Remus

Someone (I forget who) posted elsewhere that Stone Mine should be Stone Quarry. They are of course correct. While you do get stone mines (underground), this is only for for special kinds of high value stone, not ship's ballast. NavyBrig and BellePoule are missing spaces, at least in the blueprint name. You might also consider inserting a space before the bracket in Mortar - 308pd(13inch) As an engineer I hate seeing numbers and units without a space between them, and as an Englishman pound (mass) is abbreviated lb. 12pd isn't wrong, but I'd much prefer to see it written 12 lb .

Coal may be worth making yourself (before the wipe it was only coal and iron I never rotated) if only for the gold and silver. I take it you really farm it out to others to save yourself the LH. You (well, I) was never short of resources before the wipe, even with just 3 slots.

You're not an econ player, are you Powederhorn? Food supplies would be a sensible use of LH - you'll have the raw materials to had for free, after all - but it is needed in such small quantities you'll struggle to find buyers. A shipbuilder who makes nothing else needs no more than 1000 a week, which takes 400 LH, less than half a day's generation. Make this and you'll soon swamp the market. Muskets?? Have you seen the list of ingredients? Coal, iron ore, fir logs, oak logs, saltpeter and sulphur! If you can assemble this little lot then you're hardly a beginner, and in any case War Supplies (the only thing for which muskets are used) are mainly made by clans. Barrels. You'll maybe find buyers in a shipbuilding port, but since they require coal, iron,fir and oak, if you have these resources why on earth aren't you making hull repairs? Add hemp and you can make rig repairs. Get hold of some stone to build the workshop and you can make guns. These are items players really do need and crafters won't be able to make them quickly enough. The only problem is you can only put up 10 sell contracts at a time, so no selling rig and hull repairs at all your local ports, or trying to sell every size - even every popular size - of gun.

I don't think there'll be much inter-nation cross-map trade of crafting materials. Teak is the only wood I've been using in the last couple of patches I've had to haul. Sure, other wood are scarce, but don't seem to be worth bothering with. Even gold and silver, which it looked as if we would need to somehow obtain from enemies seems to appear in sufficient quantities from mine drops and odd seeding in shops (furnishings is - or was before yesterday - sometimes seeded too. But as for what will drive it, it will be player demand. Demand for ships that aren't Crew Space trim, for ships which cannot be bought, demand for repairs which drop in only minuscule quantities. Demand for long guns and carronades - and even mediums, for players will be able to undercut shop prices. Demand will be far far higher than players can supply as there is such a severe restriction on LH. But there won't be any demand lower down the production chain for crafting materials are needed in such small quantities (again because of the LH limitation) that everyone will easily be able to make their own, and even gold and silver don't look like they'll be a problem. It's only a couple of rare seeded woods we may need to fight over, but the quantities you can use are so low I doubt there'll be undue competition.

If you don't give us traders in shops, and sufficient seeded trade goods to make startup capital to set up eco, I won't cry. I'll just stop playing.

The latest wipe/patch on testbed appears to have no trader ships in any of the shops. We cannot capture them and to build one (TBrig or TSnow only - for we still don't have BPs for any of the others) requires four outposts to harvest the resources. To build the outposts costs ... I forget how much but it's in the hundreds of thousands at least ... and to make that amount of money means hauling trade goods. Have we been given redeemable Victories merely for hauling black ironwood? Is this what Live will be like? @admin, You must really, really hate us. Please tell us it is a mistake,

This is the only one I can answer for sure, From current Testbed (Hotfix 10? Not seen any patch notes), Marks (PvE, PvP and Conquest) can be contracted through the shop for money. This is a change from Hotfix 9 where conquest marks weren't listed At the moment there is still a marks for marks exchange through the Admiralty (10 PvE for 1 PvP, 1 PvP for 1 Conquest) but I recall admin saying recently these would be removed. Edit: I think the Admiralty marks exchange must be an echo of PvE server as there's no Conquest to PvP or PvP to PvE exchange.

