I think that a skill that lowers the price of items would be a nice addition to the game. If there is a skill for this I'm not aware of it. "Great bargaining skills, and knowing the right people has helped you to get a great price even when trading with a vending machine." EDIT: I was just thinking of tacking it onto another line, but a new line would be cool too. I didn't know about Curse of the Golden Ratio, but this is a possible alternative to getting Mathemagic. If a trade line was made, additional bag space could be another skill perhaps?
Indeed, and maybe the last skill in the tree is "Your bargaining skills are now so legendary that you can even talk the weapons out of your enemies hands!" (reduces their damage output and 'steal' an artifact off them)
Any such skill would need to be very, very well balanced against the faceroll Zorkmid generation of Golden Ratio, else it'd be rather useless.
On the other hand, that's a skill slot, and seven is nicely calculated as already forcing you to give up quite a lot.
Which is why it needs to be a very, very good skill. Otherwise, you should probably get Mathemagic and roll in Zorkmids.
Yeah - a Math + boosters build (I do archeo/burglary as always, then line walker/magic training/blood magic, and use the last slot for golem to keep me alive through the first level) is more or less money + experience time.
I perpetually have more than a hundred thousand gold on hand, and the shops rarely offer anything worthwhile. I think that a Trade Skill would be pretty useless unless it had lots of nice stat boosts to and trap affinity to go along with it.
A trade skill tree would obviously have a "can you check the back room?" skill, that forces the shop to re-roll its stock.
I'd imagine it would have a 60-80 round cooldown. You don't need more than that in order to make spamming it a deterrent.
I'd definitely support a general 'Economics' skill tree with powerful abilities that drain your zorkmids. Some ideas: 1. It ate my quarter! - Ability: Kick a vending machine, making it spit out one random item. May break vending machine after too many kicks. 2. Bartering - Lower buy prices and higher sell prices in all shops. 3. Bribery - Ability: Bribe enemies at a cost equal to their power. 4. Can you check the back room? (^ nice idea) - Ability: Re-rolls all store items on the current floor. 5. Power of Money - Ability: Summons an endless stream of dread collectors while draining excessive amounts of money. Also perhaps some way to teleport back to a store (as that gets kinda tedious at times).
I think the skills should be named "Fell off the back of the truck" or "It's not in the back" (because let's face it, it never is when you go to a store)
1. Love it! Though I'd probably say there's a cumulative chance of a vending machine breaking, perhaps maxing out at three or four. 2. Simple, though personally sell prices are already a bit on the high side. I'd like to see them lowered. 3. Bribe them to do what exactly? Fight for you? Disappear? Because one is immensely more powerful than the other. 4. Love it. 5. I don't know about endless stream. Maybe summon one and it costs money to keep it around per turn. And I think the problem with the teleport is if you haven't found a shop on the current level, being able to teleport up a level seems a little strong.
Maybe give the ability to sell to vending machines as well in one of the ranks, I hate going to a new floor and getting a full inventory so I have to back track back to brax.
This sounds like a very interesting idea... developers would have to tweak to what they feel is balanced, yeah, but this sounds like a very good base, at the very least. If it happens anyway, but a good idea none the less
More than anything I'm a fan of using money as a power source. I know a lot of people complain of having tens of thousands of the stuff and nothing to do with it.
