Info about upcoming features

Great, thanks for listening

Thank you for inviting suggestions. Here are my first ideas after playing 3 years in demo:

1. Fleet handling - have a button to load/unload or buy/sell all cargo for entire fleet

2. Better trade overview for export and generic trade goods. Handy sortable and customizable table that gives you highest price in accessible ports.
I guess and hope that you have something like that in mind when you speak of trade item sort function.

3. Have some special ability or feature for each of the nationalities
( I might come back on that in more detail)

Very happy to hear that the game is continuing to receive support! I'm really surprised by some of the negative feedback I've seen here. While I agree that the interface is a little behind the times, it sounds like it's going to improve with each patch, and other than that it seems like a wonderfully addictive game to me.

Oh, and while you're at it, please capitalize the "i" in "East indiaman" on the ship lists.

Thomas Paine said:

1. Fleet handling - have a button to load/unload or buy/sell all cargo for entire fleet

Click to expand...

Also repairing and replenishing ammo for a whole fleet.

I'm impressed, you seem to be addressing most of the things I immediately disliked about the game. All of them are great ideas and will improve gaming experience a lot.

If I may add something, I would like to request active warehouse able to buy and sell wares in set quantities and at set price. Something Port Royale or Patrician style. Something that would allow you to stockpile goods when price is low and sell them once it's satisfying. It would also require expanding warehouses a bit, 800 is not enough to service 20 fleets, 8000 would be in order I think for max level warehouse.

Is there anything about a fix of the bugged save files?
I have yet to finish a single game and I had to restart the game a third time today because of that bug.
Having to restart each time or switching windows to english to try and unlock the save is getting quite annoying.

What bug exactly you mean?

The bug where the game crash at the end of the year.

Thomas Paine said:

Thank you for inviting suggestions. Here are my first ideas after playing 3 years in demo:

1. Fleet handling - have a button to load/unload or buy/sell all cargo for entire fleet

2. Better trade overview for export and generic trade goods. Handy sortable and customizable table that gives you highest price in accessible ports.
I guess and hope that you have something like that in mind when you speak of trade item sort function.

3. Have some special ability or feature for each of the nationalities
( I might come back on that in more detail)

Click to expand...

Good points.

With respect to point 3: a few of us have wondered if we can make company-specific events, or make things apply specifically to select nations, already. IIRC the developers next blog will be on modding, so maybe some of this is already in? If not, then it would be a nice feature to include in the upcoming patch.

cherry_hinz and I made some suggestions (starting from post #2 in this thread) as what these unique features might be, and it would be good if these were easily moddable for those that don't like companies having unique traits/abilities/features.

Economic trends from your company's history

In beta you could only compare the economic state of the companies at the current point in time. In the launch release, is there a view showing running average trend curves for your company's capital over past years (using 3-5 years or even longer time window for averaging monetary assets, annual sizes of your fleets, ports and buildings for your non liquid assets)?

If not, this kind of information would help in following your play performance by showing the direction that your company's economy is heading and would thus motivate to search for greater profit margins to keep up with the growth track. These trend curves would show when increasing your fleets and ports start to become burden to your economic development and encourage you to adjust your play accordingly. This creates more incentive for strategic trade planning.


Fleet captains trade performance statistics

After adding the opportunity to see the profit for the current cargo per captain, why not also track the captains' career performance by giving a view with the list of active and inactive captains, their accumulated total profits from trade as well as average profits and average length of the three latest trade journeys:

Like this:
* overall profits made during the career, years at service
* the three latest trade journeys' avg.length(months), avg.profits(money), avg.cargo capacity(total fleet tons)

This would add more flavour to the captains personae and it would be interesting to follow which captains have been making the most profits in their careers and which have provided the best utility for their spent sailing months. It would be a helpful tool for tracking profit margins between long and short distance trade routes, which also adds greatly to the strategic depth of the trade.

(EDIT: I have edited the text above to reflect my earlier suggestion on the same feature).

Destinations of the fleets visible from the strategic view

There should be a tooltip text or some other text indication where the captain's fleet is heading at the moment. This would reduce yet a few clicks from the fleet management.


Roster of special deliveries from random port to another with due dates

Ok, this might require bit more implementation work. In addition to the automated trade route planning and manual trading for best price and special deliveries between home port and single foreign port, there could be another source of income in the form of special deliveries between two foreign ports.

A roster of special delivery requests could show a list of cargo items with pick up port, destination port, reward and possible penalty for failing:

Like this:
* Deliver Aristocrat family with cargo from Mecca to Yemen before 12/1627, reward 10000, penalty 10000.
* Deliver Exquisite porcelain cargo (10 tons) from Bombay to Canary Islands before 3/1628, reward 15000.

These would not be assigned to player until she picks up the item at the pick up port. Then it would be up to the players to plan optimal routes for efficient pick ups and deliveries. These deliveries would produce a notable addition in the yearly income but the cost would be more micro management for the fed-ex fleets. This feature would give more varied route planning mini-game within the game, i.e. more versatile trading/sailing experience.


Accessing port view with your fleet in opens automatically the cargo window of the first ship and the market place of the port

Trading view is one of the most used views in the game. Why not minimizing the number of clicks required to reach the most used features and make them default views.

Ok, here were some of my thoughts based on the experiences with the Beta version. I don't know if they exist in some form in the release version already.

Thanks.

As I already said, some more modifiers and modifiable parameters. It's by no means a must, but it would be much appreciated.

Here's a minor one: How about a little alert to tell you when so-and-so has arrived at such and such port? Right now I spent most of my time just looking at the little icons at the bottom, waiting for their outline to turn from green to white.

Could you add an option to include a home port profit value for the trade menu? It's irritating calculating margins all the time.

-Slow autorepair at low hull/sail values which would kind of simulate those darned sailors of yours trying to keep that bucket floating =P

-Some kind of armor values on all 4 sides of the ship which degrade when taking damage, so keep firing at one side and the side will take more damage the lower the armor value goes.

- Refilling food and water supplies should cost money for each port you are visiting. Maybe be marginally cheap in own ports, medium in allied ones and high in pact/neutral ports? It's not like they got that stuff for free.
- Ships should constantly break and fixing sails and hulls as well as recruiting new crew should be necessary on regular basis. Call it ship upkeep.
- It would be cool to add a few "generic" ports in the Mediterranean, just for the fun of it, Venice, Alexandria, Istanbul at least.

This may sound trivial...but I would love to see the fruits of my labor in battle..and be able to linger after the enemy has been defeated. Would love to see a frigate go under...instead of immediately going to the victory box.

Maybe a button to click to leave the battle...same option when the enemy tries to flee...

Hopefully this will be possible.

moltobenny said:

Here's a minor one: How about a little alert to tell you when so-and-so has arrived at such and such port? Right now I spent most of my time just looking at the little icons at the bottom, waiting for their outline to turn from green to white.

Click to expand...

That one would definately make my day. But how about making an option to "pause and centre" on a port when a ship docks? Right now my gameplay is me sitting with my fingers on +/- much of the time, just to slow down the speed to 1x or so whenever one of the wee icons dock.

Really great that you listen to the forum, am not that sad about buying this game anymore, if you can give it about the same support as paradox usually does. Dont forget us!

i think if 90% of the above are implemented ingame then EIC will set itself up in the long term as a good francise.

By the sounds of it patches will be regular ive decided to go ahead and purchase now