I disagree, certainly for PvP marks In the wider server economy, the easiest way to bring gold into the economy (by a considerable margin) is NPC goods trading. Sure, it'll be harder finding untapped trade routes with a far larger population than we have on Testbed, but unless things change dramatically I have no worries whatsoever about being able to grind my 8 million or so starting capital. Once I've got outposts, level 2 shipyard, workshop, extra warehouse space, extra ship slots, haulers, a couple of nice combat ships for myself and enough iron and coal to craft my first batch of guns for sale, I'll stop grinding for I detest this useless Elite trading game which does nothing for the player economy, nothing to further RvR and only provides scant satisfaction for those PvPers whose pinnacle of achievement is attacking traders. However, some players like trading, and so they will continue to get rich. I bet they aren't primarily PvP or RvR players, but I dare say they would quite like to get a Constitution nonetheless. For the PvP and RvR players, some of them at least must lose battles, so they'll need money to replace ships, guns and repairs. They'll be loath to surrender their marks for this deprives them of the biggest ships, but a PvP player with no money but 15 marks might well think it better to sell some marks to buy and equip a Trincomalee rather than keep hold of them and grind hundreds of thousands of gold in an old Navy Brig they have kicking around so they can buy a Consti. I expect PvP marks will become widely available in national capitals, maybe even Free Town hubs. There is nothing about PvP marks relating to national importance or RvR. Conquest marks may well be a different matter. Right now, they cannot be sold in the shop (though permits which need them can), but I dare say this is an oversight. My guess is that a few players who get them who aren't wedded to a clan may well be tempted by potential riches to sell them, and perhaps the main thing that will put them off will be an understandable reluctance to advertise their treachery by posting a sell contract. But perhaps other players will create buy contracts in Free Towns where sellers can sell without being identified.

Well, that's why they are on Live. But no reason for fine woods to exist on Testbed - it's had at least two wipes.so no oe will have them anyway. And no one will ahve them on Live either after the wipe

When I were a lad - almost as long ago as the game is set it seems - we still had coins in circulation inscribed penny, shilling and florin. Farthings and half-crowns had not long disappeared (the name half-crown was still widely used, even if the coin of that value wasn't) and crowns were still legal tender though had long since been only struck for commemorations. And these were merely the inscriptions on the coins themselves. Colloquially we had bits, tanners and bobs which you'd never giuess from either their inscription or value, and ha'pennies which are obvious when written down but when said quickly as three-'a'p'nce (a foot) is enough to confuse foreigners. And this was all in the same currency system. I vote for Guinea.

Observations concerning the Shop There is a Consumables tab but no Consumables type in Contracts The three repairs really should be in Consumables but are in Materials (Hull and Rig Repairs) andResources > Food (Rum) All the permits, including those restricted to nats / pirates are listed in the Materials category. This implies Pirates can sell Pirate Frigate permits to nats and nats can sell Lineship permits to Pirates. Is this right? (Yes, I know they'll have to get blueprints too, but ...) Conquest Marks cannot be listed. Is this correct? Some of the books cannot be identified as to ship rating when created buy contracts. Perhaps we can guess, but take a look at Mortar Handbookls which aren't in the same order as most of the others It's a little odd when creating a buy contract to get the message 'Selected price is too low, it should be at least 11 gold', when the game itself entered 10 as the default price. Why 11 anyway? While I am all in favour of preventing players listing speculative undervalued buy orders (or overvalued sell orders), 11 seems a bit of an odd choice for 12lb carronades, which cost 360 to craft. And I just have to laugh at 28 as the minimum price for salt. I don't know how many sell contracts we are allowed - 10 is it? - but even after selling lots of guns I now find I am up against my limit when I want to list more. If you really do want players to craft guns and repairs, perhaps listing repiars at free towns round the map, then please, please increase the number of contracts we can place. The whole player economy - unless you just want to confine it to clans - relies on there being suitable channels for buying and selling. You have just introduced 19 new unseeded player-made items into the game, items players will actually want to buy and, in the case of repairs, will want to buy at lots of ports all over the map, so please introduce the means of selling them too. Finally, even on Testbed there are lots of obsolete items cluttering up contract lists, crafting recipes, shop listings anf the like. Please remove them with the wipe. I never want to see a fine wood, medkit, copper ore, copper ingots, copper coins, crafting notes (unless you are keeping them for something special or they're used somewhere I don't have a BP for), silver coins (ditto) cases (ditto), tobacco (ditto), cotton rolls (ditto), cotton (ditto)

Cables and Hawsers, not howsers.

