Plantations Expansion

[Shadowood]

CJ be like... "June 1st or bust!"

[Captain Jack]

Meanwhile, the bank beast just keeps getting bigger. By far, the feature with the most lines of code.

[Bomont]

Just pulling a few quotes from the OP to make sure I understand the big picture before focusing on the details of who pays what, when, etc.

Plantations will be available to the ports which produce the following goods:
Cotton, Rum, Tobacco, Food

I assume similar facilities will be used on other ports once this is finalized, balanced, etc. but they will have different names (i.e. mining claims instead of acreage, etc.). Plantations will only be able to produce the goods that the port currently produces. A plantation on Caspian will only ever be able to produce cotton. A plantation on Psaral will always produce tobacco. Correct?

Construction Permission will allow the initial creation of the Plantation in a port.
...
Depending on their type, Plantations will come with either a Distillery (Rum) or a Packing Plant (puts good into crates, for food, cotton and tobacco). These buildings will be like the headquarters of your Plantation and will be maintenance free.

Once I pay for construction permission, I have a level 1 distillery or packing plant at that port (I assume these buildings will have levels, making them more productive as the level increases). But I can't really do anything with it yet...

I now have to negotiate Operating Permission from the Governor. A new negotiation is required every 3 months. This is like a business license. Nothing comes with it - no buildings or fields. I can't start building buildings or producing goods yet because I need...

Acreage. This is the fields I actually use to grow the crop and the space to build buildings. Once I have this, which requires the previous construction and operating permissions, I can begin building my operation and producing goods. The acreage can change daily, based on the availability of land and the bids submitted.

Questions/comments:

1. Construction is very stable - permanent - but useless without the following two. Operating permission is very stable, but only for 3 months at which time you're subject to numerous variables. Acreage is a big question mark that's hard to predict until we try it.

2. If I understand correctly, and the buildings are on the acreage, what happens to them if you lose the acreage?

You will also have to decide how much space to allocate for them. They need space to live and the only thing you got is the acres which you will also use for your crops. Additionally, you may construct further buildings for them (buildings will need acres) to accommodate them further, such as housing, baths, utility shacks,etc. All these cost gold to build and come with maintenance fees but they will improve their living conditions.

If the buildings are expensive and can be leveled up, this could be risky to try given the chance that your acreage can be lost. Or if the acreage is lost will they just go into limbo and return when (if) you get some acreage back?

3. Let's say you lose the acreage for a day. What happens to the workers that live in the housing on that acreage - the workers you shipped in from some other port? Are they all eating food and getting unhappy because they have to camp on the front lawn of your headquarters, or did they disappear with the acreage?

4. Will the buildings and research from your hideout affect the plantations you own? For instance, will a workshop reduce construction time for the plantation buildings? Will there be research added to the academy related to plantations? I'd like to see that happen at some point. It might make it worth leveling up some hideout buildings.

[Captain Jack]

Bomont, I will add things/elaborate to your points. If something of what you write is not correct, I will hit at it. If not, then it is correct.

Yes, different names, similar functionality. The idea of creating diverse gameplay for some of them is not deserted though. We like mining and we like chopping and we will not be able to resist some unique functionality there eventually. Nothing too different though.

CP is a balancing fee. It will keep newbies away, to protect them. It also acts as a credits sinker for veterans. Right now, a veteran has few reasons to spend credits, in contrary with a newcomer. It also acts as an obstacle for a player to spam create a plantation in every port.

The operating permission allows production. You do not need it to start building your plantation. Perhaps it would be wise to acquire it after you have some workers in and some basic structures going in. There is no pressure.

The operating permission does not grant you any levels though. Plantations will not have levels. They will have quality stars for different categories but not levels as a whole.

Acreage is going to be the most significant of all for the well being of your plantation. It is going to be forgiving though in case you run out of acres suddenly. However if you cannot reclaim your optimal acres for a long time, then there will be bad consequences. The interesting fact is that there will be relative freedom here and obscure info in how much acres are the optimal. This will create difficulties for most early on and decoding the secrets will be challenging.

There will be diversification to what every plantation requires to work at its best. There will be more than one ways to make a plantation work well. We might delay different type plantations due to the differences with each other eventually. The only certain objective we are after, right now, is June 1: Food ports get plantations.

1.We did not want to create a feature similar to hideout where you simply build/update. It will work differently.

2.I replied this above I think. There will not be buildings in the way you perceive it. Picture it like this:
You can fit a lot of buildings in just a few acres. Even if you manage to rent none, none will come to demolish what you have built and while you negotiate. However if a lot of time passes, there comes decay... this is how acres will work in the extreme case you have 0 or less than the critical minimum.

3.No, they will not disappear. They will start to grow restless though. Generally, keeping a minimum of acres will be important. We will not allow aggressive bidding in excess. For example, if someone has 10 workers, he will not be able to rent 1000 acres. There needs to be actual usage too, there will be a hard maximum cap relative to workers to prevent such cases. Still, you should be prepared for some battling at this front.

4.The workshop idea is a good one. Although building will be a different concept than it currently is (you will improve, you will not build/construct, you will not add levels) we could use workshop I guess to reduce some of the require time.

