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Suggestion: After the tax was introduced to the game the devs need to take a second glance at both the prices and availability of trading goods. The profit margin for most tradegoods are around 50%, this sounds a lot. But then add both a purchase and a sales tax and you're ending up with not just a less lucrative traderun but also a lot less traffic in OW. With the current patch two questions comes to mind: 1) Why trade at all? - The missions yields a larger profit (thankfully now it can pay it self off to do PvE, but what about PvP? I haven't done much else than PvE and sinking Moscalb and dron since the wipe and I really don't know how much that yielded since it was in hostility mission). 2) Why leave protected areas? Any incentive at all for moving through high risk corridors? Not at the moment. As to solutions I come bearing with 2. 1) Increase profit yield from trading and make certain goods used in crafting available on more places in the server. Like 'Grietje van Dijks', 'Cartagena tar' etc and make them much heavier. My reasoning for this is both a question about getting traders out in the waters and a question about historical accuracy. To take Grietje van Dijks as an example: (bear in mind my dutch is a bit rusty) it means masters daughter. I have from day one found it a bit odd that 5 girls are used in the making of a bovenwinds refit (and ffs I got a perm warning point for suggesting slavetrading for highvalue shipping and perhaps an increase in LH.. Just imagine what would happen if I had suggested foul murder of 5 girls to make 1 refit for my reno?!!). But disregarding the oddity of the commodity. The dutch didn't just settle in the dutch colonies. The entire carribean was in fact a melting pot of nationalities and languages (a real "frontier" society) where ppl moved a lot like grashoppers from colony to colony, some settled into successfull plantations (sugar plantations all used slavelabour) and some went on from one place to another after having overextensively farmed the soil on one island/plantation. This meant than in the danish colonies the ppl only consisted of 18-19% danes, 12-15% brits (mostly hailing from continental britain which is odd, but nvm that for now) and about 40-60% dutch (the exact number is convoluted by the arrival of french reformed huguenots in the 1680' and spanish jews in the decades after the war of the spanish succession). The net result was that the language(s) primarily spoken in administration and the markets of St.Croix, St. Jan and St. Thomas was dutch, german and danish. On the plantations of St. Croix it was mostly owned by danish/dutch planters and run by british foremans and Akwamanu/Luangan bombas. Due to the cosmopolitan nature of the carribean it doesn't make sense to restrict certain goods based on nationality. It does make sense to make them difficult to obtain (thus strategic) but I would suggest making them available in more ports, making them far heavier and for the love of god make the copperplating craftable - it was NOT so difficult to make it. My other suggestion is to basically make trading goods craftable in strategic locations around the map in order to promote both crafting and trading. For example make certain areas able to make tobacco and sugar as a trade ressource (but this time as a huge LH cost, especially sugar was labor intensive and required slave labor in order to keep production costs down). Carribean tradegoods were why the european nations established colonies in the west indies, it was to a large extent the reason why slavery became universally accepted at all (before the plantations of the west indies slavery was mostly a southern european/Iberian phenomenon) and I'd propose to make the capitals hubs for gathering these trade ressources and at fixed hours twice a week a trade convoy leaves the capital for the Atlantic - thus making it possible for players to intercept and loot the tradegoods before they reach their destination (again fixed locations on the atlantic). This can either be with the players goods in hold of an indiaman fleet or ai's with no risk for the involved players. I would prefer that payment for the tradegoods sold to the nations would be delivered upon delivery to the atlantic. Every ship that gets cought by enemy players constitutes a percentage (this means that for example 10 indiamans each constitutes 10% of the total shipping value) of the total amount to be deducted from the losing players payments.

Thats actually pretty genius. What it also does is get rid of the need for an "econ alt". If you can set up "business agents" in your ports to manage resources, then the need for TP'ing your "character" for strictly clicking buttons goes away. That being said, you still should have a very finite amount of labor hours and the goods produced/traded should still be subject to risk. All in all, its merely similar to sending a post via packet ship informing your business agent what you would like done instead of sailing there yourself. So, the exchange above got me thinking that this may be an idea to pursue. I understand the Devs are probably super-busy with trying to get all their ideas put into the game and such. However, does anyone think that having the ability to put "Business Agents" into your ports would make their lives easier, quality of life wise, while still preventing your "character" and ship from teleporting all over creation? Obviously, you would only be able to perform business/econ transactions. It's basically production building/warehouse management via mail. Moving your goods would still be subject to risk.