While I sympathise, it isn't actually gold ore. Gold and silver are precious metal precisely because they don't react, so they aren't usually found as ores. Perhaps our currency should be given a name.instead ... as I see others have suggested

I agree with the rest of your post, but ship manufacture isn't as hard as you make out; it just requires different techniques and a little more planning as you'll have to make (or find someone else to make) pretty much everything rather than buying resources or manufactured items from shops. I honestly cannot see how doing it solo is harder than in a clan, except a clan can provide escorts for hauling, should you feel you need it (which you may well do depending on where you are based) Removing notes and with them the need for moderately large quantities of gold and silver, also the removal of pine and red wood, mean that my Testbed crafting set-up is four ports instead of 6 - and one of the two I've lost is a distant silver port, so in the start up phase I actually had less hauling rather than more, The big difficulty - which you did mention - is start up capital. I now have six outposts (capital and local free town as well as the four resource ports), a vastly expanded warehouse in my shipbuilding port, a level 2 shipyard and a workshop and two or maybe three ship slot upgrades. I hate to think how much I've spent on this little lot, but it's probably a few millions. Rotating production buildings is cheap - you only need level 1 after all. At the start I also rotated outposts since it is permits that are expensive, not the outpost itself. The only way to get this amount of start up capital is from trade goods. It's doable - and not particularly difficult once you've found your goods and ports - but getting gold is far harder than on Live and you need to discover new trade routes, ones which no one else has got in and exhausted before you, and preferably a little out of the way so you are less likely to get caught.

For info, I bought the game on 6th March and, apart from at most 2 weeks in April I have used all my LH on PvP1 as a solo crafter making things to sell (well, after the first 3 or 4 ships to break), not merely making and breaking TLynxes to level quickly. Once I worked out how perks worked, pretty much all the time I've had Foreman up, and for crafting ships I've had Royal and the appropriate ship master. I am now level 40 and will be 41 tomorrow. No help from anyone and I'm not sure I've even cashed an LC on Live. When I picked some up from wrecks I was in need of cash so I sold them. It takes time - calendar time - to level, but once you've got stockpiles of resources it's easy. I made a short hauling run early last week to get something or other. It looks like I'll need another run next week. I might even need to set up a building to make something other than compass wood before too long. Levelling on Testbed will take about 50% longer at a guess with the removal of XP for anything other than ships and the inability to instant-respec. Of course, if you decide to make guns or repairs rather than ships (and you'll maybe have to to start with, to make money to build more outposts), it'll take infinitely longer. It'll also take more sailing time, if only to transport ships to market rather than teleport them.

I certainly don't mind - the more crafters who express their views the better, I would be very happy with dedicated production buildings, but I was consciously trying not to turn NA crafting into PotBS crafting. NA doesn't have production buildings excepf to resources, shipyard and workship, and I think it can manage without. But we are both aiming for the same thing - something @admin has also expressed - a need for specialisation. There is literally no point in hauling contracts right now because there is nothing to haul (if you've set up your production ports sensibly). I spend about 3 hours a week hauling and that's only because I'm not organised enough to do it in 2. But hauling contracts could be excellent if we had LH to be able to consume more stuff. I am deliberately not looking at NPC trade, making money or server economics in this thread. They do tie in with crafting, but since I am a free marketeer rather than a coimmunist clansman the only time I need to go out making money is for seed capital at the start. Once I am up and running my crafting should be not merely self-supporting but a nice little earner. Sure, buyers need to go out grinding cash to buy my nice shiny things, but that's their problem Free towns need love. But with removal of craftable rare resources I don't see any purpose in them beyond NPC trade goods hubs. Perhaps they'll become selling points for repairs. Really they should be for cross-nation trading, but with the removal of Live Oak as a crafted resource there doesn't seem to be any need for this. Seeded goods you can buy with a smuggler flag. If I were to develop this further I'd say the seeded woods should be craftable instead - certainly it's what I'd prefer - but I'm happy that seeding is being tested. Your craftsman idea sounds far better than the current crafting perks,

