Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 3037
Joined: Sunday, 2nd January 2011, 02:06
Early-Game Market Portal
Shops often create interesting choices for spending your gold, but consumable shops have almost exclusively cheap items. Once you've cleared Orc, you'll typically have enough money that any scroll, potion, or food item you could possibly want from a shop can be paid for with loose change. Oftentimes it isn't even worth actually buying, because it's just as easy to pay for later and it can't be destroyed by enemy attack while it's still in the shop, so if you run out of that kind of consumable it's guaranteed to be waiting for you later. A scroll shop on V8 will be cheap enough to completely buy out that there's hardly any difference between it and a pile of scroll-themed loot sitting on the ground, except the glowing shapeshifters can't get it. So consumable shops are mostly interesting in the early game.
On the other hand, it wouldn't be meaningful to put the good shops in a pre-Orc timed portal, because there's no reasonable way to be able to afford anything good that spawns. Spawning the Hat of the Alchemist in a D5 timed portal shop is just obnoxious, since there never was any chance of getting the money for it before it's too late. Just adding more consumable shops isn't really helpful, either, because quite a few consumables are strategic decisions that you'll plan to want later. That potion of cure mutation can just stay sitting safely in that D5 shop so you can come back when you have mutations you want cured, but if you get it in a D5 portal shop instead you can either buy now or give it up forever.
The likely possibility of being able to purchase your choice of consumables from an early portal vault would positively impact the item identification mini-game, by adding in a meaningful alternative. Currently, you read- and quaff-ID stuff as soon as you have two of them until you have all the ones that might be important, and then you stash the rest until you have spare identify scrolls. Regular consumable shops are too rare to significantly impact this strategic decision, but if there was an aggregate 75% chance for a mini-bazaar before Orc you might choose to stop use-identifying consumables early in hopes of not wasting important ones that you hope to shop-ID later. Or you can forgo shop-identification, and plan to use that money to stock up on multiple copies of especially useful consumables if they are available.
Adding a mini-bazaar Market Portal would be a fairly simple addition to code. It could even share the same maps as the bazaar, since bazaar maps exist for visual appeal and not for tactical purposes.