My favorite part about Assassin's Creed (since II) has been that they're really embraced the whole fact that you're playing/watching a game in which the character that you are playing is also watching the "game".

Spoilers contained below, but hidden.

So, obviously it all started with the end of Assassin's Creed II. This was probably the biggest one.

You end up beating up the Pope and you make it into the vault and what happens during the conversation? Juno talks to Desmond. Cue a "What the fuck?" from me out loud immediate echoed by Desmond.

So you keep chugging along in Brotherhood and Revelation. No big deal. You find out about all these ancestor's of Desmond who have been assassin's. Altair, Altair's kids, Ezio's father, Ezio, Desmond's father, and basically Desmond as well.

Now comes Assassin's Creed III.

So you start out playing as Connor's father. Climbing all over stuff in an opera house, killing a dude with a hidden blade. You know, doing the assassin thing. Then bampf, you come to the conclusion of Sequence 3 which contains a huge implication that he screws and leaves Connor's mother. That's not the big thing, it's that Charles Lee gets welcomed into the group and becomes a....

Templar.

"Wait, what?" I said aloud only to be echoed immediately by Desmond uttering the exact same thing. Now, I guess there were a few signs. General Braddock was a bit bloodthirsty for an assassin but if you think about some of Ezio's assassin allies it isn't unheard of. Some of the conversation with the good doctor of the group might have been a bit peculiar, but overall I think they kept it very well hidden. I did have some feeling that things weren't entirely right. The whole fact that I was playing Connor's father was peculiar in its own right and I was expecting the sequence with him to end with him knocking up the indian gal and then dying shortly thereafter. Kind of like how when playing as Ezio, Ezio relived the memory of Altair conceiving the one child.

Anyway. Good so far, only got as far as meeting Achilles.

I haven't even gotten to Connor yet -- just had fun running around Boston, making with the stabby-stabby and the runny-jumpy. I haven't played any of them since AC2, but once I saw the setting for this one I had to pre-order it.

Wait, it's out? Like, NOW?

...

and there's that sixty-dollar refund from MWO, just sitting there .... HMMMMMM ....

So far, so good. Just "met" Connor, did the first woodcrafty/hunty stuff, and having a blast. I've had a few small glitches here and there, a few clipping issues, but overall -- so far! -- the game's just been pitch perfect. I'm loving it. What's more? The history is solid. That has me happy in lots of ways. It's all been wrapped in a layer of fiction and conspiracy theory, mind you, but these guys really did their homework for the foundation of it all. It's...really very impressive.

ETA: I just got a pop-up from Uplay, letting me know that I'm in the worldwide top 10% for total kills. My anal-retentive need to get 100% completion on everything along the way means I've played some of these combat heavy missions over and over and over again, and apparently that counts. Huh. That's pretty awesome.

I found killing Braddock a little questionable, especially since I didn't see anyone resembling George Washington around.

I think I've gone through all the manor basics so far, so I believe I'm past the tutorial (Sequence 6 would be the first one past the tutorial).

You should play Brotherhood and Revelations. They kind of explain why Desmond had a piece of Eden in AC3 as well as a little bit more about Juno. There's also the crazy in Revelations where Desmond is reliving Ezio's memories who relives Altair's memories.

So. Making money in Assassin's Creed III.

It's a bit more difficult in AC3 to make money than the AC2 line.

Money making is all in the caravans at the homestead. Yes, you can sell your hunting wares but you get less than if you dump your hunting wares on a convoy and ship it out. A beaver pelt that you can sell for 160 to a shop keep goes for anywhere from 500-700 depending on the merchant you send it to via convoy.

However, there's some problems with the convoy that require you to take action. First, every merchant carries a tax rate and a risk rate. These can both be altered by liberating forts and the district the shopkeep is in. Once you liberate all the forts in the city, frontier, and liberate the zone, the risk drops to 10% and the tax becomes 0%.

You will also want to purchase all the land convoy upgrades (5 total), which I believe requires you to upgrade your lumberjacks once to get access to pine. You will also need Miriam and upgrade her (if possible) to get access to furs. So what you do every time you have convoys available you purchase all her fur (for a level 1 miriam that would be 10 beaver (160 buy), 10 deer (120 buy), 4 fox (100 buy) for me) and ship them to the merchant you get the best price for. For me, that is fetching 13440 profit every 12 minutes. An upgraded Miriam gets access to at least bear pelts and I'm not certain what else.

Now, if your convoy comes under attack you deal with it by opening up the assassin recruit window and sending them to defend the convoy.

Sounds very interesting, Sigma. I can't wait for my PC copy to arrive ...

Also...

