Treasure Hunt turns cost

[Vane]

I too will vote to move this into discussion.

[Hawk]

Discussion it is

[Dejanira]

I'm in favor of rethinking the whole burying treasures mechanism too, as Danik says.
By now, it is a part of the game that has no point. It is not a turn sinker anymore, not a gold storage as well (not only there'are banks, but with the turn reduction and the cunning accountant tech, one can save one hundred millions gold coins in a single turn).

And yet, burying treasures did add some flavour to the game. Lets rethink it.

One suggestion could be to add a top of a single withdrawal/deposit amount in a bank.

Another one could be to add more color to it, for instance not just a 1-9 port region but a nice map, different from port to port and includng port details like the flag of the owner or the aerial view of the plantations (as if it were a Google Map view).

[Hawk]

Really using it right now has the same motive as burying gold irl. When you are so delinquent that you don’t trust anyone to hold your wealth. I think it fills an important role in the game, and is fine as is.

Now, as to it not being popular anymore I attribute that to two reasons.

One, a lack of true pirates right now :p
And two, banks being TOO accessable. Especially inactive banks.

If banks became more adept at weeding out undesirables, and if there were more undesirables to weed out, then it would be utilized more imo.

[Dejanira]

Well, buried trasures cannot be blacklisted. That's still a useful thing.

[Most Lee Harmless]

I see Hawks point but would point out that GBs have also made the previous realisable gold sink of a 'backbone: warehouses full of tools for fast sale' a lot simpler : 20 ports with a few thousand bars in each does the job with less infrastructure or fleets reqd to fill them.
I had alook and its over 2 years since I last did a Hunt : I stopped cos I had 17 fails(empty or 1gc finds) out of 20 or so hunts. My succeses brought in about 3mil. I looked at the turn cost : exploration as well as the hunt itself and saw they were more profitably spent NPC farming.
If the port has no player treasure at a reasonable turn cost to uuncover you end up baulked : if you cant reset the odds by finding a player treasure you cant really hunt the NPC hauls at reasonable odds either.
Hoping that desperate pirates will bury their ill-gotten gains is wishful thinking : they dont need to as there are far more ways to keep your gold safe-ish and readily got at with low or no turn penalties. Its not alone as a gold store anymore : it needs updating or scrapping in my view.

[Hawk]

True to the gold bars. And probably about the hunting aspect of it. But it could be a niche for certain players even if it’s not popular. Buried treasure was my backbone for awhile cause I was knew a salty player would up lock even a bit of my gold up if they could. Plus I don’t like the idea of people tracking my gold movements, it could be used to make deductions and tip people off. That was before there were a lot of banks though. So I was rightly worried about storing my gold with someone who I might piss off. When GB’s came I used them along with Buried treasure, I actually still generally avoid banks out of habit lol. But I don’t bury either now.

Maybe tweaks like large npc generated treasures with an announcement, or perks to having buried treasure. I don’t think leaving it be for now is detrimental though. There may be new game features that would then make buried treasure more viable and/or call an update to it.

[Most Lee Harmless]

I think a simple but effective tweak would be to merge NPC and players chances together. So then you hunt both at once with the one overall percentage chance of uncovering one. Which you find would be random and, of course, influenced by your turn investment.