I'm curious how other captains are crewing their ships. Do you sail your trade ships with a full crew or with only 15 crewmen per ship?
Since it costs upkeep gold to have full crews I have been only hiring 15 crew per trade ship. I believe this decision for each player significantly affects the production of each port since each port produces the total number of hired crew for all players + 10,000.
It seems like the ports are producing about 180k goods each time so I'm guessing that's about 170,000 total crew. I believe I can increase that number to about 190,000 total crew if I sailed all my Large Merchantmen and Trade Galleons with full crews instead of only 15 each.
Do you think it is worth it to produce an extra 20,000 goods at each port? If a bunch of players all hired more crew, how much more production do you think we could all get?
Captain D.