This process has been nothing but a headache for days.
Since Friday I decided i wanted to craft a boat. The most frustrating part is that its solo, nobody can help because there is no trading, but I've vented enough on that issue.
Some things I found out about boat crafting, likely true for other types of vehicle crafting, like Wagons, siege engines etc.
They require a lot of items, generally you have to collect all of these yourself.
These are only example materials, each type of boat requires different mats. This is for the Fishing Class boat in Epheria, some cities have different recipes/types which use different materials.
Steps
Step 1) Gather raw materials using workers on farming nodes, Birch for Birch wood, Copper/Tin for Bronze ingots.
Step 2) Use alts to process the materials, chopping wood, melting raw ores. Saves energy on your main character for other things.
Step 3) Expand Lodging (worker housing) in the crafting city. You will want 4-8 workers, more on this later.
Step 4) Process all materials as soon as you get them. Because of the times required and limited workers u want to keep them all busy and stay ahead on worker crafting.
Step 5) Assembly. This step caught me off guard. When you actually have ALL the processed mats you have to Process them AGAIN during boat assembly. This part is a bit complicated when u first look at it.
2016-03-08 - 14.31.31 ~ capture.png
Full size http://i.imgur.com/vKVsgm5.png
I'll Explain this screen, this is the screen you get when u click Manage Crafting button on a ship building house (after its built).
If you see the Birch Plywood says (+4) 0/50. (+4) is how many workers i put on it. 0/50 is how many parts have been processed.
Also you can use workers from any connected city, BUT the parts must be in that local city's WH.
That's why u see it says not enough ingredients for the last worker listed who's in Keplan, plus because of distance would take 55min.
The same process works for wagons as well, just different materials.
The fishing boat is currently the most expensive item to make, possibly the noble wagon may be more, but i havent seen the actual mats list yet.
A note about workers.
When u get several alts up, and have decent supply of energy, i would play the worker lottery. I spent about 150 energy getting blue workers. it is worth it because they are at least twice as fast as white counterparts. I also like Humans and Goblins, over giants and naives. Humans and Goblins have a much higher work speed, almost the same at higher grades (blue grade).
The promotion process at level 10 seems to have a pretty high failure rate and takes 24hr, you can plan worker lottery an awful lot with 24hr of energy. Without question i'd do it. tieing up a worker for 24hr when u have many projects going on isn't worth it with the fail rate, in my opinion.
Thats it, let me know if you have any questions or comments.