There aren't many ways to create a "faction vault". I tried many different things, but ultimately I ended up w/ TirelessPage/FlyingPage. However, here is another method I think would work, involving Quests, Spells, and UnitStats...
Creating a specific item on a Champion is fairly straight-forward. You can do that using a Spell (Let's call that a "Trade Spell"). That's the easy part, although with 1000 different items available, it means you need 1000 different Trade Spells.
The first issue you will encounter however, is destroying the original item. To be precise, the first issue is destroying the original item in a meaningful way (By meaningful way, I mean destroying the item has to unlocks a specific Trade Spell). Because you don't want the player to be able to duplicate all items all the time, the Trade Spells must be unlocked AFTER the item has been destroyed. Now, destroying an item in LH is complicated:
Selling it to a (normal) merchant does destroy the item, but not in a meaningful way;
Giving it to some random Champion and then disbanding said Champion will not destroy the item in a meaningful way;
Consuming could work, but that really isn't a solution since most items aren't consumables and generally consuming the item activates it anyway, so you can't really trade an item that has been consumed;
Which leaves us w/ only one meaningful way to destroy an item, a Quest Location + Quest.
You can set up a Quest to CheckForItem (e.g. The Arctic Wolf Cloak), and based on you having that item unequipped in your inventory, it will destroy the item in a meaningful way (However, you can not use CheckForItem + ChoiceUnlock, you can only use CheckForItem + Success; there is an exception to that, see Assassin's Blade Quest, but that exception would not work to set up a "faction vault").
Once the item has been destroyed on Champion1 and the specific Trade Spell unlocked, you can recreate the item on Champion2 and then hide/lock the Trade Spell again until the process is restarted. So basically, in order to do a "faction vault" with the current set of items you need to code:
- 1000 unique UnitStats unlocking 1000 unique Quest Spells (1 per);
- 1000 unique UnitStats (same as above) added to 1000 unique Items (1 per) so that they unlock said item-specific Quest Spells;
- 1000 Quest Spells
- 1000 Trade Spells
- and likely a bit of testing along the way to make sure everything is working properly!
Let's assume you can automate the process of creating the UnitStats, Quest Spells, Quests, Trade Spells, and that all you need to do is adding the 1 UnitStat per item (Which is still a lot), then what? To do a long distance trade, you need:
- To equip a specific item;
- Open the Spellbook (find the relevant Quest Spell among a number of Quest Spells, say 100 if you have 10 Champions using 10 different items each);
- Cast the specific Quest Spell;
- Unequip the specific item;
- Enter the Quest location (and click a few times whatever dialog choices you need to click, if any);
- Open the Spellbook again;
- Cast the specific Trade Spell on whoever you want to trade the item to;
You would have to do that for every single item you want to trade.
Anyway, when I started writing this, I wasn't sure what the end result would be. It does look good, to some extent, but (i) I'm not sure it would work, (ii) I'm not sure it would be significantly better than TirelessPage/FlyingPage, (iii) I was never bothered by how many quests/spells/unitstats I created, but adding a 1000 of each may start creating unknown issues.
If someone has a better way to do this or think the number of quests/spells/unitstats could be (much) lower, do share (Other than limiting the Trade Spells to say Weapons or Rare items or something, I don't see any at the moment).
