Prices

Roland · Helmsman Posts: 4085 **22541 Gold** -

As an economist, I am interested in how the economic systems of games work. I have started a research project on the prices at which the stranger offers items in the tavern. I know the price for "basic" items ranges from 1,000 to 3,000 at Apprentice; 1,500 to 3,500 at Adventurer; and 2,000 to 4,000 at Swash. (You can interpolate Journeyman and Rogue.) And the price range for "improved" items is thrice that of "basic" items. But what determines the variation of prices within the range? It is obviously related to a city's wealth, but beyond that I'm still not close to cracking it. The wealth rating on the world map (1 to 4 coins) appears to be a relative, rather than absolute scale, which makes for a complicated relationship with the rich-poor component of the "city type" rating (e.g., capital, port, trading post, stronghold).

So I decided to tackle an easier problem to ease my frustration: the prices offered by the shipwright for our prizes.

Stephen · Powder Monkey Posts: 22 **611 Gold** -

Thanks for the chart and the information! One thing I've pondered upon retiring my pirates at the end of each game is what the gold and land acreage values would translate to in today's US dollars. A successful pirate in the game surely would never have to work again a day in his life unless he was very, very foolish with his money!

Rice, for example, sells for about $5.00 or so per ten pounds in stores today, I think. If my math is right, a ton of rice at this price would cost about $1000 (200x5). The average price of a ton (2000 lbs) of food in the game is about 5 gold pieces. So one gold piece in the game would be worth roughly $200 in today's money at this rate, if my estimate of food prices is correct. So that means 5000 gold pieces in the game would be worth $1,000,000 (that's 1,000,000 divided by 200).

A fully-upgraded Spanish Flag Galleon sells for 1800 gold to the shipwright in a good port; assuming he's going to re-sell it for at least double that price, it would be worth at least 3600 gold, or about $700,000 in today's dollars.

The question remaining is this: what is the average gold value of an acre of land in the game?

I know I'm over-analyzing the heck out of the game's economy, but I'd be interested to hear an economist's thoughts on all this!

Roland · Helmsman Posts: 4085 **22541 Gold** -

Mr. Blue · Rigger Posts: 1947 **68979 Gold** -

I'm not sure you can use a single food type as an index of comparison, because the price of the food itself is not stable. Perhaps burgergnomics experts (who compare purchasing power parity using the Big Mac as their index) would disagree with me . Smile

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
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" ... the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. " George Eliot

Roland · Helmsman Posts: 4085 **22541 Gold** -

I have been collecting data on the classifications of towns by size, wealth, and defenses. I have not yet seen a single city classified as a colony, and I've only seen one town. But that one town allowed me to confirm that the list of city types on p. 46 of the guide book switched the descriptions of port and town. It should read:

Port: A large and poor city with strong defenses.
Town: A large and rich city with weak defenses.

(Alternataively, maybe the descriptions in the book are as intended, but the text file reversed the two designations.)

It appears that a city is small if it has 4,000 or fewer inhabitants, and large if it has 4,200 or more.

There are four wealth levels: poor, modest, prosperous, and wealthy, in ascending order. For city classification purposes, poor and modest translate to poor, whle prosperous and wealthy translate to rich. Except that prosperous cities very occasionally get the designation of a poor, rather than rich, city type.

I still haven't figured out how the game determines whether a city's defenses are strong or weak. It is somewhat correlated with the number of soldiers, but not perfectly. I have seen a strong city with 80 soldiers and a weak city with 240 soldiers. There's obviously another factor involved.

Food prices follow the city's wealth level pretty closely, except in those cities whose description says they are known for abundant, cheap food or somesuch. The usual food prices are:

Poor: 3
Modest: 5
Prosperous: 6
Wealthy: 7

jlangsdo · Cutthroat Posts: 400 **10932 Gold** -

Keep up the good investigation, Roland! Excellent job on compressing all of the ship price information - I was going to try to help you out by filling in the rest, and found there was nothing to do.

Guru · Gunner Posts: 678 **1240 Gold** -

Ahoy there, me fellow gentlemen o' fortune Sailor

I'm toying with the idea of getting back to pirates! (yet again), but I've not made up my mind.. Noticed even Davetheknave was here quite recently Very Happy

But I am so happy to see some good ol' empiric study Roland! I share your interest in all those matters, in particular it would be great to get some true data on those elusive towns.. (8 different kinds in total?) And I hope we some day will get to the bottom of the Ship of the Line mystery, what specific criteria is needed, and from which kinds of towns can it spawn?

Greetings Retired in Panama

EDIT: And Kristian95!! I didn't see that one coming, nice to see you again Excited

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Roland · Helmsman Posts: 4085 **22541 Gold** -

In my most recent game (about which you will read more in the near future), I collected data on prices of special items offered by the stranger. I was playing at Rogue difficulty. Whenever I was offered an "improved" item, I divided the price by 3 before recording it in order to keep everything on a single "basic item" scale. Here are my data.