Well, I put up a thread on Hotfix 7 econ which pretty well puts forward my position. LH: Increase LH generation or reduce requirements 5- or 10-fold. Allow players who want to craft to actually make things for other people, not wait another four hours to be able to click out a Constitution for myself. 1 ship in 3 days is dull, dull, dull from a crafting point of view, it doesn't remotely satisfy server demand (who mostly buy NPC-made ships from the shop), it more or less forces everyone to craft whether they want to or not, and if clans use their LH for RvR (line ships and war supplies) then it means shortages of ships, guns and repairs for everyone else. Resources: Increase LH generation consdierably but increase resource generation by perhaps about half of LH. Right now I can make anything with just 3 level 1 resource buildings which are cheap to rotate. Okay so tonight I finally upgraded the iron mine to level 2 as it looks like I'll neve need to demolish it, but this is isn't specialisation. Specialisation in crafting is good; trading with others in elaborate production chains, requiring careful organisation for clans or an understanding of the market.for solos. - it shoud be encouraged. You even have a mechansim for it with expensive level 3 resource buildings which players will think twice about rotating (though not expensive enough to make players like me think twice. 210k is still pretty cheap if I don't have to do it too often). But right now there's no incentive to specialise or use level 3 buildings. To do so, male resources more of a restriction. Hauling Hauling is a naturat limitiation on crafting quantity, but Naval Action barely touches it. Sure you've made it far riskier - perhaps too risky, it is easily the thing in game which will stop me playing. I don't want a get out of jail free card but I do want a reasonable chance of escape if I happen to be spotted in OW, slipping away under cover of darkness perhaps, to give a RL analogy.. But aside from the risk, I quite simply don't have enough to haul. I did a 200k LGV run yesterday, half empty. I'll probably do another on Friday (maybe just Ambergrease to Turneffe though, a whopping 100k return). It'll be the middle of next week before I have enough to sell to warrant the longer and more hazardous journey to KPR to take goods to market, for I simply don't have the LH to need anything brought to my crafting ports or to make anything more to sell. I don't want to haul more, but I most certainly would if it meant I could make more. Ports There's precious little reason to go anywhere. Cedar looks useless now and only teak out of the new woods looks both valuable and scarce. I'll probably base my shipbuilding in a teak port after the wipe. Guns in an iron port, of course. On Live we have refits which have spread players across the map, not just for crafting refit thingies (whatever they will end up being) but having to build entire ships there. It is why I am in Belize now, but with the wipe I may as well move to Jamaica, doubtles with every oither Brit and we'll do little hauling runs in convoys round the island. How dull. I won't even be able to have my base taken away from me. Dull, dull, dull. On live we also had rare resources where owning a port meant something. Not now. Not, I might add, that I reckon owning a port should confer exclusive rights - there should be mechanisms for players of other nations to get hold ot the resource somehow (personally I favour attacking NPC traders leaving a port, but there are other mechanisms). At one time you wrote about restricting port resources. The mechanism you had was flawed but the idea was sound. Certainly it sounds wrong to have 100 players mining iron and coal in Montego Bay when Belize/Ambergrease will doubtless revert to their unspoiled pre-industrial charm. Crafting Perks. Abolish them. Having picked exclusively fleet/ crafting perks on testbed, I realise I want combat perks more, and crafting can go hang. I see them only being picked by crafting alts, which isn't a good game plan in my view. Alternatively create a separate Econ perks category, but then you'd need to find alternatives that players actually need to decide between, rather than everyone picking Foreman. I think that'll do for now. I will add, though, that I think you've got one of the basics spot on. Populations are too unreliable to rely on player crafters so there must be fallback optons. Seeing only fir/crew space ships (or white oak/crew space for scouts ) and medium guns in the shop provides the right fallback without undermining player crafters or overly restricting players in actually playing. For guns you've also got the pricing right but I reckon ships are very much underpriced - or would be if they competed with players on quality.

I cannot remember offhand how much an Indiaman can carry but I barely need to fill a single LGV a week to move enough materials to use all my LH - and I spec Foreman and Royal on Testbed (I won't after the wipe). I would send out a pair of LGVs to collect seeded woods (my nearest source of teak is about 400k away) but there doesn't seem to be enough on sale to justify it, so TCutter (or TLynx) + LGV is my usual hauling set up. Valuables in the Cutter, bulk in the LGV. Reducing the number of hauling runs would indeed save time, but specialisation does not. A clan cannot do anything quicker by having their members specialise than the same number of solo players could achieve, unless one or more of the clan is willing to forego combat perks, in which case they could set up a dedicated frigate shipbuilder or lineship builder. Specialisation allows you to harvest resources considerably quicker, but resource harvesting isn't a problem. I have no idea what @victor is finding difficult - possibly ship speeds and battle exit, neither of which I'm happy with myself. But I'd agree with the boring bit. Crafting on Testbed isn't exactly thrilling, just making a couple of ships and some guns to go with them a week before my LH runs out. There's precious little need for structure balancing (my 3rd resource slot is still a hemp mine - I have thousands of hemp - simply because I've got nothing else I need). After doing three or four trade runs for seed capital I'm now making at least as much as I spend from gun and ship sales (one trip every week or two to the capital with my wares for market, collecting wood on the return). I've no need to trade, no need to buy anything I don't have because I have everything (even silver and gold don't appear to be a problem with drops from the mines and I keep on coming across a few furnishings in random shops). Is this how the game is meant to be? Perhaps I'm doing it wrong.

