Living Economy
From Oblivion Mod Wiki
| Author: | creepyfellow |
| Thread(s): | Official Forums |
| Version: | 3.63 |
| Last Updated: | September 16th, 2006 |
| Download(s): | TES Nexus, ElricM |
Contents |
[edit] Description
This plug-in creates more realistic bartering mechanics, a more interesting mercantile environment and harder "get rich quick" schemes.
[edit] Screenshots
Main Living Ecnomy menu |
 Detailed customization |
 Before purchase |
 After purchase |
[edit] Features
- Dynamic Barter Gold: No more infinite gold. All player transactions affect a merchant's barter gold, à la Morrowind. If you sell an item for 400 gold, the merchant's gold will go down by 400 gold and vice versa. Repairs, Recharges and Spell purchases also affect the merchant's barter gold.
The NPC's Mercantile skill will be the main factor in determining their gold. Additional factors are the player's Mercantile skill and/or his level. Additionally, different merchant types will have different base gold values. Smiths will have more gold than a common merchant reflecting the often expensive prices of arms, while a pawnbroker will have less. This brings even more diversity to the mercantile environment. For even more details regarding the barter gold amounts refer to the Living Economy Mod spreadsheet included with the download. - Merchant Skill Progression: Now a merchant's mercantile skill will no longer be static. It will dynamically change according to how often the player barters with them. The formulas used are in-par with the speed of the player's mercantile skill. This would make your most visited merchants have a higher Base Barter Gold and raise their prices according to their skills. Their skill will also decay back to their base skill with time to prevent all merchants reaching a master level.
- Barter Renewal: Different merchant types will reset their barter gold to base after different amount of days. A common trader will reset their gold every 3 days by default, while a smith resets it every 5 days.
- Random Transactions: Random Transactions makes it so that gold fluctuates mostly between 50% and 200% of a merchant's base gold. Every new day a number of randomly simulated purchases/sales are calculated which alter the net gold of the merchant. The merchant's skill determines the amount of transactions made, from 1 to 10. This also provides an alternative to the forced gold resets.
- Expanded Investment System: Now there are more investment options available to the player. Additionally, the higher investments will now give a return of the store's profits to the player. New investment options are 500, 1000, 2500 and Full Partnership.
- Complementary Player Mercantile Progression: The player now has the facility to increase his Mercantile skill based not only on the quantity of the transactions, but on the size of the transactions. The burden of needing to sell items individually to achieve significant progress is now lightened.
[edit] Separate plugins
[edit] Living Economy - Items
This plug-in grants dynamic prices to all the items in game, simulating a supply & demand system. This gives the player incentives for visiting different shops and cities to get the best deals when selling loot or buying new supplies.
- Shop Based Prices: Smiths will offer more gold for arms and repair hammers while paying nothing for miscellaneous clutter. The mage's guild and other magic shops will pay handsomely for any Soul Gems, Ayleid stones or staves you may find in your travels. Traders will pay base price for everything.
- Quantity Based Prices: Prices will also adjust according to the amount of the item a merchant has. A smith that has only one hammer left will not let go of it so cheaply, and will pay handsomely for another; however, if he has too many in stock, he let them go cheaper.
- Regional Prices: Different cities will offer different prices for different types of items. This also introduces Global Economy and Local Economy factors that will modify prices of all items in their respective places (whole province or local city). You'll be able to sell weapons in Leyawiin for a higher price than you would in Skingrad, buy glass items cheaper in Cheydinhal, sell luxury items higher in Anvil, etc. Refer to the spreadsheet for more details, it's too much to put here.
[edit] Cutthroat Merchants
This makes merchants a bit more "tight". It lowers the initial lowest sell haggle value by 15%. And increases the buy by around 100%. Also doubles the range of the haggle bar (from 40 to 60). So you can haggle from 30% to 90% instead of just to 70%. This will effectively slow down the initial gold influx of players and makes it worthwhile to increase your mercantile skill.
[edit] Living Economy (No Barter Chatter)
This is a replacement for the main Living Economy.esp. This gets rid of all the buy and sell dialogue, so that you won't hear things like "You've bought that for a sum" or "I let that go to cheap" anymore.
[edit] Known Issues
[edit] Living Economy
- The Complementary Player Mercantile Progression will not bring the player closer to a level up with the default leveling system. However, it works perfectly with leveling mods such as Kobu's Character Advancement System and AF Leveling Mod.
- If a mod-added merchant had a gold amount not following the game's normal default amounts, its gold will be reset to a normal amount. (Example: a mod adds a merchant that has 6000 barter gold. My mod will override his values. Even if the mod is disabled, his gold will be set according to the NPC's mercantile skill like vanilla Oblivion does. If his mercantile is 100, he would have 1500.)
