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Schooner 17500 gold = 200 Capacity = 87.5 gold each
Fluyt 70,000 gold = 500 capacity = 140 gold each
Makes the fluyt's 1.6x more expensive per carry capacity than the schooners.
So the schooner is far better value.. for gold / capacity..
OR.,. you could buy 4 schooners with a carrying capacity of 800 ,,, for the cost of one fluyt which only has a carrying capacity of 500
And.. Fluyt's often have wasted space... IE they aren't carrying a full 500 all the time.
Using 4 schooners for the same cost. which carries 800.. 200 each, its easier to get them running at full capacity with no wasted room..
And ,, there is sometimes game objectives of "Obtain 3200 ships" .. which is best done with schooners at 1/4 of the price of fluyt's
Only reason I build fluyt's is when im established in game and cash doesn't matter..., and "order" not buy... 8 Fluyt's at a time from the 4 Capitals = 32 Fluyt's at a time, as these hold more than ordering 32 Schooners at a time.
Just doesn't make sense to buy no ships start of game and have no capacity, until you buy a 500 capacity Fluyt.. When you could start buying schooners much sooner, and buy 4 schooners that can carry 800 for the same cost of 1 Fluyt
you do not consider the loss of money due to the smaller amount of cargo. it is not correct to make a comparison: ship price - carrying capacity ... why not consider all the money lost due to the difference in the carrying capacity of the ships ... the lower price and the higher speed are not worth as much as x2 on the capacity of load.
if you play at maximum difficulty the prices are much higher than what you indicated .. a Fluyt costs around 170,000 gold .. a Brig around 130,000 gold (I don't remember the exact prices) .. take a Brig (or other smaller ship ) is a waste of coins that increases with the passage of game time .. because that ship (Brig) will never have a profit like a Fluyt ...
4 Schooners cost you 400 gold daily .. 1 fluyt 160 gold ... you are wasting a lot of money along the way :P
buying ships just to complete objectives .. it seems to me a waste of resources for the game ... when it would be enough to rebalance them to make them all a little more useful .. more specialized for certain tasks ..
There is no gameplay benefit to gating off basic content the game needs to make accessible to the player for balancing purposes behind mindless grinding. The entire game's economic balance rests upon the idea that equal numbers of every kind of factory are built throughout the map, but unless you explicitly go out of your way to stay poor and grind coffee delivery just to grind fame points, most players never even unlock every factory before they complete a campaign! This both ruins the game's balance and kills all the fun...
And you want to add ANOTHER grinding system? Get out.
(In fact, there already are ships that require unlocks - the two nation-unique ships that require Fame Point unlocks, AND require getting a significant way up the unlock tree to even buy!)
If you want to make players less likely to buy ships of the line early on, there's a much more sane method of doing so in a game about mercantilism - just making the higher-tier ships significantly more expensive and require much longer to build.
For that matter, if you're going to include "tiers" of ships, all you're doing is making early-game ships obsolete. You're just making it so that players who already have all the wealth now have better ships to make more wealth even faster, and ensuring that players only buy the ships of the same tiers they are in. Choices of things like ships are only interesting if there's an actual CHOICE to be made, which means having trade-offs. Making different ships clearly superior means there are no choices, and it just makes the game homogeneous and boring.
Yes, fluyts are generally better ships for most trading bulk amounts of goods provided the draft doesn't cause problems, but does that mean my trade fleet is entirely made of fluyts? Absolutely not. I buy used ships, often every used ship in the dock, because I make more money faster just buying everything available and putting them all into service. (And buying used is vastly faster than having ships made to order! Time is money. If you're complaining about losing money on upkeep for a brig, what are you losing via opportunity cost by having an investment in the shipyard doing nothing for several weeks?!) Having to match what you have to where you are going actually involves a little problem solving, as it means you focus your fluyts on the routes with the least shoals, which isn't much, but is some problem-solving skill being applied. (Barques, for example, are the fastest ship, so they need to be in barque-only convoys. They also make good explorers for player-controlled ships to uncover all the towns early on, and for hunting down mission objectives like castaways.)
