Hello,

Recently I've been back to Morrowind, with all the hot stuff from past months. Besides MW, I also like play some trading games, like Patrician III, etc. And when I was selling gear from some rouges at Addamasartus, I was enlighted - a regionally operated trade. The basics of my concept is a difference between prices in various regions of Vvardenfell and Solstheim , mainly for common goods like food, plates, etc. It always bothers me, that there is a solid price cap on wares, that can only be altered by Merchant skill, but this is not the point. As an example it would be something like this - You buy a cheap of Kwama Eggs in Gnisis, becouse of the Egg Mine there , the eggs are cheaper than in Ebonheart. You taking the eggs there and sell them with profit, possibly higher as the Merchandise skill progress.Also, there could be a region specific needs - such as Raven Rock could be a good place to selling foods, becouse it's a growing colony. Besides that, that sort of trading would nicely cooperate with some mods out there, for example a Pack Guar, so it would be possible to form a caravans.

What do You think? share your thoughts here

my faction overhaul is actually going to be addressing this a bit, though not quite in the way you describe. for me, i was bothered by rising to lead certain factions, but not being able to affect things. for example, as EEC factor, i should be able to affect the prices of ebony and cyrodyllic alcohols, among other things, and as hlaalu grandmaster, you should be able to tax most domestic products.

i'm not solid on manipulating things like prices (other than by adjusting NPC mercantile skill, or gmsts)

it'd be something i'd at least want a stripped down version of in my own mod.

Also, make it based on scarcity of an item...For example, Trama Root might cost more in Ebonheart for lack of wild ones growing nearby.

This has been suggested many times in the past. The task of implementing such a system has proven unsermountable due to the mechanics of what would be required. The first step would be to create a seperate version of each item that would have a variable price. A global script could then test the player's current location and remove foriegn copies of each item with it's localized equivelent. Every quest that involved these items would then need to be rewritten so that the scripts and dialog would recognize the localized object in the same way as the original object. Given the list of alchemical ingredients, miscellaneous items, clothes, weapons and armors that are included in Morrowind (not to mention Bloodmoon and Tribunal) the task becomes prohibitively large.

yes, i was thinking a "literal" iteration would be too hard.

BUT, what you could do is have a script attached to shopkeepers that monitor "supply" and compare it to "demand" and then modifies mercantile, et. al. you'd have a few flavors of script, based on region and shop type. that's still a number of scripts to write, but if i can copypasta my script 114 times and just plug in position data to each separate iteration, this wouldent be all that bad, just tedious.

sure it's a little rough around the edges, concept-wise, as EVERYTHING gets modified in price, rather just one or two items or what have you. best way is to rationalize that high/low prices on a few items change the "average", so that in order to avoid taking a loss on a single item, the shopkeeper adjusts all of his prices a lesser amount.

if no one has run with this idea by the time i get to working on the EEC, i'll prolly end up implementing something like this.

I think that if a common framework/set of scripts could be created then it/they could be used as a template to auto-generate the rest by using an ESM library such as the one Yacoby did. I used it to pull all objects from a given cell and turn them into a single .nif file so I know for sure the information can be retrieved en masse.

Also, here's a good place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_economy

Yes, it would be based on global scripting, possibly with a region specific local scripts. I don't expect this is possible with vanilla scripts, so MWSE could be used here. The point is to use a standard versions of wares, without making a new ones (Fun thing about various qualities of wares is more complexity, but it's takes longer for translate and more time on scripting). If needed, there could be a extra barrel/crate in major shops, that contains a script attached, so it will be adjusting the prices of wares inside the crate, but this could be optional if this is doable with standard merchant crates. As the regions question, there is a mod called "Regionally Know Criminals" on my mind.

ahhh, looking at MWSE, i see that they do have get value commands.

this actually wouldent be too incredibly difficult to do than.

i think i might start work on this when i finish temple/imp cult here in the next couple of days.

edit: i dont see a xSetValue. i'm going to play around with xGetValue and xSet and see if i can get something functional for changing the value dynamically.

Yes, this is exactly a function that would fit here perfectly. Good job RAKninja!

having played with it, i dont see how we can get this working as intended (like living economy for oblivion)

for my own work on the EEC, i'll be disallowing certain items from being bartered, and changing it to a dialog based turn in, allowing for dynamic prices on a few things.

also as part of the EEC, i'm going to try that "script by region and vendor type" attached to merchant chests, that dynamically alter prices on everything by checking total vendor inventory, and raising changing personality, speechcraft and mercantile of the merchant. it would still require script extender to calculate the total value of the inventory.

to do what we want, someone will have to add a xSetValue function to MWSE.

Surprisingly, I've found a mod that adresses the topic IDEA ideally - but it is made for Oblivion

Here's the link:
http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=25078

The part "Local Economy" and "Global Economy" is most interesting here - quoting:



So, i think this is actually doable in Morrowind - the mod i've mentioned needs OBSE, wchich i don't know if have more functionality than MWSE.

Again, feel free to post your thoughts !

as i said, i dont see how it would be possible to adjust prices of just one item.

i CAN dynamically alter merchant gold, and change their skill levels (effectively adjusting all prices) but per item is right out.

also, you can set in the CS what things you want merchants to buy and sell. by default you wont find many smiths in morrowind that will buy clothing, let alone pay less for it.