i spend most of my time in megaton and all merchants buy everything and at the same price so it doesnt matter much whom you buy and sell to because there's no difference. well apart from gob if you sweet talk him. i have to roleplay in my head that moriarty's only deals in vices, the lanter in food, doc in meds, and moira in everything else.

is there a mod like OB's living economy that would make gun merchants buy/sell guns at better prices, armor merchants with respect to armor, food places with respect to food, etc? or is it even possible?

also, things like race, six, and/or karma might factor into the barter prices you get. this would make merchants more interesting and actually give you reasons to visit different ones.

Would be great, I consider that OB mod one of the essentials in that game.

I had played around with this concept a while ago. There is a way to alter base prices of items through a script. I was working on creating some scripts that would adjust prices up or down when entering a store and setting them back to where they were once you left the store. Each store was to have its own pricing matrix. I ran into 2 big problems: Rivet City, and the SetBasePrice only worked on a certain items. I set the whole thing aside in hopes that someone smarter than me would come up with somthing workable, because I too would like to have this mod.

Couldn't you check for who you were talking to?

Absolutley, that was where I was headed with the idea when I discovred that the script would only work on a few select items.

I was actually looking for a way to scan the merchants inventory so that the prices could change more dynamicaly based on how much they have in stock.

Take a look at what The Nice One has done in his Enhanced Economy mod for Oblivion. I'm not sure how much of his scripts rely on OBSE, which is more advanced than FOSE, but it would probably give you some ideas. There's also Living Economy which doesn't rely on OBSE at all, just stock Oblivion scripting.

SteveDog, i sincerely hope you make it a habit of granting my request posts. you might want to take a look at my req for bullet time perks as well. though i hope this wont stall savage wasteland since im really looking forward to a more ... well, savage... wasteland. although at this point, RL has taken me away from FO for a while.

While this is on my own personal wishlist, it's not really at the top of my todo list. Partially because I hav'nt come across anything in the GECK that looks like it could do this the way I want. That being said (or typed rather) I have begun playing with the wonderful world of FOSE so I may find some little gem there that triggers a bizzare train of thought in my backwards thinking brain, if so I'll give this another stab. And of course there is always the possibilty that one of the super genius modders around here will get bored and create this with out any input at all.

seems like the super genius modders are too busy working on their super genius mods to bother with this "little" tweak. hope spring eternal though.

Is TheNiceOne modding for FO? Have'nt noticed. seems like he's the person for this one too, given his work with EE.

Read this thread yesterday, and thought I'd give it a go.
Spent quite a few hours setting it up, scripting and stuff, got it to work on Moira, checking about 121 items.
So I added the script to vendors in the NPCVendors list, head out to test, get to Rivet City, and.... CTD.

Maybe that's the prob SteveDog was talking about, pity, I wanted to test how it would work out with multiple vendors in a cell.

Execution is a bit different here though, with the script initiating just before dialogue, and a cleanup script upon exiting dialogue.
Ingestibles (aid items) are a problem though, and might need to check with the FOSE team to see if they have a function for this,
so far I couldn't find it in the documentation. Anyway, letting this rest for today, maybe come back to it tomorrow.

for me, my stimpacks cost 37, except at Moiarity's <--whatever) where i get them for 30 from the ghoul.
maybe i got off on the right foot with him?
maybe he's like that for everyone?

or maybe you could set something up to get on their good or bad foot, affecting how much they like you.
making different dialogue choices affect their disposition to you, or affect them more if they do.
i imagine some percent choice dilogue options, especially those granted by perks, could affect disposition more in one way or the other.
tick them off, you'll get little out of them, make them like you and get a little more for your caps.

granted, it mods many of the merchants, but isn't that the point?
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but it would be nice to have a supply and demand economy, that way after i've sold 10-20 bottles i've refilled with purified water, they won't want to buy the rest, the market is "saturated" and i'll have to go elswhere, or i won't get as much.

If you're nice to Gob he'll pay 1.2x for (all) items and sell (all) items for 0.8x. I think this is probably a lot different than applying multiple modifiers to various item types. Unless of course whatever way they modify prices for Gob can support modifying one item type.

If prices would change according to inventory, then for example Lucky Harith would pay less for guns and ammo than for other gear. Since he's supposed to be a weapons merchant he should pay better prices for weapons than for other gear in my opinion. Actually he should only buy weapons and ammo, just like Flak and Shrapnel, Crow and Potomac Attire should only buy armor, the different restaurants and bars should only buy food and drink and so on.

yes. this. supply and demand based prices would only work if the different merchants only trade in stuff they're supposed to. so Lucky Harith might pay less if he already has lots of a particular weapon/ammo in stock but you'd have to put up with it since you cant sell to another merchant type anyway.

I see nothing wrong with them buying stuff from you that they don't sell. They can still turn it around themselves and earn some caps from them from some other vendor. But they shouldn't be paying you as much for them as someone who specialized in that commodity, or who was a more general merchant. Doc Church might only pay half for an Assault Rifle as Lucky would for instance, or 75% of what Moira would give you. I think you'd run into problems restricting merchants to only buy a certain type of commodity, there just aren't enough of them to be able to do that. I'd often sell stuff to The Brass Lantern for instance since everyone else had run out of caps. Especially in the early part of the game, your options are limited.