Message in a Bottle Sixth Edition
PAGES
- Front Page - Message from the Editor
Page 2 - Portside Perusal - Global Events Round Up
Page 3 - Achievements & Historical Lookback 1
Page 4 - PG Advisor & Historical Lookback 1 cont.
Page 5 - Meet The Crew - SilverShadow
Page 6 - Historical Lookback 2
Page 7 - SLACK News
PG Advisor - Guide to Trading by Soiiei:
"You want me to do what, now? Write a guide on trade routes? Am I really the best one to ask abo- oh, a free crate of Akrotirian rum, you say? Well in that case, why don’t you sit right down, buckle up, and let Sol “Trade Route Expert”* Liel tell you a thing or two about being a merchant.
*Disclaimer: The nickname “Trade Route Expert” is self-assigned and holds no legal value. Soliel is not responsible for injury, maiming, discomfort, or death resulting from the following of these instructions. Trade at your own risk.
Ah, trading, the noble profession. What better place to start than what you need to start? For the sake of our audience, I’ll assume the reader is starting from nothing (for optimal results following this guide, send any preexisting resources to Soliel (#92804) for safe disposal). In this case, you should start as a Merchant in Aiora. If you’re not starting from scratch, skip to section 2; do not pass Go, do not collect 200GC.
~~It is About the Money~~
The very first thing to do from day zero is to get some starting money. Completing the basic tutorial alone gives you ~25-30,000 Gold Coins (GC) along with 2 captains, an admiral, a merchant, and a ship of some sort. This is a good starting point, but you’ll need a bit more.
There are a few ways to go about this. You can join a Guild, which should help you start both monetarily and with advice. I would wholeheartedly recommend this, as the experience of seasoned veterans is worth more than any guide I could ever pen. In fact, no, that’s it. Join a guild, guide over.
What do you mean “not enough?” Ugh, fine. Joining a guild also unlocks further nobility missions, which pay in credits (worth several hundred GC each at time of writing). But let’s say no, this is too easy for you.
If you don’t want to join a guild, the second-best way to get some starting capital is to request a Loan. You can do this by clicking on your money>My Bank Accounts>Request Loan Offers. To start, I would recommend requesting ~50,000 Gold Coins (GC). This gives you 10,000 to buy officers, 20,000 to upgrade/buy resources for a warehouse, and 20,000 wiggle room. You will have to make the money back, though, so be wary of how soon you must repay it. You might want to pass an offer if the interest is absurdly high as well.
“But Soliel!” I hear you say, “I don’t wanna join a guild or take out a loan!”
To which I tactfully reply, “Well aren’t you a picky little bugger.”
But fear not! For there is another option yet! Upon joining Avonmora, you are issued your very own Referral Link, upon the clicking of which you are given a whole 1,000 GC! Grab some easy early-game cash and as a bonus, if anyone signs up with your link, you get more money as they progress with you. See for yourself, click this link: [removed, stop pandering]
Congratulations, you have gold! What now?
~~Hire Ships, Build Officers~~
To start, you’ll want to make a fleet. To successfully operate a trade route, you’ll also need Officers to run this fleet for you. Good news! The officers do not sleep, even when you do. Your trade route will run 24/7 for the most part. Bad news! They cost money.
I’m going to assume that you have at least 75,000 GC for this part. If you don’t, did you even read the first part?! From here, you should buy Captains until you have 5 total (~10,000 GC), then build Howkers until you have 4 (40,000 GC, resources) plus whatever ship you started with. Mix this all up into a single fleet with 5 ships, hire a crew for it, and you should end up with a full fleet and roughly 25,000 GC. Use this money to upgrade your Howkers to level 2 and spend the points on Cotton Sails. This will increase the speed of your ships, allowing them to complete routes a bit faster.
Ideally, you’ll have started in Aiora, allowing you to skip to a tutorial mission to create a trade route between Aiora and a nearby port. Do so, or don’t; at this point, you’re ready to start. Following missions will help you, but I’m not about to write out instructions that are already there. No matter the case, make a trade route between two ports.
This route will run until the end of time, assuming you log in every now and then. Do note that if the route is less than an hour, it’ll gain danger over time, which allows other players to see and attack it. Being attacked will also stop your route. For that reason, it’s best to stick with routes that are at least an hour to start (you can see the average travel time on the map). Once you get 10 Merchants, you can also have fleets automatically wait for your danger to drop before resuming.
What route should you go for with your first fleet, though? And what’s all this nonsense about load policy?
~~Routes~~
The most you can make buying and selling a resource to the port is 8GC per crate. This has to do with how resource prices are calculated—essentially, each resource has a base price that varies with stock in each port. The cotton port with the most cotton will sell for 4GC below the base price and the non-cotton port with the least cotton will pay 4GC above the base price, allowing for a total profit of 8GC (except sometimes Avonmora seems to ignore this rule and the help article is really unclear, but generally speaking we’re gonna call it 8).
8GC per crate isn’t a bad deal, considering a fleet of 5 Howkers moves 300 crates per trip. That’s 2400GC per trip, after all! Until you consider this is likely to be the longest route, and that 2400GC is going to come over several hours. Sometimes, it can be more profitable to run a cheaper route more often. As prices fluctuate every three days in Avonmora, you’ll have to figure these things out for yourself.
This isn’t the only way to sell resources, though. You can buy a Warehouse in a port for 500GC, which enables storing resources there. In a warehouse, you can set a price for each resource in your warehouse and then sell it to other players on the player market for at least 1GC more than the port will pay (often more). You can also unload resources from this warehouse instead of buying them from the market for a trade route. Selling on the player market will generally be slower, but if you can afford to wait for your money, you’ll most likely make more doing this.
