Travelling Tradesmen - a trading scenario with advanced AI

[Kvinkunx]

Thank you for the lengthy report, mate!

- The dialogue/game messages could use a little work, they are a little odd in places (I can give examples, or even touch it up for you)
- Is the placement of initial enemies random? If not, then as player 1, I couldn't attack an NPC on my first turn, but all the ai's could
- My base weapon is, an advertisement. Did I miss a joke somewhere?

- Yes, it would be nice of you, thanks.
- Initial placement is fixed, respawns are random. Will fix this for player 1.
- Yes you did. Merchants are no fighters by default. They aim at good bargains. I find it funny to imagine a salesman trying to sell his wares to a snarling half-wit gobbo, pointing at him with a spear. The damage type "impact" is also intentional for the advertisement attack. Good ad campaigns should have one.

- The thugs you hire shouldn't attack you. I laid an ambush and took the kill. Then my own hired thugs killed me!
- As far as I saw, if you kill an ai character, they don't get the XP for the fight.
- Some NPC's spawn in the impassable void terrain and have 100% chance to hit

- There is no agreement forged between the Thugs and you that they won't attack you. It is only your idea their moral code should be. They got paid to mug a merchant at a specified place. Job done. Now where was that next victim? Ah, there's another one passing by!
A completely different thing is when you trust them while depositing money at their den; they make profit by deducing 1% and prefer good business relations in this case over a short-sighted one-time theft. In other words, you deal with guild officials in a den. In the open, you just meet anonymous brutes.
- Unless I am mistaken, it is natural for Wesnoth not to give XP to dying units. I might add script to do so but I don't feel it is needed to implement.
- So far been lazy to fix this one but will have a look at it.

- The ai doesn't use the thieves den to hire thugs
- The ai buys lots of different types of weapons, rather than buying one and taking it to the other side of the map
- Perhaps decrease the gold value of everything, increase the weapons you can carry but limit how many of one type you can have (to get around the weapon display on the right, only show 1 type of each weapon attack). This means you can plan a route to sell numerous things.

- It doesn't. And I'm afraid to make it use it effectively is rather impossible, because unlike in the case of eg. horse purchase it has to take into account moving targets, distance to the nearest den, etc.
- Yes, on purpose. They buy anything that is cheap enough. In ANY village, not just those labeled ones.
- I don't see any improvement to the mod if I was to implement this. Rather the opposite. Try the other map with fluctuating market and limited stock though if it suits your playing style better. No AI is supported (yet) on the other map though.

- Should the player get a % of the gold when their hired thugs kill an ai?
- Someone mentioned changing terrain, how about patches of fog that then hides the players/NPC's. This will put more tactics in play and also makes it easier to go for the 4 corner bosses - as you won't get mobbed.
- Perhaps include shields and things, not just weapons.

- No. As said above, they are not "your" thugs.
- It would actually put less tactics in I think. You need to know when to mug a competitor, otherwise he could take the lead and you won't be able to effectively prevent your defeat.
- I may do so, though so far I don't see it as an improvement. I don't like the idea of a trader buying a shield and making it to his destination turtle-style. Any other item type you have in mind?

- The flying machine's bomb attack doesn't improve when you level up
- The price seems to vary wildly on items. If you buy something in the bottom left (ice wands) then go to the Swords (top left) you buy for 50 and sell for 79.. Two turns to the right, at the fire wands, you sell for 150. Is there a east/west divide in terms of pricing? Shouldn't it be directly proportional to distance travelled?
- Some of the weapons have strange names: "shatterer", "dragon breath" and others (Again, I can provide examples if you like)

- True, it doesn't. It is not part of your equipment since lvl 1, it is not included in your training... your default advertisement attack improves with levels, your bomb, horse attacks or attacks with purchased weapons do not. I like the idea that traders with flying machines have to be careful, I don't want them to turn into combat choppers bombing everything big time.
- The price has a quadratic formula. Therefore, every step farther from the village with the lowest price really matters. The price is derived from the distance. It doesn't matter whether you travel N, S, E or W.
- L3 weapons have such names. They are real powerful and considered "named artifacts". As long as the names don't sound stupid, I'm fine with them being strange.

