Economy / Relative Wealth of Your PC

Originally Posted by BillSeurer
You sure about that? I got my smithing up to 100 for one character and legendary was the best I could do. The dragon armors are really good at legendary level.

There is not another level beyond "legendary"; however, as my smithing skill has increased over time and I have acquired or enchanted various smithing items, I keep going back and improving my legendary elven, steel and leather items beyond what they were the first time I improved them to legendary.

If you first max out your smithing skill, you only need to improve items once.

However, I have improved the same items many times, and my smithing skill is still only in the 70s, which makes smithing a sort of money sink for me. I'm sure I will continue to spend more on smithing materials as soon as I unlock the Glass, Ebony, Daedric improvements.

Finally after about 170 hours and reaching level 44, I was able to save up enough to afford a house in Solitude. Whoever designed that player house did a fantastic job IMO. The upgrades are another great gold sink, and it was a nice touch that a housing upgrade handbook is provided.

Well after purchasing some high level training (1500 gold per level), I'm back down to being near broke. Awesome. Just another reason why I think this game is so well balanced. The economy is great (so far, I'm 60 hours in). I had what I thought was an untouchable amount of gold, until I had to buy new armor, enchant it with grand soul gems, and purchase training. I went from 15k to 3k in no time. I'm hoping that it retains this level of balance throughout the whole game, but I do anticipate reaching a point where I really am filthy rich, just like every other RPG before Skyrim. We'll see.

Every time I think I have more money than I know what to do with in the game it suddenly goes *poof* and I'm broke. Kinda like real life that way…

Yep, I just blew 8K on a house in Riften, that plus a couple new items (a dwarven bow with the soul trap enchantment and elven guilded armor), and I'm down to just a few K now.

I just hit the skill threshold for a new batch of spells. That made a bit of a dent, and there's a new house I could invest in…

The house in Solitude is really nifty BTW.

That's the one I've got my eye on.

I almost never "go The Sims" in games and decorate my own house but I couldn't resist with that one for some reason. I put trophies from all my most memorable adventures in various places around the house. As I did further adventures I even planned it out. "Wow, that vase will look good out on the patio!"

The one funny thing about that house is the room that your follower gets. It's a bare storeroom in the basement where they get to sleep on the floor. The rest of the house is very opulent ('cept the patio). I almost felt bad about that.

Originally Posted by BillSeurer
I almost never "go The Sims" in games and decorate my own house but I couldn't resist with that one for some reason. I put trophies from all my most memorable adventures in various places around the house. As I did further adventures I even planned it out. "Wow, that vase will look good out on the patio!"

The one funny thing about that house is the room that your follower gets. It's a bare storeroom in the basement where they get to sleep on the floor. The rest of the house is very opulent ('cept the patio). I almost felt bad about that.

Yeah I have never purchased a house in previous TES games, but I'm really glad I got the Solitude house.

I was thinking perhaps the extra storeroom might be set up for expansion with mods or DLC.

I tossed torches in that room to store them and it got so bright you couldn't see anything except glare when you looked in. It was funny.