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Fixed Distance Calculation for Escort Quest Profit

At the moment there is no extra reward scalar for the amount of Escort Quests that you do.
The only thing that has been changed in the Escort Quests so far is to have the payout be dependent on the distance to be travelled and the value of the goods.

Port-au-Prince to Oranjestad is a pretty long distance haul. Wine price is 20, so 225*20 = 4500.
Port-au-Prince to San Juan is relatively close. Sugar price is 12, so 450*12 = 5400.
Indeed that does make it quite surprising that the pay is twice as much on the short-distance trip. o_O

Are Escort Quests not a bit of "easy money" in a way? You can WorldMap travel pretty much all the way and should be able to avoid enemies quite easily.
So you need to offset the costs of running your ship, but there isn't actually much real challenge in them. Is there?
Escorting a ship doesn't make you any more or less prone to attack. Which doesn't make too much sense from a gameplay point of view?
 
Pieter Boelen said:
Are Escort Quests not a bit of "easy money" in a way? You can WorldMap travel pretty much all the way and should be able to avoid enemies quite easily.
So you need to offset the costs of running your ship, but there isn't actually much real challenge in them. Is there?
Escorting a ship doesn't make you any more or less prone to attack. Which doesn't make too much sense from a gameplay point of view?
Click to expand...

Yes, you're right... with Worldmap you don't usually have enemy ships chasing you. So it is balanced from a point of view.
Well... at the start of a storyline, since you have a small ship, and there are warships that can be hostile to you in an Island... Maybe.
And well, the escorting quests should have more risks than when you are playing alone with your own fleet. That's definitely important. Perhaps making appear a pirate/hostile ship near you when you are at an island on sea, not Worldmap, should be indeed more challenging.

But I have an idea: Does Iron Man mode disable worldmap and you can only use DirectSail, right? I think putting higher payouts it's compensable, since you don't know what are you going to met on the sea.
 
I wonder... It should not be too hard to generate an enemy ship near the destination island. That happens for Treasure Quests too.
Of course this should happen only occasionally and be in relation to your own size so as to not be an insta-kill situation.
But at least the potential presence of an enemy ship would warrant the captain-to-be-escorted to actually ask for your help.
Otherwise you end up basically doing nothing and getting paid for it. :facepalm

The above added risk might also provide a good reason to put the payments up a notch further.
I do believe that to get a reward, there must be a risk. Or perhaps....
Keep the current payments as-is, but let the traders give you a BONUS if you encountered an enemy and you still survived.

HellSailor said:
But I have an idea: Does Iron Man mode disable worldmap and you can only use DirectSail, right? I think putting higher payouts it's compensable, since you don't know what are you going to met on the sea.
Click to expand...
Iron Man Mode does indeed do that, but I don't quite follow what you're trying to say. :oops:
 
Indeed the Bonus sounds good to me.

Oh, don't worry, I haven't explained very well xD Ok, since you are in DirectSail, you don't know what is going on there in the distance. That indeed is dangerous, because you can't predict if a fleet is going to chase you, like on Worldmap. That forces you to meet them and not sail away as it is at Worldmap, when you click Sea, the worldmap ecounters restarts again and enemies disappear.
Furthermore, on DirectSail you spend more time to travel from an island to another, so that makes travels too long and with a low payout it's not worth the effort.
Also, if you have an encounter on DirectSail with an enemy fleet which is dead ahead to the direction you are following to go to the island, you have to change the direction of your travel and get more wind on your sails. And that makes you lose time in order to get away from them. And they will always chase until you have arrived to another island.

To summarise, Leaving Escort Quests in Iron Man Mode as it is on Arcade and Realistic Mode it's Unfair to the player. The explanation is mentioned above. I hope you can now understand what I tried to say.
 
HellSailor said:
To summarise, Leaving Escort Quests in Iron Man Mode as it is on Arcade and Realistic Mode it's Unfair to the player. The explanation is mentioned above. I hope you can now understand what I tried to say.
Click to expand...
Would that same logic not apply to any other quest where you have to sail from island to island?
Or would you consider Escort Quests to be worse at it?
 
