Tier 3 towns as trading partners

Hey!

This kinda ties into the re-embarkation feedback but I want to keep it as a separate idea.

I don’t just want to remember my previous towns, that are mostly just resting in separate saves now… I’d like to interact with them from my new town! What if… you could have a quest that would make your town a trading partner, alike the merchants? You would need to make like a hundred of something to be able to get a trading flag for it. Then all the new towns that would stem out of this particular tier 3 town would have the option to have a merchant come with those goods for sale.

This would tie into a suggestion made by @tim1 who would like to have all the saves of one progression visibly together.

I’d just love it if a notification popped up saying something like “A merchant from Flowerplain has brought some goods for sale!” Ah… good old Flowerplain…

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I kinda love this. :smiley:

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Wait, adding to this, check this out:

This older town could be a source of higher tier things early on, even those, that might be race specific. (I’m going to get those ascendency hedges in Rayya’s dessert, you hear me!).

The price of these items would be lower than from other merchants AND could be based off of net worth of the older town! More pompous towns would bring more items for sale and offer them at a lower price! (Seeing Seth Ra right now… that thing probably has over 30k net worth at the moment.)

The merchant could be updated every time you reopened your older town and played around with it. So it would feel more organic to get back to your younger outpost and see the goods changing.

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Changing behavior in a new town after founding it when you change something in an old town is hard because you can have any number of saves of any number of towns, and managing which ones are connected to which would be a pain. The rest of the suggestions, are fairly straightforward to implement, and hopefully we can get to some of them eventually (and if not, this can be modded).

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Oh, ok ok. Everything sounds great :merry:

Here’s just what my dumb - never modded, never even programmed anything properly - brain thought.

Every town would generate with some sort of a key. This key would activate after reaching tier 3 so “flags” for trade or something, could tie onto it. After you have founded a new outpost with the re-embarked expedition, the flags would normally interact with you. If you loaded up the old town, the flags would get updated upon saving again. Now, if you loaded an older tier 3 save of the old town, the flag would compare the town key to the date of the save game and be conscious about it. A notification would appear showing something like “Hey, I see you have loaded an older save game. Do you want me to update my flags accordingly?” You might want to say no, because you are just testing something out and the flags would stay put. Multiple saves for the new outpost have it easier. Those just remember what keys belong to them and don’t think about if or how those flags got upgraded or downgraded. They just act accordingly to them.

Now, tell me this is impossible, I’m waiting :stuck_out_tongue:

Nothing is impossible in the grand scheme of things, but updating towns would be a bigger undertaking than what we have planned for this feature. I do think all that you describe can be modded in though.

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The issues here could be possibly sorted out (and a LOT of new potential could be added in) if we switched from the “each town a different save” paradigm to something akin to a “different worlds” paradigm.

Let me try to explain: what if instead of creating new games we created a world? It could be generated with the different biomes, etc… and then you create new “games” (AKA, new towns) inside this larger, wider “world” file. Something similar to what RimWorld and Dwarf Fortress do.

And then, a lot of “meta” information could be stored in the world save itself (not just the town save) like:

  • Latest stage of each town/game you play in this world;
  • Recurring characters or dead characters/npcs/quests
  • World age and date (new games would start on the latest recorded/saved date)
  • tons of new possibilities for new features and stuff, exploration, etc.

Yes, it is a big change (and a complicated one) but the sooner it is tackled, the less “worries” in the future.
Having the game play as a “world” story with different games inside of it could add a lot of depth, player made stories, fun features and in the end no game would ever feel “abandoned” or left behind, really. It would all be part of something larger :slight_smile:

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By the way, welcome back to the Discourse! I loved your builds back in the day. Seems like it’s been a while since

checks your profile

Wait, I’ve been here that long?


Agreed on worlds rather than trying to tie completely separate saves together. I’ve been thinking a lot about Stonehearth lately and I was starting to get towards the general idea, but I think you’ve nailed it.

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