improve DC merchants

[Optera]

Playing through all of TTW3.2 I noticed DC merchants really lack decent stock compared to Mojave merchants.
At high levels even traveling merchants in the Mojave carry 4k caps, rare mods and ammo like .50 explosive.
Named merchants in the Mojave are useful to shop at:
Sink: 24k caps and 100% repair
Blake: 12k caps and great overall selection
Vendertron, Alexander, Contreras: 8k caps and a great selection of mods and ammo

Meanwhile in the DC wasteland Flak and the traveling caravans after investing cap out at 4k caps, and carry mostly useless low to mid level stuff even at lvl 50. For example .50 explosive ammo and AMR mods are impossible to find in DC.


I'd like to see Durga as the DCs best merchant with a selection similar to Vendertron.
Flak & Shrapnel, Gustavo and Harith, after investing, to have 6k-8k caps and a similar collection as Alexander and Contreras.
Moira, Holmes and other general merchants should be brought to 4k caps and sell equally good wares as traveling Mojave merchants.

[RoyBatty]

NV merchants have entirely too much crap and money, totally breaks the economy.

[Optera]

Most NV merchants are affiliated with organizations way bigger than what we see in game. Having lots of caps and good selection of wares makes perfect sense for the NCR, Crimson Caravan, Van Graffs or Gun Runners.
With DC merchants you do have a point. DC has no large organizations with a booming economy.

As for economy, any Bethesda game breaks sooner or later. FO3 is especially bad in this regard with Enclave dropping the best PA and weapons available and respawning faster than anything else.
Limiting the amount of caps merchants have available only delays breaking game economy by a few hours play time.

Making 100% repair, endgame ammo, mods and food like Yao Gui Medallions available in shops would be working cash sinks. As it is now, I have no incentive to even spend money on anything at any DC merchant. All they sell is either crap or in too limited supply, so I end up using crafting mods to convert 5.56 to .50 and save caps in the process.

[Death_Reaper56]

Most NV merchants are affiliated with organizations way bigger than what we see in game. Having lots of caps and good selection of wares makes perfect sense for the NCR, Crimson Caravan, Van Graffs or Gun Runners.
With DC merchants you do have a point. DC has no large organizations with a booming economy.

As for economy, any Bethesda game breaks sooner or later. FO3 is especially bad in this regard with Enclave dropping the best PA and weapons available and respawning faster than anything else.
Limiting the amount of caps merchants have available only delays breaking game economy by a few hours play time.

Making 100% repair, endgame ammo, mods and food like Yao Gui Medallions available in shops would be working cash sinks. As it is now, I have no incentive to even spend money on anything at any DC merchant. All they sell is either crap or in too limited supply, so I end up using crafting mods to convert 5.56 to .50 and save caps in the process.

Yeah,no.FO 3 is nowhere near as bad as NV.Obsidian fucked up the economy with NV badly by stupidly allowing you to repair things to full condition regardless of your repair skill.Making that skill useless to invest in unless you want Jury Rigging.They also made everything cost at least 100 caps non fully repaired.FO 3 handled the economy much better because you needed to invest in repair to repair everything to full condition.Your barter skill had a much better impact of how much caps you would get for selling things while in NV,it's useless because again,Obsidian fucked up the economy.In regards to the enclave,that isnt broken and is perfectly fine.Because they show up late game and at that point,making caps shouldnt be that difficult anymore.

[RoyBatty]

I already expanded the DC inventories quite a bit, and no I won't be making it so they have 8000 caps like NV. Eventually will change the NV economy to be less idiotic, where combat armor mkII isn't worth twice as much as power armor, and no 35000 cap weapons which cannot be repaired by vendors etc. NV economy is straight dumb, the game was rebalanced late and not by josh, he said so. It still only costs 2000 caps to get into the strip and casinos are capped at 8000-12000 caps as max you can win, among many other things (like vendor repair) which are very much still balanced for the original economy. If everything is basically free, why have caps at all.

[Laclongquan]

1. Reduce the merchants' bottlecap down to 1000-. That will prevent money bloat a bit.

2. Change perks from achievements or rewards that affect price. PC can only raise Barter if they want better price. And even then it's a bit easy since they can use barter magazine with big sessions. Still, at least that make PC unable to do big shopping frequently

3. Raise the merchant investment to 3000/10000 just to delay the expanding of 4 merchants to middle game. If players want to expand their shops, that need serious dedication to gather money. As it is, the original 200/500 (total 2800) offer is too bloody low and they can expand 4 merchants very early into the game. If you want to build a merchant empire (name of the unmarked quest) you damn well need to be middle game, not newbie, right?

That's it, I dont think you can prevent economic bloats, simply because of fast travel. With FT, PC can travel around the Wasteland and do shopping easy every few days.

[jlf65]

1. Reduce the merchants' bottlecap down to 1000-. That will prevent money bloat a bit.

3. Raise the merchant investment to 3000/10000 just to delay the expanding of 4 merchants to middle game. If players want to expand their shops, that need serious dedication to gather money. As it is, the original 200/500 (total 2800) offer is too bloody low and they can expand 4 merchants very early into the game. If you want to build a merchant empire (name of the unmarked quest) you damn well need to be middle game, not newbie, right?

One and three are at odds with each other. With vanilla merchant caps, it's tough to collect a couple thousand caps, much less your proposed ten thousand. One of the more popular FO3 mods increases the merchant caps given how few most have. Without such a mod, I tend to fall back on using ammo as my primary currency, constantly swapping ammo for goods. That won't work for expanding the merchants as he wants caps, not ammo. So REDUCING caps below vanilla just makes the problem that much worse. Your only recourse to that would be to cheat the game (using the game console to swap ammo for caps, or by quitting and reloading the game to force merchants to respawn caps artificially), or use a mod to bring the caps back up to something reasonable. If you want the quoted behavior, make your own mod. Don't try to push it into the base TTW.

Even if the base TTW allows you to eventually accumulate a tidy stash of caps, I think you forget how expensive everything in NV is. Ever bought an implant? Or a unique NV weapon? Or mods for weapons? They run in the tens of thousands of caps for a single implant/weapon/mod. Your average CW transfer will very quickly run out of caps trying to buy a few things that match their level (which tends to be why some players ask for a mod that lowers the player's level upon entering NV the first time).

[Laclongquan]

You simply dont see the scenario, do you?

Because merchants have less bottlecap as I suggest, it's harder to accumulate spare cash to invest in merchants.

With the bar raised to 3000/10000, the total would be 52k. To gather that much cash in my scenario, you would need to save money until level 14 at the very least. Possibly 16.

And even then, you would need to acquire all the accessible shops in CW.

[Risewild]

Reducing the merchant caps to 1k will just make players bored, and force them to take the tedious route and fast travel to all the available merchants one after the other.

Since there's no random encounters or enemies while fast travel, the player will still be able to cash thousands of caps without any danger, it just makes it boring because of having to fast travel over and over to unload a good haul. It's a gameplay loop that would annoy me as hell if I was a player.

[Laclongquan]

I know, I know.

I did use the Fast Travel mechanic after all.

Curse Morrowind devs! When they introduced Mark and Recall spell, they created an abyss.

Without it, the breakage of economy system would delay to middle-late game stage.