IMO I consider Escorter Quests to be worse at it, because, if the merchant ship is sunk while it is been chased, then you can't do more Escort Quests; that's the way it worked on vanilla POTC. A galleon would not travel fast so if you are trying to sail away, the merchat ship doesn't get that option too if you are on Iron Man Mode.

Imagine you are in a Gaff Schooner and your companion is on a pinnace. Then an enemy fleet of big warships appears on DirectSail is coming to chase you. Do you have any chance of destroying an entire fleet of big warships with your ship? Surely you couldn't, but you can sail away, something that the pinnace can't do well if frigates are chasing him; Your only chance of survive both of you is that you sail away the enough distance to open worldmap and be safe of the danger. But in Iron Man Mode you don't have that option; you are stuck on DirectSail, so if you leave the merchant ship at his destiny, it will be sunk and you will not be able to do another Escort Quests. That why I consider Iron Man Mode more tricky when you have those situations; in order to equilibrate the risks, I thought about increasing more of the payout the merchant gives to you. But that's only my opinion.
 
Cargo Haul missions for merchants also used to stop if you failed one.
That was due to a design flaw in the coding though and technically was a stock game bug that I fixed at last I think some time last year.
I'm not sure if that applies to Escort Quests too. Could you or anyone conform that they stop after one failure?
Otherwise I would suggest just a substantial reputation drop on failure, but allow continued ones.
 
- Ironman (Journeyman difficulty)
- Escort quest taken in Kingston, Jamaica.
- Target Bridgetown, Barbados.
- Escorting HMS Romulus, English Bark, carrying 409 units of sugar and 11 units of silk.
- Player level 5.

Payout 21 184.


I'm currently at my second attempt. The first one I encountered three Dutch brigs that I had to engage, and then sailed back to Jamaica to refit. I'm currently being chased by five small pirate ships half way to the destination with only open sea for miles and miles. I guess the only thing that can save the merchant is another "sail ho!"...
 
This issue @Levis to look into the payment a bit more.

Extra risk + bonus upon surviving could be done after Beta 3.4 is released, unless Levis thinks it is worth doing now.
 
Marking this as "Solved" too. Pay is much higher and much fairer than it was, so certainly no worse.

Can always be tweaked further if need be.
 
I am now playing the game to my likes, and I decided to do some escort quests. What I found is that from Sao Jorge to Barbados you receive 7000 gold, the same as going from Sao Jorge to San Juan (Puerto Rico). Even when you can do an escort quest from Sao Jorge to Santiago, it still give you low profits (Around 5500 to 7500 gold). Maybe a case of bad luck? I tried several times before giving up.
 
and what level you are.
The distance should be making more of a diffrence, but also your rank does.
 
Ok, here there are two escort quests:

First mission:
  • Level: 15
  • Difficulty: Apprentice
  • Origin: Sao Jorge, La Grenade
  • Target: Alice Town, Eleuthera
  • Ship and cargo: Bermuda sloop with 203 planks.
  • Money: 6797 gold.
Second Mission:
  • Level: 15
  • Difficulty: Apprentice
  • Origin: Sao Jorge, La grenade
  • Target: Grand Cayman, Cayman
  • Ship and cargo: European Barque with 252 silk.
  • Money: 4684 gold.
 
And those amounts are still not profitable?
I mean a merchant carrying such a load shouldnt pay to much now should he... Else he is paying you more then his cargo is actually worth
 
Perhaps our idea on the danger-induced bonus could help out a bit?

It doesn't help that the random choice of destination port doesn't necessarily coincide with any actual profitable route.
So you can hardly carry some cargo of your own along and make some extra money that way.

If I recall, that was the main thing that Hylie found quite useless about these types of quests. And he does have a point I suppose.
Because if you have no business going where the escort wants to go, then the payment from the mission is all you've got to compensate your expenses.
 
yeah that part will be fixed once I made the dynamic economy.
 
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