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Obsidian and Orb of Confinement
Let me begin by saying I'm not that experienced with mining and this is just my potentially very flawed understanding. With that said, I've been looking into the orb of confinement city improvement for Targossas for a long time now, and it seems like the obsidian upkeep requirement is rather high relative to the spawning of obsidian lodes. From what I understand about mining, lodes only spawn when the commodities are used. So if the majority of the obsidian is mostly sitting in people's inventories, lodes will only spawn at the rate that enchantment goes through obsidian. Even if you get a majority of the obsidian lodes, I think the obsidian upkeep is a bit too high. I love the idea of a city being restrained by what commodities they can bring in, but with the numbers I've been given, it's too close to unsustainable. Am I totally wrong about this or can the orb of confinement use some adjustment in terms of upkeep price?
i'm a rebel
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Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
I guess it depends whether they're using scripts, tracking and manipulating the timing to get these lodes or whether they're just trawling for them constantly as to whether that should be okay or not.
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
OR we could just change the spawn code to destroy all of the above work someone may have done and prevent something like that from ever happening in the future. I mean, god forbid you actually be forced to plan and work with other people and invest time and gold to prevent someone who is determined and comes up with a plan like that from actually succeeding. Sarapis said in the very beginning that stuff like that could happen and make some people rich and others would lose their ass trying... when it actually happens people lose their minds *g*
Plus, quite quickly, your advantage in terms of information (which you did righteously and skillfully gather) would utterly disappear, and eventually everybody would know the schedule, which becomes pretty boring to everyone, including you, pretty fast.
On a related note, is there any reason the Delos commshop doesn't take down offers after an Achaean year?
And once everyone figures out the spawn times, you won't be able to hire someone to distract them during the node spawns anyway.
Although I do wonder whether it might be possible make the spawns periodically randomised rather than just more random in general - keep the current system, but basically reparametrise it every few months or something.
That love soon might end You are unbreaking
And be known in its aching Though quaking
Shown in this shaking Though crazy
Lately of my wasteland, baby That's just wasteland, baby
@Melodie remember that what'shisname who drove the price of obsidian down by selling his own product in batches of 100 at decreasing prices? Yah don't forget there are people who will do stupid things like that too.
That love soon might end You are unbreaking
And be known in its aching Though quaking
Shown in this shaking Though crazy
Lately of my wasteland, baby That's just wasteland, baby
It could, though I wouldn't do it anymore. Not worth it. The whole point of there being a high possibility that you could control a commodity (which for the record is only being done on two commodities) is so you can dictate the market price to ensure it is a profitable venture. There are currently more commodities being mined than commodities being used, by a LOT. This means that even if you mine in the most efficient way you would have to sell at a loss on some commodities because people sit around with 10k raw commodities that aren't selling (because there isn't a demand for it) and they need the gold to float their next mine so they lower the price in hopes to sell quick. If you have 10 different people doing that constantly it keeps going down and down and down until the point that it is impossible to mine that commodity and break even at the end.
Take silver for instance. I'm not going to give you real numbers for proprietary reasons, but look at it like this:
A large silver mine produces 4K silverore and costs 400k gold to operate (construction price + upkeep). This would mean that to break even you have to sell silverore at 100g. However, let's say there is 30k silver mined annually but only 20k of that silver is used annually. This means that someone is going to not sell their silver that year. That extra 10k silverore cost a million gold to mine, which means people are going to try to at least cover some of their losses, so they'll sell at a loss in order to recoup some of their gold, this pattern continues until it is literally impossibly to mine silver profitably because every year there is a 10k surplus that will be sold at a loss in order to stay afloat. You see this happening with ice and gold.
