Technologist profitability

I tend to play technologists far more often than magi, and have found that there are a rather large number of items which return a rather large amount of profit when sold to the right people. Conversely, I have found several that you make a loss on. Electricity and Mechanical have been the biggest cash cows so far - the Shocking Staff and Eye Gear, specifically, easily earn more than ten times the amount of gold it costs to make them, even with no Haggle skill; the Flow Specktrometer is also a good source of income. Gunsmithing has been the worst - with the exception of the Handcrafted Flintlock and the revolver, pretty much everything you learn to make in that disclipline apparently costs more to make than you can get back by selling it. Anyone else have a particular technological cash cow they like to milk? Is there an item with a higher profitability that I've missed (and are its components reasonably easy to find)?

 

I haven't played a technologist for some ime now, but I think that the eye gear was the best option. It's engredients are extremely easy to find, with several pairs of glasses you can buy every day from the guy in Ashbury you practically only seek for the mechanical part which can often be found in an inventors equipment. There may be self-made tech items worth more than the eye gear, but the time it takes to find the engredients and compose them together isn't worth it when compared to eye gear.

 

I too have found that peddling the shocking staff as a great way to make money. The first time I did so made me incredibly nervous because I was afraid that I was taking the first step to flooding the market with shocking staves. I expected that putting more shocking staves in circulation would mean that they'd fall into the wrong hands and I would face an NPC who was using one of my own shocking staves against me! It would appear that the game designers put no such consequence in the game, so hocking one's technological creations is in fact a simple way to generate capital.

Would it be possible to mod the game such that what a character sells to the shop keepers influences the game balance?

 

I'm really not sure, although it would be kickass if it were possible.

 

I'm going to cautiously say I don't think so. At least not without some major reworking of the way the game handles the shopkeepers.

 

Actually this can be easily scripted by using the "buy object" attachment point.

 

I stand corrected.
Teach me to expect everything to be complex.

 

let's say a script is attached to all those merchants in i.e. Tarant who will usually buy the shock-staff. can the script refer to / update a single global variable counting how many shock-staffs the player has sold in Tarant alltogether?
if yes, the said "kick-ass mod" would check that number whenever the player enters tarant. if it's reasonably high, the script would update the equipped weapon of some NPC's with shock-staffs.
same would go for any tech weaponry
live economy FTW!

 

If four days constitutes a grave dig, I'm in it with soviet because a live economy is more or less what I'm looking for in a game. Any game.

Specific to Arcanum, a consequence to an otherwise unchecked cash flow is what I imagine. After all, there is no such thing as a free 834 coin for a shocking staff.

 

I think, if such a thing were to be implemented, it would fall somewhere between 'pretty awesome' and 'totally kickass'. Although also potentially dangerous to me, as most of my income comes from unloading scores of homemade technological weapons onto every junk dealer I can find. Would be nice to actually have some consequences for that.

 

This sounds amazing.... now to just compile this and sneak the idea into AWIP when Rroyo isn't looking...

 

now a question for the wise mod-makers: is there a "sell object" attachment point?
should be something like this:
SELL OBJECT
when called: when PC sells an item to NPC
triggerer: item / list of specified items
attachee: PC
extra object: NPC
effect of RETURN AND SKIP DEFAULT: same as above.

because as far as I understand the scripts, it'd be much easier to make a "live economy" mod work with other mods if it has a script on the PC instead of attaching scripts to all NPC merchants.

 

I have to disagree.
while a single manufacturer wouldn't have a noticeable effect on a free market, the player's party is close to being the Arcanum-wide monopolist on tech weaponry of any kind. one could imagine the Boil clan leaders asking the merchants about new weapons from time to time. and while the merchants have the same old stuff for years, after the player enters the scene, new and beforehand unseen items enter the market.
IMHO the point is not the quantity, but the quality of new high-tech weaponry that enters the market. while shock-staffs may be too high-tech to spread across Arcanum, I'd imagine that producing large amounts of revolvers, balanced swords and feather-weight axes for sale would make orc bandits and molochean asassins considerably more dangerous.
AFAIK there are few, almost none, NPC's wielding high-tech weapons. some would be more dangerous if they got tech weps to use. with the trains connecting major cities, certain spread of tech weaponry seems reasonable.

 

I see your point, The_Bob. The impact of one seller may be negligible enough for Arcanum's programmers to overlook.

Practically, who's going to have the coin to purchase a shocking staff for 800+ gold? Perhaps a wealthy collector of technology, not necessarily an adventurer the player would encounter! However, the Mollochean Hand is organized enough that its members might have the resources and the foresight to pick up these items as they find them. Assuming their agents are following the player to some degree puts them in the same locations in which the player is selling these devices, making access to them near inevitable.

The speculation here is bordering on fan fiction, but negligible or not, to me the impact of that one seller seems more probable than impossible.

 

point taken. this is indeed a major logical shortcoming in my reasoning.
tho a few new questions come up this way.
if, as The_Bob pointed out, the world lives beyond the player's limited observations, the molochean hand acts unreasonably, using a very limited range of weaponry. one should expect them,

Spoiler

an ancient order of asassins, backed up by a continent-spanning conspiracy,

to provide the actual killers with best gear available. same goes for specific NPC's, i.e. Bates (+ Chukka and the guards) and the melee master - they might be not levelled, but at least significantly better equipped.

for the molochean hand, a possible explanation, slightly changing the story, would be the following: the actual order is almost extinct; their mode of operations consists of hiring regular bandits and mercenaries who enter the continent of Arcanum (much like european fugitives entered North America), providing them just with the target's description and the amulets, paying them a little incentive (or maybe some spare equip) and promising the entire sum upon return with the player's severed head. in that case only very few true molocheans would ever encounter the player,

Spoiler

i.e. Vollinger and Gideon.

the random encounters would then be just hired hands, thus maybe needing some adjustment in the dialog (i.e. the ability to talk or buy them off) and maybe a sript to randomize their equipment and combat AI.

adding some high-tech (and with the same reasoning high-magick) objects around the world (an adventurer's corpse placed next to a wolf pack) would help, much like the "Small Camp" location near Quintarra where the player finds something looking much like another adventuring party/ a merchant caravan that met it's demise by wildlife.

 

I'm quite impressed with this conversation. Keep it up! My only commentary would be, even if you assume that this IS a big, living world, things don't spread as far then as they do today. Even with the trains. If you sell 200 or so eye goggles in one city, it may not spread to others terribly much, but it IS going to have an effect upon the value of them in that city.

 

that's part of the discussion - there are AFAIK no shops in Arcanum that sell high-tech crafted items. to make a step towards "live economix", the (currently theoretical) mod would IMHO add crafted items to high level tech merchants' shops and decrease the amount of components for sell. tho I can't really estimate the amount of modding needed, a living world would require a blacksmith merchant who buys i.e. iron ore and steel from the player to have pure ore on sell the next day.
P.S. did you ever ask yourself what kind of blacksmith Shrouded Hills has, if he needs you to find pure ore? the quest would make a lot more sense if Lloyd requested i.e. 2 steel and 2 iron ore and would sell a balanced sword after quest completion
P.P.S. modding question again - is it possible to divide a merchant's goods into restockable and not restockable?