by Haron » Thu Oct 27, 2016 8:25 am
About transporting immigrants.
So, you want to take people from one port, and move them to another. Let's assume, for simplicity that these ports are of the same size. Now, you can achieve your goal either by using one Black Death (BD) card and one Transport Immigrants (TI) card, or by using fleets. Let's look at both options.
Let's set the price of 1 BD card + 1 TI card to 15 credits. Asuming a credit price of 200k gc pr credit, that equals 3M gc. Using a fleet to transport goods, you should make at LEAST 2 gc for every crate moved between ports. This means you could earn 3M gc by moving 1500k crates. With the transport immigrant fleet option, instead of moving 1500k crates, you could move 750k people. So with these numbers, you can either move 750k people between ports, or you can move crates, and buy and use one BD card and one TI card. These cards reduce/increase population by 1%, so moving 750k people from one port to the other would be achieved if the port populations were 75M in each port. That would be the "break even" point; for larger ports, using BD and TI would be cheaper than using fleet transports.
However, this is using very conservative estimates. Usually, buying and using BD and TI cards will be preferred even for smaller port sizes, for the following reasons:
A) A decent merchant can easily make much more than 2 gc pr crate moved. If he makes, say, 6 gc, the break even point changes to ports with a population of only 25M.
B) I have assumed that the "return trip" when transporting immigrants and moving crates are equally profitable, and not been counting this. For many ports, this is simply not true. You would often make less money on the return trip from transporting immigrants than from your optimized trade route.
C) I have also assumed that it takes the same time to transport immigrants as moving crates. Again, this is usually not true. Your optimized trade route would have a relatively short travelling time, usually around 1 hour between ports (2 hours for a round trip). But if you want to reduce the population in St. Martins and increase it in Akrotiri, the travelling time is obviously much longer. Using BD and TI cards, however, the posision of the ports does not matter.
D) I have also assumed that increasing the population in one port and decreasing it in another is equally important. However, if all you want to do is increase the population in your own port, you would only need the TI card, not the BD card. Thus, the real price is lower than in my example.
The following ports have a population less than 75M today:
Akrotiri (7M)
Pania (48M)
Kanoni (59M)
New Land (59M)
However, in practice, Akrotiri is the only port where transporting immigrants by fleets rather than moving crates and using BD / TI makes sense because of the other factors mentioned. So, the effect of introducing the ability to transport immigrants by fleets, is that "nuking" ports with BD to below a certain threshold (probably around 20M, but depending on the port and other factors), no longer makes sense. For ports above this level, moving crates with the purpose of buying voodoo cards will still be the more profitable option.
Summary: How many people you can move for one crate (one half in the suggestion) determines the "break even" point for a port size where one would rather use this method than buying voodoo cards. If around 20M is what one aims for, then one half person for each crate is a good choice. If another level is desired, the "person to crate"-ratio should be changed accordingly.
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