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Need Help crew moral sinks rapidly

Hah! There are class 5 ships with bigger holds than class 4 ships. Frankly my dear I don't give a damn. The crew will get their wages. I will get my profits. There is little to no money to be made from plunder when playing as a merchantman.
 
Money per cargo capacity then? Need a good value to use, though!

"Divide the Plunder" doesn't mean that the money must be gained through plundering. Gaining through trade, then sharing with the crew also makes them happy.
They don't care where it came from.
 
I still say money per head. There's already a formula for working out shares - use that. ;) Speaking on behalf of the crew, I couldn't care less whether somebody way up the chain of command thinks this is a tier 4, tier 5 or tier 6 ship, how much cargo it carries, how many guns it carries, etc. What interests me is how much cash I'd get if that big pile of gold under the captain's bunk was divided up versus how much I'm getting paid monthly. Especially since once we've signed articles, that money-hoarding captain isn't going to divide the pile unless he really has to, which means I won't be seeing any money for a long time. I'm not risking a keel-hauling or hanging for mutiny unless I reckon I'm going to be significantly richer after dividing loot than I am over the same time getting paid regular salary.

Incidentally, having signed articles some time ago, I had somewhere around 12 million gold. Previously I had 15 million, but then I captured a battleship and decided to keep it, fitting a bunch of upgrades and signing up a crew. The net result was that the amount per head per unit time dropped, and so did morale. It was beginning to look like time to divide the plunder. Instead I put that battleship to the purpose I'd intended, with a visit to Martinique's fort and subsequently a visit to Martinique's governor. Total is now about 27 million and the crew are happy again. :)
 
Perhaps.... What if we check the "pay per crewmember" on salary vs. the same on Divide the Plunder.
If there is a big discrepancy, morale will start dropping. Would that make any sense?

On the other hand, I do believe that defeats the original purpose. After all, if we go with the above, switching to Divide the Plunder would NOT benefit the player, only the crew.
But the whole point of that addition was to encourage the player to use Divide the Plunder.
Reason being that it IS a good feature that otherwise people might never try.
It gets crew morale much higher up if you are successful and the six-monthly restart prevents the game from becoming too easy as it progresses.
So it prevents things from getting too boring as well.
 
Pieter Boelen said:
Perhaps.... What if we check the "pay per crewmember" on salary vs. the same on Divide the Plunder.
If there is a big discrepancy, morale will start dropping. Would that make any sense?
Click to expand...
Yes, that is what I was suggesting. ;)

On the other hand, I do believe that defeats the original purpose. After all, if we go with the above, switching to Divide the Plunder would NOT benefit the player, only the crew.
But the whole point of that addition was to encourage the player to use Divide the Plunder.
Reason being that it IS a good feature that otherwise people might never try.
It gets crew morale much higher up if you are successful and the six-monthly restart prevents the game from becoming too easy as it progresses.
So it prevents things from getting too boring as well.
Click to expand...
Signing articles would still benefit the player in that you can get the higher crew morale, and you won't have morale dropping when you have lots of money. All we're arguing about is how to set the threshold for that morale drop.

Another way to encourage people to sign articles might be if, should you fail to pay the salary, one of your officers suggests that if you don't have the money for salaries then the crew would be happy just to share whatever profit the ship makes. Possibly less politely if you do in fact have enough money but didn't pay the salary anyway. :guns:

What's this six-monthly restart? I haven't divided loot since signing articles at least a year and a half ago! You do get an indication of how the crew share compares to average, and presumably if that drops too low then the crew start getting unhappy and you either divide the loot or watch morale sink faster than an anchor. Hence my tale of the Martinique raid, which bumped the crew share up so they're happy again despite still not being paid. :rpirate (I don't know if reputation is playing a role in this. The "Iron Will" perk certainly isn't because I haven't taken it.)
 
Approximately after 6 months, the crew morale will start dropping due to not being paid in half a year.
If you keep going, even if you DO have a huge average share, morale will continue dropping.
Because the crew doesn't just want the money to be on the ship, they want to get it themselves so they can spend it!
 
That's my point, though. Crew morale isn't dropping after 6 months. I don't know exactly when it did start dropping, maybe a couple of months ago, certainly more than a year after signing articles. And when I more than doubled the ship's money in the Martinique raid, morale shot back up and is once more "Heroic", where it's stayed since.
 
Depending on how successful you are, you might be able to keep morale up long after those six months.
But it does become harder and harder to keep up.
 
Successful battles raises morale quite a bit, so maybe that is why they are so happy.
 
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