[Suggestion] Event shops

[Warzameg]

Basic idea: an event can have a shop associated with it, giving players an opportunity to do things like buy unusual items or get stuff at a discount.  Think travelling merchants, a sudden glut on the market, a chance to get some military surplus from friends on the Council...

Rough spec:

• If an event has an associated shop, in addition to the button to exit the event, there's another one to open a purchase screen.
• The purchase screen shows the list of available items, along with their price in this shop and how many of the item are available to buy, if the mod author has set a limit.
• Exiting the purchase screen takes them back to geoscape with the event message still up.  This is so they can refer back to it in case the mod author put some useful information there.

Increasingly fancy extensions:

• The purchase screen can have a custom background.
• The mod author can do some randomisation of the shop's contents: (a) they can set the chance of a particular item being available each time an event using this shop triggers; (b) they can set a delta value to partly randomise the amount of an item available (like the one for enemy numbers on missions, so e.g. if the base availability of the item =4 and the delta =2, the amount available each time the shop appears will be 4-6).
• As an alternative to money, the mod author can set a shop to require some item.  The shop's prices are then an amount of this item.  This would allow things like an event shop in Piratez that requires the player to spend Mutant Alliance bounty tokens.  This is set at the shop level, not the item level – this is to reduce UI complexity.

Would anyone use this?  I'm pretty sure Dioxine would use this in XPZ.  Today he was talking about a workaround he's been considering to mimic it, that would involve special 'shopping' missions – it sounded like a complex and kind of painful workaround for the above.

[mutantlord]

Wouldn’t this be easier to implement, if players or npc can have a feature that allows of a very limited dialogue interaction with civillian NPCs in battlescape missions?

The menu for snap shot/auto shot and etc can be replaced with limited dialogue like;

Follow me
Trade with NPC
Unfollow me

This opens up new possibilities like quest missions and ETC.  I refer this to the new Fallout mod for XCom released on Mod.io

[Warzameg]

Personally I prefer the event-based approach I described, for the following reasons.

• Events are much quicker and easier to set up for mod authors than missions.  Speed and ease of use are obviously importance in themselves, but pragmatically I think this also means an event-based approach is more likely to get used.
• Events are much quicker and simpler for players to engage with – the battlescape is a very rich environment to use for shopping, with a bunch of stuff that isn't very relevant to the basic concept of handing other some sort of currency for items.  I think I'd be glad to occasionally spend 40 seconds buying a couple of weapon crates with random contents from an event shop, but that sending a craft and maybe messing with loadouts (unless I can bring rocket launchers to the market?) is another work that I wouldn't want to do this often.
• A system using events strikes me as relatively light in scope and non-invasive, while adding CRPG-like mechanics to the battlescape seems likely to be time-consuming, complex, and plausibly beyond the scope of OXCE.