Pileups give… a LOT of metal. It’s taking me several hours in real time to move the metal from the pileup I disassembled…
I had to get rid of it; it was in the way of my new stash-base! Still, that’s more metal than I could theoretically use, ever.
This got me thinking… I can’t use it all at once, but an NPC faction might be able to build a large-scale city wall out of the innumerable car wrecks. They’d also need metal to craft their arrows/bolts, swords, armor, vehicles… but how would we be able to track what a faction owns? How would they store it? How would they gather it?
Don’t forget that NPCS and FActions are still in development. The people we have in our games right now aren’t even finished. Something like this might be added in th future.
As to the problem at hand: The easiest way would be to make a Merchant which would by different kind of metal, similar to the Broker in the refugee center where you can sell fruit wine, jerky and so on. I believe selling to the broker gives you money and some reputation in the faction, it wouldn’t be hard to add another Variable for the Faction and their ressources. Either make it one big Ressource pool or divide it in metal, wood, food, chemicals…one big ressource pool would make sense though, as they would obviously trade with other people too and sell a metal surplus in order to get wood, chemicals or food…
Vendors for resources are likely, a rough outline of the kind of thing we’ll likely do:
NPC faction starts a project, which might be constructing something or might be upkeep, like food or medicine production. This might be triggered when the faction is founded, or when the player interacts with them.
Projects would have manifests of materials needed, which would be fufilled in several ways:
Explicit missions for the player (please get us X metal frames).
NPC trader keeps buying metal frames until the project is done.
NPC scavengers would also be scavenging metal and delivering it, either because they’re faction members, or for the bounties.
The NPC faction would most likely establish a location where they could store the materials until they’re ready to be used.
Would that also mean you could raid those locations, for ressources? This could be especially intersting if it’s a food/medicine stockpile, you would possibly kill an outpost of a whole faction with the Raid, but you’d have a lot of stuff for yourself…mh…
also, if you kill everyone in the location, couldn’t you sell the stuff back? People wouldn’t know that YOU were the one who raided it if nobody survives.
[quote=“Kadian, post:4, topic:10092”]Would that also mean you could raid those locations, for ressources? This could be especially intersting if it’s a food/medicine stockpile, you would possibly kill an outpost of a whole faction with the Raid, but you’d have a lot of stuff for yourself…mh…
also, if you kill everyone in the location, couldn’t you sell the stuff back? People wouldn’t know that YOU were the one who raided it if nobody survives.[/quote]
I’m guessing an area that’ll hold the items owned by a faction would have a zone you can’t remove. Take anything from there, and your ass is grass, or somesuch. Killing everyone affiliated with the certain faction can possibly make you remove the zone, or at least take items from there without a group of guards still alive to kill you.
[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:3, topic:10092”]Vendors for resources are likely, a rough outline of the kind of thing we’ll likely do:
NPC faction starts a project, which might be constructing something or might be upkeep, like food or medicine production. This might be triggered when the faction is founded, or when the player interacts with them.
Projects would have manifests of materials needed, which would be fufilled in several ways:
Explicit missions for the player (please get us X metal frames).
NPC trader keeps buying metal frames until the project is done.
NPC scavengers would also be scavenging metal and delivering it, either because they’re faction members, or for the bounties.
The NPC faction would most likely establish a location where they could store the materials until they’re ready to be used.[/quote]
What about NPC faction capacity for crafting? If they have the metal and the metalworking equipment, I could see them making metal frames when there’s demand for it.
As for storage/raiding therefrom, I could see factions converting existing structures into storage facilities, or even making new structures as a project. They’d be guarded, but someone with the right bionics (night generator/invisibility, quantum tunneling) could conceivably sneak in and out. That said, it would be vitally important to track what’s actually in the storage facilities and ownership of the things (The Elder Scrolls style), otherwise a sneaky thief could take the metal, sell it back, take it again, and thus allow NPCs to build huge projects without actually spending stuff, or clean out NPC factions with too much ease. (Profit through robbery should be possible, but inconvenient.)
Ideally we’d have guards, those guards would alert as you approach, and do sensible things like warn you off and then open fire if you weren’t very friendly with the faction, and if you ARE very friendly with the faction, people would know you, so all it would take would be calling in your name over a radio to nuke your rep and put a bounty on you if you end up torching everything.
If on the other hand you did manage to stealth-kill everyone or rob the place without being spotted, I’d be very against it impacting your reputation.
I’m thinking of the goods being the most basic raw materials, so a big metalworking project would simply want x lbs of steel and not be too picky about the form it comes in.
And yea, any system for long-term projects would periodically inventory the materials and at the very least not do something silly like complete the project based on non-existent materials.
A sensible system for preventing you from selling goods to NPCs repeatedly is a bit tougher, probably the simplest thing to do is have NPC alert levels increase when items are discovered lost, and one effect of that would be them shutting down trading.