Knights and Merchants.net Forum

Hey ho

Reading people talking about infinite tree trunks and no need for woodcutters makes me want to participate in this topic.
I played a lot with the market, abused like hell and tried to make the best thing out of the market.
I made things like having a lot of coalmines early for trading coal for tree trunks and it is true: you have a lot of tree trunks then,
without even having one single woodcutter, but there is a high price for having that advantage in the earlygame -> you will have no coal for lategame !
In maps like golden cliffs your coal will be depleted after around 60 minutes , so what will you do then? Even if you have 10 woodcutters now for your woodproduction you will see that you will run out of gold very fast,
so everyone who didnt abuse coal for tree trunks trade will have the advantage now.
But if you have maps with 1000 coal or more there will be no disadvantage in lategame because you have masses of coal, so here abusing the coal is the best you can do.
So what i want to say is that it is about the amount of coal/gold/iron in a map. How would you use over 1000 coal anyway in a game? Maybe in 2-3 hour games, but games normaly are over after 1-2 hours.
So in maps like dead of winter or back in the desert I abuse coal just because its the best thing you can do. It wouldnt be a problem if that maps only have 600 coal.
Then i would adapt my strategy and build an other way, because it is about finding the best build, isn´t it? On Golden Cliffs for example there is only around 600-800 coal,
so i decide to build early woodcutters and keep my trading to a minimum because resources are rare.
So i heard people talking about matt and me being abusers of market and i say it is true! But seriously , why would you ignore something that makes your economy much stronger? So in my opinion market is overpowered now ,
but not because of the market itself but the possibility on most maps to abuse the coal because there is way to much. Golden cliffs is the perfect example for a good map because there you
only use the market to bridge over the time when your trees are growing .( and you trade some Ironbars for horse but that is another story )

So this is my experience and i´m open for questions about it

Once again I disagree, people are just shifting the problem. We both look at it in a different way. You say maps shouldn't have so much coal, I say the market needs reblanced values. Large coal fields were in KaM before the market was even invented, so saying 'omg all maps have too much coal, i need to abuse it' doesn't make much sense.
Having lots of resources on a map shouldn't be abusable at all... Let's go back to original KaM (this is a Remake after all...): what would you do if you had too much coal? If you had too much gold? Or gold chests? Iron bars? Yeah, you would close your storehouse for these wares or perhaps close the metallurgist's or iron smelter. Now people were like 'hey, I can also trade this'. People anticipated, made extra mines to trade, and here we are.
On maps that don't have much coal it is more risky to trade because you will run out sooner.
On maps that don't have much trees you will run out of timber sooner.
Now the other way around:
On maps that have loads of coal you can abuse it and trade.
On maps that have loads of trees you can... no wait, you can't abuse that.
I haven't seen anyone complaining about too large forests. Why? Because the value of coal (and more) needs to be rebalanced, OR the value of tree trunks/timber/all other cheap stuff.

Well acutally you can use loads of trees because then you have a lot of timber and not even the need to trade any resources for tree trunks , so you can build your whole economy while having all your coal for iron/gold production -> so you have what you want : you can play without market then.

And i think changing the value won´t work because if coal for tree trunks isn´t ridiculus high its still worth it to trade on mass-coal-maps because you don´t need that amount of coal anyway.

Indeed. So we need to dump the whole marketplace.
Glad you agree!

Seriously though, it would at least make some difference, also because (lets take 2 coal for 1 tree trunk as an example) you will need the double amount of serfs/serfs will have to walk twice and it takes longer. But preferably I'd make it even more expensive.

TDL if we're going back to the original TSK then we had 5 hours to build our town, then we start fighting.
Let's have 8h multiplayer games then, because that's the way it was in the original game.

Na , i dont think we should dump the whole marketplace, because i think its a great thing . It should help you in sticky situations when you are out of timber or gold and i think it should also help speeding up your build a bit because the game is already time consuming enough . Also i think market allows you to vary builds a bit. I think if there would be no market there would be only 1 or 2 ways to build the most effective citys, which results in all having just one build.
But what is the problem with making less coal in maps? I think its really intresting because you really have to think about how you are going to spend your coal.

SO BE IT!
I agree on that one. Thanks for bringing up the first nice thing about the market. I don't agree there would be just 1-2 ways to build your town without the marketplace though.

I agree with pizza, Maps should be better thought out in the future for sure!

The reason that I hate the marketplace is primarily because of trunk-trading, but this is the root of it: KaM now plays differently. The entire economy is now ruined. This is a quote (in this instance it is taken from Wikipedia) that I hear all over the internet to describe KaM:
"... in order to get loaves of bread, the player is required to first build a farm to get wheat, then a mill to get flour and also a bakery to bake loaves of the flour."

This is what made KaM so great. Now the quote should be changed to this:
"...in order to get loaves of bread, the player is required to first build a coal mine to get coal , then a market to trade it for flour, and also a bakery to bake loaves of the flour...which, oddly, came from coal."
Don't you see? The complex economy of KaM is falling apart. It is shattered. We don't build woodcutter's huts to get tree-trunks. We make coal mines. Why not just take tree-trunks out of the game altogether? Why not just have the sawmill use coal to make timber? That would make your games even faster!

Couldn't agree more.

Complex economy?
The market adds complexity to the economy...
People here are just being way to theoretical,
give me 1 good player who only uses market in order to get acces to trunks and corn.

Actually the market makes it much easier, because as Siegfried pointed out you can 'make' every resources with just one building. That's not very complex.

You see? In theory yes you can make 100000000 knights with only 1 market, 1 baracks, 1 school, 1 inn and 1 farm. Oh no market is imba.

Well but guys as i said before if you dont have enough resources for trade you can´t use the market for trading coal for everything. You have to build a normal economy on maps like golden cliffs because there is just not enough coal for trading for anything . So there is no problem with "no real economy gaming" .
Actually golden cliffs is the perfect map to show that decreasing the amount of coal in maps is a real good solution for avoid the "coal for anything trade" .

@Bo You're not replying to what I said.