New feature discussion: ic extension

[Captain Jack]

Greetings,

(IC stands for In - game - Character)

Currently, you all have an in-game character.
-It has a name, an avatar, an id.
-He can travel to ports, romance with daughters, cast voodoo, command ships, join a nation, work as a porter, join guilds etc.

How about a character that would also be able to learn certain abilities and skills, relevant to material production,adventuring and in the future battle,voodoo casting etc ?

This idea is not exactly new and the timing I chose to refresh it in the forums is not random. It has to do with certain features ahead, such as the Hideout, the Treasures feature and the Banks feature.

Especially at this point, we want to mess with material production. As you all know, we got 7 resources in Avonmora and an 8th will be soon added (gold). Currently, only 4th are needed in ship building, the rest are unimportant and can only be used for trading. However, no one uses them anyway. We want to give the ability to players to create materials and also use the unused materials for certain bonuses.


Regarding material production:
-Character skills will be learned for a gold fee (different ports will teach different skills) and will be improved only through usage (so the more you mine, the better miner you become).
-By adding a mining skill to a character, this character will be able to go to a port which produces Iron and spend his TURNS in order to get IRON. The better his skill, the better the production per turn. If he ALSO has an IRON Workshop in his Hideout, he could help his rate even more. And the better this workshop, again the better the skill.
-Then the iron produced in this way, will be stored in the player's warehouse at the port. From there, he will be either able to sell it DIRECTLY and IMMEDIATELY to the PORT (something not possible now) but to a price lower than the lowest IRON price (ie, 8 gold per crate) or trade it with his ships for even better profit (the code for this already exists as you can already choose to empty a warehouse first).

At a LATER version:
-Currently production is automatic and happens daily. We also got a voodoo card called Fertile lands that is currently responsible for extreme manipulation of trade routes. We could add player production and limit the automatic one. If everything goes well, in the future, automatic production could be turned off entirely.
-We could make it possible to even buy any resource you want from a port, if it has enough stocks based on player trade routes. So every market will have rooms for profit as you will be able to buy and sell from your warehouse directly to the port market. Such an action however will need careful planning and should be excluded from the entry version. If we implement such a way, then only resources that are CONSUMED will leave the game and this would mean that in the same time we would need to pause automatic production.

Just a couple of ideas, out of the countless that we could consider for such a system.

There are dozens of skills and abilities we could consider for characters, but as an entry version we should limit our thinking to crafting/production skills. The hideout feature and buildings it will allow can be our starting points for these.

I think this entry description is enough for now. I am very interested for your feedback.

+1 Discussion

[Hellfire]

This sounds like a great expansion, but I would say don't turn passive resource generation for ports entirely off, just leave it much lower than it is now so that players can have a choice between making their own and rolling the dice with the smaller stocks of port resources. And on another note, wouldn't the massive quantities of resources that have been moved around in the game's lifetime still be in the ports when you opened up the trade, because with how much that is no doubt lying around, players probably wouldn't be too persuaded to make their own when you can just snatch something up for minimum price at a port with 300Mil of the resource.

[Captain Jack]

This sounds like a great expansion, but I would say don't turn passive resource generation for ports entirely off, just leave it much lower than it is now so that players can have a choice between making their own and rolling the dice with the smaller stocks of port resources. And on another note, wouldn't the massive quantities of resources that have been moved around in the game's lifetime still be in the ports when you opened up the trade, because with how much that is no doubt lying around, players probably wouldn't be too persuaded to make their own when you can just snatch something up for minimum price at a port with 300Mil of the resource.

This is after all something to discuss as a later time; when player production will become large enough.
Right now all resources stocked in ports, are purged in the end of the day,right after the prices calculation.

It would be safe to say that production will not play a role in the trade at all, in its first steps.

[Xepshunall]

I think that the resources that exist now should remain until they are bought and sold or used and that if anything is limited, it should be a maximum number of resources that the Fertile Lands card can create similar to the Pouch of Gold. Unless I'm mistaken, it seems that Pirates Glory has gained popularity so production should reflect need. It should be distributed among the three ports that manufacture the specific resource based on population. There should never be a complete lack of any resource like there was before voodoo was added. The lack of resources in the past is the reason that there is a huge imbalance of availability of resources today along with the locations of the specific resources. If Tools were sold in Goroum, all experienced merchant players would build up production in Goroum and Regis and move all of their trade fleets there. Maybe the tools and iron that are available should remain available but when a certain limit is reached, A different resource could be produced . Many of us want multiple resources at each port. Some of us have suggested it in the forums. Tool production could be moved to more remote locations like Akrotiri, Chalkos and New Land while the tools that are there now should remain where they are. Right now, none of those three ports produces either of the two most expensive/profitable resources. If production doesn't move around, the game gets stale. We all do the same things every day. It's time for more choices and for more thought and action to be required. Of course that's only if the others who care agree.

