Remus

I had in mind a system where meters would be visible - you would know in advance what your output was likely to be if you opened a silver mine in this port, for example - and this would be the driver for players to choose whether to set up here or somewhere else instead. Obviously for a dynamic system the output next week won't be the same as the output this week, but I had thought of giving players some clues to guide their decision before they invested in infrastructure. But you reckon start producing first and then find out by looking at how much you produce? Means a lot more trial and error on the part of players that I'm not entirely sure I like. Favours large clans too, who will have players in several ports reporting back yields. And of course if you include this sort of thing in an API, players like me who can read the files get an enormous advantage over those who cannot. But I'm all in favour of trying things out and seeing what they look like in game. Don't get too carried away with reality though. With all the ships built in NA over the past couple of years I don't think any of the islands can have any wood left by now.

None, from what I can tell. Sir Peter Parker just seemed to like him, appointing him both Master and Commander and Post Captain. After becoming Post Captain he merely had to stay alive.

I've done quite a lot of blue water sailing, and as I recall there isn't actually a great deal of reflection of sky colours unless the sea is very flat indeed. But it's been fifteen years since I was last in the Caribbean and doubtless what I'm thinking of is the North and Irish seas, for which the NA colours look just right. I'll maybe dig out some old photographs.

I loathe alts on a game like this, but I have also spent many hours trying out game mechanics including (not on this game) econ alts. I fail to see what problem you are trying to solve here: As far as I am aware, econ alts aren't banned (much as I might like them to be), so tracing market deals merely means monitoring econ alts (who also happen to trade through the market) rather than doing anything about them There is almost always a gap between buy and sell prices, and it is easy to exchange money to alts using by listing some obscure item below the NPC buy price, so listing the iron for 1 or 1001 doesn't make a lot of difference. In any case you usually want to transfer money in this direction anyway, so the alt can pay their woodcutters. Surely most econ alts dual box anyway.

As far as I am aware (I recall actually testing this, but with my memory etc...) the Trader tool does see player listings, but it doesn't show availability and the 'A' flag isn't to be trusted either way - from what I can tell it may indicate that goods are seeded in that port. This isn't a complaint on my part - I don't think we should be able to see prices and availability in every port - and I cannot actually think of any changes to make to the tool without risking making it either OP or useless. But perhaps other players can think of improvements that haven't occurred to me.

Right, let's get the last few hours' updates into some sort of order. I am definitely an OW player and have no interest in the instabattle game you appear to be developing, I generally approve of the changes and doubtless will be spending many hours on Testbed trying out some of them out an reporting back. But ... Firstly, this is Testbed we are talking about. ALL communication on Testbed is via Global - to the extent that I don't recall ever seeing any other channel ever being used. Not surprising since there tends to be only half a dozen of us and we're spread across several nations. Ok, so I suppose we'll just use Help instead. As, I dare say, will people on Live servers if Global is taken away. As someone who uses Help quite a lot I don't really want it spammed with ... not abuse, but merely routine inter-nation social and gameplay conversation. Aye, ok, but you're turning off Battle chat too. I disagree. It means there is one player - or a few players from one battle - that needs to be dealt with. One too many, admittedly, but this is an MMO after all. This is one of the problems. You choose to right click>ignore and it irks you so you want to get rid of Global altogether. I never ignore anyone ever, and when Global goes toxic I simply ignore the entire channel for the next 15 minutes or however long it takes to settle down. You cannot use it for social communication anyway when it's aflame, but these occasions are rare. But how will our seconds arrange things if they can't talk either?

I generally like what I read, but I am also conscious of the effort Liquicity and others have put into a daily small battle challenge which many players have enjoyed, and I am disappointed to see this disappear. Two questions: 3. What do you mean by 'farming options'? 6. What do you mean by '2-3x more expensive than crafted ones'? If you mean click costs (which right now is merely the cost of materials) then, even if you manage to eliminate inflation, crafters will still want paying for setting up outposts and buildings, time spent hauling and use of building capacity and labour hours which may well - quite legitimately - push the selling price of a ship costing 200k gold in materials up to over a million gold in the shop.

A thought: At the moment, Marks appear to be tradeable - there's a category for them in the Shop on Testbed. I know current Testbed isn't what we'll see in game, but if first rates are limited by requiring a huge number of marks, and if marks are tradeable, then the limitation might not be that ... er ... limiting. If a first rate needs 10000 marks, then 100 players collecting 100 marks each isn't particularly daunting, but one player needing to collect all 10000 ... I'm not saying marks shouldn't be tradable, merely pointing out it makes a difference.

When I had to put my old laptop on trays of ice out of the freezer to play PotBS I knew I needed a new computer.

