Round Table: Ship Recipes and Ships

[ARobertsFrenchie]

If the Halifax schooner is supposed to be as cheap as it is now on a single deed recipe, that recipe must be something like 2 planks, oak, a hemp canvas and a swivel gun.

a small hull and 6 guns is probably more expensive than the halifax is now.



Come to think of it, why do deeds have multiple duras? Isn't that like building multiple ships?

All ships recipes 1 deed, 1 dura!

[Remus]

Originally Posted by PaulG Will someone please explain, in plain english with examples, how decreasing the output from 5 deeds to 1 deed does not mean the cost of the 1 ship has not increased 5 times because I'm really struggling to follow that part of the argument? I'd also like to understand better what is meant by cross nation trade because in my mind that is exactly what the freetrader is supposed to do? Any clarification would help because at the moment the incentive behind this looks suspicious to say the least.

Right, I will have a go. As I said in an earlier post, I think prices and hauling will have to go up - and probably more for smaller ships than for larger ones - but not fivefold.

The Bermuda recipe is currently

Output			5 'Bermuda' Sloop
Labor			6 hours
Cost			1200 doubloons
Anchor			1
Cannon, Swivel Gun	4
Cannon, Very Small	8
Granite			4
Small Fore-and-Aft Rig	1
Small Hull		1
Sulfur			1
Wood Tar		3

Overall the cost of ingredients is 7246 db making the current base cost of one deed 1704 db.
Overall recipe duration is 25.19 hours per deed.
Total hauling weight of iron ingots, oak logs, fir logs, common wood, granite, sulfur and tar is 172 (I think), which makes a hauling weight of 35 per deed.

Quite clearly if the new recipe is only to make one deed then the time can be reduced to 72 minutes and the cost to 240 doubloons, but this would not have much impact. Something needs to be done with the ingredients.

Nothing can be done with the Sulfur, unless it is removed entirely, and the Wood Tar can only be reduced to 2, 1 or nothing.
Reducing the Granite quantity to 1 seems reasonable enough, but other ingredients offer different scope for change.

All current ship recipes except for four of the largest ships produce at least 2 deeds, so it is perfectly reasonable to have a wholesale reduction in ingredients, costs and time for all items which are only used for shipbuilding.
Anchors are currently made with 2 ingots of iron, so the recipe could be changed to 1 ingot.
Swivel Guns use a ridiculous 4 tons of iron to make 8 guns. This could easily be reduced to 1 ton for 8 guns and the recipe time and cost can also be reduced to 25%.
Very Small Guns use 6 tons of iron and 6 of common wood to make 6. This could be reduced to 3 of each, and the recipe time and cost halved, and still be more or less representative of the actual weight of 4 lbers, I think.

But the biggest items are hulls and rigs, and here we need to look at their ingredients.
(Almost) all hulls make 2 ships and Small Hulls always make at least three ships. So straight away the hull and rig recipe costs and times can be reduced to one third what they are now.
Some ingredients can be reduced in quantity. 1 Iron Fitting instead of 2 for example. Others can be reduced in their own costs and ingredients. Frame Timbers for example can be reduced from 20 Oak Logs to 10 and the recipe cost and times halved.
Much the same can be done for Masts.

Making similar changes elsewhere I have come up with a Bermuda that costs 3128 db and takes 45 hours to build. I haven't gone through and worked out the hauling weights but I think it is around 60 tons. Certainly this is a significant increase over the existing costs, times and weights, but all are less than double what they are now and a far cry from a five-fold increase.

Note that to do this for all ships means a large number of manufactured goods and shipwright material recipes would need to change - this might have quite an impact on shipbuilders with large stockpiles of these items who suddenly find their value is halved or worse. It might be made rather easier if some of the pre-1.12 items were brought back; perhaps not beams and transoms but different sized masts, frame timbers and keels.
I also feel in doing this exercise that I am following in footsteps the devs have made already. Fodderboy's posts read to me that he or one of his team has done a similar exercise and he has quite a clear idea of what the new economy is likely to look like. I suspect the ideas he has put forward in this Round Table are quite far advanced.

[Nestcrow]

Originally Posted by Remus Nothing can be done with the Sulfur, unless it is removed entirely, and the Wood Tar can only be reduced to 2, 1 or nothing. Reducing the Granite quantity to 1 seems reasonable enough, but other ingredients offer different scope for change.

Nitpick - you can do something about it, just keep the sulfur in but increase sulfur mine output to 5 times what it is now, for the same cost.
Still, the problem stays that ships with a large output number are going to be a lot more expensive relative to one deed recipes compared to now - this is the same with cannons, if you just half the iron requirements for them a ship currently making 2 deeds requires the same amount of iron, but one making 5 requires 2.5 times as much as now. I see no easy way to fix that if you want to retain accuracy, you can't just have a ship require more cannons then it has on board to balance it out. Imo unless one deed recipes are required somehow it would be better to normalize them around 2 or 3 per run instead of going on the extreme side (additionally, I've always thought the reason to have them produce multiple deeds is that people sit on ships they don't need and put them on the AH).

