Plantations Expansion

[Shadowood]

CJ,

You have mentioned Nations being able to adjust NPC Tax in the future and possibly with the Plantations update.

Do you have something in mind on what that will be. 1-20? 5-15?

Thoughts?

[Captain Jack]

I think that the only realistic decision will be to put no limits at all. However, before this can happen, we will need to have something like Port Traits

[DezNutz]

What is going to be the max number of workers per acre? Time of Production?

[Captain Jack]

We are not looking to put such limits as maximum number per acre. Instead, we want to work with productivity per worker. That's the concept.

Of course, it is reasonable to have a relative average and a relative max productivity per acre. This is how it happens in agriculture. A tree might give you nothing a year but give you 4 times the average production the next year. We want to give some freedom here as we want to see Plantations react in a way that simulates reality and in agriculture, you can take nothing for granted.

While on this, I believe that this will give room for an extra national law for Crop insurance perhaps or Plantations Insurance. We will see how we will call it but there should be a way for nations to help their Plantation Owners if they want it.

Regarding time, things are under debate and we would welcome anyone's input. We have no seasons in Avonmora. I doubt we want to get. Also, days here are nowhere similar to earth's days.

However, the truth is that for this feature we have calculated the following based on an average speed of a galleon versus average trading trip length here.

Average speed back then was 5 knots and for a typical distance that here lasts 1 hour, a real trading fleet would need about 10 hours. That's clean sailing speed though as back then you would also have loading and unloading times plus resting. So, if we oversimplify things, we could claim than 1 Avonmora hour ~= 1 Earth day

Therefore 1 Avonmora day ~= 24 earth days.
If we use this metric for our plantations, then we should have a full season in just 15-16 days as 15 * 24 = 360

[DezNutz]

Will production cycles be automatic? What I mean is will the resource be automatically harvested and sold to market at the end of it's production cycle, or will the user have to interact and perform these tasks.

[Black sparrow]

You will have some thousands of workers to do these for you. Right?

[DezNutz]

You will have some thousands of workers to do these for you. Right?

You have a crew that sails your ship, but it don't go anywhere unless you tell it to.

Plus I think forced interactions would make this a better feature. If the feature is click and forget, it isn't really adding anything other than a potential point in profit.

[Captain Jack]

Well, this will work mostly like it works now with Goldsmith. You will get to see production per day. Most probably though, for a small period of days there will be no production though. If we go for the 15 days model, perhaps 10 days production and 5 days no production.

There will be no seasons though. It will be relevant to your timings.

As for harvest/sale actions there will be no such nuisance. Your army of workers will take care of these indeed, based on your orders.

The time needed to run a plantation will be considerable but if I had to rank it, I would say that it will probably be less than the time a successful bank requires. It depends though. You will not have to deal with things that end up repetitive, like harvest/sell. You will just point what to do of the production, store or sell and up to what point.

[Black sparrow]

How about production numbers? Can you give us the current numbers under revision? Perhaps we can help.

[Captain Jack]

I can provide them yes, but they are under revision.

The key number for what we got now in the game, is that plantations sooner or later will need to meet a demand around 3M crates per day, per port. Now, some ports might have greater production according to needs. But in general, 3 * 21 = 63M crates is the reasonable current demand number.

If we take a normal sized plantation at 500-1000, the we speak about 25 to 50 plantations per port (maximum). The maximum is very important though. The defined consumption helps us here. The maximum allowed production should be able to feed the maximum amount of citizens.

Therefore
Max Population = 2.1B * 21 = 44.1B
Max Consumption = 44.1 * 0.0025 = 110M per day
Max Acres = 50.000 acres * 21 = 1.050.000 acres
Max production per acre = 105 crates/day

So, a 1000 acre plantation, should produce about 105.000 crates a day.

Let's use Food as our example here which is the best candidate for a series of reasons which I will not explain to save time and space.

Food will be possible to be sold at 7gc maximum.
So, maximum income = 7 * 105000 = 735k

Of course, one could run a 5000 acre plantation, so maximum income could be 3.675M gc per day, which is closer to what we want.

5000 acres plantations per port, if we get 2-3 of each, then we will end up with a total of 315,000 acres used, for a total production of 33M crates. Which means that current world metrics can sustain more plantations or larger plantations. So we could even see a few mega plantations at 10k acres each, which will theoretically could generate 7.35M per day.

Plantations of 10k, mean a number of around 5 plantations per port. I am not sure if we want this though. We probably want more owners and higher income for owners so that the rest features that will be connected to plantations will have profitability room. For example, plantation income should be thriving if there is not enough supply and in this case the profit should be so large that they will be able to overpay needed supplies to enlarge their plantation while being able in the same time to pay high fees to ports hosting them.

The metrics, to be honest appear to be nice. The problem is what I described above and for this issue we are more contain to make mega plantations work rather than mess with the metrics. Another thing we can also do, is to limit running expenses that flow towards the game to near 0 (not building expenses though). Otherwise we should change max production per acre. Truth is that max production per acre should be increased in order to also meet player demand. Perhaps all the above, tweaked in a limited way can produce the final result.