[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

All in all more disadvantages than advantages. I think we can assume that even if traders and ships had the same costs and each trader gave a 100% bonus it would still provide more advantages to not garrison traders. A 60-80% bonus would be useless except for very special situations (very few wood available - assuming we add wood to ship costs - or too many ships already so they are blocking each other). 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.