Settlement
1250 - 1
1500 - 3
1750 - 5
2000 - 2

Poor Stronghold (small, strong)
1500 - 5
1750 - 4
2000 - 1

Poor Port (large, strong)
1750 - 2
2000 - 9
2500 - 1
3750 - 1

Modest Stronghold (small, strong)
1500 - 2
1750 - 5
2000 - 7
2250 - 3

Modest Port (large, strong)
1500 - 1
2000 - 1
2250 - 8
2500 - 5
2750 - 7
3000 - 1
3250 - 2
3750 - 1

Prosperous Stronghold (small, strong, poor) - 2250 - 1
Prosperous Port (large, strong, poor) - 2500 - 1
Prosperous Village (small, weak, rich) - 2250 - 1

Prosperous Trading Post (small, strong)
2000 - 10
2250 - 8
2500 - 6

Prosperous Capital (large, strong)
2500 - 4
2750 - 9
3000 - 11
3250 - 6
3500 - 1
3750 - 2

Wealthy Trading Post (small, strong)
2000 - 1
2250 - 8
2500 - 11
2750 - 3
3000 - 1

Wealthy Capital (large, strong)
2750 - 3
3000 - 5
3250 - 3
3500 - 9
3750 - 1

Wealthy Town (large, weak, rich) - 3000 - 1

The clear pattern is that items tend to be more expensive in cities that are larger and richer. I was not able to discern a pattern with respect to strength because "weak" city types are so rare - only the four "strong" types (whatever that means) are prevalent. I was not offered any items by the stranger in a colony or an outpost - and I might very well not have landed in an example of either. In fact, I still do not have a single example of a colony in my records since I started this thread on prices.

I was surprised to find items offered for less than 1750, which I thought was the minimum price at Rogue difficulty. I was even offered one item for just 1250 in a settlement.

Despite the wide price ranges for some city types, I do not think there is any randomness in prices. Whenever I would return to a city repeatedly in quick succession (or replay a port visit) item prices remained constant. I am convinced it is all deterministic, but some of the factors are invisible. Perhaps there is a permanent price factor associated with each city. Or perhaps wealth levels are broken down more finely than the four levels (poor, modest, prosperous, wealthy) that we can see. The fact that some "poor" city types appear with a wealth level of "prosperous" suggests the presence of finer gradations of wealth that are hidden.

jlangsdo · Cutthroat Posts: 400 **10932 Gold** -

There is a wealth factor associated with each city, which is a number from 0 to 199. It jumps up if a city gets a new governor, and otherwise drops by one each month.... the Caribbean is slowly slipping into poverty.

jlangsdo · Cutthroat Posts: 400 **10932 Gold** -

This is not simple. The wealth number doesn't always drop every month - that might depend on the year and difficulty level. Perhaps there is some overall economic direction that can be set to up or down.

I wondered if the wealth level was related in a simple way to the amount of gold that you get from plundering the city. So I set up 3 savegames (based on the original Fencing Academy, where you engage the city immediately) where I had 3000 crew and Santo Domingo had 0, 20, or 120 soldiers, and conquered the city 10 times in each. The wealth number was 112 (prosperous)

With 0 soldiers, he concedes immediately.
Gold: 8900, 12500, 6900, 5500, 12300, 12600, 9800, 9500, 7700, 7700.

With 20 soldiers, he fights until struck once. In all cases, I lost no men. Gold: 9500, 9700, 7800, 8300, 4400, 5000, 7100, 7200, 8600, 5800.

With 120 soldiers, there is a land battle. I was careful to lose no crew - generally sat in wait with 7 squads of buccaneers, waiting for the Spanish to leave the woods.
Gold: 8500, 8900, 6700, 6500, 6500, 9600, 4500, 7200, 8100, 9300.

That varies even more than I would have guessed. Also random was how many of my mutinous crew deserted when I left the city - varied from 8 to nearly 300, with no correlation to gold taken.

The good news is, the prices at the merchants are stable from one savegame to the next, so that at least can be figured out.

Getting back to your original question about prices of items, one experiment would be to reload a savegame over and over (using shift-A), each time just visiting the stranger in the tavern, to see if the price for a given item is stable when it happens to be offered in the same savegame.

Roland · Helmsman Posts: 4085 **22541 Gold** -

CAPTAINcredible · Seaman Posts: 220 **1136 Gold** -

This is all over my head, but good work guys!
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Get your own fleet/inventory banner!

davyjones · Cutthroat Posts: 313 **5230 Gold** -

davyjones · Cutthroat Posts: 313 **5230 Gold** -

As to the various thoughts in this thread...

Are any of these in the guide? Could we put each of the categories in a new thread, and let folks research various scenarios to help triangulate the formulas.

1. goods prices
2. town worth in sacking it
3. price from stranger

what else?

jlangsdo · Cutthroat Posts: 400 **10932 Gold** -

Going back to the original topic (item prices in the Tavern)

Roland is right, prices are stable; if you keep reentering a town, all items of the same level are priced the same.

The item price depends on multiple factors.

Changing the city Wealth (City_x_5) is one of the factors.
This is a number from 0-199.

Playing on Rogue at one city (all other factors equal)

Wealth Description Item Price
0-39 : quiet and desolate : 1250
40-79 : baking in the sun : 1500
80-119 : bustling with activity : 1750
120-159 : clean and prosperous : 2000
160-199 : brimming with wealth : 2250

This also affects how fast the music is playing when you enter; faster music means higher prices. So to some extent you can hear how expensive it is going to be.

The trick is that the Wealth score is not as strictly related to whether the city is described as Poor, Prosperous, or Wealthy, or how many gold doubloons are shown in the world map. Those may have different breakpoints, or they may be on a relative scale.