A Resource class?

[Itangalo]

Could it be useful, for providing methods for converting resources or managing prices? Or is it handled by add-on code just as well?

[Itangalo]

Perhaps the right approach is not to have resource as a class, but market. Then you could have types of resources defined in the market, as well as costs/conversion rates for various things.

(Thanks for Chuck L White Jr. for bringing up things that led to these thoughts.)

[Itangalo]

Ok, so here's a sketch of what a Market class could provide.

• A list of which resources the market uses. "Resources" here means things that are accepted as currency by the market (and could for example be money, but also stuff like wood/clay/wool/grain/ore and victory points). This is set when the market is created.
• A list of things you can buy at the market ("goods"), along with the prices (given in the listed resources). The things you can buy could both be resources (i.e. conversion/exchange rates) and other stuff (like buildings, technologies, event cards, victory points and whatnot). These are set when the market is created and could be updated during play.
  • There should be room for "any" as cost – for example "two gold and one 'any' gives a resource card" or "four any gives one clay". I guess that it should be possible to distinguish "four any of the same kind" from "four whatever".
  • It should be possible to set limits on how many units can be bought of each type of good. For example, there are only two "hacienda" but an infinite amount of ore. Or whatnot. The amount could be changed during play.
  • It should be possible to add resolver functions for goods, taking care of any special effects.
• There should be a method for displaying what goods can be bought for a given set of resources, making it easier to see what an agent can buy.
• There should be a method for buying something. This method must update the marked inventory (assuming the goods are limited in quantity). It should probably take the buyers list of resources as argument, along with the id of the good to buy, but what should it return? Probably the updated list of resources, or false if the buy couldn't be made. Not the good itself, since it is already known to the buyer. Any special effects are taken care of by the resolver function, so that should be called when the good is bought.
  • Maybe there should be another parameter to allow buying large quantities at the same time, but I doubt it. Handling exceptions when 5 out of 6 items could be bought is tricky, and if there are any resolvers to call they would still have to be called once per buy (I guess). Or, which is probably better, the resolver is only run once. So multi-buy becomes something different than buying once multiple times. This could be useful for example if every buying occasion (but not item) raises the cost by 1, or something. Then the multi-buy method should probably take an array of goods to buy, allowing to buy different types of items at the same time.

[Itangalo]

Also: setPrice, getPrice, setQuantity and getQuantity methods.

A potential problem with the 'any' cost is that the payment might be made with another resource than the agent intended. Standard principle would be to take the most abundant resource after non-any resources are paid. If the agent wants to control it further, the resource list sent to the buy method should be set to only the resources used in the purchase.

Possible addition: managing goods costing a flexible amount of resources. (Pay X, get X+1, or something.)

Possible addition: Managing resource deduction from agents. This would require a standardised way of storing resources (such as sub properties of agent.resources).

[Itangalo]

And: Initial value for quantity. Perhaps a cap. And a method for restocking. (Good when markets are used for worker placement.)

[Itangalo]

Implemented, mostly. Still to do:

• buyMultiple()
• Consider managing goods costing a flexible amount of resources.
• Consider managing resource deduction from agents. Are we sure that only agents will carry out purchases?

[Itangalo]

Closing this issue. See #30 and #31 for remaining issues.