Analyzing the game experience, I noticed that the merchants in Sepermeru and on the island of Siptah are not particularly popular, so I suggest:
Trade and barter - make the purchase of goods not only for coins, but also by barter. For example: for 1000 units of stone, you can buy 2000 fibers, for 2000 stone you can buy 1000 wood, for 3000 stone you can buy 1000 iron ore and so on… Weapons dealers would accept payment only in ingots (iron, steel, and hardened steel). The weapons produced would be made of the same metal as the payment (just need to find a balance in pricing).
Traders giving quests/missions - random quests and missions with very different rewards (except legendary ones). For example: chop wood, bring an animal skin, collect berries, collect stones, etc. The value of the reward depends on the quest.
Random maps - When killing any named NPC, make a 50% chance to get a map with valuable loot in the form of materials and a 50% chance to get one legendary item.
Chariots - the ability to ride in a chariot with a spear or sword or the ability to take a passenger on your horse. It’s been a long-time dream of mine to see this in Conan:)
Economy and the value of objects - There are many objects and things in the game that are rarely used. On the Exiles map, obsidian ingots are hard to come by, but weapons and tools are practically incompetent against star metal. Many players don’t even go for obsidian because there is no point in it when there is star metal. Also, for example, with food. There seem to be many recipes, but few purposes. Since we have taverns, it would be possible to make a cooking mechanic for the tavern. So that visitors who came would pay for the food or drink that We made for the tavern. This in turn would allow us to earn coins to spend them at merchants.
Golems are good of course, but… - what if we change the mechanics of resource extraction golems and give this right to porters. And let the golems play the role of guards. 1,2,3 tiers of porters would extract relatively little. But the named ones would extract 2 times more and randomly they would have more developed one of the skills: woodcutting, stone mining, fiber collection, ore collection, coal collection. Specialization would increase resource extraction by 30%. Make a limit of up to 3 simultaneously working porters by specialization. And set the radius of their work around the base.
The recipes one is a big one. As you said, there are so many recipes but few of them are worth making (especially the stove ones) and most of them drop from exploration so you end up with more than you could possibly use. I think I have over 130 salted pork in my fridge and I didn’t cook any of it myself.
Being able to sell in taverns would be cool. Alternately, splitting food and drink into different “faction favorites” would be a neat way to curate your tavern guest experience. You’d have to stock the bar and guests would deplete the inventory and what you stocked it with would influence the types of thralls that came by.
One of my biggest pet peeves about the game is that, as you said, certain items and materials are useless or drop far too regularly that it diminishes the crafting loop that used to be necessary. Padding (perfected and regular) both drop from chests like candy. Haven’t had to make a padding, other than to complete a journey step, since the loot revamp. Same with weapon handles, or dragonpowder (I don’t PvP so ymmv if you need a lot of bombs).
I’d give the Tavern counter an inventory that accepted food items.
Periodically, the food is consumed to spawn an NPC.
No food? Noone visits.
Better food? Better thralls visiting.
This is quite simple to implement. Of course I’d like if certain thematic foods caused thematic NPC’s to spawn (Darfari Soups making Darfari spawn for instance) but I’d be perfectly fine with just what I outlined before.
Something that would spice up the Exiled lands without much effort would also be a sort of reputation system with each town. It doesn’t even need to be anything too fancy:
-Killing members of an oposing twon raises favour with another
-If you have positive favour, they no longer attack on sight
-You can use their merchants
-Some merchants will require that you reach higher favour
And where would the game save that information? Why, on the Clan itself!
Clanless exiles are never trusted, so you never get positive reputation.
Exiles in clan act as representatives: if you slay NPC’s of a town, your Clan loses reputation with them (and gains with another town).
I know that with Dune coming around the Corner, CE won’t get a lot of support anymore, so I’m sticking with the simplest sugestions.
That is, you do not want Conan to develop and be a versatile game that would gain priority to online, and not its annual decline and, ultimately, the closure of the project? I do not really want it. And I think it is right that the developers are now busy solving the problems in the game. But at this time we have the opportunity to throw them a lot of ideas for future updates. That is why I wrote my proposals.
What problems have they solved kid? None! They continue to add more problems and have failed to fulfill things they said they would do. Every time the rookie developers touch the code we get more bugs.
Don’t go absolute, it hands your opponent a weapon.
Just because funcom is not good at fixing issue, or fixing them in any sort of timely manner, doesn’t mean the don’t usually fix the big bugs eventually.
See how I left room there for fixes to be accounted for.
Been my understanding there has been so much developer hack work done by so many even a pro would have issues working with it. Supposedly a good part of this update is basically combing out the spaghetti code so bugs can be fixed more easily, as can adding content.
Now “supposedly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. A supposition isn’t a fact, it’s depending on your faith in who is supposing what. I have little faith in funcom, they have proven with persistence they can’t be depended on.
I would suggest that, too. The main change I suggest is for the chariot to hold a decent amount of supplies or loot. Like enough room to move a pvp base.