- Training is not affected by the services features (this is deliberate; it isn't really a store-like function)
- When playing with this mod disabled (uninstalled works fine), the invested gold and gold from the mercantile perk will register at the second time you start bartering with the merchant. (Example: If you invest on merchant or you have the 100 mercantile perk, he won't have the additional 500 gold the first time you barter with him. Exit conversation, start barter again, and then the 500 gold should be there. It is a limitation of the current implementation.
- If you have a twitchy finger and enter the barter screen too quickly, the first transaction might be taken into account.
[edit] Living Economy - Items
- It is not possible to modify scrolls, potions and ingredients via the used methods, so they are untouched.
- The item count for the quantity based pricing is not exactly accurate, the problem being that the items are spread all over the cell and there is no way to count them all. Only the items on the main merchant container (which is also the one where the items the player sell go) are counted.
- Some specialized stores (mostly The Best Defense and a few guilds) are not affected by the quantity based pricing due to different reasons.
- Due to the fact I can't reference content from other .esp files, there is no way to add support for the dynamic pricing of mod-added items.
- Persistent references had to be added to two instances - one for Hamlof Red Tooth and another for Tadrose Helas. These two may show conflicts with a couple of mods, but it is likely that they can be ignored.
- When a fence is in a tavern (and you are in the Thieves' Guild), the publican will also share his prices.
- The Nord Winds shop in Bruma is treated as a normal trader store, so all prices will be trader value. There is a smith and a clothier in the same cell, and unfortunately there is no way for to compensate for that.
- Hopping between shops too quickly will make the prices take more time to change. This is because prices are applied when you enter or exit shops. If you exit a shop and enter another quickly. The "outside shop" prices will still be aplying themselves to items when you are in the other shop. The prices will end up correctly eventually, but it may take a couple of seconds longer than normal. This is especially noticeable in the Imperial City where stores are so close too each other.
- When using Regional Pricing and using quick-travel to a city, don't rush to barter with merchants! Prices need a couple of seconds to update with regional changes.
- If some items are incorrectly priced at zero when outside a shop using this mod, use the "recalculate prices" option. It is possible your CPU didn't have time to finish the price calculations before applying the prices.
[edit] Compatibility
[edit] General compatibility
- Living Economy will conflict with mods...
- ...that change the conversation the original infos on the topics BarterBuy, BarterSell, BarterStart, Invest, Repair and Recharge (this includes mods that remove the "barter chatter" - as an alternative, an optional Living Economy .esp which removes barter chatter is included)
- ...that change the game setting that affects the master mercantile perk
- ...that alter the Barter Gold in weird ways
- Living Economy will not conflict with any mods that alter items at all. The pricing is done via scripts. In fact, you could use Living Economy instead of some of the re-pricing mods out there of a non-conflicting alternative.
[edit] Specific mods
- JOG's Thievery in the Imperial City mod will conflict with Living Economy - the merchant that his mod adds will have infinite gold (however, that conflict is pretty minor and can be ignored).
- Living Economy includes creepyfellow's Improved Barter Gold mod, so do not use it in conjunction with this one.
- Don't use with the Valdacil's Scaled Economy mod. It is not needed as Living Economy can basically do the same thing (level scaling).
[edit] Credits
- Rekvor - for the original Improved Barter Gold mod that inspired me to do all this.
- odfella - for giving me the idea to use messages reflect gold change. Even though as of version 2.0 these are not needed.
- Drokk - for a mean bug-finding streak.
- JOG - for helping me get to understand reference variables and get services working.
- Galerion - I used his skill progression formulas to balance out merchant mercantile progression.
- Everyone on the Official Forums for their support and ideas!
[edit] Changelog
[edit] 3.63
September 16th, 2006
- Fixed broken menu function on Max Barter Gold.
[edit] 3.62
September 14th, 2006
- Fixed an issue regarding Shadow's prices that broke the menu.
[edit] 3.61
September 8th, 2006
- Fixed the missing "more options" button in the Alternate prices menu.
[edit] 3.6
September 8th, 2006
- Added a Complementary Player Mercantile Progression feature.
- Added a Global Barter Renewal option to the menu for the sake of simplicity.
- Removed the annoying "Day Pay is: " messages. These were intended for testing purposes and slipped in the release.
- Added a table to the spreadsheet regarding the Complementary Player Mercantile Progression feature.
- Added more Alternate Prices options. Dreighton's, Galn's Gems, Shadow's Values, Better & Realistic Prices and Oblivion Enhanced.
- Some tweaks to my CF's prices. Increased soulgems, decreased some books, upped gems a tad more...
- Added 2 extra optional esps. A "No barter chatter" LE.esp and a Cutthroat Merchants.esp
- Added more information regarding Expanded Investments and CF's Prices to the Game Mechanics section.
[edit] 3.56
September 1st, 2006
- I spazzed out and left some boxed checked for some placeholder items during my last testing. Nothing game breaking, but annoying if you like to pickpocket merchants!
[edit] 3.55
September 1st, 2006
- Updated the Items.esp with the OOO 1.3 price changes.
- Fixed issues with fences.
- Removed changes to mercantile perk description changes to prevent conflicts with mods that change skill gain rates.