[umebo]

one way to adjust the power of a ship would be to adjust how many outfitting slots it has of each kind
a cheap ship with one sail, one gun and one hull spot?

or maybe one ship with one outfitting slot that depends on your class
so NO could use hull there PR guns and FT sails? or something like that

[Temmypoos]

Originally Posted by Barberouge There have never been a 10 slot limit. When we had to pay to play, only people with enough real money could have more slots. Now that it is free to play, everyone can have more slots. If you add XP or reputation, only people with enough time to farm could have more slots.

for the first few months, when the game itself cost something like £30, very few people had more then 1 account.

we only really saw mass accounts start to develop when people left the game, giving their accounts away, and the game became super cheap


db's were also the limiting factor on what people could afford to produce back then, so it simply wasnt worth having more then 1 account unless you intended to grind to afford it

[Temmypoos]

Originally Posted by PaulG I'd also like to understand better what is meant by cross nation trade because in my mind that is exactly what the freetrader is supposed to do? Any clarification would help because at the moment the incentive behind this looks suspicious to say the least.

to me, a cross nation trade, is a direct trade between player 1 (in nation A) to player 2 (in nation B). 99% of these are ppl trading goods from 1 alt to another.

the freetrader is supposed to produce and legitimately sell goods. 99% of legitimate cross nation transactions, i.e. player 2 (from nation B) buying a product from player 1 (from nation A) occur via the ah. the ah is an indirect form of players trading

[Remus]

Ah, I have just taken a look at my Hated alt on Test Server.
He cannot chat in Nation or Area (not a problem for an econ mule). He is permanently flagged and is displayed to everyone in Traitor's black (but that might just be my pirates_local.ini settings), also not a problem for a foreign econ alt who does not haul.
He can run econ, buy and list on the AH and carry out cross-nation trades.

However, there is one killer. He is forced to pay 85% tax in his own nation's ports.

[Barberouge]

Originally Posted by Temmypoos for the first few months, when the game itself cost something like £30, very few people had more then 1 account. we only really saw mass accounts start to develop when people left the game, giving their accounts away, and the game became super cheap db's were also the limiting factor on what people could afford to produce back then, so it simply wasnt worth having more then 1 account unless you intended to grind to afford it

Well if reputation was tuned to keep players from using alt eco toons, lots time would become the new limiting factor. But wouldn't it give an advantage to those who have more time to play their alt eco toons ? Which I would call farming. And...

Farming is not fun ™

IMO.

[acerrak]

Originally Posted by ARobertsFrenchie If the Halifax schooner is supposed to be as cheap as it is now on a single deed recipe, that recipe must be something like 2 planks, oak, a hemp canvas and a swivel gun. a small hull and 6 guns is probably more expensive than the halifax is now. Come to think of it, why do deeds have multiple duras? Isn't that like building multiple ships? All ships recipes 1 deed, 1 dura!

no way, absolutly not. you will kill any pvp. that was one of the points with duras and multiple ship deeds is to be able to turn out ships faster plus make the ships viable.

the less a person gets the less likely they will pvp.

[Remus]

Originally Posted by Barberouge Well if reputation was tuned to keep players from using alt eco toons, lots time would become the new limiting factor. But wouldn't it give an advantage to those who have more time to play their alt eco toons ? Which I would call farming. And... Farming is not fun ™ IMO.

There are a couple of overlapping issues here:

1. F2P / Unsubbed Premium (is that the word? I have forgotten) accounts for lot farming are considered a Bad Thing.
   This is the reasoning behind recipe level restrictions.
   As you say, players with more time to play their alt eco toons would have an advantage, but really the advantage is not that great. We don't know what level FLS will set for running recipes, but even so you will only have to do it once per account, and pure levelling does not take that long.
2. Crossteaming for econ purposes, while expressly permitted by the rules, is probably seen as something to be discouraged. This I imagine is where the reputation thing comes from, whatever form it may take.

In my own 16 lot, 4 account econ set up I have mentioned before in this thread, all my econ is quite deliberately on the same nation, so [2] will not apply to me. From the Economy round table I was already expecting something like [1] so have taken steps to level my three F2P alts.
People using foreign econ alts will have both [1] and [2] apply.

By the way, I agree with Tem's assessment of econ in the early game. I would add that after the discovery of JOMT, the introduction of dailies and insurance and before the 1.12 changes, the econ limiter swung firmly from doubloons to lot hours. Lot hours remained the biggest limiter up till F2P, but not to the same extent as immediately before 1.12.
With F2P, even with the econ alt restrictions discussed in this thread, I still don't see lot hours as being much of a limit. A little more than now perhaps, but nothing like pre-F2P. Doubloons certainly aren't any restriction in general terms, although they may be for newer players starting to produce, and will be for many players buying (and losing) ships.
The biggest limiter is hauling time, which is one reason why I have tried to include item weights in my posts because I think this (and ship capacities) are likely to become the biggest change from this thread for producers, with prices being the biggest issue for consumers.