- If you want to move the focus away from soley trading, then you could get a small amount of gold when you kill an NPC
- There needs to be more to do once you hit level 3, apart from avoiding trouble and moving between 2 points
- Would it be possible to see everyones gold during your turn, to plan thieves guild stuff - Although, remembering the information from the update would require more skill

- Under consideration, will probably be done along with Sheriff/Don implementation.
- Anything specific you have in mind?
- Alt + s does the trick. Won't show deposited gold though, of course. But then again, you don't need to know that if you want to mug someone.

- You can technically level up after level 3 (the XP bar is blue, not purple) but nothing happens apart form a standard increase in hp
- In the miscellaneous villages, you could randomly spawn rare artefacts that sell for 200 or something.
- To add more strategy: Every turn you hold a miscellaneous village for, the cost of everything in it reduces by 5% (cheapest being 10 for level 1, 25 for level 2 and 50 for level 3). It resets if you lose it.

- Should be violet, will fix.
- Random events are under consideration. Don't want these to be decisive though since they benefit those lucky enough to be near the event spot when it occurs.
- It would be necessary to inform the players about discount level in each owned village. In the end the result would be more confusing than beneficial I think. Held villages give you income, which is basically the same feature.

- Give each player a secret challenge with a gold reward: Kill 10 goblins, sell 20 ice wands, ride a horse from arcane to spears, etc...
- The ai doesn't take villages (except to heal). I held 13 villages at one point with 14 gold a turn... On average I'm making 10 gold a turn, which is a lot.
- Add in the potential to lose weapons when you are killed

- Quests/challenges are under consideration. Sheriff and Don will have some, common traders probably too. Will see about possible quest types.
- They are programmed to make profit, it is a safe bet. 14 gp per turn matters in short games only and it takes you cca 20+ turns to claim 13 villages.
- Absolutely not. One of things players really HATE is when they lose their equipment. Touching their money is much less painful.
Also, it may ruin you the whole session sometimes, when you have only one weapon at the beginning, almost no money and you die. Claiming villages is quite impossible in such a case due to the lack of weapons, especially when you are so low on money you can't even afford healing.
Hardship funds sound to me like a fix to something I don't consider a good feature in the first place.

- Pickpockets could be hired in the thieves guild and have a % chance to steal an item (which can be auto sold at nearest shop, so that it doesn't cause a problem if you have max number of items)
- It's very easy against the ai. It dies a lot. I got bored when I had 2.5k on the 5k game. The ai needs to use the thieves guild and be les aggressive and be smarter in it's weapon choices.
- It'd be nice to see more upgrades to your trader - not sure what though.

- See above. No item loss for players.
- It's Wesnoth AI. You can't really expect miracles. AI is there to provide you with additional competitors if you have too few players to join a session, but playing against AI only is probably better with the target sum of 500 or 1000. A tweak to aggression is still possible.
- Feel free to tell me later if you think up some.

[pauxlo]

- The thugs you hire shouldn't attack you. I laid an ambush and took the kill. Then my own hired thugs killed me!
- As far as I saw, if you kill an ai character, they don't get the XP for the fight.
- Some NPC's spawn in the impassable void terrain and have 100% chance to hit

- There is no agreement forged between the Thugs and you that they won't attack you. It is only your idea their moral code should be. They got paid to mug a merchant at a specified place. Job done. Now where was that next victim? Ah, there's another one passing by!
A completely different thing is when you trust them while depositing money at their den; they make profit by deducing 1% and prefer good business relations in this case over a short-sighted one-time theft. In other words, you deal with guild officials in a den. In the open, you just meet anonymous brutes.

Maybe have some different kinds of contracts buy-able (for different prices)?
Like an escort or similar?

[Kvinkunx]

I want to test the fluctuating market map with multiple players on Saturday 20:00+ GMT.
Ie. interested players either appear sometime 20:00-20:15 GMT in the lobby and contact me once I appear in the lobby or send me a PM with info when you gonna be online that evening, please.

