I love stories of the adventures and battles of old sailors and pirates during the Golden Age of Piracy. They are so intriguing and entertaining and as someone with a very short attention span I am constantly able to sit and read hundreds of pages of books about pirates, mostly non-fiction. It's a very rare thing for me to be able to focus on something like reading for more than 5 minutes without going to do something else. Therefore, I know a lot about piracy and one thing I love reading in particular is about what they steal.
A common consistency in these "manifests" is that bars of precious metal like silver and gold are prized due to the fact that they are, obviously, precious metal. I know this game is not realistic whatsoever, given the storyline about a giant ghost skull who summoned ghost vessels and giant skeletons who can breath fire and throw flaming rocks from the undead to sink living pirates (who are also technically unkillable thanks to the help of another ghost who sacrificed himself). But I would love to see elements of realism added to this game, and I think precious bars would be a good way to implement this.
My idea is that there these bars are sellable to the Gold Hoarders, and it implements it's own player affected economy (I'll explain in a minute). There would be these bars, ranked from least valuable to most valuable:
Copper
Bronze
Brimstone
Silver
Gold
(Various cursed gold bars)
The prices will dip or rise, and this is where the economy comes in. The prices are affected by every single player of the game, and they change based on how many of each bar are sold. This is not like the merchant voyages, where you purchase the bars and deliver them somewhere else. They are the same value at every outpost. Say a gold bar is worth 1k gold. Players start delivering massive amounts of gold bars and deliver nearly no copper, so the price of copper raises and the price of gold goes down. (These prices reset every month to avoid screwed up economies).
All prices are written in a manifest set next to the Gold Hoarder tent and the prices update automatically. I think this would be a unique way to introduce and economy and a bit of realism without overdoing it. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions because I am aware I rambled a bit.