You also aren't making the basic calculation of value correctly. The basic Trade Value (TV) of a ship is speed * cargo capacity / upkeep, before you start having to account for more tricky considerations like draft, sure. But what you aren't considering is the up-front cost as well, as Money per Cargo Capacity (MpCC). This is the amount of money per unit of cargo capacity that new ship has to sell just to pay for its up-front cost, nevermind upkeep. As a game about expansion, this up-front cost is especially important in the beginning of the game (you know, at the point when you're trying to say that players should be climbing up tiers of ships?)
Here, let me do the math for you. (I'm using base values, but AFAIK, they're just multiplied in different difficulties, so the ratio stays the same.):
Schooner: 20 TV for 55 MpCC
Sloop: 20 TV for 85 MpCC
Brig: 21.2 TV for 88 MpCC
Barque: 21.4 TV for 132 MpCC
Fluyt: 31.25 TV for 88 MpCC
When you run the numbers properly, the schooner is actually the best buy you can make for turning a profit on your investment quickly. It's not hard for a schooner to pay for itself in just 2 or 3 stops on normal difficulties, depending upon market conditions, and you can use that return on investment to buy another schooner, or hey, maybe save up for a fluyt!
Fluyts are good long-term investments, but all you really need to do is increase the up-front costs so that they aren't essentially on the same level as a brig. Just doubling the up-front price and construction materials/time of a fluyt would instantly make other ships much more competitive. (And ALL these values besides speed and maybe maneuverability are pretty arbitrary, so there's no reason you can't fudge numbers around.)
Keep in mind, when you set trade routes and there are two numbers with a "Small number...large number" format, the fluyt takes the big number and everyone else gets the little number. It only needs to be 50% longer for literally any other type of cargo ship to actually match the fluyt! (While I don't manually adjust to avoid shoals in routes I don't use fluyts upon, I often see trade routes with something like 18 days for a draft 1 ship, and 39 days for a fluyt - more than enough to make the fluyt drag down to below a 15 TV, making it the least efficient ship! Ironically, the area around the Bahamas has a ton of shoals, making the Dutch home ports the worst place to sail a fluyt!)
Even after considering draft, there's also maneuverability, which determines how much sailing into the wind slows a ship down. Anything but a route around the Gulf of Mexico will inevitably have to sail upwind. What ship has the best maneuverability in the game? Oh hey, look, it's the schooner! Meanwhile, the fluyt has the only maneuverability below an 8 among trade vessels, at a measly 6! I take it back, maybe the up-front costs don't need raising when you consider all the factors...
Also, realistically speaking, the TV I list here isn't really that important. It would only be important to maximize efficiency if you somehow hit the carrying capacity of all trade in the Caribbean and THEN still cared enough to bother maximizing profits. Realistically speaking, you make far more money far faster just buying any ship you can get your hands on and putting it into service, with Schooners actually being the most effective ships. The opportunity cost of time keeping your assets frozen in a shipyard waiting for a new ship of your particular specifications to be built are always going to outweigh the efficiency benefits of a larger hold because your money is always compounding at an exponential rate in Port Royale so long as you ship goods for money, not underselling to maintain market share. Essentially, you're just saying that fluyts are the "best ships" because you're ignoring a lot of vitally important factors you don't bother to consider. That said, even at the hardest difficulties, it is ludicrously easy to turn a profit in Port Royale, so this is all just in the realm of personal preference for low maintenance on your part. (Even a ship of the line can at least pay for itself if you set it to run goods around.) You can buy literally any trade ship and make money hand over fist, so if you don't like buying anything but your favorite type of ship, OK, fine, that's your choice to make. Maybe try to let other people make their own choices, though, rather than ask for a system that forces people to progress the way you want them to?
If we're trying to create a system where players want to climb up tiers of ships as they go from starting out to just trying to maintain a fleet as efficiently as possible, it's better adopting a natural style where players can emergently drift towards that goal as they choose. Besides adding player choice rather than developer fiat, it is also much easier to implement than building a BS gamey experience bar that detracts from the gameplay and often winds up wildly out of balance while needing multiple hot patches to fix! It's almost like simulation games work better by being simulations rather than experience bar grinders, who knew?!
I assume that the truth is in between, so speed has its weight as much as capacity do but it depends on the route and its length and the amount of time you play a game.
