[PATCH] Garrisoning traders in merchant ship is not profitable

[mimo]

Garrisoning traders inside a merchant ship increases the gain by 20%, but I guess nobody ever used it as it has no interest. Taking the exemple of cart, we have trader cost = 100 food, 80 metal and time 15 s merchant ship cost = 100 metal and time 20 s such that building more ships is much more interesting.

There are several ways we could use to make trader garrisoning a better alternative:

• increase the price of merchant ships which anyway looks too cheap to me.
• increase the additionnal gain for each garrisoned trader.
• maybe increase the armour when garrisoned traders (more people to defend the ship)
• others ?

As a first step, I propose to increase the cost of merchant ships by 100 wood and increase the garrisoned gain from 20 to 40%.

[Palaxin]

Trader garrisoning disadvantages:

• a garrisoned merchant ship means a greater potential loss than an ungarrisoned ship because a higher amount of resources can be destroyed with the same effort
• depending on the number of your merchant ships it can be pretty much micro work to garrison them with traders
• efficiency drops down when the traders and ships do not generate resources during garrisoning
• on most naval maps you have less protection for sea trading than land trading because you can't build obstacles/buildings in water - reducing land trading and strengthening sea trading gives you less options for a safe supply
• huge loss of efficiency: currently you slightly increase the resource generation of a cheap unit by "sacrificing" costly units - it should be the other way round

Trader garrisoning advantages:

• trade ships have much more defenses than a single trader and can sustain longer during an attack
• too many ships on a comparatively short route mean a loss of efficiency due to the interference of their paths and thus movement blocking/slowing (but often you can set up additional trade routes to solve this)
• sea trade routes are typically longer than land trade routes, especially on maps with small islands - in this case garrisoning traders might provide more efficiency for very long routes (hardly for the current 20% bonus)

All in all I can't see why trader garrisoning brings more advantages than disadvantages. I think we can assume that even if traders and ships had the same costs and each trader gave a 100% bonus there were still many cases in which trader garrisoning is not profitable. A 60-80% bonus would be useless except for very special situations like very few wood available (assuming we add wood to ship costs), too many ships already so they are blocking each other or very small islands. So my proposals are:

• I absolutely agree with increasing the price for merchant ships, especially wood. A ship totally made from iron is also somehow strange. Your proposal for a total cost of 100 wood and 80 iron makes totally sense for me because it means total costs of traders and merchant ships are the same making them more comparable.
• At least 100% trade gain bonus for the first trader and less for further traders. The bonus should scale somehow with square root or similarly if you add further traders. Implement a tech which enables trader garrisoning (should be very cheap) and/or another tech which increases the bonus per trader (should be more costly).
• If so, implement armour increase by garrisoning soldiers but not traders (e.g. up to 5 per ship, +1 armour per soldier for a weak buff or alternatively up to 3 per ship, +2 armour per soldier for a strong buff)

Generally speaking I have the impression that ships are very strong compared to their low costs (a 1400 HP trireme can easily kill 5-10 soldiers in direct combat depending on rank etc. and costs as much as 3 citizen soldiers or 1 champion soldier). So strongly increasing ship costs would bring them more in line with unit costs on the one hand and also allow us to keep the % bonuses for garrisoned traders at lower numbers.

[Palaxin]

Patch doing the "first step" proposed by mimo. In addition, each trader will add a greater bonus for the merchant ship. First trader 40%, second 50%, then 60%, ...

[Palaxin]

Correct error in garrisonMultiplier calculation

[Palaxin]

Trader garrison bonus as proposed by myself. The bonus decreases exponentially, i.e. 0.9^{{0}=100% for the first garrisoned trader, 0.9}{1}=90% for the second trader, 0.9^{{2}=81% for the third trader, 0.9}{3}=72.9% for the fourth trader, …

[Palaxin]

Trader garrison bonus as proposed by myself. The bonus decreases exponentially, i.e. 0.9⁰=100% for the first garrisoned trader, 0.9¹=90% for the second trader, 0.9²=81% for the third trader, 0.9³=72.9% for the fourth trader, …

[Palaxin]

Decrease the gain a bit. +90%, +81%, +72.9%, ... for first, second, third, ... trader now

[Palaxin]

removed unused counter variable

[Palaxin]

removed unused counter variable

[Palaxin]

This is irrelevant due to the planned changes to the trading mechanism in #3697

[elexis]

I'm not sure if #3697 will be committed. Some like it, some don't (Certainly it's not ready for A20...)

[Palaxin]

Ok I will keep that in mind and reopen if necessary...

[elexis]

• So currently you get only 20% of the profit when garrisoning a trade cart? Sounds bad, should be like 90% indeed.
• Merchant ships should also cost wood, since ships are made out of them, but don't make them that expensive IMO.
• Not convinced that the profit should decrease nor armour increase proportionally.

-> We would end up with a 3 line patch, which would improve the balancing until the final fate of wraiitis tradepatch is decided.

[Palaxin]

• I made them cost 100 wood and 80 metal, so they are comparable with traders which cost 100 food and 80 metal.
• I think we could use also the diminishing returns concept similar to farms here. Otherwise you would just put 20 traders into a single merchant ship. I think a little fleet is nicer than that and also grants more safety and a more continuous resource supply.
• Armor is not affected by my patch. If so, it should be by military units and not by traders IMO. I tried an implementation with auras but as far as I remember it was not working as I wanted to.

I agree to take this at least as a temporary solution, so reopen the ticket.

[fatherbushido]

As first step mimo's suggestion and elexis one, i think we should just increase garrison bonus (nearer 1 than 0) and slightly the wood cost (something like 100 or 50). Using less of those metatrader is good against the painfull ship motion (so i m not convinced at all for any diminishing returns).

[Palaxin]

Or make trader garrisoning increase efficiency up to a certain maximum (more traders would decrease efficiency again) like ​that. Note that 15 is the maximum capacity of a merchant ship.

Actually sounds quite realistic to me. A group of cooperating traders will probably be more efficient than several single traders. But there is only limited capacity for trading goods / resources on the ship. Too many traders will just waste a lot of time on their long journeys where they can't sell or buy.

However, most of you will prefer a simpler solution, I guess...

[elexis]

Feature freeze in 2 days.

[elexis]

Moving to the Work In Progress milestone, since there is a patch asking for feedback, but since it is not strictly bound to a specific release.

[Stan]

No news for 9 months, patch should be on Phabricator

[Imarok]

Move tickets to Simulation as UI & Simulation got some sub components.