Once you’re established, you can also use warehouses to Party Trade. You can party trade by filling a large warehouse (level 50+ at least) with either Food, Tobacco, or Rum and then using the voodoo card Potato Party, Tobacco Gathering, or Rum Festival respectively to sell it all at once for a large margin. How much you can sell is based on the port population, so mind that when picking a port to party in.
Once you’ve decided on a route, you’re officially a merchant! Go forth and move goods for money! Buy low, sell high and the like. Unfortunately, you’re not a very big merchant, and you’ll find the game quite slow with only one fleet.
~~Too Big to Fail~~
Make money, rinse, and repeat the last steps. Be sure to pay back your loans if you took them out, then take out another to buy more. As your income increases, you can take bigger loans, but make sure not to borrow more than you can repay as some bankers are a bit more… er, “hands-on” in getting their gold back. Buy 5 captains, 1 admiral, and 1 merchant (these will get expensive), then build 5 Howkers (always 10,000 per ship plus resources) and make a new fleet and route. Bigger, pretty ships can be tempting, but stick with Howkers until you get to 40 fleets/200 ships.
At this point, it becomes better to expand vertically than horizontally, so to speak. Start building some Large Merchantmen (LMM’s) and phase out the Howkers in your fleets. Keep one Howker at the end of each fleet, though, preferably with the Extra Cargo trait. This will reduce the base amount you lose when you’re attacked by about six times. These Howkers should be level 10, but the LMM’s are fine to leave at ~level 5. Putting their points into sails and hammocks will allow them to travel faster but leveling them any higher will just make it more profitable to attack you and slow down your growth. A fleet is also only as fast as its slowest ship, which will be the Howker in this case. There’s no reason to max out your LMM speed only for it to be limited by the Howker.
Once you’ve done this, it’s time to keep going. You should keep doing the same as above over and over until you’re as big as you like. With guild support, I managed to get to 300 ships/60 fleets in under a month, so don’t worry if it starts out slow! Something to note is that the more fleets you have, the more attention you’ll draw, or essentially pirates will find it more worthwhile to attack you as you grow. The final thing I’ll talk about is how to try to limit this.
~~Prickly Fruit Keeps Away the Paws~~
There are a few ways to keep those greedy pirates away from your precious ships and cargo. The most common is to place a powerful ship at the front of each of your trade fleets that can defeat weaker attacks from pirates. The current fan favorite is a Flag Galleon, which reduces fleet efficiency but makes it possible to destroy the iconic pirate’s Frigate.
You can also use voodoo to your advantage when being attacked to make it less profitable for the pirates involved, but this depends on your casting skill and may just result in you losing more. Your main objective is to make it cost more to attack you to lower the attacker’s profit margins and consequently their desire to attack you specifically.
~~That’s All Folks~~
Well, ladies and scallywags, that’s about all I have to say. Whew, this ran a bit long, eh? What am I getting paid again? “Exposure”? Last time I heard that the police were involved… er, anyhoo!
If you take away nothing else, I want to reinforce one point from above: join a guild. I’ve sat and rambled here for a few hours about what I think I know, but I’m near certain I’ve probably said something wrong or skipped over some detail. I’m just barely not a total noob myself, yet here I am writing a guide. Sure, there may be some surface-level knowledge here, but going to a guild dedicated to trading is the best way to learn about it. If this has piqued your interest, then that is the next place to go.
In any event, thanks for tuning in. It’s been a wonderful evening, but I must go. This is Sol, signing out, and remember to buy Caspian cotton!
Thanks Soiiei
Historical Lookback 1 (cont):
7. Sea Shanties Started Out As Slave Songs
All the sea shanties that we link to pirates should actually be linked with something else: black slaves. According to one theory, sea shanties never would have existed without the influence of African music.
Some scholars claim that parts of sea shanties seem to be borrowed from African songs. It’s more than just similar sounds; some of the earlier sea shanties actually use the pidgin language of early African slaves, suggesting that they might have been written by Africans or adapted from their music.
The multiracial crews on board of these ships, they believe, would have come up with sea shanties through collaboration. The Africans on board sang while they worked, and the white crew members heard them and started to adapt their songs into songs of their own.
8. Captured Pirates Were Sold Back Into Slavery
When an escaped African slave made it into a pirate crew, he had every reason to stay. Pirates gave them freedom and equality, and if they were separated from their brothers at sea, they’d find themselves back in chains.
One pirate on Samuel Bellamy’s crew was a black Miskito native named John Julian. On Bellamy’s ship, he was the pilot and one of the most important and respected people in the crew. When the ship crashed, though, all that changed.
As soon as Julian was captured, he was sold into slavery, soon finding his way into the servitude of John Quincy, the grandfather of President John Quincy Adams.
Julian managed to escape and even killed a bounty hunter who was trying to catch him. In the end, though, he didn’t get away. The pilot was caught and executed because he refused to become a slave.
9.Slavery Boomed When The Golden Age Of Piracy Ended
Pirates actually made a difference. The slave trade economy was crippled by pirate raids. Bringing slave ships to the New World became incredibly dangerous and costly, and pirate raids made life Hell for the slavers. According to Marcus Rediker, slavery in the New World didn’t have a chance until the pirates were gone.
The Golden Age of Piracy ended, according to some, when the pirate Black Bart died. Within ten years, slavery was booming, and England had more slaves than any other country in the Western world. Pirate raids on slavers and their ships were the one thing that held the slave trade back. Once they were out of the way, slavery came into full swing.
Pirates didn’t set out to make the world a better place—but in a strange way, they actually did.