First the speed difference looks like it would be of non importance but you have to look at another aspect and this belongs to the amount of time the ship is used.
On a short route 20% speed will ever loose against the double cargo of the fluyt but when you supply 20+ on towns then the speed is more relevant because your 20% more speed on 50 days (which means that you save about 10 days) travel will hit longterm the capacity of the fluyt. And after it hit it will have more profit then you get from the capacity which is also limited to the demand.
Also you have to consider that this time loss is for every ship more in the trade routes so if you have two convoys the loss is 2x 20% because they operate independently.
Capacity on the other side has it's best success when used on short amount of distance. The speed bonus is to low to help and it takes huge amount of time to compansate the capacity. This is something that is a good value when starting as manual trading can get you the edge to evolve faster and you can concentrate on short delivery routes.
However both of it can be valued dependant on the play style and where they are used.
To the other points, the difference between the ships are not mutch especially between the first 3 where speed is the most obvious one and you could argue if you would buy a sloop for a schooner only to get 10% more speed (especially on higher difficulty as the price go up more).
In most of the games i play schooner / bark, if playing netherlands you will swap the bark for the trade fluyt as the capacity, speed and maintenance are better. But you are right the difference there could be more important for the selction and also the differece where the ship is used at.
ETC ETC..
So its not a matter of comparing one Schooner to One fluyte.
Its a matter of comparing 4 schooners to one fluyte.
Especially since the topic was also "the first ships I buy" .. IE start of game.. When cash is low.
buying used ships on high difficulty is very counterproductive .... they cost about 100,000k more than the order .... and 100k in early game is huge ... especially if you have to buy a shooner.
the purchase of used ships is feasible only in mid / end-game where you have a fair amount of gold and I generally use it to buy warships and certainly not to buy .. For example a Barque if ordered costs about 60k .. if you buy a used one you pay about 210k
this means you can buy 3 as opposed to a quick purchase ... and it's a waste of money for commercial ships.
As for the ranks ...
they simply give a sense of progression to the game .. same thing with regard to fame .. @Wraith_Magus obviously you like to play at low difficulty and without any constraints ... which in my opinion ruins the progression to the game which translates: increase the amount of money available ... and stop
while with the ranks you would have a much more marked sense of progression .... obviously the ranks must be managed well for the unlocking of the ships in order not to overly complicate things ... just avoid making quality leaps in early-game ..
personally I like challenges ... having everything free without the least effort is not very stimulating.
As far as I'm concerned, Fame is the right thing they did with PR4 .. PR3 buying and capturing war galleons was extremely easy .. even in early game ..
There are 2 types of players: those who want to have everything immediately without the slightest effort (and I think this is your category .. no offense) and those who want a challenge (having access to all ships right away is something which simplifies the game a lot .. as far as I'm concerned. Not to mention that many ships are not as cost / efficient as others ... others are completely useless).
@Annihilator
I did a lot of tests before writing this (huge) Post ...
with a Fluyt in trade routes ... just optimize its route to make any other competition with faster ships ... useless
only in some routes (like maracaibo) it is not possible to do so and even in those circumstances there is no reason to prefer smaller and faster boats.
Tanitha
4 schooners have a daily cost of 400 gold (almost like a trading office) ... which in early-game is a huge loss (especially on high difficulty) if we consider that 1 Fluyt at a daily cost of 160 gold.
340 Gold more for +300 carrying capacity ..... doesn't make much sense.
4 schooners = 400 daily cost of carrying capacity = 800
2 Fluyt = 320 daily cost of carrying capacity = 1000
8 schooners = 800 daily cost of carrying capacity = 1600
5 Fluyt = 800 daily cost per load capacity = 2500
if we compare the daily costs the Fluyt over performs all the smaller ships ... and the higher speed does not compensate for the expense of a higher daily cost and a smaller amount of cargo.
only on the route to Maracaibo do they get very close (as it is not possible to optimize the Fluyt route)
Yeah nps with fluytes long term.
