Ultima IX’s Economy

by Iceblade · Published August 16, 2022 · Updated August 21, 2022

Another attribute about Ultima IX that Britain brings to light is the economy of Britannia. Britain is both the player’s first encounter with shops and the city with the largest variety of goods available. You can purchase some provisions, ranged and melee weapons, armor, and even baked goods. There is even a magic shop and jeweler in the city. Unfortunately, the city-focused plot progression restricts the selection and quality of goods at each city you visit. This reminds me of the gear progression from Final Fantasy and other JRPGs, which is a little immersion breaking. Not only does the player feel even more on the plot rails, but there is also no sense of connectivity and trade between cities with goods arbitrarily being capped by the plot.

At the beginning of the game, only leather armor and low-damage weapons are available at the blacksmith, and the bower just sells novice bows and arrows. This is made worse by the fact that better gear rests on display in these shops. With Britain being the capital city, you would expect that it would have a wide variety and selection of goods with at least mid-tier weapons and armor available. The magic shop itself is closed for half of the game, which is bad as you cannot purchase any reagents at the start. Only by the middle of the game, is there a noticeable change in the selection of items with the magic shop becoming opened and the blacksmith adding chain mail armor. However, these additions add little since you should already be wearing full chain mail and have access to other shops for reagents. Thus, there is little point in spending time shopping in the capital city.

Another severe limitation to the immersion of the economy is the lack of variety. As will be seen, Britain provides the most variation in goods in Britannia as it should, but what is available pales in comparison to prior Ultimas. In Ultima 9, Britain has a total of 7 shops including a tavern and a jeweler who only buys gems/jewelry from the Avatar. In Ultima 7, Britain had an inn, a healer, a trainer, a marketplace for food, and 9 traditional shops. Ultima 6 was little different with 9 shops, a healer, and an inn. While the number is less, it doesn’t seem Britain is drastically worse than prior Ultimas in term of shop availability. Other towns, however, fair much worse in their stores both in terms of items sold and the number and variety of stores. The closed off nature of each town/area further exacerbates the situation. In previous Ultimas, travelling between towns was often a simple matter, particularly in U6 and U7. The Orb of the Moons, horses, boats, and moongates all made these trips easier and faster. In Ultima IX, Paws barely has one shop and Cove is gone replaced by a new ruin of town on a far-off island. Every other town is simply inaccessible at this point in the game.

This inaccessibility leads to another issue with the economy in Ultima IX. In prior Ultimas, the towns were implied to be dependent on trade in order to function. Minoc and its surroundings focused on crafting and mining while Britain and its surroundings were the major breadbasket of Britannia. In Ultima IX, it has been 20 long years since the Columns and Cataclysm occurred. How have these towns been surviving? It is implied that the whirlpools have been crippling trade and presumably for years not just a few months. Few of the towns appear to have pushed to gain self-sufficiency in terms of food. Further where is the mining to get the iron ore and other materials needed for weapons and tools coming from. Covetous is closed down and Minoc/Cove is inaccessible. Obviously, this poor approximation of an in-game/in-universe economy can be blamed on game deadlines and cut content/development. Even so, it remains that another pillar of verisimilitude of the Ultima world is lost; thus, hollowing out Britannia one step further.

Other issues abound with the Britannian economy. The pricing of items is rather extreme and imbalanced. Gold coinage is quite common throughout the game world unlike in previous Ultimas. When hostile creatures die, they often leave a dozen to several dozen gold coins or even 50-250 pieces for tougher enemies. These values are considerably more than the loot drops encountered in any previous Ultima. In fact, most monsters didn’t drop much if any loot and even monsters like dragons mostly dropped a handful of gems. And unlike in Ultima 7, most items you loot can be sold even if for 1/5 of the purchase value. Speaking of purchase prices, item prices are quite high relative to previous Ultimas. Beverages and food (when available) costs 3-15 gold, most adventuring gear costs at least 40 gold if not more than a 100. Most weapons regardless of effectiveness costs more than 100 gold. Most armors come in sets of 6 individual pieces with leather costing dozens of gold coins, chainmail in the hundreds, and plate mail pieces costing one to three thousand per piece. By comparison, plate mail armor pieces in U7 cost a few hundred gold each and were much more common to encounter as loot drops from human enemies. Apparently, the loss of the Britannian mint forced Lord British to debase his coinage down to 10% resulting in massive inflation. That 10-gold piece tax seems rather meager now when you can kick a few giant rats and pay that off.

Training is also comparatively quite expensive, but the differences in how training works between Ultimas makes comparison in price untenable. You need to train much less often in Ultima IX, so the prices are correspondingly much greater; however, prices are also greater because of inflation. Thus, the prices may not be significantly higher relative to previous Ultimas. Despite these factors, training has actually gone down in value because, as I have previously explained, most trained techniques are useless. The training feels more like a money sink than a value-add to your character, so there is little point in training other than being a completionist.