[edit] 3.51
August 1st, 2006
- Fixed an issue with all Elven weapon prices being assigned alchemist's weapon prices. Thanks to Crazy Ace for pointing it out!
[edit] 3.5
July 29th, 2006
- Revamped the menus. Added more options and more freedom with numbers.
- Expanded the investment system. Now there are more investment options and the higher investments grant an additional gold return to the player.
- Introduced Regional Pricing. Different cities will offer different prices.
- Introduced random global economy and local economy factors to dynamically enhance the regional prices even further.
- Restructured the readme into HTML format for better ease of understanding.
- Revamped the Living Economy spreadsheet with more information regarding the new features.
- Added support for some items I overlooked in previous versions (quills and inkwells).
- Made clothiers and smiths pay more for hides and pelts.
- Added my own pricing scheme to the Alternate Prices menu. "CF's prices" based on the MOBS as a base for weapons. Everything else was scaled from there with a few of my own changes based on personal preference.
[edit] 3.12
July 19th, 2006
- Fixed a problem with Common trader customized prices. They weren't storing decimal places.
[edit] 3.11
July 18th, 2006
- I mistakenly was adding Adventurer prices instead of Piratelord prices for clothing, this also broke the menu.
[edit] 3.1
July 17th, 2006
- Added customization options to enable to select price categories for different item types in different shops.
- Added a common trader shop type to include the general trader shops. Everything is defaulted to normal pricing, but is customizable.
- Added a customization option to allow you to select the maximum barter gold cap.
- Added some clarifications to the Game Mechanic sections.
- Finished updating Piratelord's prices. Now all his changes are included.
[edit] 3.07
July 10th, 2006
- Made mages pay higher and alchemists pay normal for books.
- Partly updated Piratelord's prices. His clothing prices are not taken into account yet.
- Raised the time delay when calculating prices for the first time to prevent it from sometimes setting it to zero.
- Updated the known issues section with stuff I forgot.
[edit] 3.06
July 7th, 2006
- Fixed a bug regarding that would disable the menu when changing the day renewal options.
[edit] 3.05
July 7th, 2006
- Fixed a bug regarding investments.
- Added stuff I forgot to the readme.
[edit] 3.0
July 7th, 2006
- Rework of the mod implementation.
- Now investments made with this mod enabled will not be lost when uninstalling the plug-in.
- Services transactions will count in any occasion, even if merchant was scheduled for a reset.
- Added merchant skill progression
- Added random transactions
- Included the Items plug-in that dynamically changes prices of all the items in the game according to shop type and qty available.
[edit] 2.22
June 15th, 2006
- Added support for Repair, Recharge, and Spell purchases affecting barter gold.
- Added an option for individual renew for mod merchants.
- Added menu options to toggle the services feature and individual renew.
[edit] 2.2
June 13th, 2006
- Fixed the messed up dialogue entries. Cleaned it up with TESSnip.
- Added a safety check to prevent gold from going to the negatives.
- Removed the individual renew gold option. Editor Spell IDs don't work in the console.
[edit] 2.15
June 12th, 2006
- Fixed inconsistencies with the merchant's barter gold values.
- Restored the functionality of the disable menu function
- Added the menu option to Renew all merchant's gold.
- Removed the effect of services other than bartering to barter gold. It wasn't working right at all.
- Made it so the disable function is not necessary to uninstall my mod.
- Made it so when Living Economy is disabled, mod-added merchants would properly restore their default gold values.
- Fixed some issues when investing with the mod disabled.
- Removed my changes to some actor references and their cells.
[edit] 2.1
June 10th, 2006
- Fixed a extremely nasty evil bug that would make the game run 40000 scripts at once and send it crawling to a slow freezing death of eternal damnation.
- Renamed some placeholder items to better reflect what they are.
- Made gold spent on training, repairs and recharge affect gold available for barter.
[edit] 2.0
June 9th, 2006
- Total rewrite of the mod. Compatibility should now be greatly increased.
- Barter Gold now correctly updates in the menu. No more messages are needed. :)
- Removed random transactions. For Now...
- Added lots of customizable values and a handy menu to change them.
- Different Merchant Classes now have different Base Barter Gold values.
- Gave the Fences a separate value for the day reset from the normal merchants.
- Made different barter scaling methods.
- Scrapped the need to read a book to disable the mod.
[edit] 1.2
May 26th, 2006
- Added the script to a merchant in Chorrol who slipped my fingers the first time around.
- Made random transactions more rare. They will not take place when player is in same cell and just waits for an hour. Only when the player has been away for a while and has visited different cells. And even still, there is a chance no gold transaction will have occurred.
- Made the script a bit more effective.
- Made it any gold transaction not pertaining to a NPC service will not affect a merchant's gold.
[edit] 1.1
May 22nd, 2006
- Added Message boxes reporting change, fixed typos and errors in readme
[edit] 1.0
May 22nd, 2006
- Initial Release