I hope the Devs take this into consideration
And yes, I'm using the default values for ships. This is mostly because I didn't want to have to go into the game just to look up prices and stats, so I just went onto the wiki, but it also brings about a few more good points, if you're going to try to lord how ultra-super hardcore a player you are because you play with the most edgiest of difficulty settings:
1. Most players aren't going to be playing with the "difficulty settings" cranked up to max, so it should be principally balanced around the normal "difficulty settings". You shouldn't ask for a change to the whole game to balance a difficulty setting very few people actually play, you should ask for a balance change to the difficulty setting.
2. Most of the "difficulty settings" in this game are just nonsense that do not add any actual difficulty, but instead just add more grind without actually changing how the player has to play in any meaningful way, or worse, just make the interface less functional and call it a "difficulty" "feature". This is like if an FPS had a setting where they take away all mission briefings, mission objectives displays, map and any objective markers that might exist, leave the player lost and clueless as to what to do unless they memorized every mission without the setting on, and called it a "difficulty setting". Turning off quality of life features is a nuisance, not a "difficulty setting"! (And disabling the "green bars" is especially stupid since they left in the part where price doesn't change around the two bar range that is the only price that really matters to player decisions. It's literally making players just waggle the bar around a bit if they're going to manually trade to see where the price stops moving, and calling it a "difficulty setting"!) (This is, granted, a rant not entirely relevant to the discussion at hand, but GOD, this idiocy really helps feed that sneaking suspicion that the current devs of Gaming Minds really don't understand the game they inherited.)
Gaining wealth is not only effortless and inevitable, it is automated for you. That's kind of the whole point of this franchise. Whether you are playing on "very hard" or not is just a matter of how long it takes to get there. Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to the "takes longer to get there" settings if that's what you want, but it's not a difficulty setting. (And yes, I also found the combat and ease of boarding made a total mockery of progression in PR3, but that has nothing to do with this.)
Beyond that, you seem to have have run with the idea that the only stats that matter are upkeep costs and cargo capacity, and dismissed all other considerations without thinking about them at all because... you either don't understand the concepts or you just think math is too hard, I guess.
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So, OK, let's go ahead and do all the math for the person who thinks playing hard mode in a game about doing lots of math proves they're a man, then. If you don't respect anything but the in-game values, here are the values of different ships at the "normal" and "very hard" (whatever that means) economic difficulties:
Construction material costs do not change based upon difficulty.
The math is a little rough, probably because it tries to round to hundreds, but generally speaking, you are paying 55% to 60% more for a used ship than ordering a new ship on normal, and 60% to 70% more on very hard. Overall costs are roughly quadrupled, while building time is roughly tripled.
While this isn't entirely proportional, you can see that the differences between normal and very hard difficulties are mostly ones of scale, and mostly not ones that actively impact the way that you have to make strategic decision making. You are, after all, going to just set up automated trade routes to make all your money one way or the other even if the amount of profit per trip is lesser.
Let's also do a quick comparison of prices in different difficulty levels - I'll use bricks, beer, and luxury goods since bricks are the cheapest good, beer has a base value of a nice, round, 100, and luxury goods are the most expensive good. Due to prices subtly changing as time goes on, I'm comparing the 2-bar value to what a town with 0 inventory of a good has at the start of a new game offers for a good just to try to keep things as neutral as possible. (N = normal economic "difficulty", VH = very hard economic "difficulty". 2 = 2-bar "standard" value. 0 = 0 goods at all start-of-game price.)
As we can see, the spread of prices is actually not all that dissimilar when we're talking about shipping goods. You can hypothetically make up to 111 money selling a unit of beer, provided you sell to someone entirely out of the good, on normal and 98 on very hard, although you obviously generally get less. The spread from 2-bar to 0 is very roughly a doubling of price. The lower value of 2-bar goods on very hard likely exists to make factories much less profitable, but the amount of profit per day on a ship running trade routes should veeery roughly be similar, with the differences being too subtle to speak about in broad terms.
(I also have to point out this once again reaffirms that there is no actual change in difficulty between "normal" and "very hard" economic settings, there is just a quadrupling in the amount of time it takes to get the same things done. But hey, I guess grinding just for grinding's own sake CAN give you a... "sense of pride and accomplishment"?)
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Because of this, I can say definitively that fluyts are not as good as you think they are.