I didn't really know much about it till the posts here a couple of days ago, but I've now (briefly) read a couple of accounts and listened to the BBC's In Our Time podcast, what I cannot help thinking is what a bloody daft plan it was in first place. Fancy trying to co-oridinate a navy in the confines of the English Channel with a separate army who had no means of direct communication till the navy happened to show up, while facing naval opposition from both sides. I've sailed in the English Channel myself and know from experience the lack of safe anchorages between the Isle of Wight and the Downs and exactly how confined the Straits of Dover are. Reading accounts of the Spanish fleet getting continually harassed by the British as it sailed up and tried to anchor in the Channel I begin to see why so many would-be invaders of England chose to land somewhere in the West. After letting the English fleet get to the west of them on the very first night in the Channel, the Armada's fate looked - well, not quite sealed, but rather precarious. Yet Spain could have won. It looks like it was only naval opposition that stopped them camping in the Channel and had they concluded that their first objective should be to disable the English navy, they could have done so by sailing into Plymouth and engaging in their favourite tactic of boarding at close quarters. Oh, it's easy now over 400 years after the event to say what so-and-so should have done, or if only such-and-such hadn't happened then, so it's almost impossible at this distance to apportion blame, but I would say the biggest mistake was in the planning stage in not recognising that the entire invasion rested on there not being an opposing English fleet to frustrate the Armada being able to communicate with the Duke of Parma's army. Wikipedia (so not entirely reliable) makes the truly remarkable assertion that, when offered the opportunity of capturing the English fleet at anchor in Plymouth, 'Medina Sidonia declined to act because this had been explicitly forbidden by Philip'. If Philip really did order that then quite frankly he deserved to lose. Perhaps Medina Sidonia was being overly cautious - which doesn't really seem to be his character from what little I've read. He appears to me to have been aware of his own inexperience in command of such a venture, so perhaps this really was the King's order and Medina Sidonia was simply too deferential. Blame on the Spanish side, but credit to the English. Howard and Drake seized advantage of the situation, correctly realising their precarious position in Plymouth so sailing out sooner than they probably would have liked with the Spanish fleet still to the west, but knowing where they needed to be and getting past the Armada overnight (does anyone know a good account of this? It seems quite a difficult fleet maneouvre for the time). Thereafter, with the notable exception of Drake the Pirate chasing after Rosario and San Salvador, the English seemed focused on their task of preventing the invasion by Parma's army, in which they were entirely successful. Several posts in the Galleons thread described the Armada as if it were a Napoleonic wars naval battle, fought between ships for the control of the sea where the primary objective is to sink or capture enemy ships. The way I read it the Spanish Armada was more an auxiliary part of a land invasion, and what happened to the ships themselves was pretty immaterial.

I have no idea what your post means, but I like it

'Better' would be daft. But I dare say there are some who don't see that 'as good as' is equally game-breaking for the player economy. I haven't been able to get any clear understanding from reading dev posts what they actually intend doing for either capping NPC ships or NPCs selling ships in the shop, but recent pronouncements give me confidence they know what they're doing and I'm happy to wait to find out. But it won't be in next week's Testbed patch, looking at @admin's post at the head of this topic.

At least she's likely to go out into the harbour. Trincomalee looks set never to leave her cosy dock.

Not really, not yet unless there is something specific you want to look at or try out. Even then, most players would probably do better waiting till the patch next week. I'm there right now building crafting xp and generally taking a look around, but current Testbed is still a long way from what we'll see on PvP Global in a couple of weeks.

Look, we are never going to agree here. I contend that gold balancing is needed, and so I think do you. I contend that there is no need whatsoever to 'balance' labour supply, resource supply, hauling times, maximum nunber of buildings or any other crafting limitation I may have omitted, at least not for 'ordianry' production.The balance needed is to provide interest and difficulty so that some players like crafting and others are willing to pay for their services (the two groups of players could be the same people), and this is what drives the economy. Elite ships and builds, such as the current live oak argument, may need very careful balancing indeed in one or more of the areas I listed, but these are special cases. I have absolutely no idea why you seem to think it desirable for labour hours to be a limiting factor but 'resource availiability or production capacity is not ment to be a limiting factor.' Labour hours aren't either. Why on earth have a PvP ship combat game where players are prevented from building ships to fight with? Gold has far more purpose than ship productioin. I'd hazard a guess that more gold is exchanged for random drop upgrades than for crafted ships. And no, of course a situation of inflation and overabundant labour supply isn't fine. But it's only inflation that would be the problem, not the overabundant labour supply. Anyway, we clearly have either a fundamental difference of opinion, a problem of communication or both and I see no point in continuing this discussion. If you reply I'll read it but I won't respond.

No harm doing so. But PvP1 becomes PvP EU after the wipe, so no need either.