You get the best prices from New York shops but New York has a 22 minute trip time for the convoy. Boston merchants give you comparable prices to Frontier merchant though both are lower than New York. The problem is the Boston takes 12 minutes for a convoy while the Frontier takes 19 minutes. The price difference I noted between my best New York merchant for Beaver Pelts (671) and Boston (560) is only 111 which does not make up for the 10 minute longer trip time. There's no other advantages to using Frontier or New York other than prices (risk and taxes are the same) so it's better to go with Boston since you can do so many more trips in the same amount of time.

I've always gone running to defend my own convoys, rampaging through the wilderness to show up like a one-man army and wreck face. It's never occurred to me to fiddle with assassin recruits to try and do it, but I'm still fairly early in the main campaign and I haven't really played with assassin recruits for anything yet.

So, is AC3 actually about playing an assassin, or is it an economic sim?

I'm actually not sure how to do it. Tried it this time and couldn't figure it out.

Anyway.... right now I am ranked all time 1579 with money earned from sending convoys (you can check leaderboards through the animus training menu).
Monthly I'm ranked 754.
Daily I'm ranked 755.

All time high is 1,073,611 and I have 122,047 from convoys...

Like the last couple of AC games, there are side jobs/quests/mini-games to distract you so that the game is more than just "run jump stab, run jump stab," if you want. There's plenty of assassination going on, but it's also a historic sim as much as anything else. If you just want Prince of Persia with more combat, you can do that too, I guess, but you'll be missing out on a lot of what the game has to offer.

Money is a necessary part of the game in order to upgrade weapons and other various things. Figuring out the most efficient method of acquiring it is completely worthwhile.

Just finished all the naval missions to reduce risk, so I know which routes give the best ratios.

Using a bear pelt, here's the ratios of Income/Time. The order of ratios holds for other pelts, though they are no where near as high.

Hancock's Store No. 5 (840) - 1.167
Elizabeth Murray's Fineries (768) - 1.067
Child's Still House & Dry Goods (672) - 0.933
De Lancey's Imports & Goods (1008) - 0.764
The Walking Haberdashery (840) - 0.737
Murdoch's Barter (840) - 0.737
Rhinelander's Suagers (960) - 0.727
Van Brugh's Spices (912) - 0.691
The Milliner's Wares (720) - 0.632
Saint Augustine (1152) - 0.6
The Bahamas (1224) - 0.583
Louisbourg (1248) - 0.547
Virgin Islands (1128) - 0.448

I'm not sure what version you're playing or if the rankings are platform based or global. At least on the PS3 there's about 520,000 people ranked so top 10% is in the top 52,000. Not -that- impressive.

When I logged off last night my rankings for money earned through convoys....
All Time: 121
Monthly: ~50
Weekly: 7
Daily: Bugged. For some reason most of my daily stats are stuck listing "Count resets any second" and I have 0 credited towards most of them.

Here's a list of bugs I've encountered so far that I remember.

West New York Fast Travel Station: Stuck at 84% even though I've discovered 11/11.
Convoy: I have a convoy that is permanently stuck in the attacked state.
Hunting Lodge Bear Mission: The body required to spawn the bear did not spawn.
Parkouring: One feather in the frontier (south of the Monmoth harbor fast travel) I had an absolute pain getting because either the trees were poorly planned or something else was going on. How to get to it is completely obvious, but ever time I'd make the third jump I would glitch or fail to grab onto the limb. Frustrating.
Liberation Missions: All the points will show up on the map at one point then any not in revealed areas would disappear. I also had no icon for my last help farmer task despite having virtually the entire North New York map revealed.

Gripes:
The Map: Previous AC games would reveal the entire map if you visited all the synchronization points. AC3 does not do this. New York's synch points give the best coverage of the city though a huge swath of North New York isn't covered by the points. The Frontier is absolutely horrid. I'm not sure why they even bothered to include them.

One thing I plan on doing, eventually, once I stop being competitive with the leaderboards on convoy money being sent and I get my 3 rd convoy back from its bugged state, is to craft all items and see the sell price/profit per item. There's all this crap you can craft that I have yet to discover any in game purpose for (ship masts anyone?). Some of it has to sell better in Boston than a raw material (bear pelts). The thing that worries me though is the that crafting costs increment by 5 for each successive craft. I assume those costs diminish over time.

Yeah, there are some products that are just golden, some that seem to add extra work (having them crafted) for not much reason, and some that are in between (depending on who you sell them to). For the most part, I stick with my hunting/furs mainstay, and I broke 100k last night while mostly running-and-stabbing.

