Is it worth fiddling with those? Intend to play with 2... "Friends," so with my unbelievable math skills, I concluded that reducing the margins by 25% per extra person would be prudent for balance... But is it? Or is it preferable to keep the normal margins? I don't want to get showered with gold in the first year, but I also don't want to struggle to buy a singular parsnip seed.
What's the highest monetary restriction? That's probably what I will be using when I play with my pals.
Depends on how it is done. I mean... come on. If things sold at a quarter of what it used to, most things wouldn't BE profitable. It wouldn't matter how many you sold, you'd be literally selling at a loss, and the vast majority of all crops would be completely impossible to raise for money. For example, let's look at the Parsnip. You buy it for 20g, it sells for 35g. If they halved the value of the parsnip sales, it would sell for less than 20g, and you would literally be making a loss on every parsnip you sell. It just wouldn't make economic sense to put them in the ground, even the ones given for free, because you would make less money planting and harvesting them than it would just selling the actual seeds themselves to Pierre. However, if they take into account sale price, you run into a problem when you try to calculate how much they should be purchased for, especially for things like Coffee Beans and Ancient Fruit. I'm curious as to how it actually works, because I suspect it is somewhere between these two extremes, and I'm one of those weird guys who tends to play the game with calculator in hand who actually enjoy crunching the numbers.
The way it is currently implemented, the difficulty modifier applies to the sale price of everything and the purchase price of seeds and saplings. So, for example, with a difficulty modifier of 50%, you can buy parsnip seeds for 10g from Pierre and you'll get a base price of 17g (or 18g; I don't know how it is rounded) for selling the grown Parsnip. The Traveling Merchant follows her own rules though, so Rare Seeds & Coffee Beans from the cart are still 1000g & 2500g respectively.
That's very interesting, MouseyPounds. It reminds me of how Civilization has a marathon mode where the research and build times for everything is extended significantly to make each era of time last longer. Do you know how high the difficulty modifier goes?
I believe the new game interface lets you pick 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%. But you can edit the save file to change it to whatever you want. I briefly played at both 90% and 110% in singleplayer.
Basically makes things easier by putting a 10% increase on both sales & seed purchases. i.e. Parsnip seeds cost 22g instead of 20g, but the grown Parsnip brings in 38 or 39g instead of 35g. If you want to experiment, the save file entry is called "<difficultyModifier>"; a 75% profit margin would be a difficultyModifier of .75 .
I'm thinking a reduction for each player in my hosted game is gonna be ideal, so I'm imagining something like 75% difficulty for 4 people.
Hadn't played around with it yet, so that's interesting to know. If the purchase price of seeds is 25%, you could buy 40 potatoes with your initial 500g, which would get a much faster start to grind up the farming XP. With some mixed seeds from weeds, plus a few forage finds sold straight to Pierre's for more seeds on day 1, you could easily have Farming 3 on day 7. Ploughing the cash from that harvest straight back into more potato seeds, and supplemented by a bit of fishing, Farming 5 on day 13, Farming 6 on day 20 (booooo egg festival) and Farming 8 by day 26 would all be quite doable And if fiber still sells for 1g, instead of rounding down to zero, it's well worth slashing everything on the farm and in cindersap, not just for the mixed seeds, but to sell all that fiber too and buy even more seeds; for 0E cost, you could quickly and easily get hundreds of fiber and buy 25+ extra potatoes. Possibilities....