Opportunity cost is an important concept in economics. It is not simply a matter of what your income and expenses are per day, the best choice is the one that gives you the most net revenue per day. When you talk about building fluyts, you completely ignore all the opportunity costs associated with ordering one as opposed to buying cheaper ships and setting them to work immediately.
A quick look at some of my trade routes says that profit per day is far from uniform or easy to assume, but I can make between 2k and 6k a day on any given trade route I'm going purely for money upon. (As opposed to just running goods back and forth for the warehouses to make money, which doesn't show up on trade route profits.)
To try to land on an only somewhat arbitrary round number, let's just say that you make 4k a day on a single convoy, and that convoys consist of either one fluyt, two barques or brigs, and 2.5 schooners or sloops, just so we have an even 500 cargo capacity, since more cargo capacity would upset that assumed 4k a day. Or, to break this down a little further, we'll assume an average of making 8 money per day per cargo capacity, which lets us avoid working with fractions of a schooner. (Meaning, I am assuming 1,600 profit per day per schooner. If you feel that this assumption of profit per ship per day is too high, it honestly doesn't make all that much difference. If you want to go with 800 profit per day per schooner, you're just multiplying all the times taken - minus some fractions I rounded up - by two, and the overall results are still going to be fairly similar, although the time required for shipyards to complete construction do become much less painful.)
Running a quick test with a brand new game using the one schooner on very hard economic on a short loop shows I absolutely can make more than 1600 profit per day with just my starting schooner doing a short loop:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2298486588
(But really, it's too bad I can't zoom out more to see even the full loop of this very short trade route!)
You start the game with one schooner in very hard, making roughly 1,600 per day making trades with your 200 cargo capacity. I'm going to assume the starting 30k money needs to never be touched so that there's an operational fund to keep buying and selling goods, so you have to purchase new ships entirely on what you gained. You will also need money to buy and trade new goods, since you don't bankrupt yourself buying a new ship as soon as you can afford it, so new schooners have a 30k buffer you need to afford before buying them, and fluyts have a 75k buffer you need to afford before buying them. If we restrict this just to schooners and fluyts so I can maybe, possibly, flood this thread with a little less math, we have the following possible ways to expand our business by buying a new ship:
Buying a used schooner costs 70,000 money plus a 30,000 buffer, for a requirement you make 100,000 money before you can safely buy a used schooner (which fits in with what you spitballed, anyway) so at a rate of 1,600 per day, it takes 62.5 days to afford a used schooner. (Bolding the number to make it easier to find.)
Ordering a new schooner costs 42,100 money plus you need a 30,000 buffer, but since the ship won't be ready for 33 days, we can actually order the ship before having the buffer ready, as the buffer 30k takes 18.75 days to earn with one schooner, which takes away some of the pain. We can order the ship in 27 days, but it takes 50 days to be complete. Still, this IS actually faster than the time to buy a used ship, so you are right in that it makes more sense to order ships, provided we are using this somewhat arbitrary 30k buffer for every single ship we add (buying used is faster if you don't add the buffer, and most players stop adding buffer cash after a while), and that there will be no delays because of materials.
Buying a used fluyt costs 280,000 plus you need a 75k buffer. It therefore takes 222 days to afford a fluyt as your second ship.
Ordering a new fluyt costs 168,800, taking 105.5 days, with another 46.875 days to afford the buffer, and 69 days to build the ship, taking a total of 174.5 days for your ordered ship to be ready.
(If you're curious about the without-buffer times to afford used ships, it's 44 days for the schooner and 175 days for the fluyt, which ironically is very close to the ordering times.)
Now then, here's the thing everyone else has been telling you that you've been ignoring:
If you order a second schooner, then when you get it in just 50 days, you have essentially 125 days where IT is making 1,600 money per day, doubling your income. (For the rest of this section, I'm rounding fractions of days up because it's messy, and we can assume a little inefficiency.) This means you can buy the third schooner used in just 32 more days (82 total), since the ordering times start to get much more onerous as we make money faster and faster. You can buy the fourth in 21 more days (103 total), and you are buying your fifth schooner in 16 more days, for 119 total days.