[Kvinkunx]

Maybe have some different kinds of contracts buy-able (for different prices)?
Like an escort or similar?

Is under consideration for both the Sheriff and the Don.

[Tet]

Have you considered bodyguards? Maybe this is to much cross over to regular.

[Zaroth]

Hi there! I was really excited about your add-on when I first saw it and it's good to see you're developing it again. I played my first online match with some strangers on the MP server recently and I've got a few comments about this:

• if you're playing with strangers, the time settings we used (300/300/+60/0, 1000 gold goal) are probably too much if you want to have the game going smoothly with 6 players (+ 2 AI), as we did. For people trying this, I'd recommend 180/180/+30/0 the next time - you're only going to use more than 30 seconds when you're shopping, so this keeps the game from going on forever.
• the gameplay turned out to be much less exciting then I was expecting (and I'm a fan of dopewars-styled games) - it's probably because there is not a lot going on in the world... But I guess this will get better after you add some quests and random encounters. If I could suggest something, it would be nice to be able to buy some general-store type items in far reaches of the map and there exclusively. Some more ideas I will list below. One of the reason the game was pretty dull was the fact that everybody was just the same, with no difference between players at all... Some specialization areas would be nice, for example traits (as in Bob's RPG era)
• the flying machine is far too OP, especially for its price and compared to the horse. Not only it gets the most amazing movement of all possible mounts, 5 pockets, 50% defenses everywhere and ability to fly over water, but it also costs the same as the far inferior horse! I think it either should cost 500 (so it will be useless in medium games), have only 3-4 pockets (how the hell this tiny propeller is able to carry both the human and a lot more weapons than he normally carries?!) or use my movement-limiting idea described further. On the other hand, the horse has less movement, is terrain dependent, weak to pierce and has inferior defense percentages everywhere.
• you should somehow make selling in the main city (where you get teleported after your death) very unprofitable (maybe disallow it at all or allow selling for the lowest prices). This is exploitable, especially if you decide to include the idea I wrote about later (overloading)
• sometimes thugs spawn in the cave walls and don't do their job of ZoCing well (apart from their movement

Now, some loose ideas for improvement, feel free to cherrypick:

