Prologue
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Plantations are still in Beta.
Plantations are not a full feature yet, they never were.
Here is the announcement:
If you actually read the forum announcement, the following is mentioned:
BETA Release Announcement wrote:What BETA means:
-The feature is incomplete and may have a few glitches.
-It will last as long as we need to finish all the final touches.
The good news are that the glitches have been few and as always they have been dealt in a timely and responsible fashion.
The bad news are that this feature has been criticized and slashed like as if plantations were a finished feature.
It is important to clear up the meanings of BETA and FINISHED for future cases. After all, if I recall correctly, plantations were the FIRST feature ever to launch as BETA. Prolonged at least as we might have tagged features as such in the past for their first 24hours.
So, by Finished we will refer to a feature that is bug free and where no major changes will be expected. Finished features can still have expansions if need arises. However, Beta features should be regarded risky and obscure as during their phase we will most probably still determine their impact on the game as a whole.
Ultimately, as the game grows larger, BETA features will become more frequent. It is inevitable. And we must not take for granted that a beta feature will always be evolved like this one. A BETA feature that proves to be a bad move, could be instead removed.
This discussion
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You are all welcome to participate.
At this discussion, we will not deal with EXPANSION ideas. We will deal with what this feature requires to be considered completed, as a feature with the main ideas that are currently employed. After all, we have been through a long list of updates ever since the beta started and we are surely nowhere near to where we were at day 1. You can find ALL related implementations here:
https://s2.piratesglory.com/index.php?s ... _submit=Go
The list is long, which shows the continuous effort we made to transform plantations into a full feature. Not EVERYTHING is mentioned above and the truth is that the plantations-related features are more. For example, the latest warehouse management feature can be said that is related to plantations as it makes their management a lot easier.
I will list below all the key matters that remain open, either listed by players or listed by myself. I will list them all by memory, as the top impressions that I hold right now. So, if your key element is not here, please spend a few minutes and add it.
Open Issues
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1)Plantations take too long to develop
I mean, they do really take a long time to develop. In contrary to other game features, there is no "Instant Turns" mechanism here. I believe that we can now use this for construction: Only for laborers though. This way, the transition from a developing to a developed plantation will shorten. We will also provide another turns sinker.
We can also choose to increase the Laborers speed by investing extra gold bars to them. Perhaps this is the best course of action as we are in need of extra gold coin/gold bars sinkers.
We will need to pick one of the two or have another solution here. A solution to speed must be provided though.
2)No way to calculate the total investment
This is true. The good news is that we keep track of ALL gold bars invested. However, this is not the only cost. We could display the gold bars invested by category or in total. Of course, the investment actual numbers are going to be frightening to all players that have not realized that plantations are an investment: You pay up front only to receive your investment back in time. We cannot include any side investments though, we can only display the gold bars invested.
3)The advisor is unhelpful
Our recipe for the advisor complaints are to make him a paid feature. Do you want an advisor? Well, you will have to pay him. Nothing else will be changed. They will become optional and those who want one, they will have to hire him.
I will only add here that Advisors are not computers.
4)Average production is lower than expected
This is our position. We expected production to be greater. I can see that the average production has only now started to scale. We will give this some time more, I want to run some tests on my own for this. There is a chance that there are still unlocked potential here. However, the very fact that 6 months after plantations launch, the avg max s around 90 crates per acre, is outside our expected result.
Do not take me wrong here though, at these or worse metrics plantations are still abundantly profitable. Still, this is an issue that we will be inspecting and fine tuning before considering the feature as finished. This means, that production rate may be improved.
5)Guard Houses are not really needed
Plantations initial design required random events. These will be implemented only as an expansion. Till then, the guard house role should become clearer. Since we have no workers revolts or issues between them, the guards are not really needed. The best solution for now, is to produce a message to plantation owners telling them that improving and assigning guards is not really needed right now.
6)Acres Management
Another annoying issue is the acres management when you lose acres. Right now, since acres management is numerical, you need to check your settings at times and tweak them. This is unnecessary. The solution to this is that the player will instead assign % to the fields there. Then the game will distribute the plantation acres based on these %.
So owners will now only change the acres when they want to switch their strategy based on their needs and not when they lose a bid.
7)Bids
The bidding system has been through numerous improvements. There still remains a way to combine existing ACTIVE bids. We already made this for PENDING ones. Combining ACTIVE ones though is even more tricky. It is doable though.
If you have a solution in how to do this, let us know. Key problems are how to calculate remaining time when combining them. We should take for granted that the maximum acres that can be combined cannot be larger than 2500 acres, for bidding competition issues.
8)Emergency Help
Right now you can only bring immigrants with trade routes.
We could consider adding a card that adds workers directly to the plantation, taken from the port.
If it was a common card, it should cost 3 turns and add 25k workers.
If it was an uncommon card, it should cost 3 turns and add 150k workers.
If it was a rare card, it should cost 3 turns and add 500k workers.
However, the added workers for all cards should never be greater than 0.5% of the port population.
This would prevent the card to be used as black death for low population ports. This would mean that the rare card would return 500k workers only to ports with population of 100M or more.
I would mostly prefer the Rare card option as we need more rare cards. I cannot come up with more/different card ideas for plantations but we are open for ideas. List them here.
9)Interface Improvement
The main plantation page will change. It is confusing. I still have not adjusted to it after all this time so I suspect that most are having the same issues.
Epilogue
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I have surely omitted something, I will come back later and add it if I come upon it or you could help out by listing it yourself. At all cases, your feedback is needed in order to reach the best possible result. We will need to work on the above sooner or later so your feedback can help us go to the right direction.
References:
Plantations
Plantations Open Beta
