I've continued to do a little work the past few days. There's not yet a conversation system in place, but you can ask people to join your group now (they'll agree if they don't have a job). Before I finished coding everything, I had my first adventure: I asked someone to join my party, and after she accepted I realized she was a young mother of 2. We went to a bandit cap and were promptly slaughtered.
I'm starting to return to thinking about what should happen when someone who is an active participant of the economy dies. In normal cases, the person's son, or some other apprentice, would probably take over without too much trouble. So, I'm thinking that usually any economy agent will have some sort of apprentice which could take over the business on their death. However, if you can "take care" of the business owner and apprentices, that will effectively remove the economy agent from the game.
Of course, right now the game looks at whichever commodity is most demanded, and adds a new agent of that type back into the game. I'm thinking that there will have to be a "training" period associated with each commodity, where an agent will commit to the economy, but it may take him a year or two (or more?) to actually get up and running. So that a psychotic player could kill all the blacksmiths in town, and see some definite effects in the economy, but that town wouldn't be economically crippled forever (nor would it instantly recover). How does something like that sound? Also, I'll have to figure out some sort of immigration mechanic, where outsiders or residents from other cities could move in and become economy agents in a city, so that there's not a fixed amount per city.
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Topic: Iron Testament - an ancient "open world roguelike" (pre-alpha) (Read 81888 times)