Industry Chars Disadvantaged

[ArPharazon]

Yeah, industry started lagging behind slightly, but when the map resets everybody's gonna want brick walls and hopefully that will help increase demand. Also, we could try to band together as metalworkers and form a cartel to artificially drive up prices, I suppose...

I'm guessing in the future we'll get plenty of weird DFy things to spice it up. Different metals like copper, silver, gold. Coal veins. Gems. A Phosphorescent Fungus. Some Dungeon Crawling elements and weird events. Maybe one day we'll even see mines no longer operate as "pocket universes" and be able to turn it into an underdark.

Oh my god, that would so many kinds of awesome! Of course for it to really work, you'd need DF-like geology and all mines connecting to the same secondary map layer. Not exactly DF-like though, more like 3 types of rock: Mineable, difficult, valuable. Difficult rock (soil?) would be the background that takes an obscene amount of time to mine. Valuable would appear in clusters or small veins and actually give you something. Mineable would appear in semi-random spagetti-ish snaking veins connecting the cluster. Add some already present empty pockets of air every now and then, some of them with HFS of some sort, randomly spawn underground creatures everywhere, and you have players actively and naturally creating a very nice system of Underdark-esque underground dungeons.

In fact if you added mine carts and tracks, and gave them both decay time, you could also end up with very realistic "abandoned mine" places: Half decayed tracks, rusting carts, and monsters roaming through now-vacant (very realistically mined out, since somebody actually built them to mine stuff) tunnels, dug out and abandoned long ago. We'll call out MMO 2.0: Now with user created dungeons! =p

Maybe if nature players could make some sort of salve from herbs that healed HHP far faster than a bandage, the ability to forage small amounts of food from forest tiles, but in exchange, industry players get to make rifles.

...yes. Make them do a bit more damage than a bow, with a slower firing rate (muzzle-loader type of thing). We'd have a steady income of LP from making bullets and could easily trade them with nature people for salve.

Heh, sell them guns then sell them bandages... How ethical.

[Potjeh]

Also, we could try to band together as metalworkers and form a cartel to artificially drive up prices, I suppose...

The current prices of iron are just fine, considering the effort involved. I'd say they're a bit on the high side, actually. If you tried pushing prices up to unreasonable levels, your cartel would quickly get boycotted as everyone makes an industry alt to supply their iron.

[ArPharazon]

That's why cartels have lots of thugs with guns =p

Though then again, you might just skip the whole industry thing and start a roving barbarian horde...

[KoE]

That's funny, Potjeh, I always thought iron prices (yours, anyway, which you say are based on the norm - I'll admit ignorance here) were a bit low for the effort involved. Obviously I don't feel too strongly about it, probably because at the moment iron isn't really that useful and is waaay too common. The current prices are gonna change if iron actually becomes scarce, too. Same with any new metals. Which, given how loftar's said mines are gonna be, seems like a pretty safe bet.

As for cartels, if mines are somewhat difficult to handle, I think the nature fellows will be willing to put up with a certain degree of artificially high prices before they go traipsing off to find their own. Of course, that assumes everyone breaking off into naturist hippy communes and high-tech industrial fortresses to a degree, 'cause nature guys could just move to a known mine.

Anyway, the really important suggestion thus far is metal tipped arrows. Do want.

[Jfloyd]

If we could get metal tipped arrows, and could rape chickens for fletching that'd be great.
I'd imagine we could make arrows out of each type of metal.
I'd be happy with five arrows per bar.

[ArPharazon]

Well if we had extra damage dealing metal arrows and if arrows broke sometimes that would stimulate the iron economy pretty well.