Decentralizing the player economy to all over the map

[Marcomies]

With the introduction of the player production buildings, the amount of traders (and the resulting piracy/commercial raiding) has decreased significantly and concentrated on a very small area around the nation capitals. There is really no reason to build production buildings for any material anywhere but to the closest possible port to the nation capital. When the NPC production is phased out completely, there will be no longer any reason to sail traders beyond those ports and invading ports for economic reasons becomes pretty much an obsolete concept.

 

As far as I know, the current plan is to reduce the number of different resources in each port to spread the production into larger number of ports. However, this solution would still have two large issues:

- There would still be no reason to build production anywhere further than the closest possible port from the capital. 99% of the production would be concentrated in 7-8 ports instead of 3-4 ports and there would be virtually no traders beyond that area.

- Weak nations could lose their capability to produce ships almost completely if they lost their access to just one resource. This would not be an unlikely scenario if more than 4-5 ports are needed or if some resource is located far away from the capital.

 

I would suggest that the number of different resources produced by each port would not be reduced significantly but instead a following systems were added to the game.

 

Bonuses for production in unpopular ports:

- Let's presume that about 1/2 of the players of a nation had their production buildings in the closest possible port to the capital. They would have no bonuses to their production.

- About 1/3 of the players would have their production buildings in the production port second closest to the capital. They would have a small bonus to their daily production amount, small discount in labor hour cost and small discount to the production price of the resource.

- Rest of the producers would be evenly spread out all over the nations ports. They would have significant daily production bonus, significant labor hour discount and a significant discount to production costs.

 

This would give people a reason to go beyond the closest possible port to manufacture resources. Much larger area of the map would have regular traffic, pirates and privateers would have much better chance of finding prey outside their enemies' capital regions. Entire clans could decide to move their base of operations from the capital to some other region and enjoy significant improvement to the efficiency of their ship production in comparison to the capital. There would always be a reason for military expansion and and producers would have to balance between the risk and reward of operating in the dangerous and unpopular ports. The maximum bonuses should be at least somewhere in the region of 50% to really tempt the people to leave the safest ports and to reward the increased risk they take.

 

In addition to gameplay benefits, this system would also make sense from realism point of view. Unpopular ports would have more unemployed workforce willing to work for less and  more unused resources available for exploitation.

 

 

Dynamic refund for selling a building:

- Part of the value of a building should be refunded when player decides to abandon it.

- For a building in a port with a lot of buildings of that type (the closest possible port to capital in most cases) the refund could be somewhere around 80%

- Abandoning a building in a port with only few buildings of that type, the refund could be only 50% or something like that. 

 

This would encourage people to move out of their established outposts an allow for more dynamic use of available ports. It would further increase the spread of the server population. From realism point of view, selling a production building in a port with plenty of people buying them would give you better price than selling a building in port with only few people buying buildings.

 

 

One additional upgrade building for each port:

- Each player outpost would be allowed to have one upgrade building.

- Different upgrade buildings would only effect one type of production building

- Effects could be increased labor hour efficiency, increased daily production or larger storage capacity for example.

 

This would give the players the choice of either concentrate on one material in one port or to spread their production of different materials into several ports in order the gain the full benefit of upgrade buildings. This would further increase the amount of trader traffic in the world and add a benefit to specialization.

[tatannn]

Sorry i didn't read all of it.

i just want to warm you  ( if i'm not mistaken) that harbor will get labor hours , and not everyone will be able to extract ressources by building in the same port.

 

just take an example.

 

One port have 5k labors hours /day

if i use 500 LH for extracting ressources, just 10 players will be able to do the same. others won't be able to extract ressources and that why Nations will have to spread out if they got a large population.

 

this is my vision how the mecanics will works.

 

wait for Mods /admin to clarify things

[Diggled]

I dont think any of this is going to happen until they work out some sort of system that you have more than half a days notice to get stuff out of a captured port.  Noone is going to risk large scale production in backwater areas that can easily be captured by enemy.

 

I'd like to know what plans the devs have for trading at other factions ports or even setting up your production there and how it fits into war/peace diplomacy patch.  Will I be able to setup production on allied nations ports?  Trade with any other national port as long as we arent at war?  Perhaps a blockade running mini-game/instance to get in and out of captured ports?

[Hethwill]

No matter how many production buildings are established in a port the whole production should never go over that port production.

 

If a port produces 800 silver, no matter if you have a 100 mines, the full production will be 800 for the entire port.

 

This should automatically make traders spread out.