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Message in a Bottle - Edition #4 - Page 4

PostPosted: Wed Mar 24, 2021 10:26 am
by Meliva
PG 4 PG ADVISOR - PLANTATION GUIDE - CUTPURSE
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CUTS GUIDE TO PLANTS - Cutpurse (edited by Jose Gasparilla)
PLANTATIONS - FEATURE - by CUTPURSE

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Plantations - what to do with them, and what to expect in return.

I will try keeping this short as possible, and edit and add new stuff every now and then. If you have any questions, things you want to be added etc, do post to this thread.
The Basics
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You produce goods in a plantation, these can be either stored into your warehouse, or sold into the port for other players to buy for 1gc less than the port price. this happens automatically every 10 minutes, 10.07, 10.17, 10.27 and so on. Gold coins from sales go straight to your gold on hand.

There is a 100 credit one time fee per port to start a plantation. After that, you will need an Operating Permission. This is paid to the port governor, and lasts for 3 months then you will need a new Permission.

Without one you can improve a plantation and access the workers market, but you won't be able to produce anything. Finally there is land. you will bid for acres. Once your bid succeeds you will rent that land for 21 days.

Location - Where to start?
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You should choose a friendly stable port
Governors can deny you permission, or charge an outrageous amount. your hostile acts towards the nation may lead to the king/queen not wanting you on their soil.

High land prices. I have seen the price per acre changing from 10 to over 200, and vice versa, in often less than a week in nearly every port. This risk we cannot control. Keep some Fertile Lands in stock for when these things happen, because they will.

Fertile Lands usually sells for between 100-200 gc per acre. Currently we are at the high end of that and it is unlikely to become cheaper.

Enough about risks we can't control, let's take a look at where most swag could be made.
In the long run ensuring better than average returns is important,

Plantation type
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Each Plantation type produces the same value per day
The difference is the base price of each crate.

You can produce 3 times more cotton than tools, if both plantations were the same but 3 times more ships would be needed to trade the cotton away.

My advice is to avoid cotton and wood, favor tools, iron and party goods (food, rum, tobacco)
Production yield will be the same for all resources - the same overall output.

If you have 2 identical plantations, the worst paying tool plantation provides more gc than best paying cotton plantation, despite the fact that you produce a little over 3x more crates of cotton than tools.

That is why I suggest favoring tools over cotton, and to look at port stock before opening a plantation, especially if it is the first one.

The price paid for each Plantation type varies according to the base price, the recent trades and the warehouse stock

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https://s2.piratesglory.com/?page=help& ... ase_prices
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=88#
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=4225

Starting up production
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While producing your buildings use small amounts of various other goods.To avoid problems, stock up your warehouse and set min and max limit to all resources there.
You need to have each type of goods in your warehouse, except tobacco and what you produce, unless it is food, that is always needed.

In Aiora you don't need wood, and in Baramas you don't need rum.
If you operate in a food port, set the minimum limit for food to 5-10k crates, so your fleets won't move away all food your workers need to stay alive. boy, was it fun to notice that happen

Iron, cotton 5k. rum, wood 15k. tools 25k. This level of stock lasts for over a month with 5000 acres and 6m workers. Scale to your needs. How much food to stock is up to you at least enough for a day or two in case your fleets can’t bring more for one reason or another. You can see your daily consumption from the workers page.

Make sure to have a max limit on every good, and see that the total of all max limits is less than your warehouse capacity.
Now we have stuff to operate with, next we need land and workers. Make bids for 100-500 acres at time, or use Fertile Lands. don't bid for too much land until you have workers to put the land to use.

Aim to have 1200 workers per acre, that works for me. so if you have 1000 acres, you should have 1.2m workers too.

After you have gotten some land and workers, and are thinking of expanding further, do always get more workers before more land. Paying for something you're not using is throwing money away.

Allocating Acres
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Acres allocation is based on the total population in your plantation. The following figures are for 1,000 acres with 1.2m workers
Housing 100 Acres
Utility 30 Acres
Kitchen, Baths 40 Acres
Recreation 60 Acres
Guards - none. this feature is not implemented
All remaining acres will automatically be set to fields for production.

