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Pirates of the Burning Sea

Big Business

For those of us who enjoy economic warfare more than sinking ships, or just take heart to the Rules of Acquisition (specifically the one that says "War is good for business"), I'm happy to report that there is a solid economics sub-game in Pirates of the Burning Sea. Making replacements for all those sunken ships and associated bits is a complex affair. One structure is used to harvest trees for wood, another turns the wood to ship components (with nails, made from iron bars, made from iron ore). In addition to wooden parts, you need sails, brass, provisions, rigging, gunpowder, barrels... the list of finished goods required as components for ships just goes on and on, and in practice you need the cooperation eight to ten players to set up a self-sustaining manufacturing operation for larger ships - any less, and you have to buy some of the bits from other players.

The requirement for cooperation stems from the structure system. Each account gets only ten structure slots per server, and there is no way to build more than one or two types of components with ten slots. You can split these among your characters as you choose, but once you have total of ten structure slots used, none of your characters can build more on that server unless you take down an existing structure. Each structure accumulates labor in real time - up to 72 hours of it - and eats upkeep, paid every week.

Harvesting raw materials, manufacturing parts from raw materials and manufacturing finished goods from parts all require different structures and use up both accumulated labor and doubloons. This sets an effective and fair limit to what one account is able to produce in the game, and sets a floor price for commodities. As production chains are fairly long and each port has only a limited selection of raw materials available for harvesting, there is a big incentive to trade. This is definitely not your "click one button to grind finished goods from two pieces of raw material" crafting!

Players are able to buy basic "civilian" ships and low grade melee weapons from NPCs, but effectively all goods on sale are player made, and there is a fertile ground for real, player-driven economics. This is very much from the playbook of EVE Online, and a Good Thing(tm). Money can be made in all parts of the production chain - including distribution of materials and finished goods. While sailing around, you can run cargo from port to port and try to make some money, but to actually profit you have to plan around the supply chains as most goods can be sold only to other players. All career choices can participate - it's just that the Freetraders are best at it. In fact, in the long term it's most likely that every player of a National faction will end up with a Freetrader alt for business. Pirates, being pirates, can not specialize for the economic game - they prefer to plunder stuff - but nothing prevents them from participating.

Auctioning the Goods

On the most basic level, you have the auction houses - available at every port. All players can view auctions at their local area from any port, but any purchases of items that reside in other ports must be picked up afterwards. Freetraders get the special ability to see all auction houses across the Caribbean, easing up the task of setting up long trade routes.

In addition to the normal AH, each region has a Regional Auction House. This resides in a port that does not allow the construction of any structures by players, but everyone also gets a free warehouse at the regional AH and the listing fees are cheaper. European NPC traders also reside in these ports and they trade certain items for European goods, not available elsewhere. Your reputation with the trade company in question determines the trade ratio you will get. The design idea seems to be to get the players to ship goods from other ports to these regional ports, ensuring that there is always healthy amount of hauling to do. Currently the business seems to be very much concentrated around the newbie ports, but it's still early days for the economy system, so it remains to be seen how it all works out.

Auction Houses seem strange at first, as they employ a system of blind bidding. You can see what is available at each port, and the prices paid in recent completed transactions, but there's nowhere you can see the asking prices of the items on auction. There are also two additional important rules: you always pay what you bid, even if the price was lower, and whoever has the item for sale at the lowest price sees his goods sold first, but he still gets the price the buyer offered.

This allows interesting scenarios for shrewd traders. You could drive down the "apparent" price of a specific raw material by gaming the last trade prices down with single unit sales, and then buy up bulk quantities at a low price when someone puts stuff up at the last sale price without considering the real value. You could also try to pump up the price, but whoever had the lowest asking price will see his goods move at a higher price first. It's slightly annoying to try to find the lowest available asking price by trying to submit buy orders at an ever increasing price, but the system allows so much more interesting business dealings that after the initial confusion, I very much believe in PotBS's blind bid system.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Factions and CareersPage 3: Gameplay FundamentalsPage 4: Gameplay - Sea BattlesPage 5: Gameplay - EconomicsPage 6: Gameplay - Faction PvPPage 7: Issues & ComplaintsPage 8: Technology, User Generated ContentPage 9: Final Thoughts and Scoring

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