05 October 2010

The Crafters Dialog

Mac/Windows
The original King of Dragon Pass let you set the number of crafters. As your clan had a better economic base, it could support more, and this produce more goods each year. In addition, you could decide whether to produce Plain items (with a reliable return) or Fancy (riskier, but potentially more profitable). As you explored your tula, you could also expand production into exotic goods such as ivory or iron.

iOS
These decisions weren’t terribly interesting, and their results, while real, weren’t easily visible. So when I looked for things to simplify for the iOS version, I dropped the idea of trade allocation. I still wanted players to be able to see the impact of exploration, so I included a list of exotic products you currently had, even if they weren’t a choice.

The dialog still nagged at the back of my brain, and I finally decided to eliminate it. The game can assign an optimal number of crafters. And while it was a squeeze, the exotic products will fit in the Trade screen.

I’m a little sad that some of the advice for the dialog won’t be seen, but it’s not that wonderful. (And while Trade advice is fairly rich, maybe some of it can be stuck there.)

One thing I still need to change: we added some omens which were intended to get players to look at the Crafters dialog on occasion. I’ll have to delete these too.

Anyway, enjoy the dialog here, because you won’t see it in the game.

8 comments:

  1. The choice of what to craft always felt arbitrary to me- like I was making it without knowledge of what was likely to be valuable. Doesn't bother me one bit to put that decision back in 'NPC hands'.. Presumably exotic products just make our trade goods more valuable across the board, which makes sense to me.

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  2. Well, I think it was all documented pretty well, but I don't think there was any way to know if the crafters had a good year or not. And in practice, I think the randomness of fancy goods evened out, so the safety of plain goods didn't offer a very different option.

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  3. I always used any exotic products I had then made as many fancy goods as I could. I was never so short on goods that I needed the safety from plain production, so I was always willing to gamble on the fancy goods.

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  4. well i am playing the iphone version and a ring advisor told me to have more crafters on the ring to produce more goods. I am always short on goods and I dont know how to get more produced, what can I do?

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  5. Pretty sure all the advice got adjusted, can you send a screen shot of the advice to the bugz @ address?

    (There may be comments in the Reorganize dialog that didn't get quite as much scrutiny, that's the only place I can think that might talk about crafters on the _ring_.)

    There's a number of ways to build up craft output and market profit. Exotic products make better crafts. Trading partners help the latter. Magic allocation helps too.

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  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. Hi, I have a question which I couldn't find an answer anywhere: whenever I find a exotic resource, soon another clan would offer to pay around 10 silver anually to buy ALL of said resources. However, besides a decrease of my clan's mood, and the text says that my crafters are not happy losing the chance to work on the resources, there seems to be no other actual side effects...or there is?

    It is especially confusing since it seems that I can't cancel such dealings in the game. I don't really remember on the PC version what will happen if I sell the resources to another clan.

    Anyway, can you clarify what can I actually do with those resources, if I sell them will it hurt me in the long run, and can I cancel it? Thanks!

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  8. No, I can't. Besides not remembering, this is a "what happens if" question and I think that's best discovered through play.

    I do remember that these are simple but irrevocable deals. And as usual, there will be tradeoffs to any decision.

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