6.2 The Economy: Design Vision

Most of what a captain does outside a battle is economic: buying and selling in port, crafting components, fitting a ship out of the materials to hand, dispatching cargo, and taking cargo off somebody else. This page explains what that system is for — the design intent behind it, in the developer’s own stated terms — rather than giving step-by-step instructions.

It is worth reading precisely because the economy is unfinished. A large part of it is implemented and playable; another part is designed but unbuilt; a third part is still being argued out in public. Knowing which is which will save you from planning around something that does not exist yet.

6.2.1 What the economy is for

The first design rule of Letters of Marque is that sailing and fighting are the fun part. The overworld exists as connective tissue: it supplies context, stakes, and a reason to stay invested between battles. The economy is the main engine of that context. If a fight is over a cargo somebody spent real effort assembling, or over a port that supplies a material you need, the fight means something.

Two ambitions sit behind it. The first is a genuinely freeform player-driven economy — the developer names EVE Online as the reference point for the feeling being chased, and is candid that getting it right is one of the hardest problems in the project. The second is that it must not become a treadmill. Long-term goals are meant to give you something to pursue over months: skills and experience, conquest, rare and valuable materials, friends and enemies. They are explicitly not meant to become an escalating economic obligation that eventually blocks you from playing unless you grind. That distinction is stated as a design commitment, not an aspiration.

Two further principles shape the details. Authenticity by adaptation: the rule is to take real ideas from the period and fit them into a framework that keeps their essential character, rather than either simulating history exactly or inventing freely. Legibility: with a little experience you should be able to look at something — a hull, a pile of materials — and make a fair snap judgement about what it is good for, without consulting an outside reference. The developer has said in as many words that players should be able to explore builds through the menus rather than being made to test blindly or read a wiki, which is a slightly awkward thing for a guide to report, and to its credit is the correct goal.

6.2.2 Markets and orders

Ports have item markets, and you have a warehouse. Trading is done with buy and sell orders resolved by the server, not by haggling with a shopkeeper. The matching rule is first-in-first-out: among orders at the same price, the oldest fills first.

The direction of the price advantage is the part worth understanding, because it is deliberately asymmetric:

• When you place a buy order, the system works through sell orders from cheapest upward. The seller is paid the price written on your buy order — not what they were asking. You can therefore overpay, which is the incentive to bid low.
• When you place a sell order, the system works through buy orders from the highest down. The buyer pays the price written on your sell order. You can therefore be underpaid, which is the incentive to ask high.

In both cases the money that changes hands is the price on the order being examined. The intended effect of that arrangement is to squeeze the gap between what buyers bid and what sellers ask, rather than letting a wide permanent spread sit there for arbitrage.

Item stack sizes were later reworked so that a stack represents how much of a thing a ship can physically carry — one stack equals one unit of weight. That change ties the market directly to the shipping problem: what you can buy is bounded by what you can move.

6.2.3 Taxes and the money supply

The developer identifies runaway currency devaluation as the thing that kills player-driven economies, and treats taxation as the first line of defence. Two taxes were described as implemented in December 2025:

• A sales tax of 5%, paid by the seller when a good actually sells. This, together with ship destruction, is intended as one of the two main routes by which money leaves the economy permanently.
• A broker fee of 3%, paid when you list a contract, waived on an immediate buy or sell. Its purpose is behavioural rather than fiscal: it discourages flooding the market with contracts, on the reasoning that high-frequency trading is bad for the market.

Both rates were described as set by instinct and expected to move. The structural point is more durable than the numbers: sinks are designed in from the start, ship losses are counted as part of the monetary system rather than only as a combat outcome, and region ownership is intended to reduce taxes — which makes tax policy something conquest can influence.

On the faucet side, sinking a player’s ship in PvP yields redeemable tickets that can be sold for cash, scaling with the rate of the ship sunk. The developer has stated plainly that the cash economics of this are not yet worked out.

