Awesome stuff, both of you!
An ACKS freelancer once said that what he loved about ACKS was that it was fractal. You could go as deep as you wanted in any sub-system and create yet more sub-systems.
Re: Commissioning System:
How does the commissioning system work with mercenaries, then? That is, normally the commissioning system treats equipment as one row higher on the price chart, but mercs don’t follow that price chart, so I’m not sure how many more mercs I could commission then normal.
Then there’s the GP/day ‘construction’ rate; if mercs follow the same rule as animals (??) then 1gp/day means it’ll take twelve days per crossbowman I want to hire, so if I need 240 crossbowmen (eight units at platoon scale) it’ll take 2880 days, or about eight years? That seems high.
(In case it’s relevant, my group found out there’s a 700 goblin force approaching a small outlying domain we’d like to protect. I’m not sure how many weeks we have. Hopefully more than two. Thus we need to raise as many troops as possible as fast as possible. I’m interested in the best way to do this)
Isn’t “Constructing Mercenaries” just like training conscripts? I suppose you could hire a bunch of normal men, train, and equip them if you can’t conscript.
I believe training particular troops of a kind is covered in great detail in domains at war: campaigns. there are percentages of normal men who qualify for certain roles and then you need to spend a certain number of months training them.
Well, Alex mentioned that “Commissioning” mercenaries would actually represent putting out enough advertisements to attract mercs from the surrounding area rather than raising them from scratch
Have you thought any more about this? I’m close enough to guilddom that I’m thinking of writing up rules myself, but I thought I’d check in here before I started.
I have, and I’ll share what I have. I’m off schedule, I apologize - between work and my temerity to actually start a game of my own, my time has been more limited than I expected.
Aside from the initial expansion of the trade routes I’m behind on doing the actual math to prove if it’s workable (as compared to Hideouts), most of what I have is still in the what-if stage.
So we don’t clutter up this long thread more, I’ve started it here:
http://autarch.co/forums/house-rules/merchant-venturer-mogul
I’d very much welcome your input and suggestions, and where you think I should expand or contract ideas. Your input will get this going a lot faster than me puttering over theoretical spreadsheets.
As you’re the one that’s actually playing, and I’m only here thinking, if you have any thoughts on what part of any of that in there you’d want to look into before other parts, I’d very much welcome the feedback, so I can target myself to what’s immediately useful to you in play.
Since we've already got a thread for my explorations in mercantalism I guess I'll just post here.
I've been thinking about how I want to run ventures in ACKS, and I think one of the biggest things the book leaves undefined is how demand modifiers and prices are learned. On one hand, it seems like a certain amount of it should be common knowledge- Anyone passing through my hometown can see the vineyards and apple orchards and be aware that we make a lot of fruit and wine. On the other hand, giving PCs access to all demand modifiers for free gives them a really powerful wealth of information!
Same sort of logic goes for current prices.
I'll post my thoughts on how *I* will run it later.
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Proposed Rules:
DEMAND:
Any demand modifier of +3- is automatically known and should be part of the town's core description. ("You enter swinewich! The town boasts a large saltworks and is famous for its hams. You've met traders carrying spices and grain to swinewich, since the salty earth is poor for crops, and seasoned hams can be sold at a premium.") Characters with bargaining do not even need to visit a town to know its threes, barring special circumstances, they either already know, or can make reliable guesses. A forest town by the ocean probably exports timber and game.
Demand modifiers of +-1 or 2 can be found by a character with bargaining who stays in town for a week.
MARKET PRICES:
I'm currently leaning towards current prices being a little trickier- PCs are only aware of the prices being offered by the merchants they meet, because the particular circumstances of every town make it impossible to derive the current wholesale price based solely on the current retail price. They can, of course, try to persuade a merchant to change his proffered goods, but that involves a reaction roll and the risk of alienating him.
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Is this something you could ask a Sage? It seems reasonable to assume there'd be money for a man who just sat around keeping track of prices and import/export ratios so he'd be an expert on demand modifiers and current market fluctations. How much would he charge? I guess if he charged a sufficiently low amount, the above rules would be pointless, since you'd just throw gold at him immediately.
I think I generally agree with you on demand modifiers; I’d like the PCs to know the obvious, major ones, but anything small should be relatively hidden and/or discovered in play.
As far as current market prices, I’ve always assumed that the time involved in finding a buyer also included traveling through the market and talking to a number of merchants, figuring out what things were being sold for and what they could get away with. I don’t think it’s valuable to make players struggle to learn the current price, unless you actually want to have significant price variances (that is, different rolls) for different merchants or parts of town.
As far as a sage doing it, well, this is a real job in reality, so it would probably exist in-world. It’s a fairly well-paid job, so I’d want to balance the price such that it’s not worth doing for small transactions but valuable for major ones. Perhaps
1,000 gold a month for access to his data, or something in that general vicinity.