Quote Originally Posted by ToranagaSama
HINT: Remember to keep a sharp eye on the Upkeep costs for your ships. Ships have the highest turn-by-turn upkeep of all the units. Too many ships can quickly bankrupt you. Just a small number of ships could equal the upkeep cost of a full Stack or two!! (too much at least).
Sound advice but the whole point of the ships you build is that the trade revenue they generate should be capable of more than paying for the upkeep costs.

You referred to the string of trade ships. In fact, as far as the game is concerned, the trade ships themselves are invisible, whilst the ones you build are purely the military ships required to keep them safe from piracy. So your entire fleet is about trade protection and occasionally you must mass them together to launch an attack and break a military blockade action by an enemy faction. Breaking the chain of ships means the trade route becomes unsafe, the invisible trade ships dare not make the journey and your revenue is thus interrupted.

With regard to the running costs, the thing I've now worked out is that the maintainance costs of a particular ship (or fleet) varies according to how remote it is from a friendly port.

For example, as Byz, with one Dromon per sea zone, each is costing 15 per year between the capital and Venice because I have ports in Greece and Naples but the one in Tyrhenian Sea (sp?) costs 30 since no ports (of any province) are in that zone and it is one move away from port.

I forget whether friendly ports in another faction's province also reduce the maint cost but assume for the moment that they don't. So the further you extend the more it costs. But let's analyse it a bit more.

As Byz, with Constantinople making 135 florins per province in sales, at basic TP level, I can afford to send a dromon up to INT(135/15)=9 sea zones away from my most westerly friendly port, currently Naples. As they are denied access to deep sea regions this limits them to (roughly) the sea region off the north coast of Spain (Leon, Castile, Navarre ports), if memory serves.

BUT... that's not taking into account the trade coming from my other provinces with port and TP and when those are factored in, then the Baltic becomes a decent proposition, only 5 more zones away.

I grant that sending a non-trading 'reconnaisance' ship that far from home would cost far more, especially over a succession of turns, than building maybe half a dozen priests or emissaries to do the same job. All the same, as the English, I once saw a lone Almo ship exploring up as far the North Sea. Dumb-ass AI... or was it blockading me at the time?

ANyway, upshifting to Merchant, Master Merchant and so on will amplify your trade income all the more (but factor in required castle upgrade costs unless you planned to build these for other reasons as well) and that means that a large, roving 'combat fleet' can not only justify itself on military grounds but is fully supported by the strengthened economy.

The one thing still missing from the economic summary is a subtotal showing you how much of your annual profits is coming from foreign trade. I was pleased to see the improvement in the VI expansion whereby the sea zones are now separately alpha-sorted to the bottom of the province list. This makes it easy to check each land province's economic stats without having to stop to scroll past the gaps made by sea zones, as in vanilla. It also makes it a doddle to total up the ship maintainance costs at the end of the list. A subtotal showing the trade contributions would help to quickly assess whether the fleet is paying for itself or not and thus avoid over-building.

Even more efficient would be for the ship parchment to show one line for maint costs and another line to summarize just how much trade income it is generating in that zone. Some zones may be found to be unexpectedly unproductive because the receiving zones produce the same commodities that your source zones export, so switch to another sea zone of equal distance but to a port with no exports of its own - eg North Africa coast rather than southen European coast.