6th... 13 more days... 132 total
7th... 11 more days... 143 total
8th... 9 more days... 152 total
9th... 8 more days... 160 total
10th... 7 more days... 167 total
11th... 7 more days... 174 total
So, if you hold off and wait to buy a fluyt as your second ship, and order it as soon as you can afford to do so, by the time it's actually coming down the slipway, another player who is going with an all-schooner strategy is already building up towards buying their 12th schooner, and even with your fluyt in operation, that other player is making almost four times as much profit per day as you.
If you're talking about which ship is better for kickstarting your game, clearly the compounding snowball of the schooner fleet crushes the fluyt flat.
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"But wait!" you try to argue, "What about the upkeep costs? You didn't count them!"
Well, actually, yes I did. they're included in the 4k profit per day number I'm using. You might look at how you're not making enough money, look to your ledger, and see that there's too many expenses, but honestly, those sheets are terrible and it's very hard to get actually useful information out of Port Royale's (and any other business management game's) graph section. Now, it's true, my fluyt trade routes do run a slightly larger amount of profit per day than my schooner or barque routes, but honestly, the difference of 160 upkeep per day versus 300 upkeep per day tends to get lost in the statistical noise when we're talking about 4k profit per day. The fact that I can make about an additional 240 money per day does mean something, but this isn't a game of upkeep. This is a game of expansion. Cheaper ships with more upkeep aid expansion much more than expensive ships with low upkeep.
As a wise Korean philosopher once said, "Zerg rush kekekeke ^___^"
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Now then, you could say, "I don't care if it's not as efficient and good at making money quickly so as to expand more efficiently, I only care about keeping expenses down to make the highest profit per day per ship, anyway!" Well, the problem with that argument (which I'm not saying you're making, but that it's one that could be made to counter the above argument), is that it's kind of abandoning the core premise of the argument you started this thread with, which was that the fluyt was objectively the best money-making ship, and players should need to earn a ship so awesome and good. If you're only favoring this ship because of subjective, personal biases, then it's not the objectively best ship for a starting player (or indeed, any player at any point in the game), but just a player choice you made. And if you think that players need more choices and differntiation between ships, then by golly, that's exactly what the current setup already provides you (besides the nation-specific ships that require fame points, which is why fame points need to go away), so what're you complaining about?
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Let's also look at just how much slower fluyts can be:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2298388272
Again, you're presuming that a fluyt moves at 10 knots, but draft can make a major impact. In this simple sample run around the Bahamas, a fluyt is actually making an average of about 5.8 knots. This means that the TV of the fluyt is actually 18.4 compared to the schooner's 20 TV. The fluyt does have lower maintenance for the cargo capacity, yes, but that is compensated for when the other ships are sailing twice as fast.
When you ARE using a fluyt, you need to make optimized routes. Let's look at one near Seville:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2298402507
Without optimizing the route to avoid shoals, this would be a 14.6 day route, but I can get it down to 11.7. However, the unoptimized route is a 10.5 day route for shallow-draft ships. The fluyt wins IF I optimize in this case, due to the relatively out-of-the-way shoals, but it's a situational victory.
Again, you are declaring that there is no "differentiation" between ships and fluyts hands-down the best when you ignore the impact of all the differentiation in the ships that already exists as totally irrelevant before you've even considered them.
Clearly, in spite of making misinformed decisions, even on the "very hard difficulty", you can still keep progressing just because the franchise is designed to effectively have no challenge or difficulty. If you want to have a challenging game, you should probably look elsewhere from capitalist expansionist games, because they entire point of the genre is to start crazy wealthy, then spend that money on stuff that makes you more money you use to buy more things that make you even more money. There is almost definitionally no way for these kinds of games to be hard, since they essentially are predicated upon starting out with you having already won.