100k income or 100k in rankings? =P

I'm sitting around 350k in cash lying around though I haven't bought any weapons. Bought all the Aquila upgrades, maps, and outfits though.

Twin Holsters are bugged. That's disappointing.

Sitting at 100k in income (haven't thought to go check my rankings), but that's with every weapon bought (or rather, buying every weapon I've come across in stores, there may be more?) and every Aquila upgrade.

I'm not mentioning 100k because I think it makes me hot shit, just that all I do is sell and trade furs and sometimes meat, and I'm still sitting on a pretty ridiculous pile of cash for the Colonial economy -- it's been trivially easy, hasn't required a ton of crafting, etc, etc. I'm able to focus primarily on everything else (the assassin side of things), and with just a little bit of nudging here and there, still kept the money rolling in.

A particularly literal case of An Economy Is You?

BAD Tanegar! POST A DISCLAIMER, man!!!

So yeah, I just got back from that TV tropes binge by forcing closed the 53 tabs I inadvertently still had open at the time. What'd I miss?

I'm currently in the top 100 out of over half a million players for money earned via convoys...

I could probably be a lot higher if I wasn't dumping all the pointless crap I picked up from completing guild missions and my misguided decisions to buy 10 of every good produced by my homestead.

Also, I just recently discovered that there's 5 sea convoy upgrades. So unless I'm mistaken your total convoy capacity is 3x8 (24) for land and 2x15 (30) for sea.

In retrospec, I'm not sure how I feel about this convoy bug. Having one of my convoys permanently stuck in an attacked state without being destroyed or able to be rescued seemed to preclude any further convoys being attacked. I've sent well over 50 convoys since the bug hit me and I've had no attacks on my land convoys (10% risk) or my sea convoys (5% risk).

Huh. That IS weird.

Yeah. It's weird since it could be construed as a beneficial bug since you don't have to worry about attacked convoys. It's really just a problem with how much you can make at once.

I'll have to check on my Naval Convoy upgrades. So far I've only got to Naval Convoys, and wasn't able to (IIRC) upgrade the capacity of either of them. I'm still just slowly meandering my way through the game, though (finished section 9 just now, I want to say?) -- taking my time with side quests, soaking it all in, murdering my way through Redcoat patrols for no reason, etc, etc). Maybe they just haven't unlocked yet.

Well; Steam is being dickish about pre-purchasing just now; I've tried to throw money at them for the digital Deluxe edition six times this afternoon .... they keep insisting I "already own it", even though I most certainly do NOT ...

::sigh::

You sure it didn't go through the first time? Check your games library.

Most likely. I found the naval upgrades in sequence 11 or 12.

--



Check to make sure you didn't accidentally purchase it as a gift.

So like a half dozen of his friends are all "Woooo, free game!" this afternoon?

You can buy games as gifts without gifting. They sit in an inventory. You can later gift them to someone else or yourself. I believe you can only have a single copy of a game as a gift in your gift inventory and I don't know if they let you purchase the game if you have it sitting in there.

My Steam-items inventory is completely empty. I've got some Portal 2 items, and some TF2 items, but nothing related to AC3 (nor AC2, AC:R, AC:B, AC1, whatever).

EDIT: Support got back to me, had me delete everything except Steam.exe and the SteamAPPs folder. We'll see if that fixed anything, or if it broke things even worse. I fear the latter more than I hope for the former ...

EDIT AGAIN: Yup, all set now. Digital Deluxe pre-purchase, complete! ^_^

.... hey, fellow Assassin's Creed fans - I have an offer for you.

When I pre-ordered AC3 on Steam, I got a coupon for any of the prior AC titles, good for 50% off. Cool, right? Well, there's just one thing: I'm flat broke for pocket money this month, and the coupon expires on the 20th.

...

It's tradeable; so rather than let it go completely to waste ... does anyone want it?

I'm not a PC gamer, but I appreciate the offer, and...*bump* Maybe someone else will take you up on it.

Beat the game this weekend. Going for 100% synchronization now. I need 1 more fucking activity with Norris for Encyclopedia of the Common Man.

Beyond that, last time I checked I was all time 5th highest in money earned from convoys. I think I'm around 1.5-1.7 million and top is around 2.7 million. I don't try to micro my convoys anymore. So with my two naval convoys I drop 10 bear pelts, 10 beaver pelts, and 10 wolf pelts to St Augusta which nets a little over 30k in 32 minutes. Then I dump 10 deer pelts and 6 fox pelts with my two good land convoys to the New York shops that gives the best price for about 7k in 22 minutes. If I'm feeling aggressive for cash, I'll run along the river in the homestead just south of the manor and east of the bridge on the north bank killing beavers. I hauled 75 undamaged beaver pelts in about 15 minutes. I'll sell those to New York in place of deer and fox pelts. I tried crafting beaver tooth daggers. Not worth the effort. I got maybe 1/3 of what I get for a beaver pelt and less than what I get for a fox pelt so I just vendor off the castoreum and beaver teeth.

