• New Horizons on Maelstrom
    Maelstrom New Horizons


    Visit our website www.piratehorizons.com to quickly find download links for the newest versions of our New Horizons mods Beyond New Horizons and Maelstrom New Horizons!

Trading missions

carmenara

carmenara

Pandora's Kitten
Storm Modder
We may have talked about making the merchants' trading assignments more interactive during the December runup to Beta.

This involved removing the time limit for each trading run (in those days, they didn't have RFID tags and GPS tracking) but rewarding the player for deliveries made under a certain time.

A baltimore clipper moving a small load of high value cargo in 4 days should make much greater profit than a slow fleut ferrying a huge consignment of mundane bulk cargo that takes a month to arrive.

An extension to this idea is signing a contract with the merchant to ferry say, 5000 tons of food to Cuba over a period of 6 months. The player is then given a subsidy for loading food at the client's port of call, and guaranteed profit on the other end. A bonus may or may not be paid depending on how far the player went to achieve the target, once again, a hefty bonus if the target were achieved on time, and zilch if less than a certain percentage (say, 66%) was actually delivered.

What do you think? We might not have a dedicated or willing coder now, but over the next few months? It might just become reality just as all other Build features had been - they were just daydreams once.
 
I like this idea.
I never was happy about the unrealistic time constraint, although I appreciate the the modders, at that time, were just spicing the game up.

Also from my point of view, you would know where to transport what, (i.e. where the best price was being paid), from gossip in the tavern, or more likely from a merchant who knew where to get something cheap, which he could sell at a profit at his location.
(This could be achieved with code in the merchant dialog.)

Again, I can see why it was done the way it is, to provide a challenge in the game.

Just me chuntering on, (again).
 
I definitly do like the idea. Coding it might be tricky and I don't readily have any ideas on how to make it work properly,
but it should be possible. Would definitly be a welcome addition. :yes
 
Pieter Boelen said:
I definitly do like the idea. Coding it might be tricky and I don't readily have any ideas on how to make it work properly,
but it should be possible. Would definitly be a welcome addition. :yes
Click to expand...
As time permits, I will look at the merchant "giving you some hints" maybe just on a few items to start, just to see how much code is involved.

Question: Are the prices of goods at each location static? i.e. gold is ALWAYS cheaper at a particular location?
I know the price changes locally as you trade - but in generality?
 
If your reputation is very bad, merchant might ask you to "make favor". I mean escort mission of contraband. You need to give that not to trader, but to smuggler...
 
Short Jack Gold said:
As time permits, I will look at the merchant "giving you some hints" maybe just on a few items to start, just to see how much code is involved.

Question: Are the prices of goods at each location static? i.e. gold is ALWAYS cheaper at a particular location?
I know the price changes locally as you trade - but in generality?
Click to expand...
Aren't there some rumors already in game, about making profit with some runs?

Last time I had checked, import/export goods were defined as Island attributes. (so they are static). Always dreamed about the economical system being totally rewritten - but I'm not sure we will ever try that.
 
The economical system IS messed up though. Especially with the changing-priced-while-buying.
Also islands' supplies being depleted by the player and such.
And the current settings for importing/exporting/contraband for most new islands is just copy-paste from stock game islands.
That's not good at all; each island should have different settings for that.

There ARE indeed trade run profitability rumours, yes. Not sure if they're still true though.
 
I thought the trade profitability rumors were a nice touch. We can easily add on to the rumors selection.

Oh, and do you think we should make some goods dependant on player ranks? Hauling gold at lv 1 (when you still have a fast and hard to intercept lugger) is a sure fire way to get a good economy going, but that's not entirely realistic is it?
 
The rumours are definitly nice. I'm just not sure if they're true anymore.
And the new islands are excluded.

Adding to the rumours sounds like a VERY good idea.
We could all sorts of stuff in there about new locations and pointers to new sidequests.
Could be friggin' darn useful to point players to new stuff!

Gold should be too expensive for a beginning player to buy in large quantities, I'd say.
Disabeling it altogether is rather arbitrary...
 
Snow White Sorrow, I like the idea of having some goods being 'strategical', and not available to the first unknown captain in his tiny lugger to get away with. I'm not sure if the player level is the best criteria thought. but you know, basicly our current system is 100% historically inaccurate... You are free to buy whatever you want and sell it wherever you want, unless it appears to be contraband good for whatever reason. There is only one type of money - the universal PotC 'gold coin'. Thanks to false flags, you can enter every port you want. Smuggling system is reduced to sell some goods at very high price to some dummies stupid enough to buy them.