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Now then, to address the final point you make, Port Royale does need progression, but just making it arbitrarily locking ship classes behind progress bars that fill up based upon letting the game run on auto-pilot for hours is the stupidest, most "gamey-game" way to do this. Proper progression in a Patrician-legacy game is based upon city development and trade route refinement. If we want to talk about actually expanding the franchise out from just NOT being worse than past games in the series, then we need to start talking about how to make the simulation better, not how to create more arbitrary gamey systems that distract and detract from the simulation. The progression of Port Royale should be one of the game world reacting to the actions you take, going from a few tiny colonies exterminating the natives that can barely sustain themselves to thriving metropolises that will form the basis of new nations once the slaves revolt and overthrow their colonial taskmasters. Grinding experience bars doesn't give players the sense that they're living in a historical time period in the least.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2298523615
I wound up getting 7 schooners and 2 sloops because the shipyards ran out of schooners to sell me, and I couldn't be bothered to wait for one to be made. (In case you're wondering why the value of my company is low, look at the value of my ships in that chart. I spend 70k for a schooner, but they are only valued at 10k. This is the base value, which is less than even the normal economic setting price to order a schooner. You basically take a bath as soon as you purchase a ship.)
This is, once again, roughly around where you would have been able to have that first fluyt coming off the slipway, and I have 9 ships running convoys.
Truly, Very Hard economic setting is so "very hard" to make money...
but lol .... thanks for insulting me .... how to turn a discussion post .... into a children's post ..
you talk about "very Hard" difficulty without ever having played it before ...
you play with indicators to help you buy, manual trade routes you don't even know how they work .. let the AI do all the work for you ...
you don't even know what it means to optimize a manual route ... but you keep talking about high difficulty as if it were a single price increase ..
I see that you are a "Very Hard Mode" expert without having ever played it before .... it makes a lot of sense ..
if you set the difficulty to the maximum .... in mid-game you will have a lot of pirates and wars to annoy your convoys .. and filling a convoy of these small ships (to increase the loading capacity) exposes you to continuous attacks from part of the pirates and enemy factions .... every day you will have a lot of economic losses ..
so you can't afford to put 8 Schooners in a convoy ... the late game you will have to trash them to make room for the Fluyt and insert some military ships in the convoy ... so the late game you have to prefer the ships with greater load to insert some military ships ...
not to mention that when you start producing in large quantities you end up going into a large accumulation of goods due to the low carrying capacity of the convoy ... so you are forced to do many more convoys, which results in more attacks received and more ships military to buy for defense .. Shooners are good for initial thrust (if you are running) ... but Fluyt are the solid choice for the whole game ... your goods will never pile up in warehouses .. 3 fluyt are enough to give an excellent load capacity to the convoy (in late-game) and to concentrate the other 5 stolts of the convoy for military ships ...
if you follow the shooner strategy and every attack of the rival faction causes you to lose some ships of the convoy .. and you will have to constantly replace the losses .. (this was with patch 1.2 ... I just started a new game with 1.3.1, I have to check if the same thing happens)
obviously this problem does not arise at medium-low difficulties .. just ignore the attacks ... so I can understand it.
so I address your speech to you ..
According to your reasoning ... Shooners are the best .... ok ... this means you are not using Fluyt, Barque, Brig
so there is the same basic problem .. you are not using the other ships because they are not convenient .... so in your games you will only use the Shooners ....
what I propose in this post is a revisiting of merchant ships .. to make them ALL usable in some way ... that's why I was talking about "specialization" ....
in your posts you have entered into "defense of the Shooners" mode .. which is not the point of discussion of the Thread ... even if you use the shooners the problem is still there ... and you cannot avoid it.
so you can do all the calculations you want .. the problem is present and perceptible to everyone.
as for the ranks .... read them carefully the 1st post I wrote ... you will find:
Quote:
"In addition (OPTIONAL), add a rank requirement for the purchase of ships"
requirement .. means minimum requirement (such as fame for large warships) .... if you are not captain .. you cannot buy a vessel .... as if a merchant .... buy a warship
serves to make the progression within the game more believable ... and realistic.
but I repeat it is optional ... it is an idea that I threw in the post ... if the ships are specialized and therefore each has well-defined roles there is no need to enter the rank limit on the ships ... it was just a idea..
an idea that can still be implemented (without adding ship requirements) .. but this is not the post to discuss it.
as you can see I made a long post ... without insulting anyone.
It's pretty clear by this point you don't really understand this game or what anyone is telling you. Read what I say before trying to argue against it. (I was only using schooners as an example to SOMEWHAT cut down the length of the thread, and I went and bought sloops in the quick run through the game.) Judging by the extremely choppy sentence, it's possible this is an inability to read/write fluent English, but regardless, you clearly aren't understanding basic economic principles, how the game works, or what other people are telling you. It's pretty clear there's no helping you at this point.