There's a little spot in the frontier, just near the couple-of-bad-guys-on-piers-at-the-lake, where bears spawn like what. There's sometimes even a few bear cubs romping around. When I'm wanting some scratch I just head down there and kill 4-5 bears in a minute or two. Might be worth it, for you to make the trip.

I think the beavers are superior. Here's the reasons....

#1 - The spawning point I'm talking about is a short distance from the manor, which means no need to fast travel to get to a stockpile ledger.
#2 - The beaver is easily killed with a single hidden blade hit. The bear is a crapshoot on whether you have to do the quick-time event with it successfully 4 times.
#3 - The beavers are very close to a fast travel point (manor). The bears you're talking about is still a bit of a trip from the nearest fast travel point (transition to homestead).
#4 - I may have overestimated the time it took me to get 75 beaver pelts. It may have been closer to 10-12 minutes for 75.
#5 - Bear Pelts sell for 1560 to St Augustine. Beavers sell for a bit over 1000. For the purpose of back of the napkin math, you need to kill 1.5 beavers for every bear for them to be comparable in throughput.
#6 - You have 54 total convoy slots if you send all three land and both sea convoys at the same time. That gives you roughly 30 minutes to acquire 44 bear pelts through hunting though the stockpile bought bear pelts don't have as good a margin over hunted bear pelts.

So #6 is really the key point. You need to be able to hunt enough bear in 30 minutes to keep your convoys supplied, otherwise it's worse than hunting up beaver.

#7 - Because saying "I'm hunting beavers for money" sounds a lot better than "I'm hunting bears for money".

I was just saying, if you felt like a break from the grind of killing beavers (or if, for some reason, you felt like stocking up on bear parts in particular), it's a good spot, too.

Everybody at work is talking about what a tremendous step backwards ACIII is in terms of fun, usability, and coherence. I am looking forward to playing it, but it's not sounding too good over here.

At least I didn't have to pay for a copy, though!

If we remove bugs that are still in the game, I suspect a lot of this usability and coherence problem is resulting from how the maps are handled and the fact that the viewpoints don't reveal the entire map. This will, in turn, cause things to not appear on your map until you have gotten close to them. I don't feel there has been any regression in gameplay, in fact combat has been seriously improved by allowing you to use tools in combat rather than just weapons.

I suspect the coherence comes more from how the Templars were portrayed in AC3.

I...huh. I've been having a great time with it. I didn't play Brotherhood or Revelations, so maybe those were just OMG AWESOME, but in terms of fun, controller usability, etc, etc, I'd say it stacks up just fine with the AC games I have played.

Yeah, the last I've played is ACII, as well. I've just been hearing a lot about imprecise controller input resulting in mis-angled jumps at a larger margin than in previous games, the map & viewpoint issues Sigma mentions, and a lot of meandering & "pointless" narrative. I quote pointless because I don't necessarily trust many co-workers on their ability to separate plot & narrative structure from shit that is otherwise frustrating them.

Yeah, Critias, if you can: pick up Brotherhood and Revelations.

For one, the gameplay really is pretty damned solid.

For two, there's a LOT of modern-era metaplot you've missed between AC2 and AC3.

I'll be honest, the modern-era stuff just doesn't grab me. It's the historian in me, maybe, but I always buy the AC games for the past-era goodness. I leap back into Connor's timeline whenever I can in the new one, for instance.

I'll probably still grab 'em and try 'em out, eventually, but...yeah, for me it's not the metaplot that gets me into the games (not yet, at least).

Hmmm, but, do you know what the Temples are really for? And why it's so important for the modern folks to find them, and ACTIVATE them?

Do you know what the Pieces of Eden really are? Where they came from, what they were made for?

Those are not only metaplot, but also the history of the AC world. Very important parts of it, in fact!

Started it. Map is too slow. Don't like the UI at all. Everything else is totally awesome, I don't get what people are pitching a fit about.

Yahtzee also has difficulty with Assassin's Creed suddenly being an economic sim.

Playing through ASSBRO, finished it, noticed something hilarious in the credits.

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I'm curious if the previous titles, as well as the titles after, have this same line.

If so, we've all been suckered into the greatest series of Flash games ever!

The UI and menus are ran by flash.

Way to kill my buzz Sigma.

It's why they're so horribly slow.