6.2.4 Ships are assembled, not bought

A ship’s performance comes from what goes into it. Rather than a hull with fixed statistics, a ship is a hull plus fitted components, and the server calculates its statistics dynamically from that equipment and the materials it was made from. Before crafting existed those numbers lived in a hardcoded table; the rework means buffs and penalties now apply live in combat, and the client is sent enough detail to show you what your ship actually is. Stats and equipment are viewable and manageable in port, and the same modified values apply in the overworld and in battle alike.

The slot model as described has two kinds:

• Fixed slots — frame, planking, deck, keel, masts, sails, crew, rudder, with the final count still open. Each must hold something for the ship to be useful, but filling them with a cheap assortment is meant to be affordable. This is the floor, not the aspiration.
• Optional slots — free space for a mixed bag of extras: better boarding weapons, a heated shot furnace, additional bulkheads, more crows’ nests, extra crew training. Useful, never required.

Each fixed slot is craftable from different materials, and the material is what confers the bonus. Deliberately, the first pass is cautious: each slot affects a fixed set of statistics, and only two or three slots can improve any one statistic. The stated reason is to stop a metagame in which every build dumps every bonus into a single axis, leaving no room to express anything else. Bonuses use stacking penalties to create soft caps, which both encourages varied builds and makes the balancing job tractable.

Where does a ship’s role come from, then? The intended division is that the hull signals the general class — what you are looking at across the water and roughly what it can do — while components determine specialisation within that. The developer’s own examples are HMS Victory as a lighter British first rate that hits hard while remaining quick, and USS Constitution as a modern American fourth rate built to evade the line of battle and overpower fifth rates. Recognising the silhouette should tell you most of what you need; the fit tells you the rest.

For what the fitting screen actually exposes in the current build, see Refits & Equipment and Reading a Ship’s Stats.

6.2.5 Materials and the wood trees

Because materials carry the bonuses, the material list is a substantial part of the economy’s design. It is organised into families — several related woods forming a progression, so that once you learn what oaks do you can guess what an unfamiliar oak probably does. Historical shipbuilding practice supplied the starting point, then game balance decided the outcome; the developer is explicit that in-game statistics will not always follow real material properties.

6.2.6 What a ship can carry

Cargo capacity is where an early design was tried, found wanting, and replaced — which makes it a useful window into how these decisions get made.

The original scheme distinguished goods by physical character: military goods were heavy, economic goods were bulky, with some overlap. Implemented, it turned out that giving a ship several different kinds of capacity made it very hard to work out how much of anything would actually fit. The verdict was that it was unusable, and it was scrapped.

What replaced it is a slot system. A ship has two separate holds — one for military goods, one for general goods — each with a limited number of slots, and the maximum stack of any item occupies exactly one slot. You can therefore tell at a glance whether a stack fits. It also makes the economy balanceable from the other end: if a trade ship carries ten stacks of wood, the designer need only decide how many stacks a first rate costs.

The problem the split hold solves is real. Ships are expected to carry consumables such as repair materials in order to fight, so a single pooled hold would mean that loading cargo quietly degraded your combat readiness. Keeping the two apart means a warship and a trader differ in more than their guns.

Note that this is the design rather than the present state. Repairs exist in the current client and cost nothing but time and a cooldown, so there is at present no repair cargo to provision. See Repairs.

6.2.7 Trade without hauling

The design premise here is blunt: manually carrying goods from A to B is boring in every MMO, and hours of uneventful sailing is not gameplay. So players do not haul — they dispatch AI convoys, and the convoys become targets.

A convoy is a number of escorts plus a number of trade ships, in several sizes. You load it, publish it, and other players can then buy space in it by dragging their own goods in; on arrival it docks and distributes cargo into the warehouses of everyone involved. Letting friends and clanmates rent space was a core goal from the outset, along with the matching problem of stopping that being abused.

Movement runs on trade nodes, waypoints whose only job is pathfinding. Node-to-node was set at fifteen minutes, making the map roughly three hours wide; the lines were to be adjusted to sit ten to fifteen minutes off the coast so that raiders do not face a long sail to reach them. An early version made convoys attackable only at nodes, which feedback correctly called artificial — so fleets physically sail their routes through the world instead, where you can find them.