• allow overloading - so you can carry more weapons that you have capacity for (I guess the word "pocket" should be changed then), but for the cost of your maximum MP. So either you travel lightly and switfly or profitably but slowly. For example, for every additional item you carry you lose 1 max MP (2 MP if you are using a flying machine, since they're especially influenced by the extra weight). This would allow for nice specialization for players, either you take heavy load and count on getting profit or you get the extra movement and go for the gold of other players.
• connected to the previous idea - you could add a new mount, cart+horse/donkey - 6 MP, 8 pockets, terrible movement off-road (and defences as well), 300 gold. It could be worth it then to make the most distant and profitable villages (in the corners) disconnected from the road system.
• allow delayed attacks (when do you want our friends to attack?) to be able to make planned powerful night attacks, detract suspicions from yourself, or just not have to wait near the thieves' guild till the victim sells his load and has some gold to steal. Of course that would cause the risk of wasting your money if on the specified attack turn the victim will be within city borders - but TG is not a charity and won't give the money back (or possibly spawn thugs next to the walls instead, but I don't like this idea) Plus it would be nice if the thugs kept ZoCing the player instead of attacking him from one side and releasing him - but I guess it's wesnoth AI and can't be much helped...
• it'd be fun to be able to upgrade your base weapons, not necessarily in terms of damage, but maybe some fun effects - an example could be a "plague" like effect to the advertisement attack, changing dead opponents into brainless consumers. I guess the consumers shouldn't have the plague effect, or it would quickly turn into a tactics game from trading game Or "stunning" ability to bombs, which would have an effect similar to slow.
• I'd extend the prison period for city murderers, perhaps depending on the level (prominence) of the killed tradesman, for example 1 turn per level, to deter players from experience farming. It would be also nice to be able to push other players within the city limits, so we can enter the shop they're standing on (this is probably a lot of coding for little reward, but it would be nice to have anyway). Plus, if the prison period was extended, you could add possiblity of bribing the guards (possibly the bribe amount rising each time you do it) It makes sense, after all - this game is all about money, so you should be able to solve any problems with it
• move the statue (dead player) spawn away from any shops... I'd sometimes like to use the Weapon Shop in the city and when playing with AI it's impossible, since at least one of them dies every turn...
• Speaking of AIs, they should probably be a temple inside the city for those who can't afford full healing potion. The temple may use the rest of your turn and heal you only to 25% or 50% HP, but make it free and make AI use it - when we played, one of the AIs who spent all of its money on weapons and died, just kept going out of the castle with 4 HP, allowing experience farming for one of the players, who happened to be nearby... Actually, I'm not even sure if the AI couldn't afford the health potion, maybe it could - then it should get fixed as well.
• add trainer NPCs to allow getting traits for gold (probably hidden in different part of the map) - I think being able to learn any of ambush, nightstalk or regenerate abilities (and probably others) would be veeery useful in this game - especially the hiding ones, since you wouldn't be attacked by the AI then that said, skirmisher ability should be either uber-expensive or behind a difficult quest
• add traits. This one should be absolutely done if you want serious replay value. You could either go with Fallout-like trait system (a picked trait gives you both advantages and disadvantages), Bob's system (you pick one advantage and one disadvantage), but I'd suggest a system similar to MOO2. That is, you have some points to spent on both good and bad traits. Picking bad ones gets you points, picking good ones uses up your points. Since I'm up to some fun now, let me give you some suggestions (let's say you start with 3 trait points):
  • Aggressive (3) - you get 25 % from carried gold of every killed player and they lose that much
  • Mugger (5) - you get 30 % from carried gold of every killed player and they lose that much (I'd love that, that's just my playstyle )
  • Soft (-2) - you get only 10 % from carried gold of every killed player (but he still loses his 20 % for balance purposes)
  • Honest (-3) - you don't get any gold for killing other players (but they still lose they 20%) btw I like how being a honest trader would be a disadvantage
  • Silver tongue (3) - you get -5 % discount at every shop/trainer and +5% when selling (excluding TG) - you're probably already coding per-player discounts as rewards for quests (noble Kvinkunx, we're so gratious for saving us from the orc raid that you get a -5% discount everywhere at our country, etc.), so it should be easy to add
  • Natural trader (6) - you get -10% discount at every shop/trainer and +10% when selling (excluding TG)
  • Lousy trader (-3) - you buy for +10% everywhere and you sell for -10% less (excluding TG)
  • Repulsive (-5) - you buy for +20% everywhere and you sell for -20% less (not sure if this one won't ruin the game, maybe make it 15% then - but again, mugger-types would be probably happy ) (excluding TG)
  • Porter (5) - additional pocket at start (and to all your mounts as well)
  • Boon to the Family (3) - 2x starting money
  • Heir (4) - starts with a good, lev2 weapon (the one that can be sold for cheapest price next to him)
  • Friend (4) - you start the game with a pet or some other unit (without shopping abilities of course)
  • Affinity with (insert weapon type here) (2) - you deal more damage when fighting with that particular weapon type
  • Sixth sense (3) - thugs/other muggers get spawned at least 2 hexes from you instead of just next to you
  • Careless (-3) - thugs/other muggers attack you the same moment they're spawned! (or just get one free hit in) (would probably need the [harm_unit] tag from 1.9)
  • Good connections (3) - you don't have to pay the 1% at TG (btw, I'd increase it to something like 3%) and the thugs are 20% cheaper
  • Reputable (-3) - the percentage at TG increases to 8%, buying thugs is 20 % more expensive
  • and some other, boring ones, like quick/slow, healthy/sickly and so on... balancing costs in points of everything would probably take a bit of work, but I think it's totally worth it!

I probably don't have to add that some traits would be mutually exclusive, right ?

Probably the maximum amount of traits would also have to be limited, to prevent uber-builds. Anyway, this whole notion would add some of the much-needed variety to the game. And it may be kind of obvious, but let me say that anyway: don't allow to change traits of your merchant later in game - that's where the replay value lies! (And what the various NPC trainers would be good for, but they shouldn't give the same effects as traits).