[Black sparrow]

A little off topic which will end in-topic again; what you are going to do with ship cargo tweak AND Favorable winds card is A GAME CHANGER. I won't analyze the details of such but I must say I am impressed. When you first discussed the ship cargo changes, I thought that these changes will not be enough (I even discussed such with other player); Trade Galleons would get a small boost but would remain incompetent to large merchantman; No top player would find the necessity to use them. BUT, with Favorable winds, trade galleons can outperform large merchantmen. This is a kind of micro-manage that I might not follow but I like.

I would say that for now, you could do one more thing to further balance the ships: You have raised the ship values a long time ago, time to also raise the resource cost of the ships.

Why ? Because Large Fluyt for example, used to be the cheapest ship as the resources needed were nothing in compare to other large merchant ships. With the enormous ship price increase, the difference in price due to resources became insignificant. I think it is time to consider increasing them again. Perhaps raise them by x5? You will find the best formula I guess.

Such, would create again a small gap between new and old players but we all know how quick such gaps can be closed. I know you are working to balance the ships! You have made so many posts regarding the matter! You HAVE to increase the resources needed for each ship at some point.

And this is where I become on topic; The implementation point for THIS CHANGE could be the same with the implementation of this production feature! It will make resources more important than they are now so people will have an extra inceptive to use it!

It would also make the ship selection a HARDER ISSUE.

For what has BEEN DISSCUSSED ALREADY, I agree that automatic production should not be turned off but a tweak regarding player production should be in the scenario. I think what cpt Jack wanted to say, is that non-production resources are purged at the end of the day as main production remains (and increases) during update. Keeping resources or not in port right now, would make no difference for players as we cannot buy them; Except if he meant prices recalculation. This would not be a bad idea as this means that the price history would be then based for all time, instead of daily that it is now. It will not change balances to some ports (ie Tzogos will keep paying the smallest fee for Tools no matter what) but it could be successful for the rest ports (Although I hate to say that Akrotiri will almost always pay the best price for tools if we do this...). Certainly something to consider. Perhaps Xep can give us more details on what he meant on this.

Regarding different production per port, I am not favorable of it. And here is the most crucial question: What would be the decisive factor for what resource each port gets to produce ? We got 7 resources and 21 ports. If random is in such an equation, it would mess things far from a point we could even determine.

On the feature itself, I would certainly support such an expansion but I think on such a feature, you would need to listen to the players and design it very carefully. I will be happy to provide metrics and I am sure other players could be of important help.

For instance, what I already told you about ship resource cost increase, must be taken seriously in mind.

Sorry for the long post, but I get carried away far too easily!

[Xepshunall]

What i was trying to suggest is that Tools and Iron are too close together and well within the safe travel speed of the best merchant ship. If it took longer for the The Large merchantman to trade Tools and Iron, then some other resources might be traded more frequently. This and the devs' desire to make things more realistic should be looked at when considering relocating production to different ports. Minerals run out, animals need to graze in new pastures and soil needs a break from certain vegetation. Also markets need to change so prosperity can be achieved. Like I implied before, other opinions are important.
Another important point is that non-production (That created by Fertile Lands) should not be purged at any time. That would be akin to having my gold reduced at the end of the day because mining slowed down after I got my gold.

[Black sparrow]

So you meant that they should relocate production once ? I would be okay with this

[Xepshunall]

Once would be enough if done right.

[Snowy McScruff]

You could have a time limit for when a port is ready to sell that item again because you can not plant plants all year round also summer changes depending on where you are could also involve the movement of rum. so you could have one city sell something for a while then change it to another port on the other side of the world. You also could have food migrate between two towns that are near each other to simulate when cows are going to another area to get grass. they could go around many more than just one city as well. This what you could do if you want it to be very life like.

[Xanadu]

Just thinking about this a little tonight. Realistically, what happens when my fleets move more iron and tools between ports than can reasonably be used by the population and other players building ships in those ports as well. Then add in all the other traders plying those two ports as well seeking the high amount of profit that comes with trading these goods. Realistically there would be a major surplus of tools at the iron port and vice versa. Would there be a way to subtract the amount of goods used by the pc in the port from the total number of goods moved there by traders. Then decide on a number of each of the goods used by one person of a ports population and multiply that by the port population to come up with the total number of goods used in that port each day. Keep production of the goods where they are but if a surplus of tools should build up at Regis, for example, than tools could also be bought by pc there as well to be sold elsewhere. Ports with huge populations would need to have extra resources brought to them. On the other hand, ports with smaller populations might be able to sell goods at a cheaper price if the goods are not used up by as many npc.