@admin I would love to hear your thoughts on this as well as all the other players as I have had a number of players agree on these changes. These are mainly Economic "Start-up" changes that I think would greatly enhance new player game play without the daunting task of feeling like they can't do anything and can't progress. So right now I am hearing the difficulty for some players to make money, and I am also hearing (myself included) of some players making a plan and then able to use trading goods to make fast, quick profits. The bigger problem is that some goods are gone, some have already overwhelmed the capital consumption markets, but that is a different thread. This thread is about the difficulty of starting up AND feedback to make some ships easier to make, while still keeping the spirit of the Admin's wishes to make 4th rates and lineships difficult and expensive to produce. 1. I think generally across the board all buildings "extraction" costs should go down. What I mean is the gold cost to extract the resources should be lowered. While I understand the admins don't want us printing money via resources, it currently prohibits pretty much everyone in starting well...anything. If I had to pick a number to lower everything, I would say all building resource extraction costs should be lowered by 15-25%. I should make it CLEAR that IF @admin you feel these are good changes, this needs to happen first before anything else. 2. I believe 6th rates should be cheaper to produce. I know they are already cheap but I feel 7th AND 6th rates should be the "dirt cheap" and easy to replace. Cannons I think are fine on them and don't cost too much. losing a 6th rate is lost money BUT it shouldn't hurt the bank, it should have the player need to take just a little amount of time to replace. the player shouldn't feel like he's back to square one losing any of these ships. 3. I believe the lighter 5th rates should be slightly less expensive to produce, mainly the cerberus, surprise, and reno. I think they are in a good position, I just feel a slight material reduction is needed. I believe the 1st point of cheaper resources extracting from buildings should help with this though. 4. mid to high end 5th rates are in a good position, no change is needed. 5. 4th rates are in a good position I think, maybe slightly more expensive but ONLY if you make resource extraction cheaper. 6. the Admin wants lineships to cost in the millions, I think that's fine. If resource extraction becomes cheaper, then more mats should be required in lineships to compensate. I envision a Cost CURVE instead of a linear increase. Numbers can be discussed as I certainly don't have the right number but I think it's absolutely needed that this "Start-up" econ gets addressed. Please add your feedback. again I want this to be only about start-up econ, whether we should start with some gold or not, and general resource and crafting issues.

After the return of shipyards on the testbed it seems the concentration of the population around the capitals will be even more pronounced than before. These suggestions might hopefully reduce this and create a more organic spread of players on the open world Resources -- At the moment there are no limits on resources coming out of a port so the vast majority of crafting, trading and sailing is done around each nation's capital. This leaves massive areas of the map feeling empty (meaning a lot of conquest battles could be undefended for a while). While I'm against hard limits on the number of buildings etc in a port I think a soft limit of some kind could be useful. For example, after a certain number of mines/farms/buildings have been built in a port (depending on the % of players in a nation/a certain number with buildings there?) the cost in gold/LH will be increased and the amount of resources will be decreased on a sliding scale (depending on the size of the empire/number of ports/buildings present etc etc). This will help create shortages in ports with massive populations and push people towards other regions, as well as creating lots of opportunities for haulers, traders and pirates. If those nations and clans want to continue crafting ships in one central area the resources will have to be hauled from further afield to make it economically viable. Buildings -- While it's nice to see new buildings I don't think it makes good sense ingame to make each player individually create their own dockyard or foundry to progress in their crafting. Most clans will have dedicated crafters so dockyards will just become a nuisance (if you personally don't have one) rather than something which adds to the gameplay - resources will simply be passed over to the crafters creating even more downtime between sailing/pvp. The current shipyards also tie players and clans to one area, if you've spent the last week getting a level 3 shipyard built you're not going to want to move any time soon or use up another building slot for another shipyard somewhere else. Perhaps a shipyard or foundry needs to be a national project? Once a certain number of resources are taken to any port and 'paid in' to the shipyard building project a shipyard will appear in that port and be usable by anyone in that nation. This price could increase exponentially with numbers of shipyards and distance from capital etc. These projects might also need upkeep in the form of resources per week but i'll leave that to another time. This would also help create new trading/crafting hubs in areas away from the capital. Any comments/suggestions/insults welcome