Hideout HQ - Special Buildings - Gold Resource

[Most Lee Harmless]

That's a neat solution, 'taxing' 25% of it into oblivion : which would work for bars sold to port merchants well. Why not add another element to that, with a part of that 25% going as 'tax' to the national treasury of the port owners? This would provide an added incentive to go for control of a port, also encouraging port owners to build trade into their ports.

[Sir Henry Morgan]

Heheheh....

I believe there's ample financial power in port control. The issue for port control is its high cost. Not many can afford to sit at the table to play, and there is really no return until a country can hold the port long term. Additional revenue from gold bars will only make it harder to take the port.

As for the 25% tax, I don't believe we will need to remove any additional gold bars from the market. Between buildings, hiring officers, building ships, casting certain voodoo - all proposed to cost gold bars - will remove enough to keep things in check, and they will be added as the game progresses. If gold bars can be used to purchase influence, this too will drain the supply.

Gold Bars will also be buried as treasure and hoarded in warehouses - until a there is a new need, such as the new features like foot battle come into play. It may be hard to convince someone to invest, say 500 mil for a way to only make 5-7 mil per day. (It will depend on what Goldsmiths cost to build and level up.)

I don't foresee alot of Level 20 Goldsmiths soon, while I do believe we will see quite a few goldsmiths around. It is going to take a while to build up the world supply.

[Captain Jack]

These are GREAT ideas on how the goldsmith should operate guys, great ideas!

There only some more details regarding how markets AI will be. I will share more info on our ideas as, obviously, you are helping a great deal.

The suggested 2000 gold coins a bar, is the starting price where markets will buy gold bars. Btw, this is the way to "forge" gold bars into gold coins; you simply sell the gold bars at the market. Markets will always buy them, so you always have a worthwhile liquidable asset.

Looking the figures Shaydo worked out, I like them a lot. It is a different model than the one we had at mind but it could work better.
So,let's build together on those figures.

The 25% difference in buy/sell price, is it a bit high perhaps? Or better go with something that safe?
What happens with stock levels. Do we define some and take them in mind?

For example, we should rank market based on the stock levels. Here is an example with 5 ports:

Tortuga - 1200 Gold Bars
Tzogos - 3000 Gold bars
Aiora - 6700 Gold Bars
Vaasburg - 15056 Gold Bars
Regis - 32406 Gold Bars

Without stock levels, let's call them Divisions from now on, the ranking would be as they are ordered above. Tortuga pays 2000 per bar, Tzogos 1972, Aiora 1944, and so on.

With the following divisions (example starting divisions - feel free to propose your own - we can change them later once we get some real time results)
Division 1: 0 - 5000 -> Buy - 2,000g / Sell - 2,500g-
Division 2: 5001-10000 -> Buy - 1,972g / Sell - 2496g
Division 3: 10001-20000 -> 1,944g / Sell - 9,430g
Division 4: 20001-30000
Division 5: 30001-50000
Division 6: 50001-75000
Division 7: 75001-100,000
Division 8: 100k-150k
Division 9: 150k-200k
Division 10: 200k-300k
Division 11: 300k - 400k
Division 12: 400k - 500k
Division 13: 500k-750k
Division 14: 750k-1m
Division 15: 1m-1.5m
Division 16: 1.5m-2m
Division 17: 2m-3m
Division 18: 3m-5m
Division 19: 5m-10m
Division 20: 10m-20m
Division 21: 20m or higher

21 divisions are needed in order to create 21 different prices, the number of the ports.
Now, according to division, the ports are ranked. In our example:
Tortuga-Tzogos -> Division 1
Aiora -> Division 2
Vaasburg -> Division 3
Regis -> Division 5

Let's suppose that all 21 ports fall into these 5 divisions. Then there will be 5 prices available and not all 21. If we want, we can then rank them in division and offer different price per port as well. So, in division 1 where we have 2 ports, final prices would be:

Division 1:
5000 is 100% which gives 1972gc/bar, for a degration of 1.4% from base price (2000 gc/bar)

For Tortuga:
1200 is 24% which equals 0.336% degration, which results 1993gc per bar.

For Tzogos:
3000 is 60% which equals 0.8% degration, which results 1983gc per bar.


If we use this mechanism, we can exclude the timers updates.
As you see, the results are way different than simple ranking and seem to me more safe.


I support the idea to remove at least 10% of gold bars traded every time, for inflation. It is natural. This will not necessarily go somewhere in particular - market management (their operating fee for example). Till we incorporate enough uses for gold bars at least.

[Shaydo]

I agree the % taken out doesn't need to be used for anything or go anywhere but there should be an artificial reduction in there.

The reason i picked 25% above buy price for sell price was so that the bottom and top end of the spectrum if traded off against each other weren't left open to vast profits per bar, around 100g seemed reasonable for this kind of trading otherwise the economy could get very destabilised.

I like the division structure you suggest for prices, it means all will start at 2000g and steadily decrease although the upper limits may be to high for now, maybe start them lower and increase them as the game progresses. or could they be based of an overall % of stocked goods?

[Captain Jack]

Perhaps we should avoid division scaling. We could however add greater % reduction at the price. This would force goldsmiths to stop producing if the price is not right. It makes more sense this way.