This is second half of XX ultra-liberalism theorical system... No taxes, no identity check, no Trading Companies privilegies, no interdiction, no protectionism, etc. The trader will just refuse to talk to you if you forgot to change your flag or you're having a bad reputation (wonder why reputation even come into account.)

Gold should be too expensive for a beginning player to buy in large quantities, I'd say.
Disabeling it altogether is rather arbitrary...
Click to expand...
My, Pieter... do you have any idea how the Spanish trading rules were like? xD:
 
Reputation sometimes affects if you can do a sidequest or not, also you cant do trading missions or escort as no one trusts your sailing if you have a really bad reputation
 
Traders should not care anymore about what flag you're flying. I changed that.
They care about your real relation to their nation.

I would like the trading system to be more involved and interesting,
but don't really know how that should be done. I'm not convinced on having multiple currencies.
That'd be realistic for sure, but it just sounds like just another hassle for the player to me. :?

No, I don't know what the Spanish trading rules were like.
Gold belongs to the Crown or something?
 
Here is a suggestion:

I have to use a LOT of generalisation here, so let’s not get into nit picking.

As a general statement:
An ounce of gold is sufficient for a man to but a complete set of GOOD clothes.

This is true and recorded from Shakespearian times (1564 on) through 1900’s. (well within the time range of the game)

As a side note, it all started to go wonky after world war one, when the various western governments wanted to inflate their own particular currencies, and eventually their “coming off” the gold standard and relying on “paper money” ( a phoney promise to pay in gold).
A major disservice to their respective peoples, but that is another matter.

For the purposes of the game, the value of gold can be considered to be “Static” (as it was) and therefore of “international value”.
So the variables would be “goods” (commodities) and the value of these would vary according to their availability.
Rather than keep blathering on, I would suggest the following:

Main Towns: basically governmental (therefore non or low-productive) = high buy - high selling price
Secondary Towns: Produce specific goods (per town) low buy – low selling price of those items (compared to Main Towns).
Pirates and smugglers: Goods “stolen from others” therefore low buy low sell. (compared to Main Towns and lower than Secondary Towns ).

Suggested Examples:

Main Town - (all items ) High sell – High buy (all items)
Secondary Town 1 – Produces Item A (item A Low sell – low buy) ( all other items High sell – High buy)
Secondary Town 2 – Produces Items B & C (items B & C Low sell – low buy) ( all other items High sell – High buy)
Pirates and smugglers: Low sell – Low buy (all items equal to "productive towns" plus say 10%)

Obviously the sell price in ALL cases will be higher than the buy.

It would then pay the player not to buy in main towns, unless he/she has to, but to find specific items at the “producing island” and take them to the various main towns.

If you all agree with the general logic of this I can draw up a suggested chart for goods and prices at each island.
 
Short Jack Gold, I like your suggestion - that's a simple system to begin with that will greatly improve things. I'm looking forward to your chart of good & price per island. :onya
Then maybe we could make it period-dependant?


Question - I agree with gold price being static, but what about silver?

Pieter Boelen said:
Traders should not care anymore about what flag you're flying. I changed that.
They care about your real relation to their nation.
Click to expand...
Aha, thanks Pieter - I had forgotten about this change!
 
...I carry on with what I was writting earlier :
What makes our economical system both unrealistic and unhistorical is the fact we consider the Caribbean as a closed area. We are thinking of trade between different islands, in a open, big free market whereas the Caribbean where either a transit area between the main land and Europe (Spain trading with its continental empire), either seperate groups of colonies trading with their mother country.

The primary trading web is closed to the player, because he cannot leave the area. In some time periods, it should be as well because he is not part of the powerfull national Trading Companies that were granted monopolies on the most important goods. At one point, each nation had created its own market. You were not allowed to trade with some other nations, at all, and even at time of peace. You understand that if this reality was better simulated ingame, next goal would be to implement the conter part : smuggling system...

As such, if the player could indeed have an impact on the primary trading web (by sinking big merchants ship for example), for himself he have only access to a secondary trading web - the kind of short runs you can do with your sloop, for example. The new trading mission SWS suggest will fit perfectly in this optical.


Another thing : I personally think that if we wanted to have a coherent economical system, that would require other agents than the player alone. But that would require much more work.
 
Pirates and smugglers: Goods “stolen from others” therefore low buy low sell. (compared to Main Towns and lower than Secondary Towns ).


What about the risk of being caught & selling goods not legally traded on an island. - should mean High Prices. :yes
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top