Economic Reports - Good or Bad?

I know these are not available in game at the moment, and in discussions with Richard I know consideration is being given to bringing them back at some point.

I wondered what people's views of them were, and if they were to return, could we offer Richard some insight into the information to be provided and in what format.

Having only order these once in a game I found them fairly useful. Though I don't remember if the trade areas that each country were trading in were in the report . If not that may be of use, in deciding where to establish your tading embassies.

Regards
Wildee

If you are looking for tangible ways to measure your progress and improvement against other nations, the game offered two options....the Honour Table and the Economic Report. To that end I thought the report was always good. I know the game isnt just about honour score and trade income but these were two measurables that could be applied consistently across all nations.

Each nation did have their trade profits split by region, so again it helped decide where to plan investments. It never included tax income details, so a full understanding of another player's position financially was not possible.

The down side, as I saw it, with a kind of league table approach to measurables is it put the leaders up as target practise. I found "envy" to be quite a driving force in the foreign policy of some players !

I am not sure if this is a postiive or negative, but again, if you were at war with another nation and wanted to target that nations income, the economic report would make that easier, by idenifying where the most lucrative markets were for your enemies.

Overall, I think the return of the report is a good thing. The financial and economic side of the game has undergone some development in recent months, improving this aspect of the game, and I think the next step is to make this information available for analysis via a report.

Can you explain this report in more detail? I would be keen to see something that gave me more detail on my economic structure...

By nation, it listed their trade returns by region as a financial amount (in £s). If defined by the nation, the products traded in as well.

The report also gave a summary of key trade activities during the year and finished by ranking the top ten economic powers in order.

So, as well as measuring your position overall, you could also measure by region. England for example could see how dominant it was in the Maritime Europe region, Sweden in the Baltic etc.

economic reports have to be read in conjunction with your fincial report at the beginning of the year to get the full picture, that and looking at how much you invested in each area to see the full picture of returns you got.

I agree with the call to have them back, I liked to see how i was doing in an open comparison with others, helps target your investments as well.

In some of the positions such as a banking one, or as a merchant, as well as a buccaneer I might add. I imagine the information would be useful to figure out where the best pickings are.

I got the reports regulary the first time round I played dthe games, but I confess that I failed to grasp their significance to game play Now I can. Thankfully. - The carrot & the stick is needed to show me what to do.

I found the economic reports enormously interesting but would suggest a few tweaks (which would also simplify their production by Agema):

- Drop the tax rates listed for each country. This must be a pain for Agema to list out, and actually, who cares? Perhaps stating the Foreigner tax would be useful, but no more
- I found the detailed trading lists useful as a benchmark. If there is little appetite to list out every country's trade revenue by region, I would at least have a "top ten" trading nations under each region. E.g. Slave trade: 1. Asante, 2. France, 3. England and so on. Don't have to include actual figures (and indeed that might make it more interesting

I found the reports injected a further degree of healthy competition into the game

Yup agree there it helped me no end