I don't play Pirate, so I'm merely interpreting other players' posts rather than going on experience, but it seems pirates cannot get BPs or permits for lineships in their equivalent of the admiralty. This might not necessarily prevent them crafting lineships if the BPs and permits are tradable between nations, either directly or via the shop. I haven't tested either. However such a trade would be treason and sellers should have their character deleted. One other way would be to capture (or sink and loot) a ship carrying a permit. I found myself needing to carry a Consti permit yesterday, so it is a conceivable proposition. Possibly someone might want to carry a BP; perhaps if it was a loot drop or they obtained it for another player. But realistically, if pirates want lineships they'll just have to roll nat capture one off a nat.

Well, fair enough, but the Mercury comes fully furnished, and so does the Rattlesnake on Live.

Cutter blueprint LH and XP reward are still wrong (prob should be 224 LH and 536 XP as per live), Surprise BP is wrong (I F11'd it last week), T Cutter, T Lynx and Niagara BPs are still missing (In hotfix 2 thread you said the two traders were forgotten rather than intentionally omitted like the LGV and Indiaman; I don't recall any mention of the Niagara either way). Rattlesnake BP is missing as well but this may be intentional (I forget). I see Cutter prices in the shop have been corrected (maybe an earler patch I hadn't noticed before) High and Mid-grade notes and silver coins BPs are still in game and silver coins are still in Admiralty shop. So far as I can see, everywhere these items were used on Live doesn't exist on Testbed, but of course there are a number of ship BPs I don't have Other apparently redundant blueprints are cotton rolls, cases, bermuda cedar, compass wood, cotton, mahogany log, pine log, red wood log, tobacco. Tobacco and Cotton apparently still exist as port resources, so I guess it is possible to still erect the buildings and harvest the resource even though they are useless. That farm building's pricey isn't it? 50k to make 200 fish meat and 50 salt a day. And it'll cost you 7000 gold a day to harvest them, but I suppose it's only 33 LH instead of 80 LH for processing the same quantity of herring. Still, poor value I reckon. Copper ore no longer drops from iron or coal mines (I don't currently have a stone mine) - thank you! Contitution permits drop from shop-bought Constitutions - thank you

Can we have more useful information in contract fulfilled emails please? I now have lots of guns on sell contracts, and to get five messages each entitled 'Contract fulfilled' saying 'You successfully sold items from contract' is no more use than not getting message at all. I'd like to know how many of what sold in which port.

I am in the same boat. Having now played extensively on Testbed with crafting rather than combat perks, when it goes Live I'll only keep fleet 1, maybe fleet 2. But no foreman, no royal shipbuildern no overseer, no frigate shipmaster - it's not worth it. I'd rather have combat. I reckon either crafting should get its own perks not detract from combar or else abolsih them altogether as it too much favours crafting alts.

I would agree with you, but I don't think it's true.. The only thing I'll really struggle to do solo is get marks of conquest (I'm waiting to see what price players will sell them for), but it looks like I'll have no problem with 4th rates and below. Three resource building slots are plenty with current BPs. The major difficulty looks like obtaining purchased woods, notably teak, which I dare say affects clans and solos alike, though clans could station players at teak ports specifically to grab logs as they are seeded. I think on Live I may change my crafting hub to a teak port just for this purpose.

Copper still exists in the Precise Parts blueprint. I think you've removed this BP from the list of visible ones in the craft tab, but you can still reach it by clicking through hyperlinks from War Supplies. Also copper coins are still in the Admiralty exchange. As too are Silver coins which didn't used to be called up anywhere outside of notes, but might now be in high level ships I don't have BPs for.