[Captain Jack]

In general, Plantations will be more forgiving in low scale and less forgiving in large scale.

Competition will also play a role. We want to tune it in a way that small plantations will be easy to run while mega plantations will be a lot more challenging.

For example, it should be quite an accomplishment to manage to run a 5k plantation, it is only natura. Also, there will be roleplaying involved. Some of the rp elements will be added later. It will be a nice experience to grow your plantation but do not expect to run it perfectly from day 1.

[Cutpurse]

should sell prices be tweaked? as with new pricing model that also includes ports current stock, producing cotton, food or wood in highest stock port would yield 0gc.

also, do bonuses from east india, and duke rank affect plantations, if one chooses to sell all products to port?

will be interesting to see how running costs of plantations will be handled, i would assume cdv to have daily rental fees in tens of millions

[Bomont]

Thanks, Captain Jack

[Captain Jack]

should sell prices be tweaked? as with new pricing model that also includes ports current stock, producing cotton, food or wood in highest stock port would yield 0gc.

also, do bonuses from east india, and duke rank affect plantations, if one chooses to sell all products to port?

will be interesting to see how running costs of plantations will be handled, i would assume cdv to have daily rental fees in tens of millions

There are no other pricing tweaks ahead. We believe that the current model is enough. How exactly you will get 0gc from the highest stock port? Selling to the port will not be through the port market. Plantations will sell directly to the port with other prices. Voodoo will not affect this procedure. You will choose how much you want to keep at the warehouse. The rest will be sold to the market, at the offered market price which will always be a little less than what the market will charge to sell it. Ie, if the market sells for 8 gc, it will offer perhaps 7gc to you. If it sells for 3gc, it will offer 2gc. These figures will finalize in the following days where tests will begin. We got an outline right now, for all metrics but nothing is finalized yet. Even after plantations are out, revisions will certainly come. We just strive to make the numbers as balanced as possible from the entry level, to prevent potential unrest; the more balanced the entry metrics, the happier everyone is.

Profit from plantations cannot and should not be greater than trading. Although under circumstances, the income can be a lot more times greater. It will be up to the rest of the players, either by port control (operating permissions) or acres rental or competition in general (with similar plantations), to limit such cases and push the income to become reasonable profit.

What is ahead, is the port consumption mechanism, which however will need some tweaks on the version currently proposed. For example, population will not consume the resource the port produces. This is not a top priority though and we can afford to work a bit on ship specialization before expanding further these concepts. Meanwhile, we must work on the concepts of Port Buildings and finalize the proposals there. This is hard work but we need to push them for the greater good of the game. Ideas like Blockades will need to be incorporated into the game as well, as they are close to mature as an idea and it will be easier for all of us now, to come up with final functionality.

Ever since Shadowood brought up the issue, there has been a lot of thinking into the issue. I think that our initial thoughts are safer regarding acres rental. When you have 20,000 acres open plus 30,000 more potential growth, it will be nearly impossible for a player to HOG the entire acreage of a port just by himself. With 1000gc/acre, a large enough plantation of 1,000 acres, will pay 1M daily. So if someone wanted to hog this place, he would need to pay 20,000 * 1001 = 20M/day

This is a large figure, even for the big players. The only problem here is that most of this rent will go to national coffers (although a large sum, 17% will go to corruption, so it has a high maintain fee regardless). We could have an exploit in this manner:
-Get the player to pay for his license.
-Then hog the acres with high rents.
-Then get the coin through national coffers back.

However we believe we should keep out from stopping such. If someone wants to act as a rogue, he should be able to do it. It would be impossible to close all such exploits after all, so it would be better to unleash them. If a nation wants to allow such, then it will be only logical that there will be either port assaults against it OR players will avoid said nation's port.

Player decisions are going to be the highest risk you will encounter at this feature and this is the key difference from the rest. At goldsmith, you have pvp competition when selling gold bars. At this feature, you will also have on production level as well. I think this is very beautiful and it will add realism.

At goldsmith, you also have the added risk of losing your precious cargo to Pirates/Skirmishers. This is not an issue with Plantations so the added risk of competition is reasonable.

Other risks will include some random events but these will not be so detrimental to your plantation well being. Even the worst of events will be nothing than temporal issues. Initially, it should and must be hard for everyone. Once you learn how to manage a plantation though, the risks will be nearly ineligible. Failure however should be part of plantations for those careless.

We also believe that plantations will give plenty of interest to a player type that is not so interested in battles. We have some of them here. Plantations will not be battle heavy as your only risk in terms of fighting will be your supply fleets. This feature will also act as a good backbone for every established player.

Ultimately, their profitability will also be relevant to the amount of competition. Just like it happens with Goldsmiths.

[Cutpurse]

on first page it was said, that goods from plantations are sold to ports at port price -3gc, and -2gc for cotton. this is where i got 0gc from.

not having the ability to enhance profits with voodoo is understandable, as it might enable plantation owners to sell produced goods, and to buy them into warehouse afterwards at a cheaper price

[Captain Jack]

I saw it now. I removed it. I will update the Logistics details once they are finalized.

This post is more accurate:
viewtopic.php?p=70414#p70414