If you liked my ideas, I can write some more later - although right now kind of dull, this add-on has great potential And I can't wait for the sheriff/Don update, keep up the excellent work!

[Kvinkunx]

@ Tet

Yes, bodyguards will be available for hire at the Town Hall (free of charge for the Sheriff) and Thieves' Dens (free of charge for the Don). Bodyguards will be limited to one per trader, I don't want to turn this into a full-scale battle.


@ Zaroth

Hey there, thanks for the detailed input!

I reckon you've played mainly the fixed market map. You might want to try the other map with fluctuating market for a more varied experience, at least once the AI is implemented in the next version.
Yet I am open to ideas about replayability and variety. There is a lot of room for improvement.

I will tweak the Flying Machine.

Selling in the city isn't really profitable. On the map with fixed market the profit is based on distance from the shop with the lowest price. Since the price grows exponentially, the distance really matters and buying/selling in the center of the map isn't going to win you the session. Even upon death you either lose money if you have some or you don't have a lot of money and then you cannot afford healing which isn't much of a good situation either.

Thugs spawning in cave walls and/or not ZoCing well is my "favourite" still persisting bug.

Overloading may be useful in systems with larger attribute value scale, I think. In my system with so few pockets it would get too clear what level of overload is the most effective one, hence rendering the feature redundant. Also mounts would become a bit less important.

A cart with horse or donkey isn't out of question, it sounds interesting with such different movement aspects. Will think about it; it requires considerable amount of work done on gfx.

Delayed attacks sound confusing to me.

I don't want to allow upgrade of the basic weapon to something nasty that would motivate you to prefer it as a primary weapon. Will see about some fun abilities. Low priority for now.

Prison sentence length should remain 1 turn I think. Players want action, not just sit and watch their leader behind bars. No matter the imprisonment is a righteous punishment for their dirty play. Bribery is just a patch to a longer sentence. Experience farming is better prevented by changes to placing killed traders so that they don't block shops, which I will look into.

Temple with free healing for 50% HP sounds good.

Abilities like ambush, nightstalk or skirmish sound too fight oriented to me. These guys are traders. Though, once you become the Sheriff or the Don, your primary weapon and other aspects change.

I like the MOO2 trait system but one has to be careful with changes to discounts, interest rate, gold share from mugged traders, etc. Also, I'm not sure I want players to go through a dialogue with attribute picks. I want to minimize any settings and stuff. Will think about it because of the replayability benefit though.

[Zaroth]

A quick reply as for now, maybe I'll post something longer later:

• however unprofitable it may be, the weapon shop in the center is still needed - in my case I just leveled and needed to buy some better weapon to bash the thugs outside the castle. And while selling in castle may be unprofitable, buying there still is - especially when you just bought additional pocket and are traveling to a certain map corner anyway. - thanks to the quadratic price increase, the profit margin is not so low (at least on fixed market map)
• delayed attacks would be useful for the one reason I said - because right now if you hire thugs, everyone knows that it was you who hired them, since they appear on your turn and you just visited the thieves guild. Maybe make them appear on start of the opponent turn to add some plausible deniability?
• experience farming doesn't sound connected to the dead player's placement at all, they are petrified till their turn anyway... care to elaborate?
• ambush, nighstalk, skirmish combat oriented - oh, do you really mean it? To me all of these three sound rather focused on avoiding being attacked by creeps (ambush, nighstalk - or in case of nighstalk additional ability of players unable to find and mug you), and skirmisher sounds to me like an excellent thug trap avoidance method - after all, good traveling trader knows his ways of escaping from unpleasant situations... especially if the ZoCing thugs were changed to appear on the beginning of your turn instead of during the opponent's who hired them. None of them seems really battle-oriented to me... Come on, these aren't berserk or backstab
• trait system - well, for those who want it simple (I doubt if many would like to play a boring game without traits when the version with them would be available, but anyway) you could have an option... wait, OAB. Nevermind

[Kvinkunx]

Am I wrong or do we both see the weapon shop in the city fine as it is? I agree with you that there are situations when the shop is handy. If it wasn't, there wouldn't be a reason to put it there. OTOH I don't think it is exploitable repeatedly on purpose.