Well, we're never going to agree here either. Inflation is specifically about gold. If gold is overabundant, whatever is in short supply goes up and up in price. I've been looking at labour, but it also applies to rare drops and other things as well. If labour is overabundant, crafting the same ship doesn't consume more and more labour over time; if oak is overabundant, ships don't start needing more planks to make. Gold is special. If labour were plentiful and gold still didn't have sufficient sinks, then inflation would attach itself to something else. Resource availability perhaps, or hauling time. Anything that players struggle to obtain or don't want to spend time doing. If everything were plentiful - players could make any ship they wanted in any port for a few clicks - then even if gold had insufficient sinks you wouldn't get inflation because there is nothing to inflate. There wouldn't be a meaningful economy either and I'd probably not bother playing, so this isn't really a scenario worth considering. If labour were restricted more than now - say everything took 10 times longer - but gold costs increased 100 fold so gold was in short supply as well, then you would not get inflation even though labour is in short supply, because there isn't any gold to drive it. Sure, players would charge for their labour, for hauling and other things buyers either don't want to or cannot do themselves, but they could only charge relatively small amounts which wouldn't increase over time.

From what I could see there isn't currently a distinction between PvP and PVE marks. In the admiralty shop you can select to exchange your marks for a PvP something (I forget the name) or a crafting something else, one ultimately giving you ships, the other one blueprints (and other things besides in both categories), but the marks themselves were the same. Will this change so we get different marks for PvP and PvE?

Already in place on Testbed, though I hadn't realised till someone pointed it out to me. Load the ship in port, select another ship, add first ship to fleet and tick the box. At the other end move to docks and unload. But I don't think on current testbed build you can access fleet ships' holds in the end of battle screen.

Yes, I agree. Reducing income would have the same effect. My guess is that making sinks deeper is easier as there are just so many different methods of making money in this game - but at least one of them will cease (gold for damage), so perhaps the devs want to throttle the supply side instead, or maybe do both. Labour inflation - now what on earth is that? Labour generation is fixed, labour for each recipe is fixed and the amount that can be stored is capped, in this game as in every other I've played. Okay, NA effectively allows infinite storage with labour contracts, but who will use these if labour plentiful, and neither of us like LCs in any case. What you seem worried about is labour devaluation. Currently LCs can sell for over 500k. If labour were plentiful they would become almost worthless. What is wrong with this this? Eco won't crash unless players either don't want new player-made ships or they cannot get the gold to pay for them. I don't want to increase demand - this cannot come from the economy. I want to be able to meet demand. I want crafting to be able to meet the maximum possible demand. The primary purpose of this game is PvP ship combat. Crafting has two main roles: to supply ships the PvP players need (not to restrict the ships they can have) and to sink gold that players grind for to get their ships. It need not be (and indeed in NA it isn't) the only way of supplying ships to players or sinking gold, but since Naval Action has crafting, it ought to be the principle means of both supplying ships and sinking gold. This is not to say all ships should have unrestricted avaialibility. I think we are all agreed that first rates should be significantly harder to obtain than they are now, and part of this restriction could be through the economy, and may well involve labour hours too. But excluding 'elite' ships, any ship a PvP player is able to grind the gold for, the crafter should be able to craft in similar time. I deliberately use the terms 'PvP player' and 'crafter' as if these are two separate players because they often are, but don't take this to mean players shouldn't do both. I don't understand what you mean. I don't mind assuming resources don't require labour, but I am only looking at the current scenario where: crafting ships costs gold and labour (somewhere in the process - it doesn't matter where) gold costs more or less keep pace with labour hours labour is in relatively short supply If labour were unlimited, or labour hours were abolished altogether then gold per labour hour would be more or less irrelevent. In any case, I can only ever say that gold per labour hour is too low, because this is the only case I can safely assume that all labour hours are used, being the worst case scenario. If gold costs were 100 times higher I couldn't say gold costs per labour hour were too high, as to say this I'd need to know how many labour hours were actually used. Gold costs probably would be too high in this case, but it would probably be argued using some other method. Gold cost per ship perhaps. I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one. Ships bought from NPCs in the shop or captured off NPCs. I've only got three or four player-made ships myself, all crafted by myself; all the rest are NPC ships.

That's air draft where I come from. Draft is waterline to bottom of ship.

