Piracy by Other Means
I recently joined a guild—excuse me, society—in Pirates of the Burning Sea, which in turn means an end to fence-sitting on where to pitch my tent in the game’s economy.
Factory production is a matter of complete disinterest to me as far as fun value goes, but it cannot be ignored. There is simply too much money to be made in production, and even if a player doesn’t particularly want to be rich, he has to make money to keep himself supplied with shot and ship repairs, not to mention buying expensive ships in the first place. (Hopefully, a player looking to buy a ship is moving up in the market, but replacing a vessel sunk in battle is a sad possibility.) Things must remain this way: shipping supports the entire game, and if the burning seas are to have pirates, then the pirates must have something interesting to prey on—other players. The game, therefore, must employ some kind of device to make players want badly enough to haul cargo that they are willing to become potential targets. The developers chose to do this by making the economy dependent on player production; apart from the barest necessities of shot and crummy ships, both available at grossly inflated prices from ‘bots, all the equipment—ships, shot, crew rations, repairs, luxuries, and the raw materials to make them—come from player production.
So I knew I had to get into running a few factories sooner or later, preferably sooner, but kept putting off the decision because it didn’t sound like fun. (It isn’t, especially. Not to me.) My last remaining excuse was a reluctance to sink money into a factory that would prove redundant for friends in a guild. Now I’m in a guild, and I can set myself up in the colonial economy.
It’s a very small guild—I was the fifth person to join—yet by the time I joined, it had already covered its bases: shot, repairs, and ship components. It fell to me, then, to produce high-end raw materials like zinc, gold, teak, and ironwood, which are not strictly necessary, but are used to produce certain high-quality items that can give a player an edge. Unless the French manage to conquer territory from their enemies—unlikely, when we’re the smallest of four factions—our only sources of these goods is in the hotly-contested center of the map. Dangerous territory: we’re likely to lose these cities to British or Spanish conquest, and consequently be forced to pay heavy taxes on production. Even if we don’t lose these towns, they’ll often fall into zones of contested control, wherein merchants are subject to unrestrained attack, losing their cargoes to pirates or enemy nations.
Nonetheless, the assignment suits me just fine. People need more iron than gold, more oak than teak. So in accommodating my guild’s needs, I am “forced” into a low-volume, high-margin operation. As long as I’m patient, I can time my zinc and gold runs for low-risk times. And the chance that France’s enemies will snatch our vulnerable zinc, gold, teak, and ironwood sites doesn’t entirely work against me; as long as the need is there, I can pass the increased production costs onto the consumer, and the dangers put off the potential competition. The zinc market, particularly, raises my hopes: only once in several weeks of play have I seen zinc on sale in any of the more stable French ports. Nobody, but nobody, is selling zinc.
Giddy at the prospect of a monopoly, I launched my zinc enterprise yesterday by departing from the path of sound economics. Rather than laying one massive cargo in the auction house, I placed several small lots at different prices, anywhere from 600 to 750 doubloons per ton. This tactic offers several advantages: it lets me find quickly what the market can bear, it lets me fleece a few gullible customers, and next to 750db/ton, 600db/ton looks positively reasonable. It’s not; these prices are sheer robbery, 400% to 500% the cost of production. Overpricing may cause buyers to decide they can (or must) live without my zinc entirely, but it’s worth a shot. If it doesn’t work, I shall humbly retreat to offering zinc at the one price I’ve seen quoted, a mere 300 doubloons a ton—still a 100% profit margin.
There’s more ways to practice piracy in the Caribbean than by running up the Jolly Roger and seizing hapless fluyts.