Oversea Commerce and Merchant Venturers

Adding oversea campaigns was pointless if the player had no interests in oversea territories, so instead I'm going to work on commerce first. Military campaigns will be pushed back for another release.

What you'll be able to do in the next version is to buy and review trade licenses in the Correspondence menu.

There are 21 licenses, one corresponding to each different tendency inside the colony. They dropped from 22 to 21 for convenience so that I could be able to assign 3 tendencies to each of the 7 fronts. Hunting and Environment were merged into Bushcraft because they were the less frequently used two.

Presently, the player's fist license will cost 1500 Arkhe and 3 Merits, the second will cost 3000 Arkhe and 6 Merits and so on, but these values might be tweaked after further testing. Each license will also carry a small maintenance cost dependant on the Tension value of the front they belong to.
Once the player has a unit with ferrying capacity, he or she will be able to make use of the licenses. To make gameplay more varied from one kind of character to another, Explorer players are now called Merchant Venturers. They start with "a battered freighter" and a Ferrying value of 35, so they'll be able to acquire a license and carry maritime commerce cheaply by week 2.

For example, suppose you choose to acquire a license for Farming related goods. In this case, the values of the front of the city of Stallia will influence how beneficial this trade route would result.

You will then be able to start maritime trade projects from your Projects menu as many times as you want as long as you keep the license. The duration of these projects will vary and remain secret, but they'll last longer in fronts with low Instability. The base gain would be 0.1 of your unit's Ferrying capacity, but that value will be multiplied by the colony's Farming tendency value, plus the front's Economy and the Overall Economy value.

Therefore, a Ferrying value of 35, a Farming Tendency of 6, an Overall Economy of 2 and a Stallian Economy of 5 would result in a total gain of 28 Arkhe per turn, while the maintenance cost for the entire license, independently of the number of units working on it, will be the Tension value of the stallian front at that point, perhaps 5 Arkhe per week.

The values of the fronts will for the moment simply oscillate very slightly over time without any kind of explanation, but this will be changed in the future. Overall, I found enjoyable being able to see the total colonial wealth increasing because of the maritime trade. Perhaps increasing the total colonial wealth might have further uses in the future.