Interception is structured rather than free-for-all, and the reasoning is worth following. Defenders must never be required to sit and manually escort a convoy, because that would defeat the entire point of automating it; instead the defending ships travel as part of the fleet, and players jump in to control them when an attack begins. That produces an inherent asymmetry — unlimited potential attackers, a fixed handful of defenders — which without constraints makes every trade fight a ten-versus-one. Hence:

• Convoy battles are battle-rating limited. A trade fleet’s rating derives from its largest ship and its number of escorts, and the attacking force is capped — initially at parity with the defenders. This is the opposite of what most players expect from open-world raiding.
• Convoys are not vulnerable for their whole voyage. Windows are limited and telegraphed in advance, so defenders need not be online for three hours, and a fleet cannot be attacked repeatedly without pause. A fleet is immune for a significant period after a fight, with measures against players tagging their own convoys on alternate accounts to farm invulnerability.
• Raiding trade is about theft, not sinking. Trade ships surrender rather than sink, releasing a portion of their cargo to the attackers; military escorts are sinkable. The stated reasoning is that trade raiding should be economic sabotage, because if using the trade system risks total loss the penalty is simply too high to be worth it. The developer has explicitly invited argument on this point.

Battle rating itself follows a deliberate rule: all ships of a rate share the same rating. The problem being avoided is one the developer attributes to several MMOs in the genre — when ships are individually pointed, players identify the most efficient hull per point and every fleet converges on dozens of copies of it. Flat ratings by rate are intended to make fleet composition about roles instead of arithmetic. Some rates may be split for balance, fifth rates especially, since their combat strength varies widely.

6.2.8 Scarcity and the map

All of the above only matters if goods are unevenly distributed, and this is the part of the vision furthest from complete.

The intent is that materials are scarce and regionally available, so that moving them is necessary and therefore contestable. The reality during early development was the opposite: until AI trading existed there was no point scattering materials at all, because players were not expected to carry goods by hand, so the port of Messina simply stocked everything. Crafting prerequisites were left unfinished for the same reason — what a thing should cost to build depends on how much can realistically be moved.

Distribution is also entangled with conquest. The developer has stated that capturable ports have become increasingly necessary for other systems to make sense, resource distribution among them, and that the trade battle system was intentionally built to be reusable for realm-versus-realm fighting. Region ownership — a region being a group of ports — is intended to pay out in regional bonuses, lower taxes, and faster trade through friendly territory, so that it is clear which ports are worth attacking and why instead of the map being coloured at random.

Other pieces of the world that bear on the economy: the map was expanded well beyond the roughly one hundred period ports it started with, a figure that came from a community member’s research, because sustaining conquest needs far more; the Aegean is designated shallow water and there will be shallow-water ports, which constrains which hulls can operate where; and free ports are undecided, though the developer expects some form of them. Alongside conquest sit semi-structured events meant to inject value and reasons to fight — port raids, announced treasure ships to intercept, and objective-based faction warfare, all rating-capped with substantial rewards.

6.2.9 Settled and unsettled

The honest summary, as of the sources available in July 2026:

The public development board shows some of that thinking still in progress. Recent economic notes there weigh how many distinct trade goods the economy actually requires, whether crafting complexity should deepen as ship rates rise, whether resources should be tied to particular ship roles so that geography forces conflict, and an approach in which a ship is assembled from discrete pieces — a frame, a hull, a deck with masts and sails — joined together and given a crew. Some of these sit alongside the slot model described above rather than replacing it, and none of them is a decision.

The direction, taken as a whole, is consistent: a market whose prices players set, ships whose qualities come from choices made in the economy rather than from a table, cargo that has to physically cross a dangerous sea, and scarcity arranged so that captains have something concrete to fight over. What is not settled is mostly the arithmetic — and the arithmetic is what will decide whether it works.