Delayed attacks lack any good reason in the first place I think. Why would I want to hide my intention to bring a specific player down? There are no alliances possible. I can't see how another player would send thugs after you just because you've send some after him or another player. Hiring thugs just to have a revenge is too expensive here and sometimes also time-consuming if you are far from any Thieves' Den.

Experience farming in the center and respawn coordinates are connected in the sense that if the city is too crowded and all the Potion Shops are occupied, AI would decide that it cannot heal this turn and would pursue other goals, becoming an easy target. I will prevent this by respawning traders at a random hex of city walls. Implementing a church or two as you've suggested should also prevent AI with no money to suicide itself over and over.

Abilities - in my eyes "ambush", "nightstalk", and "skirmish" are combat abilities. If I want to "ambush" somebody or "skirmish" with somebody, I sure don't want to avoid him. With "stalk", perhaps I do. Anyway, players usually don't give a crap about linguistics and those abilities can be used elusively. To help improve gameplay, I will consider this feature.

Making fun of me about options, are we? At this point the first round of player 1 is pretty full of dialogues - 1) game length, 2) AI setting, 3) first shopping (usually). And you vote for squeezing in one more dialogue with traits. Well, I may put the mentioned option as a switch to the game length dialogue or something and hope for patience of the first player.
Alternatively I may merge traits with the abilities above and place them in a Trainer Shop close to the starting position of every player. No points, just gold price for training. First ability for free perhaps. Whoever wants to shop there, can do so. Whoever doesn't like abilities, doesn't have to and will save money for goods.
I don't know yet, just thinking.

[Kvinkunx]

I would also like to offer players a reason to pick specific traits. Not sure what it should be based on yet.
Might be fun to give one trait randomly chosen and then let the player choose the rest that fits well with it according to his/her taste?

[Zaroth]

Weapon shop in city - yeah, it's completely fine - besides the fact that it's the default respawn point for dead players and it's blocked ~50% of the game (with 8 players and 4 AI it was about that much). That was my point when I was writing that it's needed - just stop making it a cemetery or a petrified statue holder

Delayed attacks - what you present here is perfectly reasonable when considering serious, "optimized" players. However, people are just people - some play for fun, some play to win, some play petty, some understand it's just a game. I would surely prefer to attack a petty player (therefore considering revenge as a real option) with a delayed attack to maximize my chances. Besides, since as you noticed, Thieves' Guilds are located quite sparsely and one isn't near one quite often. So I'd like to maximise my usage of time I spend there - if I see that most of my opponents shop in the city (or are near the city anyway and death won't be a handicap) I consider my visit in TG (or passing it) wasted. However, if I could plan ahead and think "this rich player is in the city, in two turns he will probably be quite far away from it, so it will hurt him then", I'd do it. Well, since I started learning WML just recently I don't know how much difficulty could such a queue of delayed user-generated events produce - it may be too much hassle for what it's worth, you may be right with that. Nevertheless, I still think it'd be a nice feature - you just don't have to use it.

To make usage of the temple clearly inferior, I suggest that after going there it'd eat up rest of your MP (and move you to an adjacent hex, so you aren't blocking it for other players) besides healing you. Or you could go another way - make players respawn with 50 % HP, this would restrict the temple's usefulness to visiting players. I don't like this idea, however, dying should be a handicap, going the cheaper way to heal afterwards even more.

Abilities - oh well, you meant the names... I being a non-native speaker don't really "feel" the true meaning of this words when I use them, they were to me just descriptions of masking/agile units in Wesnoth until I stopped and thought what they actually mean... Well, names surely could be changed, but wouldn't that produce confusion to Wesnoth players already used to "skirmisher" trait doing what it does? However, if you plan to adhere to the theme so strictly, it probably can't be avoided

Regarding set-up time - you know, Bob's RPG era and his Brotherhood of Light add-on or even Survival Xtreme (with 800 gold shopping takes quite a while for a new player) have quite a long setting up phases and they still have lots of fans. I think you're underestimating players, people playing add-ons of this flavor (being a Wesnoth conversion to a whole new theme) are already used to this (and it's really an issue for first-time players only). (Am I overusing brackets? )

Just as a side note, since I'm a WML beginner - care if I code the temple for you? I already learned quite a lot skimming the WML of your add-on and it looks like a simplest task to do. And you won't be able to say my ideas are not backed up by actions!