Easy one, this. High in the water is faster. With caveats. It isn't necessarily true now as they can do clever things with hydrodynamics which I don't begin to understand, but in the age we're talking about I think they knew about hull speed (longer ships go faster) but the two biggest effects are:resistance and friction. Resistance is basically having to push water out of the way of the ship. Hull shape outweighs everything here and a deeply-laden well-designed hull will easily outperform a lightly-laden poorly-designed hull, but all things being equal, deeper in the water means more water that needs to be pushed out of the way, without having any more sail force to do it with. Friction is, having pushed the water to either side of the ship, it now has to flow past the hull. Weeds, barrnacles and such like have greatest effect here, but so too is the area of hull in contact. Deeper laden means more hull area in contact with water, so friction is increased. Turning the rudder increases both effects. Now for the caveat. Or rather two caveats. Hull shape trumps everything, and hulls were designed for a certain displacement. If you lighten the ship to less than this then you might upset the hull performance. The same thing happens if the weight distribution is wrong. All ships require weight to be evenly distributed side to side, but they also require the weight to be distributed correctly front to back as well, and the optimum distribution varies from ship to ship. A heavily-laden ship with the load well distributed may well outsail her sister, lightly-laden but porrly distributed. The second caveat is stability. If you remove all the ballast the ship might become unmanageable or fall over.

I like reading your posts and learning from your experience, but what is so very wrong with the third option? To my mind, unless everyone - yes, even the Dutch - has some method of getting live oak then the game is seriously flawed. How many ports would it need to ensure the Dutch get one? Clearly so many that it it is no longer rare. Should live oak be rare? I really don't know, but that is probably the first question. Assuming we do want live oak to remain rare, how are players to get hold of it? Players in nations who hold LO ports will simply craft it, and for them life is easy. Nations who don't hold LO ports must still be able to obtain it, but it must be harder for them to provide the incentive to capture an LO port for themselves. I don't know what the best method is. Perhaps it needs a combination of methods. But smuggling and hunting traders both look like suitable mechanisms to me.

All looks good. A few questions: Will you make available an ItemTemplates json file? Will this patch have NPC spawn rates you expect to see go live? Will this patch have shop seeding you expect to see go live? Will this patch have NPC cargoes you expect to see go live? I look forward to trying this out and reporting back.

I started off by assuming that pretty much everyone uses all their labour - this is true - and my evidence is the high value placed on labour hours. But I would never call this 'balanced'. As I say, this is a safe assumption to use to draw the conclusion that gold sunk per labour 'day' is too low because if it isn't true (and of course I don't think it is literally true - of course there are players who don't use all their labour), then the situation is worse than I portray. I also don't think everyone spends all their labour hours making gold live oak build strength l'Oceans. But as with players using all their labour hours, it provides a worst case scenario. It is riskier to use this assumption to calculate what a fair average gold sink per labour day is, for then you do need some idea of how many labour hours are used and how much gold actually comes into the game per player day. Which is why I haven't done this, The devs have this information; they can do the calculation. All I am doing is pointing out the current ratio is wrong. If forced to make a guess I'd say that average gold per labour day should increase about fourfold. Can you use all your labour hours in a useful way by just spending 3 minutes a day producing basic stuff, stuff that higher level crafters actually need? Genuine question btw. Merely harvesting resources won't do it because relatively little labour is used in harvesting and resources aren't much of a problem anyway: as I say, I do very little harvesting right now. So you need to make things with your oak, hemp, whatever, but most things that need making require more than one ingredient - even making notes (which can easily absorb labour hours) requires two - do copper, silver or gold ever occur in the same port as coal? Of course you can use labour hours just to make labour contracts, and this I expect is what many non-crafters do. Because my analysis is based on the assumption that all labour is used then it has to be increasing gold costs. I happen to think that decreasing labour times would increase demand for ships, so decreasing labour time would indeed have some effect, but this is more of a guess than analysis. Somewhere in the crafting process there is a gold cost. Currently it is all in harvesting resources, but it doesn't have to be. It could all be moved to ship blueprints. Somewhere in the crafting process there is a labour hours requirements. Currently this is mostly in ship and note blueprints with relatively little in resource harvesting, but it doesn't have to be. It so happens that for all ships, the total gold cost more or less keeps pace with the total labour hour consumption - if it didn't I wouldn't have been able to carry out the analysis I have - increasing slowly as ships get bigger and of higher quality. Labour hours are currently more or a restriction than building capacities, which is why my focus is there. If labour hours were removed from the game entirely then of course I'd look at building capacities as the limiting factor and I might come to very different conclusions. In another scenario where resources were free and infinite and there weren't labour hours either, I'd maybe look at item weights and hauling times. But right now, we know labour hours are the restriction (I assume you craft so experience this directly), and I assume (yes, yes I know - I have to assume this because I wasn't here long enough before the server wipe was announced to experience it myself) ... I assume inflation really is an issue because so many players say it is. Inflation merely means more gold is entering the economy than is leaving it (or being locked away); I could look at the supply side but I have chosen to look at the sink. Long term players have lots of ships, true. Hell, I have lots of ships, but almost all of these are NPC-made (I don't know how other players got theirs). As I understand, the devs want to progress to a player-made economy, and they are certainly changing to 1-dura ships. I'd say PotBS dura loss rates are pretty comparable to NA, but there were no NPC-made ships whatsoever (except for pirates who could cap them).