The example plantation we will be building, will be sized at 1 000 acres.
1)Choose your port / Prepare
Here are the factors for choosing a port:
1)Port stability
Specifically look to which nation owns the port and whether the port Governor changes frequently. You need to contact the governor before hand, asking for operating permission prices, renewals and whether or not these will change in the future. If you want to build a big plantation, you are interested for nations that do not take in consideration your plantation size when pricing the permission. If you want to build a small one, you might want to go with a nation that does this. Since this can be obscure even for Governors at times, you can always ask in the Tavern or the King of the nation holding the port you want.
2)Proximity to food ports
This can be important. Food plantations tend to perform better just because you do not have to ship food to them, which is the resource that they need most to operate. If you plan to have a small plantation though, this should not matter much as you can cover this with fishing fleets.
3)Port Warehouse stocks
Check if the port warehouse is full. The emptier it is, the better price the port will pay for your resources.
4)Available Acres / Current average price per acre
These metrics will help you get an idea of the current competition at a port. If the acres rent is lower than 100gc, then the competition is not that high and should be still an option. Ports will less than 50gc per acre should be considered without blinking.
5)Your nationality
Do not necessarily start it to your own nation. There are no perks other than paying the rents to your nation. For mega plantations, this makes sense, for smaller ones though, it is ineligible. In most cases, you will make more at a foreign port as you will get the duke bonus when selling back to a port of your nation.
Credits
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You will need credits to start a plantation. If you cannot afford them, buy from the credits exchange. You will need 100 credits for the constructions permission and a few more for Fertile Lands. Start with at least 5 Fertile Lands. This will ensure you will not run out of acres. Fertile Lands currently cost 5 credits each, so you will need 125 credits to start.
Gold Bars
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You will need Gold Bars. If you have a goldsmith, move yours to this port. Or else buy straight from the port. More details on this later.
2)Important Info - Your first steps
Keep around 1.4M workers for every 1,000 acres of space.
1M workers need around 3,500 crates of food per day @ 4 meals.
So for 1.4M workers, you will need around 5,000 crates of food per day.
A fleet setup with:
1 Flag Galleon, 3x LMM + 1 Cutter has a minimum cargo space of 490 crates. So it can bring all the food your plantation needs (up to 5880 crates per day). This fleet should be good for long distances. If the food port is even closer, consider using Trade Galleons instead.
Alternatively, you can use fishing fleets. Check this table for Fishing Production. Maximum performance is 4,080 crates per day. So a mix of 2 fleets will do.
You will also need tools. The amount is low though. Just put 2 fleets to fill cotton/iron/wood/tools up to several thousands crates and then pause them. If you have a stock of Iron Golems, these will do as well. Generally, you can put fleets passing by from the port to make an extra stop and bring such resources at no extra cost. Especially if you have some fleets doing long distances and the plantation port is between, this can improve your efficiency.
Finally, you need to start bringing immigrants in. The faster you bring them in the better. Once you meet the amount you want, you pause them. You will need a few fleets bringing immigrants constantly in the first 6 months or so. So the best course of action is to keep a few fleets running after you bring the target population (in our case, 1.4M). This will get your target population above 1.4M in the short term but it will be useful later (more details below).
3)Your first decisions
Infrastructure
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The first decision you need to make is relative to your wealth. If you want to big a big plantation and have gold coins to spend, then buy all the port's gold bars and make the port to pay the highest price for gold bars. This will ensure that the gold bars flow will be enough to cover your needs as the other players will respond to this (pretty fast too). If you do not intend to build a big plantation, then try to get them when the price is low.
Now, if you are wealthy, the first thing you build is Utility Buildings. You need at least 5% of your total workers (not acres - so change acres till you get this amount - 1 utility acre = 2000 builders) there. At 15% is a good solution early on. You get double output than 5%. Output efficiency is severely reduced after this point but you might want to go for the overkill if you have money to spare. You must keep spending there till you get at least 4 stars! Remember, always keep 5% or more of your workers there or else you will never get 5 stars.
If you are not much wealthy, you should not spend anything at Utility. You will build slower but this should not be a problem as building faster will deplete your gold faster too and you will eventually get less for what you invest. Remember, investment on utility does not improve your plantation in any way. So plantations that have 5 stars in utility, can only build other infrastructure fast but get no other bonus right now.
So at this case, put them to construct housing. Set your housing acres to 10% and build till you get one star. Then build till you get 1 star at baths. Proceed as the advisor tells you. Build housing for stamina and baths for health. Once you got 5 stars at them, you start building the rest. In case you started with utility first, you must still follow the same pattern.
Do not employ/build guards/guard houses yet. I have found that they do not affect anything yet. CJ refuses to give insight and most probably they are reserved for later implementations. Likewise, if you are not investing, do not employ any builders at all.
I have not explored much recreation bonuses. However, they should affect morale dramatically. This is the key reason why new plantations produce more crates per acre. It might worth to give this a higher priority than baths/housing, at least 1 star perhaps. Keep them around 6% of total acres.
If you run out of gold bars, your plantation should still make profit. However, given the competition I advise against this as you will end up earning less. Get loans and buy more gold bars.
Workers
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Put them at 6 hours early on. You mostly need them to build after all.
4)Long Term Decisions
Plantations take time. You will need to wait at least 1 month before you will have 5 stars at utility. A bit earlier if you employ a lot more workers. So, if you want results now, make them all builders! It will cost you a lot but if profit is not your objective, go for it.
Keep an eye to your workers health. All workers start with good health and stamina. Soon, their health deteriorates. You cannot stop this. Even at advanced plantations, your workers health will drop. You can still bring new ones and improve it. I suspect that there will be a way later to even get it near 100%. I am not sure though.
What most do not know is the stamina of your workers which is a hidden statistic. Putting your workers to high workload, depletes their stamina quick and they end up losing health faster. This is why you must not increase the workload before getting enough housing first. Your advisor will track the problem. I currently run them at 10 hours with 2 stars housing at my big plantation with no real issue. But you need to keep an eye.
The more the workload, the higher meals they need. CJ claims you can make them obese and your advisor will warn you at this case. I have not managed it but it sounds fun. I keep them at 4.5 meals at 10 hours currently.
As your housing increases, you can reduce the number of population per acre. So instead of the initially proposed 1.4-1.5 per acre, you can go down to 1.2-1.3. Especially, after a point where utility buildings will not be needed as much, you can save more on this. Less workers mean less food and this increases your profits.
5)Combos
Plantations make various combos with existing strategies. Especially with Gold smiths. In my case, I have my goldsmith at a port that needs all three resources to be transported. This is cost inefective. However, with plantations, by building one plantation at each providing port I can bring immigrants on the travel back which creates no additional need for fleets, besides food and some resources. You can easily get plantations of 1000-2000 acres in this way.
The obstacle I have run across for this type of plantations has to do with the operating permissions cost which can be high. I hope things will get better here in the future.
Another perk that exists for really big plantations, is the income you get every 10 minutes. Right now, the average production is like 80 units per acre. So a 20k acre plantation should produce around 11k crates per 10 minutes. This is an income of 77k per 10 minutes or 460k per hour. This can prove as a good defense in case of attack - like one casting a generosity on you every hour, in fact, better than this
Epilogue
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I could have written this a long time ago as this is accumulated knowledge from pretty early on. It's not meant as a guide to make the best plantation but mostly to help you get started or help you improve some points you might have not been aware of.
