Wages are screwed up. They have been for a while.


As it stands now:

Raising wages to any degree gives a slight morale boost (+100). Docking wages to any degree gives a comparatively huge morale penalty (-300). This was done in order to address the problem where some captains would keep the wages at middling levels until they went to sea, raise them for a temporary morale boost, and then lower them on return to port.


The problem:

Unknowing captains will often tinker innocently with the wages, attempting to find that happy middle ground, only to realise that even if their crew thinks the pay is "kingly indeed", they've steamrolled the morale into mutiny.


A fix:

Remove the boost and penalty for raising and lowering wages. Moreover, make it so that wages can only be altered once per Achaean month (starting from the point where they were last changed, not from the 1st of the month). Call it a condition of the sailors' union or something. As for morale gain and loss based on wages, make it a gradual thing if it isn't already.

I'll admit that I basically know nothing of sailing or wages, so I'm basically drawing conclusions (true or false) from this post.

The best solution to me would be to have morale slowly trickle from wages, and that morale only changes on payout of said wages. Say a neutral morale is 0 and ranges from -100 to 100.

If your wages are set at the middle, your morale will be 0 (assuming it's been at the middle for an extended period of time). Raising the pay to the lowest amount possible will not drop the morale to 0 instantly, nor at the next payout, but will rather change it by -10 per payout (I think these are done per IC day, correct?) to a minimum of -100. The same would be true in reverse as well. Of course, there are two general ways to make morale changes; bellcurve or linear. I chose linear as it's far easier to calculate and far easier to manage.

This would A) mean that you can't raise the wages just before a trip, and B) make more sense ICly (at least, to me).

Note that I chose -10 change per payout above. The exact formula would, of course, likely be more complex (preferrably making it taking longer to go from -100 to 100 than it would to go from 0 to 100). But those are generally details.

So... hopefully I didn't make too many bad assumptions and drew too many wrong conclusions.

I'd recommend learning more about something before posting next time. Your idea still doesn't deal with the fact that the starting wages are still extremely high and moving them down to a reasonable level tends to leave you with a mutinous crew that you can't use for a RL month. Using a sliding bar scale doesn't work because it's up to the person what they want to charge and it's annoying to punish those who are under an arbitrary point with negative morale. I like delphinius' idea and it would take a lot of punishment out of the steep learning curve for new captains.

Ship crew wages crewmates 10

Ship crew wages shipmates 15

Ship crew rations common

Ship crew rations triple


Problem solved. Stop screwing with your wages. Stop complaining. Set them and leave them alone.

No... maybe they should just fix the problem?

There is no problem. If you continue to set your wages under a misconception of how the system works well that's your problem.

You're not getting a perfect crew over night. Accept this.

I've had the fun time of dealing with a ship that was completely mishandled wages wise, and have slowly tinkered it down through reasonable drops in wages over an extended period of time. I could have done this much quicker if I had a) used the ship more, and raised the morale through sailing, b) had cooked a bit more fish to raise the morale, c) took a heavy hit gold wise to fire all the crew, set the wages to what I want, then hire new crew at neutral morale.

As Kinilan says, you will never have the perfect crew overnight, especially on a new boat. The costs are harsh, but they are meant to prevent people from dropping the wages when they get into harbour, so they can leave the ship alone with no real gold costs to them.

As a side note, if you can afford a ship costing millions, a few thousand gold shouldn't break you to pay off wages for a while.

So first, when you get a ship and hire crew, don't preset the wages, please. My new crew has no idea that Zulah, as a completely fake example, pays his crew 50 gold each per Achaean day, they've never been at the same port with them.

I like the idea of only being able to raise or lower them once a month.

How about lowering the penalty for lowering wages to, say, -200 as well?

Penalty should be proportionate to the change.

That's a good idea. Have any formula in mind?

If the wages are dropped while left in harbour, even without the initial morale penalty (as I have suggested), morale will still steadily trickle away or at least rise at a slower rate. If wages are raised while out of port, morale will in fact increase at a higher rate, but only while out of port (thus making for negligible benefits unless you happen to be at sea for real-life days, by which time the differentiation is moot anyway). Moreover, the fact that you would only be able to alter wages once per month (presumably per crew type) means that even when you return to port, you'll be stuck with the higher wages.

@ Kinilan: If your starting wages are at 10 bits, and you lower the wages to 5 bits simply to see how the crew feels, then back up to 11, you'll see a net loss in morale. This nonsensical outcome is the "problem" in question.

@ Dusty: If the penalty were proportional to the change, the boosts would have to be proportional as well. This would cause people to give large raises for immediate boosts while at sea, in essence returning to the previous problem that we're hoping to avoid.

@ Lisbethae: The idea is to remove the immediate penalty and boost for raising and lowering wages, keeping only the gradual morale loss/gain over time.

But they wouldn't be able to revert it back without losing the same, no?

That's correct, but the thing is, you don't especially need that extra morale while in port. It's only at sea where it makes a difference.

I'm sure there's be a simple way to avert this. I can't think of any right now, but it seems like something simple to avoid.

Would it kill them to have a truly "set" wage? Pay THIS and you crew will think wages are fair, pay that and they'll think wages are kingly. At this rate, your morale will go up by X per Achaean day. Then captains wouldn't have to - around with wages at all. Also, I have no way of gauging what the crew thinks of their food at all. That would be nice.

EDIT: jeez I forgot how irritating these forums are with the editing functions, etc... For all non-"idea" discussions please see my sig.

The Achaea programmers are all about making things as difficult as possible for their playerbase.

They strive for our angst.

Delete ships, problem solved.

I'd prefer they just have a categorical selection for wages: low, standard, high, or something along those lines. It would match well with ration type and quantity selections and would solve the runaway wages issue everyone always complains about.

This seems to be the simplest fix. Do you really need or want an entire strategy associated with setting your -ing crew wages?

As someone who often ends up spending a great deal of effort assisting frustrated new captains, I would find this to be a most reasonable fix to a well known problem.

you need to go stock my ship while I'm dormant

It'd be nice if some kind of fix could go in for this, it seems like a needless frustration. Also, could the amount of morale you gain through 'cooking' be raised a bit? Right now, I believe cooking a fish raises it by five, and morale is measured in the thousands. Five seems a bit low, when you spend 250 on the bait and also spend time getting the fish.

you can fish with minnows in the lake to get fish if you want.

Or dive.

On "fish with minnows or dive", I still think the payout is low in terms of morale. And what about the ability to give a one-time 'bonus' to ship crews? Don't know how that would work with the current morale formula.

pay your crew more. problem solved. Cooking morale is fine.

I don't think cooking needs to be changed. Basically everything that leads to morale changing very slowly is good, no matter how frustrating I currently find it personally. The wage change bonus/penalty is definitely a problem though. Delph's proposed solution is probably the way to go.

ETA: Although I'm not really crazy about wages being based on what other captains are paying. It creates a kind of one-way ratchet for all captains who care about their crew's morale.

And have more money than sense or compassion.....

I'd be nice to see this fixed. But one can only hope.