Search the Community

Spotted this quoted elsewhere and what follows is a possible partial explanation and at least a partial solution. I am not a zero-risk player but I started on PvE. I am a long-term Civilization player and I rather blundered into NA while looking for something more interesting than Sid Meyer's Pirates. I've never done anything even remotely similar to NA or online multiplayer. The US nation on PvE was a place to sort out the game mechanics. But there is structural obstacle in the economy that frankly contributes to boredom on PvE. It affects the Caribbean server as well, but less obviously so. I've posted about this before. There seems to be very little interest in the community on the matter. The bottom-up view on this is that the inability to see contract activity without visiting a port creates a functional bottleneck in player economic activity. It is probably not an issue with high server populations. But in a low population environment, either on the server as a whole, or in a particular region, it is going to be a game killer. The effect on PvE is that a player very rarely can get a contract filled outside of a national capital. At any price. It is a feedback loop. Since since the econ activity is in the Capital, that is where you do the contracts, and resulting in very little buy/sell activity outside of it. Which means a PvE player really can't get very far from a national capital if they are interested in at least some interaction with other players. I circuited Cuba scouting the area (from Charleston) and the Caribbean region was pretty much a player desert. My opinion, is that at a minimum, player buy/sell contracts need to be on equal footing in the trader tool with the port stock. I watch port stock looking for reasonable consistency in availability before I spend time sailing any distance. The same thing ought to be true of buy / sell contracts rather than the current complete crapshoot. It would be nice to see the same thing with ship sales but making contracts visible would remove the bottleneck. The econ activity would be present elsewhere to actually support shipyards outside the green zone. In the PvP environment it is possible to kludge around the problem by maxing out outpost permits. But addressing contract visibility would help here as well. Player activity would start to spread out beyond the green zones and at least some of the argument about green zone mechanics and OW incentives would become irrelevant. Including the argument over taxes. Would like at least a yes, this is on our radar, or we have this alternative in mind, or no. An explanation would be nice, but I can live with a flat no, and I will not quibble with that, or any explanation you offer. I suspect this is not a trivial coding project and it is your game.

New player on the PvE server here, with economy suggestions. I've hunted around for this and I apologize in advance if the issues have already been addressed somewhere. Improving communication between buyers and sellers in-game will boost the level of economic activity, particularly by newer players. I haven't played on the PvP server yet much but it seems like this might boost the number of targets for you all as well. Two suggestions, either of which might help. 1) Make contracts to buy visible on the trader tool. If I understand the codes it currently shows (A)vailable, (P)roduces and (C)onsumes. Add a column to display (B)uyers. 2) Provision outposts so owners can post notices and advertise their presence in a town. I am guessing free-format notes would probably overload the servers so this would need to be standardized. The content could be limited to nationality, clan, and commodities bought or sold. All optional elements as there might be situations were you would want to post products for sale but not advertise nationality or clan. The notices would need to expire, possibly five days after the player's last contract at that outpost. (And YES the new tutorial was extremely helpful to a new player trying to wrap my head around the cannon mechanics!)

I bought carolina tobacco in St Mary's for 338 because trader tool said it was 441 in Brunswick. I've done this route several times. I sold it at Brunswick without looking at price. It only gave me 202 per unit . I lost 12,000. when i rebooted the price was even lower in Brunswick 186 If trader tool is not accurate then then trading will become worthless because of unreliable price. Price can change in real world but you should announce it first because I will not trade to loose money.