Economy

The economy within the game is based on principles of a self-sustainable economy – meaning supply and demand govern it. Everything in the game is manufactured by some player, be it cannon ammo, cannons or the ships themselves. The prices vary from town to town because the players themselves set the prices. The currency is called Dubloons and sales are done through auction-houses in each city.



Auction houses are a place to buy, sell or simply monitor the market growth; meaning you can check whether skins are sold in this region, amounts of it, when was it sold and, of course, for how much. That’s when supply, demand and healthy competition come in.  Before deciding on what you want to make and sell, you need to find a raw material that’s not too common in the area and the one that you think players might want. The ,pre common the raw material is, the lower the product price ends up to be.

Sales are carried out by auctioning your product and setting the price. As soon as someone buys your product, the money automatically ends up in your account. Potential buyers can’t see the price that you have set, but they can check how much it cost when it was sold in the market, so don’t expect to sell skins for 500 Dubloons if the average selling price is 60. In case there are more people selling skins on the same market, the cheapest one will be auctioned first.

For instance, player A is offering 10 skins priced at 30 Dubloons a piece, and player B is offering 30 skins priced at 60 Dubloons each. A buyer tests the market by offering 20 Dubloons for 20 skins and receives a message that he can’t buy this product for that price. Then he offers 40 Dubloons for 5 skins and trades successfully. Player A sold his skins for 40 (although his specified price was 30), while player B has to wait until all the cheaper skins are sold, in order to meet his specified price.

This system works well and leads to healthy competition that forces you to constantly adapt your pricing on the market. Still, the prices vary from region to region, so if a town has plenty of skins, the profits from producing it will not be that high. Still, you can choose to exploit exactly that and buy it where it’s cheap and sell it where it’s expensive.

Production

For manufacturing, you are given 10 lots on a construction site in your town. The first object is a Warehouse, which is a prerequisite if you want to build anything else.



Most objects take up one slot (bigger shipyards take up two), but you can choose to tear down older and obsolete buildings and make space for newer ones. In order to build a structure you have to get a construction plan (construction deed) as well as the materials (wood, metal, etc). You can buy all these at an auction, loot it, or get it as a mission reward. After constructing your building, you’ll need the recipes for specific product manufacturing. Basic recipes come with the buildings, while more advanced ones have to be learned from the books (such as ship spare parts manufacturing). Books can also be bought, looted or received as a reward.



After getting everything and constructing the building, you need to supply money, raw materials and workers in order to actually manufacture anything. We built a Tannery in order to produce skins. In order to produce 10 skins you need 60 Dubloons and 8 hours of labor. Laborers appear after construction so you don’t have to wait. From time to time you open up your Tannery, and voila – 24 hours of labor result in 30 skins. Skins are produced in a couple of seconds and the laborers go back to 0.



However, this is quite basic stuff, so if you want to build something more complex, like a ship, it will be virtually impossible to do it all by yourself. The reason is simple – you need the sails, cannons, hull, etc. so it is a good idea to become a member of a Guild where you’ll be in contact with different craftsmen who might help you in your task.

You can read about economy and manufacturing in detail, here.