Economics and Risk: The Commonwealth Capitalist

[skyguy713]

So I have an Idea for a Fallout 4 mod, basing around economy, similar to the Mount and Blade style of villages delivering towns kind of thing, to where prices will adjust based of what is being produced by villages and processed in towns, and what raw material produced by your settlements is put on a caravan to be sold for caps. Caravans that, just like in Warband, can be attacked outlaws and other factions, essentially playing Risk with settlements, where if you ignore settlements you will lose them and the Commonwealth as a whole. This, a constantly changing world of prices, territory, and safety would make running a settlement feel more impacting than it stands in the base game

 

The biggest point in growing your settlements with this mod, the dynamic economy. To start, we need to look at what the commonwealth needs to survive; Food, water, clothing, and shelter. To provide these, settlements will go to other local settlements, or to Diamond City to sell their goods to buy whatever they need, barely cutting even, if they even make it to market. To reflect this subsistence farming style, prices are raised to reflect the starting output of the area of the commonwealth that are ready to help Diamond city. (nearly all non-food goods then have to be made outside of the map, from other big settlements, so the taxes are pretty high) As you grow out of nothing and being to produce more specialized goods other than food (raw wool for cloth, metal scraps for armor and weapons, trees for wood, etc) prices will go down and you can start to process and export finished goods to other settlements, increasing the prosperity of nearby settlements and lowering the prices that goods are sold for. Eventually, once the Commonwealth is united (by you of course) and can sustain basic survival needs, it can begin to export to other cities, where the BIG can flow into the city, and fall into your pockets.

 

So what is in your way of getting these great and powerful riches? Enemy factions, of course, that want to make themselves the sole power of the Commonwealth. These dark powers will fight off anyone who thinks they can stop them, and do whatever they can to stop you, or anyone else, from taking their place as the biggest power in the area. This includes raiding shipments between settlements, growing their own strength by producing goods they need, and taking new settlements to grow their overall power rating. As each faction takes more landmass, that faction will become much more difficult to deal with, making it more of a challenge to fight off a self-made superpower. This can make a real challenge for players who let one faction grow, a 'hard mode' for players who want that kind of big difficulty. Each faction would have their own special abilities, and their own special drawbacks, and whichever faction you side with in the main story will provide a unique characterization to your settlements. Some of the more unique ones would be the Super mutants, whereas they do not naturally produce settlers but have to capture other settlers and place them in FEV chambers to 'make' more Mutants, at the benefit that they are incredibly strong and can do the work of two settlers with only one person, promoting them as a slow, powerful force that only needs a few able bodies to take what they want; as well as the Institute, who instead of recruiting settlers, make them at the cost of materials, and can really bolster large groups fairly quickly, at the cost that they have weaker units in general.

 

Where these two ideas really unite is the economics within the factions themselves, and how, with proper spreading of resource growth, good tactics in dealing with your opponents economic/military forces, and specialization of particular goods produced in certain areas, can lead to massive amounts of land and caps in the late stages, which overall increase the prosperity of not only the Commonwealth, but the entire Fallout universe, making you the hero the common wealth needs.

 

Thoughts? Ideas? Criticisms? Want to take up this mountain of a task? Take it to the comments, I want to hear the communities thoughts about this.

[montky]

@skyguy713

wow, this is an ambitious project.

I like concepts that are ambitious, and seeing modders collaborate to realize an awesome project.

 

my answer to the poll questions will depend on

how folks want to go about achieving what they're envisaging -

from the outset, it is oscilating between "Yes, one large mod overhaul project"

and "No, break it up into a suite of optional smaller overhaul projects, so as to avoid stability and mod conflicts arising".

 

some folks have suggested going the mini-game route,

like the hacking or lock-picking.

cutting to an RTS side game (which alludes to past FO1 and FO2 or wasteland etc),

and letting the values from that update the game...

 

others have said, why not do both?

 

others would prefer just FO4,

this would require an overhaul of the vendor and settlement systems,

the settlement attacks AI and ambient quests generation...

perhaps also an overhaul of the Pipboy settlement/not-settlement indicator tab, etc.

I'd like this project to not be reliant on DLC,

and to be compatible with several other 'trade' related mods,

notably "caravans of the commonwealth' and "the UnderBoston" etc

 

if you're wanting the 'price points' and 'price discovery' to be a floating-point value,

or be updated after events in the game... that is going to be interesting to see it stable-ly implemented.

-are the prices localized to the city-settlement, or somehow across the wasteland?

it will make me think twice about blowing up The Good Institute or going evil,

because prices for everything will be hard to live under.

 

if |food.staple.per.settlement| qty < cutoff, then to purchase |food.staple| is going to be cheaper.

at that settlement, it has a 'local economy', though Diamond City and the BoS have different economic models...

so they're not as effected by 'seasonal fluctuation'...

ammunition pliability wouldn't be as much as say, 'junk' price swings.

Ammunition and water would not matter about the quantity you are able to acquire.

if your food staples > than cutoff but < others, you can charge extra per sale etc... (so, it will only exceed by a range of values, up to say 30 or something)

|bargaining.power| is determined by the net settlement import vs export, AS WELL AS the 'lucrativeness' of the export items relative to import... ie,

rad-rocks with googly eyes on them are common, so settlements in the Glowing Wastes don't have as much trade value.

This could then alter where Trade Caravans will trade to over time, causing complex states to arise for

things like 'settlement happiness' and supplies.

It is going to be very hard to keep a population of non-ghoul people near the glowing seas, because they're going to have a hard time acquiring what they need. Even for ghoul people, they're too far from their 'cultural hub' of Goodneighbor etc...

 

trouble is, the Vendor system doesn't differentiate it's locale...

a workaround could be a region-specific node which alters only the shops and interactions in its region.

This could bypass some of the 'cell reset issues', as other cells won't visually display, and sometimes the specifics between a settlement aren't tracked

(leading to 'ghost caravans " etc).

Nothing happens if happiness is at 0 for a while... I mean, productivity lowers, though you aren't attacked,

or the settlement isn't abandoned etc... it does alter where synth attacks happen - they go for the weakest of your settlements usually.

 

that is also how the 'Settlements which are not settlements" function.

they still appear in your Settlements tab of the PipBoy, but will never be attacked,

and Preston Garvey will never send you to defend these 'pseudo-settlements'.

They still accrue settlers, and can be assigned settlers or companions can be sent there.

 

-----

I hope I have given some ideas on how this could be

implemented, and broken down into smaller pieces.

I definitely would like to see an ambitious project like this one emerge.

 

I think it would be a great overhaul project, and could be fun when combined/interoperable with several other projects too.

-karma overhaul,

-expanded choices

-dialogue system overhaul

-any mod any fail and weapon maintenance system

 

it would make survival mode punishingly difficult, potentially.

[tommygun999]

Great idea, and I also would suggest going via the mini-game route with data updates straight from it, for the sake of making implementation of this mod at least a bit easier for modders; I think this is the way to make it as one big project, so I voted for the second option.

[AishaLove]

I think this would go best with something to make nothing respawn but enemies. Thus creating resource and item shortages as you collect and sell the loot you find.