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Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Economy will come after military due to popular vote
skafftaruss
Member, Phoenix Initiative, Hero of the People, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
This title on YouTube after I asked for an update on the economic node. Perhaps @Jahlon knows more. My original thesis was switching a trade skill guild from merchant guild to scientific guild. After all - if you are a seafaring guild that supports both building ships and navigators, what is the best node. Merchant node is waning in my opinion. look at this video and please provide input on its veracity and applications to advanced trade skilling. Thank you. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWmtm4e-g0Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWmtm4e-g0Q 0
Comments
Thanks for the video
P.S Another pro tip which might come in handy, not sure if it will change though
The Vek are astrologers.
Racial benefits may include navigation on the open seas.
For me the ability to sell my produce direct to auction houses can't be understated.
For you, if you want to rule the high seas, you might prefer the fast travel via Scientific Node to gather and reach the port quicker for you and your guild.
I can't make decisions for you, I can only guide with the knowledge I have (Which isn't infallible at all lol).
If I can't find an Economic Node on the coast, I will aim for Scientific, then Religious, then Military. One type or more will definitely be on the coast.
I offer thee my favourite band: The Who.
No sweat, Jamation, I didn't bank on a Metro. The benefit of an Economic Node is they should be quite sparse so the region would still use The Auction Houses and Player Market Stalls enough to facilitate sales.
The biggest hurdle will be supply and demand. To begin the construction of items we'll need gold or to gather the initial resources. I haven't made conclusive plans, merely theory crafted. For my plan to succeed I don't need a Metro, a Metro would be nice of course.
I don't see many servers getting a costal metropolis at all until nodes are sieged. It may happen with enough cooperation, but I would think that most groups that have that level of cooperation would be more interested in getting giving themselves the best chances of success at getting any node to metropolis before other nodes, and will instantly see that the best way to do this is to level up a land locked node first.
This assumes that you can't gather XP for a node in the seas, I couldn't find that anywhere on the wiki but may have overlooked something. I would believe that you can gather seaweeds and the like to push XP towards a costal node.
Nah, I assumed you could gain EXP from sea actives, but as far as we know there won't be nodes within the sea. So in my mind it would reduce overall EXP gain simply because you're losing out on collecting maybe 3-6 other nodes worth of EXP for the leader node. Since those other nodes would also have their own citizens with their own agendas and such.
This is accurate according to what we know.
You pass on experience to the node for any activity you do in that nodes ZoI that grants you experience, so that would include activities in the sea if the nodes ZoI extends in to the sea.
However, as we know there are no ocean nodes, there won't be those vassel nodes feeding experience.
There may well be nodes on islands off the coast, but since those nodes would likely need ships in order to be worth attempting to use, and ships would need time and resources to build, that isn't exactly assisting with getting costal metropolis nodes in the first round of metropolis nodes on any given server, though may assist after that.
The question is how much of an effect will military nodes have? I think the main factor in profitable trade routes will be numbers of people defending or attacking them. I don't think buffs from a military node will have as much of an effect, but we shall see when they decide on the military node perks.