From a game design perspective, if gold is a common loot drop then you need to make shop items expensive and keep loot selling from generating large amounts of gold. Where this falls apart is capping the amount of gold a player can carry. In most previous Ultimas, gold had a weight and a volume and was an item that could be stored in a central location. In U9, gold disappears into your inventory and is artificially capped at 9999. There is no way to store gold and when you have too much gold, it just drops on the floor. As a result, inflating the currency by having moderate and large amounts of gold drop from most enemies was a bad idea. In the mid to late game, you stop picking up gold from slain enemies. Another problem is how other than training and plate armor, there isn’t much you need to purchase in the game. You can generally keep yourself well or better equipped from items you find in the game world. There are also two major treasure hordes in the game that if fully collected will cause you bust over the 9999 gold limit – Covetous and Destard. Much of the problem stems from how valuable gems are such that just a dozen of them gives you almost 2000 in gold. Often when I’m playing, I use the economy patch, which lets me buy bags for 650 a bag and hold off on selling gems until I need the gold.

In previous Ultimas, it was possible to be flush with gold, but often this required lots of packmuling your companions, exploits/cheating, and backtracking. In Ultima IX, just playing the game can cause you to have too much gold without ever clearing out Covetous of all of its gems. Why is it so much worse in Ultima IX?

Gold was harder to come by using the methods that you regularly use in Ultima through normal play:

Selling equipment/supplies/magical items; not even possible in Ultima VII

Trading in goods like cotton, thread, ore, etc. (ie participating in the economy); not possible in Ultima IX
Mining gold and gems, then selling to mint/jeweler
Finding treasure troves of gold, gems, and nuggets
Killing bandits and other humanoids (and most any creature in Ultima IX)
And of course stealing; which came with consequences in previous Ultimas.

Thus, it is clearly easier to get gold normally in Ultima IX versus Ultima VII, but there are more reasons why previous Ultimas didn’t suffer this problem. For one thing, there was a lack of a gold limit with several companions being available to share the load of the precious lucre. Further, you no longer need to buy reagents in bulk. Players also has 2-7 other party members who each required:

Buying armor and weapons
Buying supplies such as food
Buying magical items like potions, spells, and reagents
Buying random stuff that has more of a story/immersion purpose than gameplay such as clothes
Travel related items such as a room at an inn, ships, and horses
And the actually useful training up of multiple party members. That 2000 gold for a medium tier technique doesn’t seem so expensive now.

It is very easy to see why there is a major problem with amassing gold in Ultima 9. There is no party to worry about maintaining, which significantly reduces outflow of gold and results in more loot to sell. Food is not a requirement and there is little need to buy reagents except for binding spells and there are plenty of reagents lying around aside from mandrake root. Granted, you may need reagents for potions, but there are tons of potions in the game world and rarely are they needed. Most all spells can be found and only a handful of spells are really useful. There really aren’t any inns, you can’t buy or rent horses either. There is some training, but they aren’t all that useful for the most part and there is no party to train up in everything.

What makes this problem even more frustrating is how much these elements are hardcoded. The following are the list of ways I have previously brainstormed for improving the in-game economy from a gameplay perspective along with how hard or difficult it is change.

No more gold when killing animal monsters. (Must change monster usecode within the executable)
Limit respawning to only animals and limit the respawning to areas that make sense such as creature dens. (Fairly easy, just change some item properties on the world map. This is mostly tedious as you have to change every spawn point.)

Implement Stealing penalties (No properties or flags for setting an item as owned, no way to cause hostility in nearby npcs, karma penalties possible, very involved to implement several trigger and scripts just for several items to reduce karma when moved)
Reduce the quantity of items in treasure troves (just delete items or replace with lower value ones)
Reduce the amount of loot in certain caves and dungeons and spread out what is there (Easy to move item position or delete them)
Adjust prices for buying and selling and increase the amount of stuff you can buy. Nominally, reduce the prices by 3-5 times. (Easy change of the shop lists for npcs, which are just special books in the books file.)
A goods trading system through dialog (Requires changing dialog trees and adding npcs, both of which are hardcoded.)
Increase the maximum amount of gold carried by 10 (Surprisingly extremely difficult; since it requires editing the hardcoded GUI; and this doesn’t even include resizing graphics.)

As can be seen, Ultima IX’s economy is very gamey and broken both in terms of lore and gameplay. It barely works as is, but the hard gold limit commonly encountered adds to the immersion breaking. To mitigate this issue, a player is actually discouraged from looting the dungeons particularly in the mid to late game. Further, they should keep gems and jewelry rather than sell them to avoid watching Cameron chuckle as he drops gold coins at the Avatar’s feet. As for any patches or mods, little can be done to truly fix the issue without massive changes to the game world itself.