POTBS: Economy (cont).

Starting to build our facilities for producing goods to be sold on the Caribbean.  Here are some notes I’ve noticed:

• Identify synergies.  Resource and the immediate factories that needs them.
• Tax.  Building in a enemy nation’s ports will cost a player 40% tax.  This tax is spent on anything that requires money.  Spending 240 Doubloons?   Try 240*1.4 = 336Db
  This actually affect the cost of production by quite a bit.  That 40% tax will need to be passed onto your customers, and for someone who may be making that item in a home port, the cost would be 240*1.05=252Db
  So basically if someone’s selling the same goods anywhere between 252DB~336DB (within a 35% margin) you can’t even compete.
• People screwing up the market by selling under-priced goods.  I actually noticed this quite a bit.  A particular [Deed: Draftsman] cost 980Db to produce raw.  Plus tax it ends up 1008Db.
  Some insane people were selling it at 1000Db.  My suspicion is that they didn’t realize they have a 5% tax that they had to pay on top of the 980Db raw cost.  In addition to a 40Db auction house fee.  So they are seriously running under-cost.
• An earlier thought we had in our construction was to reduce shipping required.  So we’d build factories near the resource gathering facilities.  This produced a situation where we had clusters of buildings on separate sides of the world, which caused a lot of back-and-forth with regards to producing goods.  During manufacturing it is quite likely that we may forget something, and having a port nearby makes it far easier to go pick it up.
• This idea ties in well with the tax problem earlier.  If the gathering facility is on alien port, then having the manufacturing facility on the same port would further increase tax on the final goods produced.  Having to build buildings on alien port is also always more expensive.
• I was proposing an alternative strategy where we lump production facilities near each other, and the only remaining long-range-hauls would be to bring in the raw materials.  This significantly reduces transporting during manufacturing.
• But this morning I was having second thoughts.  If raw materials are heavier to ship than manufactured goods, it may be that we can save more trips if we ship manufactured goods instead of raw materials.
• If you are a [Free Trader], get tax-evasion!

jliu