PS an idea - the more people buy a certain trait, the more expensive it becomes - it adds an element of competition (if more players care about having the same ability) and prevents the game from all players becoming nightstalkers and all of them disappearing at night. However, if it was added, the abilities should be sold in city to make chances to get them equal - or maybe if the abilities are pricey and the map is the one with fluctuating market it isn't that much an issue, since you travel all over the map anyway probably then.

PS2 Another idea, or rather a design question - have you considered changing the prices of the utility items (lamp, horse, etc) depending on the game gold goal (500, 1000...)? Right now getting a horse in a 500 gp game rather isn't an option...

PS3 I don't think it's a good idea to force players to pick a certain trait in any way. It should be completely dependent on player's style and taste IMHO. It's for replayability value, not for play-as-I-force-you-to value. And if a trait isn't picked very often because it's too handicapping/expensive, it should be balanced then. I'd be also wary of buying abilities for starting money - that could be a hell to balance, IMHO even more than the abstract points (I'm aware that in my ideas I included trait which doubles starting money )

[Kvinkunx]

However, if I could plan ahead and think "this rich player is in the city, in two turns he will probably be quite far away from it, so it will hurt him then", I'd do it.

The logic you present is based on a specific situation when you are at a Thieves' Den and another player is in the city. You don't have to find a Thieves' Den useful everytime you pass by. Think of it more like this: "this rich player is in the city, in two turns he will probably be quite far away from it, while I happen to be in reach of a Thieves' Den within 2 turns, so I guess I will go there and hire some thugs". He's spent some effort on being the most effective trader so you should spend some too to at least bring him down.

People play for many reasons, thats right. That isn't a fault of the game itself though... If I go and play an FPS and my team is joined by a team killer, it doesn't mean the game itself is bad. You can always kick a misbehaving player or simply start a session with people you know and like to play with.

Temple: after healing, I will use the same algorithm like for respawning - the player will be brought out to a random castle wall hex. With MP depleted.
You may give a shot to coding the Temple if you want but it won't be effective for me to include it in the code, I would still have to link it to AI and some key variables. Might be more useful if you coded something for your own add-on and then discussed the code with me? Don't worry about backing up your actions, its the ideas I value the most!

Abilities: Yes, I meant the names but also the purpose of the abilities and behaviour of units. Eg. a Wose sure doesn't use its ambush ability to stay away from fights. Anyway, if I will implement such abilities, i won't change the names.

Setup times: you're probably right.

PS: Pricey would do I think.

PS2: I have considered different prices in the General Store but haven't found it useful. In a short game the victory comes pretty quickly and you barely have time to visit the store before the session is over.
It makes more sense to me to alter the corner bosses and the amount of gold they guard in dependence on game length.

PS3: If I want to give the player impulse to pick specific traits, I have to set something first. It can be one random trait, it can also be a random event, such as "The Sheriff has doubled his guard count. They patrol the woods and will arrest any trader muggers even outside the city walls!". In such a case, you probably wouldn't want to pick a trait that boosts your share from killing players and focus on something else, like trading traits.
Hmm, perhaps the best way is to let the players pick freely and then throw events at them during play.

[Rigor]

i must play this game asap with u guys online, i havent kicked ur traders balls in a long time already, kvin

[Kvinkunx]

I gotta speed up development then, looking forward to a session!

[Heindal]

This a great multiplayer scenario, even though you should reconsider if you could trade other goods than just weapons. I just created a trader inspired by games like rings of medusa, that allows to create different goods also buying and selling options directly within a city definition.

Your game however inspires me to work my concept out a little ^^.