Using up to 3x more acres (90 acres)in utility doubles improvement speed. (meaning you burn gold bars twice as fast, speeding your way to the poorhouse.

The description for each building can be found in the buildings page. improving Utilities speeds up the improvement speed of other buildings. improving Utilities also happens 4x faster than others.

Work Hours Meals
start of with 3 meals a day, even 2,5 will do. i see no benefit increasing meals to 4. add meals only if your advisor tells you to.
Start off with 3-4 hours a day. increase to 5-6 at will. longer days means more swag, and lowers workers stats (health, happiness) improving buildings allow longer hours, up to 10-12 without decrease in workers stats.

A happy worker is productive worker. health will eventually drop to zero. then workers start dying. perhaps 1 fleet is needed to bring immigrants daily to keep current population per 1k acres. only with 3-4 star quality in buildings will it stay still, or improve. then you don't need to bring workers any more and should be able to have great ppa value (production per acre, the meter that shows efficiency of management).

There are various strategies with work hours. you may want to keep lower hours to keep workers alive, maybe even sell them steadily. sane person shouldn't buy near death workers, or any bad workers in general. on other edge you will squeeze all you can out of your workers. this means higher production, at expense of needing to replace more workers, as they tend to die faster.

Improvements
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The higher the quality in your buildings, the more production you can squeeze out from your workers without their stats suffering. with high enough quality vs work hours, they might even improve.

To see the maximum benefit from your improvements, you need to have a certain amount of your population assigned to each building - if you have 1m workers, 10k of them should work in housing, and so on. having less lowers quality. using more than that does not increase quality, as quality can only be obtained by using gold bars.

Since you are expected to keep certain percent of workers in buildings, it is not advised to have too high a population compared to acres you have at your disposal.

Why? well, because the gold bars needed to gain quality depends on the population you have. if you have 2m workers, and 2 star quality in building, and bring in 2m more workers, your quality drops to 1 star. if on other hand you sell half of your 2m workers, you will have 4 star buildings.

According to my old research, there are 20 tiers of improvement. you start from tier 1 a full star is gained every 4 tiers, and half star every 2 tiers. every 3 tiers, there is a description change, when you hover over the stars on the building
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So to reach 1 star, you need to use 3 tiers worth of gold bars. just slapping the gold bars into queue is not enough, you actually need to wait until they are used.

They are used every 10 minutes at the same time plantations pay out.
You always gain benefit from the gold bars used so far, so you don't need to wait for an improvement to be over. It just tells when your workers will run out of gold bars.

To know how many gold bars you have used is a tricky thing, as it is not visible anywhere. I blame CJ for keeping this hidden. he kept saying i couldn't handle seeing how many gold bars I have wast.. ermm, invested

Quality allows for high production, while keeping workers stats high and generally keeping them alive. You are not required to use any gold bars, but they relieve you from the burden of keeping fleets bringing in workers to replace the ones you worked to death, and to allow you to make decent profit even if land prices jump sky high. and good workers should sell for more than those near death, murderous peasants you see for sale every now and then.
I will share the figures for 1.2m workers, which would be good for 1000 acres.

The gold bars needed will always depend on total number of workers
1 star 2 400
2 star 5 600
3 star 8 800
4 star 12 000
5 star 15 200
This is the total gold bars needed to reach quality X. It is per building. The cost is the same for every building. Utility uses gold bars 4x faster, but the gold bars needed for each tier is the same as other buildings.

Housing helps tired workers, kitchens hungry peasants, baths help keeping health up, and recreation allows more work hours with happy workers.

It is advised to improve all of the following buildings - housing, kitchen, baths, recreation to the same stars level but this may cost more gold bars as every plantation doesn't work the same way with the same quality.

Alternatively follow the workers stats. Housing helps tired workers, kitchens hungry peasants, baths help keeping health up, and recreation allows more work hours with happy workers. Workers stats of 100% will increase expertise faster.

I cannot confirm nor deny, if quality in utility helps in production, or just increases improvement speed. when not improving anything, some even remove all or most utility workers - this allows more acres and workers in fields, and thus, more production.