As some of you may have noticed, the shop prices for items are sometimes deviating from each other between different item types with similar stats. Also, some items are severely under- or overpriced compared to their stats. My plan for the shop prices has from the start always been to come up with some clever formula that automatically calculates the base market cost based on item stats. I have just never gotten around to calculating what the formula(s) should be. Now, after some thinking and a lot of tweaking of parameters the last few days, I feel confident enough to present the forumla I have in mind to do this:
All items have these basic stats that we can use for calculating base market cost:
The basis for the formula is that for each stat, a "cost" is calculated, which is then summed up with the other stat costs for the item. Thus, the sum of all stat costs makes the base market cost. These stats can be divided into two parts, those stats which affect the player when the item is worn (equipped stats), and stats that are applied when the item is used (such as healing potions).
Now, for the tricky part. How to weigh these stat costs against each other? And how should, for example, the values for BC scale into the BC cost?
I would like to use an exponential formula for this, to make higher values much more expensive than lower values. The basic formula I have in mind is
Code: Select all
cost(stat) = factor1*stat^exponent + factor2*stat
For the sake of brevity, I won't go into further detail on the methodology I used to obtain the values for the two factors and the exponent. Anyway, these are the stat costs that I have come up with:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreads ... E&hl=en_US
See the columns "New cost" and "base market cost" for new and old values of what the item prices will be.
Color legend: gray rows represent items that should have no cost (quest items, uniques that should not be sellable, items not implemented yet). Red rows represent items that should have hardcoded cost values since they are considered special, they should not be auto calculated.
Red background: stats that will be tweaked for v0.6.10 .
Looking at this spreadsheet, there are some things that stand out:
- The venomous dagger is exceptional with the stats that are in v0.6.9 . It trumps all other weapons in terms of calculated market cost. Given that it is a fairly early drop, this is really backwards. How should we handle this? I propse that we lower the stats on it to AC=16, CC=5, CM=2 , and also that we add a new buyable item to a new merchant with similar stats to the v0.6.9 venomous dagger.
- The quickstrike dagger is currently priced at 512gc, but the new pricing system gives it a price of 3129, due to its combination of low AP usage and fairly high AC. Sounds reasonable and correct to me, it is a very good item for those that have built up AD when leveling up.
- The steel sword almost doubled in price. We should introduce more buyable items that can be used on the way to reaching that sword.
- The superior iron dagger went from 70gc to 1474gc, mostly due to its relatively high AC.
- Ring of strike and Ring of vicious strike were very overpriced before.
By having this type of automatic formula, we can be even more expressive in the types of items that we create, and make sure that they are enither under- nor overpowered, just by looking at the item price. This will make for some very interesting items in v0.6.10!
I guess now that you have read this far, this means that you read it all. Thank you for taking the time to read it!
As a side note, for v0.6.10, I would also like to redistribute the items among the merchants to better fit their cities and settlements. Crossglen might not sell the best weapons in the future
/Oskar