However, if a single mining group is able to mine all of the silver they can set an agreed upon price that will make it profitable, but that price cant actually be 101g before they start turning a profit. Here is why, they are mining 30k silver, but only 20k of it will ever sell, so they are spending 3 million gold to sell 20k silver, this means silver has to sell at 150g just to break even in order for the economy to remain stable. Because silver takes so long to mine it has to sell at an even higher price in order for it to bring in an hourly revenue equal to what you would have made had you just mined an easy commodity like coal. Let us say coal sold at 15g per brings in a profit of 2k gold for every hour you mined it, for silver to bring in the same amount of gold/hr it would have to sell at 200g each. But that only puts it on equal ground with coal which doesn't make it worth the risk of having a mine that could be assaulted and you lose so much gold, it would be better to mine coal and sell it at 15g than it would to mine silver and sell it at 200g, especially when you factor in that coal lodes produce much more rare minerals. In order to silver to be worth the added risk it would have to sell at a price that would bring in 3k gold/hr. Which would raise the price it would have to sell at to 250g or whatever it works out to. It is literally the only way to run a successful mining operation. Currently there are lots of people who are just hoarding their commodities in hopes the market eventually changes and they'll be able to sell at a more profitable rate, however there are too many commodities being mined for that ever to be a reality without mining operations like ours to restrict the flow of commodities into the market so the price can rise to the point where people can sell at a profit.
The answer isn't to make mining spawns completely unpredictable, the answer is to lower the amount of commodities mined every year to be close to the amount of commodities used every year (or even lower than the commodities used for a little while in order to eat up some of the surplus commodities sitting on the market and in people's rifts). How many people claim to have figured out the spawns? It is nowhere near as easy of a task as you may think, and even if you figure out the main chunk of it it still requires constant observation because there are things that change it from the normal pattern. Let people figure it out, there will be planned rushes for commodities similar to the real life gold rush in the west. There will be more coordinated assaults, there will be more deals struck and contracts written between mining communities in order to keep the economy stable. Let people put in the work and RP necessary to get to the top instead of cutting the legs out from under those who have. It will still be fun when others put in the work and figure out the spawn rhythm, more fun I think. It will open up avenues for RP that don't currently exist and will make it a rush and more coordinated effort to get the spawns as they pop up.
There are people who feel entitled to get these more profitable mines without putting in even 1/1000th of the time, effort, or gold that some groups have. They don't realize that the second other people start grabbing these lodes is the moment these commodities are no longer the more profitable mines. It just doesn't work the way they think it does. Do you know how much ice is on the market? Over 40k ice.... This doesn't include what is sitting in people's rifts. How much ice do cities use each year? None. There is over 120k bone on the market. How much bone do cities use? Combined, all of the cities together use 12k bone annually. There is ten years worth of surplus bone on the market... ten years worth... for ALL of the cities. Lol. Imagine if 20 different people held all of that bone, you would see a price war that would drive it to the point where bone would be the most unprofitable commodity to mine. Im hoping all of this doesn't fall on deaf ears. Seriously, just a single massive lode being taken by someone outside of the mining group controlling that specific commodity results in a massive loss and a big drop in price. Been watching it for almost 20 years.
People whine because Grandue and Josoul "always" get the most profitable comms but don't understand that those comms are only the most profitable comms because Grandue and Josoul always get them. Look at obsidian, ice, carbon, stone, iron, etc. They're all shitty things to mine because less than half of the yield is used annually and three dozen people are undercutting each other trying to squeeze some kind of gold out of the market. Platinum used to be a loss, so was gems and gold. They're just now becoming profitable to mine and the only reason is because we're helping someone else control them and we're intentionally not flooding the market with the tens of thousands of those commodities that we have stored up. This system only works when it is done properly and the way it is done properly is the way we're doing it. Anyone can make it to the top, earn your stars and stripes like everyone else. Put in the work, put in the money, be intelligent and make wise decisions and you'll get there.
If you want to form syndicates to keep prices high, that's still absolutely doable. Form groups, make policies. Band together to attack mines of non-syndicate members; that's all completely legit and part of the system design. But to have a mechanical stranglehold over specific resources because you've dialed in the game's spawning algorithms, to the point that no one else gets to play? While impressive, that's not a wise game dynamic, and your defense of it is pretty transparently self-interested.
To take a mine off you I'd have to attack it and lose probably half my combat squads, squads that have taken 8 years to train. That's not reasonable.