Alternate Storyline
Made in Abyss style hole in the earth that goes to some treasure like the room in Roadside Picnic. each floor would need to maintain trade and provide value to the previous floor to be able to expand with the elevator points being at the edges of the circle and more bio-diversity near the center, more monsters near the center as well.
A volcano rises out of the ocean off of the coast of Iceland and each of the major powers in the North Atlantic, the English, The Danes, the Dutch and the French are vying for control of the island, the island itself is unmoored from time and alchemical demons are starting to appear on the coastlines of the rival countries causing havoc, eating babies and spreading rumors that the end times are near.
Since the island is unmoored from time a colonial company will go into the fog surrounding the island and fail or succeed in their mission to investigate the island within a week, but the men who went passed tens of years in the fog.
The player would take the role of one of the merchants in the colonial company charter, not all of the merchant guilds have pooled capital but they in general try to obey the rule of law when interacting with each other, unless they think they can get away with treachery.
Either the player figures out the secrets of the island, builds a colony that can venture to the bottom of the well, and destroys the McGuffin or they are lost to the fog, their company goes insane and starve to death, if they are lucky a few men might make it back to England spreading rumors of Spires made of gold, Deer that can shoot out their tongues like a whip and yank a mans arm off, Runes carved into the cliff-side that only the mad can read, fields of razor sharp grass that light up when anything touches a blade, and men without faces as pale as the morning sun that stand like statues but are warm to the touch
The colonial companies take any rumors they hear and spin them into tales of guaranteed success and fabulous riches, printing their own newspapers and advertising company shares at double the market rate in their columns
Advertisements for merchants and miners and farmers read like the famous Shackleton Ad:
“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.”
The seas around the island are only calm enough for an expedition once every six months in coordination with the tides and trade winds coinciding to disperse the fog around the island and make the waters safe enough for passage. If anyone comes out at all during the passage time, they might not be from the last expedition that left but from some other one they may not even speak a language that is recognizable to any human living.
So how do the colonial companies expect to get a reasonable return? That is mostly not the point, the island serves as an El Dorado type investment illusion, if any profits do come from an expedition they are secondary to the profits a given company can make on the stock market dumping their own shares in the time between setting out for the island and the year it takes to realize the expedition has been a failure.
Likewise because of the alchemical abominations that walk out of the sea and attack villages, transmuting dogs into dog food and men into gold, silver, ash, etc. the Kings of the major powers have made grants of many times a man’s salary to investigate the island. No doubt the men who leave for the frontier are of ill repute, prisoners provided to a company to earn their freedom, gamblers running from debt collectors and low men seeking to win their fortune where so many others have failed.
When the player gets further into the island they might find structures and artifacts rusted and decayed, rotten by the constant moisture of the island that were made by themselves on previous runs. Think like the book that the fellowship finds in Moria spelling their doom. The player themselves might not know how their previous run failed and have to peice it together from item descriptions and books and names they recognize from their last run, towns they named etc. Could be that they have some time limit on turns before the map wipes and their men go mad and start to kill and eat each other or other forms of societal breakdown.
The flora on the outer layer should be like iceland, sparse, few trees, and the ones that are there are in places that men cant easily climb to or are big knotted deadwood. The animals on the outer layer should be small, mostly sheep, wild dogs, puffins, mink, reindeer.
The first challenge is surviving the outer rim, getting warm clothes, meat, and setting up fisheries, the main suplimental goal that you can get grant money for is paving a road up to the rim of the volcano, quarrying rock, moving rock and sand and gravel to the moving front of the roadhead and clearing trees and brush in front of the road head. you can also make dirt or gravle or paved roads along your trade routes to make them more efficent, paying for elevation and straightness wins in the long run, but some contracts pay per foot of road so winding routes can win in the short term to drive out competitors on a specific road.
As the needs of the frontier change, prices and the availability of goods also change meaning that trade routes that were once profitable may become obsolete, there is a constant maintainence cost to paved roads that scales with their efficiency so it is important to know when to re-configure your network when to build new roads between once unlinked resources and when to let a road go fallow.
I think it would be cool if different merchants and companies that get setup on the island have different specialities and you as the player have to decide with your limited resources and manpower what natural resources you want to expliot, what things you want to invest in and how you will get people to work for you, for example if you are investing in fisheries on the outerlayer it might make sense at the start to fully own all of the resources that go into the fishery, but eventually you have to move further into the island and you can hire a manager but with no ownership in the fishery they will run it poorly, so you will have to figure out how to keep people motivated through equity or you scale the number of fisheries you have a worse rates.
I think core gameplay route is that each turn is a loop around the route you have created buying and selling from one city to the next, the engine figures out the optimal buy/sell locations.
The length of the route is limited by the distance a horse can travel in a month and the capital the player has for buying/selling.
The player has to pay wages for their cart driver, housing at each city and can optionally spend on fresh horses in the middle of the route to elongate the distance they can travel, additionally if they upgrade the roads they are travelling on they can go to cities fast and elongate the total distance travelled or beat competitors to market.
The order of operations matters since competitors can change the price of goods in a town through their sale actions so the player should prioritize high value exchanges near the start of their route or risk the high value exchange being devalued by supply and demand
At the end of each turn the caravans zip around to each city and gold floats up to the player’s coffers with audio stims, there is a 3d view of the player’s treasury where coins are stacked relative to how rich the player is and they can pickup and drop the coins.
certian cities are producers of goods and some are consumers which dictates the price of those goods, and makes the order of operations for your route important, (is this something we actually want seems too complicated, but idk how else it would work). you can have later goods in the route sold early in the next turn by increasing the storage at your headquarters, or segregate your routes by profitability, though having separate routes means hiring managers of those separate headquarters with variying levels of skill and motivation and corruption.
You can make investments in the following categories:
transportation technology and upgrades to your fleet, better spokes, breeding faster horses, different caravan hulls to discourage robbery, refrigeration, trains
building more caravans in your fleet (expands capacity along a route for moving goods and allows for parallelism (send out one guy and then send out another to better split the months prices)),
stations in cities for your caravans and to drop off supplies (you can send a caravan to a city without a station but they will take longer if they cannot drop off supplies to be sold and leave) and to store feed, switch drivers etc.,
road infrastructure, there are some cities that are unconnected due to elevation terrain or warfare, in the beginning of the game there are public dirt roads in flat terrain between cities in the same country, you can get grants to improve public roads to gravel and then paved but they have to remain public and your competitors can use them, alternatively you can buy out a public road using bribery or legislation and put a toll on it, or you can build a private or toll road between two unconnected cities, rivals can use toll roads but not private roads if you patrol them, but might use them depending on their personality and risk tolerance if they are unpatrolled. Road efficiency decays over time and paved can become gravel etc. if not maintained (course of ~5 years of turns)
Cities can prohibit certain goods from being sold within their boarders, in early game it is beneficial to engage in smuggling given the high prices and low risk of being caught but risks inflate wiht the scale of the smuggling operation and more smuggled goods in a market that prohibits them can lead to police crack downs, costly inspections of caravans and large fines/bans from cities in your network, as you build more infrastructure and invest in a city it becomes increasingly risky to smuggle goods.
What is the Core Fantasy at the heart of this game is to start from nothing in a new land and make something through solving the puzzles of the market and by manipulating the government and political situation to ones own ends reminicient of Jakob Fugger or Rockefeller