Economics of RWL

[taekwondokid42]

I'm making this a post in development because, as always, I have a few proposals for things to change but this post has a fair bit of strategy involved as well. This post is an analysis of economics in RWL (all variables, not just cash) and postulations on how to take advantage of these economics.

A natural starting place, to me, is the most important measurement in the game, networth. As far as I know, there are only two ways of winning Redwall, the first is by having lots of army and the second is by having lots of cash (assuming you can't find a way to turn it into armies). For reasons I will explain, food is a handicap, not a means for success. (edit: I did my math wrong, so it's not as bad as I thought. Food represents a potential way to make more cash, if you can sell it for $25 each but it will only be worthwhile if you can sell 2/3 of it. Otherwise it's not much of an economic tool and represents a more risk-free form of long term NW, but less lucrative than cash.)

As best I can tell, the two ways of doing things around here are by either being an indy or by running some form of cashing strat. As an indy, you can only be self-sufficient with money if you make use of the market as a place to store troops as you mass them. Selling a unit to the mercs will no longer gain you enough money to have kept it around for more than 150 turns, even with camps and race bonuses.

Which means that indies rely on cashers to fund them, through use of the market. But this also opens up a huge vulnerability to indies: beyond what they can store in their bank, they are at the complete mercy of high-leader strategies. Someone with enough leaders can steal all of the cash after troops have been sold. Which means that the indy will have to go back to selling their marketed goods, marketing their current goods, and in general maintaining less than 200 turns worth of troops in their army (and therefore their networth). It is possible, however, for an indy to save up enough troops on the market over the course of several runs and then have enough cash to make a full run without ever selling anything.

Cashers, on the other hand, only need troops for acquiring land (or NW), and will only be paying indies when they want to break indies. So it is in the best interest of the indy to keep troops of every type, forcing the cashers to buy their troops off of the market and giving the indies money to have more successful runs. This actually gives the control to the indies, who get to decide how hard they are going to try to keep the land out of reach of cashers, and get to set the prices on the troops.

The end game is then more interesting. Cashers are going to want to buy up all the troops they can in order to boost their NW. Indies are going to want to spend as many consecutive turns as possible generating troops (or at least until it becomes cheaper to buy them from the market/mercs). Any troops that an indy sells in the end game is going to become networth for the other player, so the indy has to decide if it's worth selling them to get the increased money, or if the better option is to sell them to the mercs and prevent other players from gaining easy networth through the market.

End game market prices are likely to be much higher than at other times, because money is worth less. (once all the market troops have been sold, it's worth whatever you can get from the mercs. And if the market troops never sell out all the way, the cashers get first dibs on the cheapest units).

Teamplay complicates things, particularly where the market is involved. When a solo indy puts troops on the market, he kisses them goodbye. When a team player puts troops on the market, they are still available to the team. This is a very powerful mechanic and is one reason that team play is substantially stronger than individual play.

The usefulness of the market to an indy is limited by the % of troops that they can have on the market at any given time. If 99% of their total troops can be on the market, then they can have 100x the troops than they can support on their own. If only 50% of their total troops can be on the market, then they can only have 2x the troops that they can support. Right now, you can have 84.5% of your total troops on the market, which means you can have ~6.5x the total troops that you can support. On a team, all 6.5x of these are available to the team. As a solo player, only 1x of these are available to you.

The source of power of team play comes from being able to acquire troops without having to pay the full maintenance costs on them. Either you are aiding them away, or you are storing them on the market. This requires coordination but makes two players working together much stronger than a single player working alone.

And so I would propose at least one change, on the grounds that team play is too powerful (this is subjective, but I think it's something that we agree upon as a community): Reduce the amount of troops you can store on the market from .845 to .70. This means that you can have ~3.3 runs worth of troops total on the market, enough that solo indies can still spend 3 or so runs storing troops on the market and then have enough money to make a (nearly) full run without selling troops. This will also dramatically reduce the power of team player over the market, because instead of spending only 1/6 of the resources per run to generate troops you'll be spending closer to 1/3. Team play will still be much better than solo play.

And I would propose a second change to the market: reduce the minimum prices that you can set. Currently, the minimum price is about 3x what you can sell your troops on the mercs for. I don't know what the original logic was, but my guess is that it had something to do with team play over the market (IE reducing the price to minimum and then buying a bunch of troops from your friend for cheap). But that also means that solo players can't try to sell troops for little money when they are desperate for cash. Perhaps it would be okay to halve the current minimum prices?

[Shadow]

typing on a tablet is a pain for more thn a few sentences at a time, so ill address the multitude of threads yiu are making at the end of june if nobody else does sooner