas here, but the "bank" system wouldn't seem to fit Skyrim. It would have made more sense in Cyrodiil, which I presume will seem more cosmopolitan compared to the Nordic province.

The Fallout3 system of merchants actually having a set amount of cash - which would go away as you sold them items - made sense to me. Something like that would be a welcome change from the "I can only sell you 1000 gold per transaction - but for an endless number of transactions" in Oblivion.

One thing that wasn't mentioned is the *value* of gold & the abundance of valuable items. In Oblivion, where equipment availability was tied to levelling, at a certain point you just had too much stuff - too many magic rings, too many magic swords, more magic armor than you could wear, and so much gold it was a chore trying to find something to do with it all. On the other hand, in the "Fines" quest in Cheydinhal, you had NPCs saying ridiculous things like "I barely make 5 gold in a year!"

Fallout3 handled the economy a bit better again, but with weightless items such as chems & ammo it was still too easy to get rich.

I hope Skyrim's economy will reflect the "rugged", rural, and isolated nature of the province. I hope every bandit I encounter past level 10 won't be kitted out in glass armor. I hope magic swords won't by falling out of the sky. Here's hoping magic items will be rare - & thus feel "special" - and gold will be relatively difficult to accumulate.

Edit: Wintermane hit the nail on the head: in Oblivion, shops were primarily used as a way of liquidating your loot. Since sparkly stuff was lying all over the place, in every cave, fort & ruin, there was no need to save money to buy that cool sword you had your eye on - you'd find 4 better swords in your average dungeon run anyway.

The best overhaul mods addressed this issue in a couple of ways:

1) by making magic/powerful items rarer, meaning you were more likely to shop for weapons/armor to tide you over

2) by adjusting the value of items

3) by modifying encumbrance limits (so you couldn't carry around everything out of the dungeon)

I have to agree on the economy system. It would make things so much more immersive. It would really be as if each city is alive and growing (even declining?). Especially the shady lenders, sounds great. When I look at TES games, I can see a constant addition of stuff that make the game more realistic and immersive (and sadly sometimes the removal of such things), but if this goes on like this than perhaps TES 7 or 8 might even come really close to real life? Then we would really be living a life in another world, like Todd keeps telling us. On a side note, I dont expect any of these in Skyrim..

I totally second everything you suggest, but like others note, economy is probably not likely to be the center of attention in a game like this. One thing I do think they could fix relatively easy is cut down on expensive loot. Like finding gemstones and magic weapons in a goblin cave, not very likely. You'd have to really go hunting for the big score, which would definitely slow the speed at which you get rich. Also make the merchants more picky in what they buy and how much they pay. I wouldn't pay much for a battered leather shield that reeks of goblins, that's for sure. Actually, I'd ask you to please get it out of my shop. Some things should be unsellable.

I used the enhanced economy mod in Oblivion, and it did cut down on the get-rich-quick schemes, but didn't add any vibrant changes to the way economy works.

More merchants in the streets and outdoors markets would be sweet. More people on the roads as well for sure. I miss running into random people, although traveling adventures were also added in the economy mod. It would be easy to add traveling merchants to the existing system.

I hope they read your thread and implemented everything, though! =D

I agree with all you said. Most of what you said has already been included countless times in the suggestions threads over the years becausr they sound good and they'd make the game world alive.

I think this is heavily dependent on radiant ai. To be able to pull off the caravan attacking, in different ways and with different outcomes, the npc behaviour must be impecable. Like it was advertised in the famous demo. If radiant ai is alive and kicking, I don't see any reason why all the goodies we can imagine can't be in the game. I, for one, if Beth can do such a complex world behaviour, would declare them Gods of gaming!

A big issue in oblivion and many games is 99% of crap in stores is useless and you never have to buy it, you find loot much better and valuable, so you end up with ten times as much money as you ever need and barely anything to spend it on. A good economy is a game like this would be EPIC, and adds greatly to the realism, immersion. I hope its better implemented then OB. Barely at lvl 20 I had over 25000 gold, and only bought a few soul gems here and there to keep magic weapons charged.

Deal! That's the part that I enjoy most in my thieving adventures in Oblivion: to watch the victim's schedule and plan my attack. Now I admit that there should be more random factors in the equation. More surprise. Like you said, it's better to attack at night, preferrably in the woods, preferably during a heavy rain or snow storm. I can't even imagine the awesomeness of the scene, seeing the poor bastards running for their lives while I search the bags to see what Santa put in there for me. Oh, boy. I always get my hopes up when I read this kind of stuff, but I highly doubt we see this anytime soon. Maybe, I say maybe, in games like Thief 4 or Assassin's Creed. People say good things about Red Dead Redemption too. Is there in RDR any of this already? Attacking traders on the road and getting away with the loot?

There is something like this in fallout, more so in fonv. You'd happen on a carravan, and you can buy and sell with then like any other merchant. It did annoy me that I couldn't get into their goodies after I killed a few on my bad guy. The cow walking behidn them was called a pack bramen, but all it had was its own meat.

As for the OP, in a nutshell I'm with you ever step of the way. I've only heard good things about the radient ai, so lets hope they pull it off.