Keeping Track of Cargo

This game sounds fun -- wish I could it already. :)

Couple thoughts.

1st, instead of custom pieces for each resource, identify resources by color and use colored cubes. Also, use cubes of different size for denominations of 1, 5, 10. Use these cubes to represent the available resources at each port. This allows you to eliminate the tracks at each port.

Replace all the port tracks with a single "market chart". The rows on the chart correspond to resources. The columns are the number of each resource. The space at the intersection of the row and column shows the market price for the resource with the given scarcity/supply.

Finally -- and this may require a small rule change -- go back to your idea where each ship is a card, but replace the cargo grid with 3 cargo tracks. Players need only place a single cube of the correct resource color on the track to show how much of that resource the ship carries. Unfortunately, this means a ship can carry only 3 different resources, but that may not pose too big a limitation, and may even force the players to make some interesting choices.

Hopefully, some combination of these can be of help.

Yup. You could include simple annotations like "Rum +1" and "Gunpowder -2" on the ports themselves to show locale-based corrections to the market chart.

Shiver me timbers! This sounds like a real fun game concept that seems to be developing quite nicely. I can't wait to see what the final outcome is regarding this minor trading and transaction dilemma. It seems pretty rock solid to me, and who doesn't love Pirates. Rum and Gunpowder do mix!

That's correct.
I wasn't trying to suggest you actually use that in your game, though. I was just borrowing the mechanic to explain my example.

In addition to cost, this also makes it hard to put the resources on the board, physically.

If you have different styles of cubes for 1, 5, and 10 resource units, you would cut down on both problems. For example, if you had 5 tens, 10 fives, and 20 ones, you'd cut your money and spatial costs in half.

Another idea: use percentile dice at each port to track the number or resources, from 0-99. At each port, you'd have 2 ten-sided dice in the color of each resource. Each pair costs about $1.00 -- so less than a Euro, assuming the exchange rate hasn't gone crazy given the economic problems both over there and over here. :(

You'd still need a few colored cubes to track resources on the ships, but it's literally one per player per resource.

This system still isn't cheap. Tracking all resources is $5.00 per port, so if you have a lot of ports...

On the other hand, if you troll Craig's list, you might be able to find someone dumping his old D&D dice set on the cheap.

You could also have a single 20-sided die to track the number of resources at each port. At $0.50 a die, with 5 dice per port, and 15 ports, you're looking at $37.50. Still not cheap.

For prototyping purposes, you could use poker chips and a dry erase marker. At each port, place one chip in the color of each resource. With a dry erase marker, simply write the number of resources on the corresponding chip. A more "final" version of the above would be to place represent the resources at each port with a blank space in which you could write. Seal the ports with contact paper on which you can write with grease pencil or erasable marker.

Finally, there's always your original track idea. Have a "ones" track and a "tens" track at each port, and use two cubes in each resource color track the resources. This has a big spatial cost: the squares in the track would need to be big enough to hold 5 cubes, and manipulating them would be fiddly -- but it only requires 10 cubes per port to track all resources.

Supply chains that turn resources into commodities is a neat idea in its own right (Cities and Knights of Catan does the same thing). I'm not sure how it slows production, though. I can see in your example that rum production takes more time, but what slows sugar production?

Making timber an upkeep cost for ships is also a good idea. You could extend this idea to allow players to create more ships of different types by expending resources like rum, timber, and gunpowder.

Regardless of your costs, you probably want resources to be no more plentiful than necessary to maintain the game's average pace. That way, players will "feel" shortages and surpluses. This suggests you want production to scale with the number of players. You probably also want the size of the board to scale with the number of players. This will let you balance the degree of competition in the game, no matter how many people are playing.

Here's a simple example (not suggesting you use it, it's just for illustrative purposes):

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The game board looks like empty ocean divided into large 10 cm hexes. Some hexes have a dotted white outline. These are scattered "randomly." Inside some are 2s, in others, 3s, and in a few more, 4s. Island ports are 10 cm chipboard hexes, colorfully illustrated, with 5 colored spaces for tracking resource totals.

When setting up the board, players can put ports in any space whose number is less than or equal to the number of players. For instance, in a 3 player game, they can populate any '2' or '3' spaces.
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The numbers in this example probably don't work, but you start to see how everything is interconnected:

-- The number of production dice (production rates)
-- The distance between islands (i.e., travel times, during which resources accumulate)
-- The size and number of ships (which act as resource sinks)

It sounds like you want to capture the feel of an expanding economy, with ships carrying many more resources later in the game. How does production ramp up over time? Do players build plantations in addition to sailing ships? Does the wealth of the islands increase over time based on some sort of trade index?

Or is production so high, initially, that islands are always operating at a surplus until players can build enough ships to move the loot? This will be a problem. If you have large amounts of surplus, the market will be low and the economy sluggish. Players won't be able to accumulate capital very quickly.

Ultimately, the number of ships should increase as production increases. This should be a natural expression of the economy. As resources accumulate, surpluses grow, driving prices down and allowing players to afford more ships which, in turn, more effectively dissipate surpluses.

Talking through this shows how important the distance between islands vs production dice can be. If you can balance it right, this will automatically handle the expansion on production over the life of a game. Initially, there are no goods in the economy. Production rates will eventually populate the islands. Shipping will dissipate production. As long as the time to sail to other ports is slightly less than production, you'll have a net surplus and the economy will expand. Once players build enough ships, dissipation will match production and you'll hit equilibrium. Once players over-build, dissipation will outrun production and the economy will shrink.

The trick will be to balance everything so the game ends right around the equilibrium stage. This will have the feel you described in earlier posts.

There are other ways to achieve this, too. If you can, play a few games of Settlers of Catan and Cities and Knights of Catan. These games have elegant systems for handling production and trade but are very different from your design in terms of feel. Lots of good mechanics in there to pick apart.

This all depends on the units you use. I'd say, timber is the cheapest per weight or volume unit. OTOH the amount of wood you need to build a ship is much higher than your the weight of rum you sailors can drink (let's hope!).

On the third hand, the capacity of your ships is limited. In game you express it by the number of cubes, in reality it's the weight or volume or whatever. So your wooden cube should weight as much as your rum cube and therefore be cheaper (as 1 kg timber is cheaper than 1 kg rum). If you don't like it.... 1. either find a reason making timber expensive, 2. or simply ignore it (it's no problem).

If making timber much cheaper could be fitted into your game, it'd be nice to have this additional production chain. You could also let 1 timber produce 2 gunpowder, or whatever.

Once I had a very similar idea to yours (but didn't come far with it). Instead of placing cubes in each port I had a single track per resource type per port. I wanted many resources, so I limited each port to maybe 3 resource types. I didn't need to track the available amount - tracking the price was enough. Each buy or sell changed the price immediately and the price was ranging from maybe 10 to 20. The available amount at a port was theoretically unlimited, but nobody ever wants to buy at 20, so this was no problem.

Each turn one resource and one port were randomly chosen and the corresponding price changed. In your game it could go as follows: When Tortuga+sugarcane get chosen, the price of sugarcane at Tortuga raises by 1 (capped at 20). When Cuba+sugarcane get chosen, the price of sugarcane at Cuba drops by 2 (let say they produce a lot; capped at 10). To manage this, you only need a single number per resource per port and either two small decks of cards (for resource and for ports) or a two dice and some numbering system.

Could you use dice in the colors of the resource? for example a grey 6 sided could represent 1-6 gunpowder. Then each card ship could have spots for each dice. Which would limit the amount of cargo by the number of dice. Also adding an a unique mechanic that you have to take chunks of things and manage amount of each versus # of different resources. Just my quick idea.