Regardless, you've basically abandoned everything you were trying to argue at the start by this point, and your proposed changes wouldn't do anything to solve any of the "problems" you still hold onto, so this suggestion is pretty dead in the water.
At the very least, if you're going to be wrong, be wrong in your own little corner, though, and don't spam nonsense in other people's suggestion threads like the one about zooming.
on the contrary, I didn't do any personal insult (unlike you ... again) .. I just said you didn't play at the maximum difficulty level .... (you said it yourself)
if you feel offended by this ..... it's not my fault ....
in my previous post I have repeatedly quoted the starting post ... so you are just looking for a way to discredit my idea ... by climbing the mirrors
also you have not answered any questions I asked you in the previous post .. simply because you have never played those difficulties and you are unable to answer .. so avoid shooting sentences on things you do not know ...
is it not a bit fancy to tell (indirectly) others they should not post because they do not play on YOUR difficulty but at the same time stating in your OP that it is most probably not differing from the difficulty you are looking at?
I quote your OP just as reminder:
You really want to tell us that if we have a contraty meaning to your post then we are not allowed to say our point of view? I really hope that this is not the case.
So lets get to the topic and the points you mentioned
Regarding the points above there is still not much what let me think that your point is valid in regards of the constallation. So you are pointing at wars and pirates but to be honest when you have a military support with the trade fleet you are also bound to a captain and sailors for the fights and at this point i am curious because a 6 star captain and the 4 (capital or 3/2 mixed support) would eat 2.2 to 2.5 million credits per quater (for one fleet) on the highest economy setting.
I state the capitals and the mixed constallation because anything else would not survive on highest difficulty war level against any war fleet and pirates are less degree of a threat with this constallation as they usually has more ships but only few capitals.
If you are running only a few fleets then you are fine but you can have only 10 captains so this would limit the amount of trading you are able to perform (which could be fine when doing manually but not a good solution for a trade route in my opinion because the amount of stolen goods from foreign war fleets is even on this difficulty a minor problem).
On the other hand the expanses of the trade fleet would in this case eating anything you earn and without the sailors the war ships have only 50% strenght so they also do not win against any war fleet (aside that they would be boarded all the time).
So why is this point of importance as it is not really feasible and also not really have any point to the OP? If you meant that this limits the amount of ships you can take into the fleet then yes but only if you really running them that way (where they would most probably do not earn the trade fleet costs they are causing)
To the other point, yes the difference is small between the ships, not only in terms of cargo / speed but also at the ifluence of the other stats. Maybe it could help if the other factors like maneuverability had more influence in regards of wind change and against the wind travel and the draft would slow them more (possibly on direction change), but here the optimization is taking a lot away.
Additional there could be a difference at loading times, the grater the ship the slower? Another point could be acceleration / slowdown dependent of cargp load but the question is if this is available / feasible.
Regarding the ranks, there is the question why should anything limit the player from aquisition of a certain ship. The difference currently is small so where is the point and if the difference would be visible or major (when they get adjusted) it would be most probably not needed.
The limit currently is the money you have and to be honest you wont buy a liner in the first 5 minutes of the game even when ordering the ship (and this is not even the case on the lowest economy level). You are able to get the concessions (as buccaneer and only he can) but need between 800k to 1 mil on highest economy level for the purchase, that is far away from stright starting a game.
So if we want to limit the player we could also rise the amount of money it needs for purchase and would also extends the time at which he is able to aquire the ship and still do not need to limit his decisions when he want to do it different.
Taking the ranks however you would be forced to play a certain style (because you are always limited to the ships you can buy) and it would look every game the same (what would change when you start at schooner/sloop compared to now only that progressing is mandatory instead of assimilating the money for the ship you want?
It would only change that you have to wait and then any player will still follow the way he like to do so why the ranking when you can reach the same with the price of the ships?
+1 on your conclusion, argument and findings during your test... @wraith_magus clearly you are right. I dont get why that is even discussed here. You made an effort of thesis , proof , conclusion. Yet you get bombarded with rotten fruits and a lot doodoo :D
+1 but waste of time again with this guy sadly.