[Sir Henry Morgan]

I think the division system is too controlled - this gold bar market can be controlled by the goldsmiths to a point. The time factor is part of the supply issue in the market. If there is a glut of gold bars available in one port, there will most likely be a port that does not. Goldsmiths who are working to make a profit will have to determine the best time to 'release' their gold bars to the market. If prices are too low, a goldsmith is more likely (especially if it is an upper level goldsmith) to continue to produce, and simply wait for a market somewhere in Avonmora to rise.

The smaller goldsmiths, who will probably make up the majority of goldsmiths, will cease production, most likely. They will buy what they need rather than produce it. When prices get too high, the smaller goldsmiths will fire up their forges instead of buying gold.

The unique element will be where do pirates fit into the mix; how they read the markets to locate fleets will be interesting and fun to watch.

[Shaydo]

Don't forget 7mill a day is 2.5bn a year, it all adds up.

If you add a greater price reduction then the sell price of the cheapest bars will decrease creating a wider gap between market top and bottom and could lead to high trade profits, depends what you want these to be at really. You could decrease the % reduction in total gold cost for producing bars although it would knock on to the point at which it became profitable to make them.

Maybe, Add a global limit into the game say 500 million bars, when this level is reached the buy price for bars drops by x%, this means regardless of port the whole game will slump a bit in turns of required gold bars meaning it will not really be profitable to sell at all, they will just start to stock in the big warehouses until there is a large amount used from the market by the player base?

If you use the buy/sell prices based on port stock Vs other ports as is currently. For local reserve use a cut down version of your division system to fluctuate the price further with a confine.

So lets say the 3 lowest stocked and the 3 highest stocked fluctuate there price based on local reserves, then if we add a 5% increase on Buy/sell price for lowest 3 and 5% reduction on the fullest 3, then at he extremes it's 300g a bar profit. You could then use the division system of say 20 divisions and each division is worth 0.25% reduction so a totally empty port is paying 2,100g a bar and selling at 2,625g a bar. Where as a port that has 20+ million bars is buying at 1,433g and selling at 1,791g.

Again a bit messy, sorry about that.

[Sir Henry Morgan]

Wow, this really is a puzzler.... You have moved beyond me, Shaydo, but I am still working it through....

One issue that concerns me will be the cost of a fully levelled out Goldsmith - the bank was originally projected to cost over 2 billion at level 20, and the goldsmith was projected to cost even more - That may have changed, as alot of time has passed -

But moving forward.....

I think there's a few ways to reduce the gold supply naturally. One is the 10-25% at each sale. This will allow some control by devs to help keep a market glut at bay. They can start at 25% and as more ways to spend gold bars are introduced and used, the percentage can be reduced.

I'd also like to see another player influenced means to reduce gold bar stocks - a consumption loss by the port population for each port. Say 1% per 10 million population, with a minimum of 1%. A port with 71 million would lose 7.1%, etc. It would work well as part of a daily update, or every three days like the other commodities.

Just thoughts and ideas, mates - food for thought. I am just trying to help move things forward.

[Shaydo]

Hmm really, in that case even level 20 would take a year or so to pay off and then it would be pure profit, that actually sounds good? Means there is profit but you have to be looking long game to get the benefits.

I like the idea of population using a % of the bar stock, not sure if daily or 3 days would work better though?

[Cdv]

A few points...

Due to the high costs of building a level 20 forgery, especially the last levels, here is a 3-tiered approach to gold bar production costs.

Level 1-10 (~20% of total building cost )
Production cost reduction at 2.5% per level (g/bar)
Level 1 : 2,200
Level 2 : 2,145
Level 3 : 2,091
Level 4 : 2,039
Level 5 : 1,988
Level 6 : 1,938
Level 7 : 1,890
Level 8 : 1,843
Level 9 : 1,797
Level 10 : 1,752

Level 11-15 (~26% of total building cost)
Production cost reduction at 5% per level (g/bar)
Level 11 : 1,664
Level 12 : 1,581
Level 13 : 1,502
Level 14 : 1,427
Level 15 : 1,355

Level 16-20 (~54% of total building cost)
Production cost reduction at 10% per level (g/bar)
Level 16 : 1,220
Level 17 : 1,098
Level 18 : 988
Level 19 : 889
Level 20 : 800

Production rate to start at 1200 gold bars per day(or 50 per hour) and to be raised by 1200 per level. At level 20, production rate will then be 24,000 gold bars per day(or 1000 per hour). Also to be noted is the individual goldsmith's production could be limited by what he can afford to make and not actually reach maximum production for the level. For eg. a level 1 goldsmith needs 2.64 mil gold per day to make his allotment of 1200 gold bars.

The total building cost will include the cost of a level 20 Gold Forgery plus a level 20 Central building. Without an attractive production cost for the highest levels, it may become more cost-effective to stay at lower levels or to just trade gold bars in the market. With the above figures, I expect break-even point to be reached in a time frame similar to that for warehouses.

Removing a portion of the gold supply from the market is a good idea. There could be a Trade Tax such that the port merchants(AI) are charged according to how much total trade is carried out in that particular port. The tax will apply to both regular commodity trading and gold bar trading and shall be paid with gold bars. Whether this tax goes to the coffers of the governing nation or to the welfare of its NPC citizens is up to debate.

From Shaydo's initial figures, buying/selling in the ports is in the range of 1509g-2000g for buying and 1886g-2500g for selling. My question is, will the prices remain in this range(or any other range eventually decided on) in the future; or will prices be able to break out of this initial range?