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TL;DR - I propose Labor Hours become "Real Hours" or "Real Time" in that we do away with Labor Hour generation in-game and instead setup functions where you want X to be built or extracted. So it'll take Y time to finish (i.e. I want a lynx to be built, it takes 32 minutes to finish a Lynx being built. so When I click "create," 32 minutes later a Lynx will be finished and I can then "finish the job" and bring it into my shipyard.) How Crafting and Resource extraction is currently setup In order to Craft or take resources out of a building you need to wait until you have the required amount of labor hours. Labor hours generate at a rate of roughly 42 labor hours fr every hour. I am proposing that we get rid of labor hours and in it's place we add "real time." This would very much be similar to how you craft ships and materials in Eve Online. Explained further below. In Eve Online, there IS NOT a labor hour limit, but there IS a limit to how fast things can be created. Something as small as a Frigate in Eve Online could take 20 minutes to finish building, whereas a Super-Carrier or Titan can take 2-4 Months of real time to finish being produced. I propose that a player should be able extract resources from a building whenever they want and however much they want BUT it would take time to do so. similar to an assignment you may hire a contractor to re-model your kitchen or bathroom and they would come back saying "it should take about 2 weeks." FOR BUILDINGS every resources would have an "extraction rate" for example, for ever REAL hour spent in life, you would be able to extract 200 Iron Ore from an iron ore building. You may only have 1 Job running per Building you own (so you cannot have 5 different jobs of extracting Iron Ore from a building, they would do 1 job at a time). 1. You setup your Iron Ore Building 2. Through a game function, you request X amount of Iron Ore to be extracted from the Mine/Building. In my example of 200 Iron Ore is extracted for every 1 Hour of real time. a player can request the Mine to extract 3,000 units of Iron Ore, the game would prompt the player that in order to extract the 3,000 units of Iron Ore it would take 15 hours to fully extract. the player could adjust the amount of iron ore they want extracted, resulting in less time to wait or more time to wait. 3. Once the "contract" is accepted, the player waits until the job is finished. You could stop, or delete the job but you would not get an reimbursement, or partial extraction, you must wait the time of the job to finish. 4. Once the job is finished, you would "redeem" the job after paying the "labor costs" from the building, and the Iron Ore would jump into your warehouse. Essentially what this would do in the game is allow folks to Request for "Long jobs" to keep on going if a player does not expect to be online. A player could say "Hey, I won't be able to be in-game for a couple days due to real-life circumstance, so let me create a job to extract some resources while I'm gone, and by the time I come back I should have X amount and be ready to craft a ship or mod once I get back home and playing Naval Action again." FOR CRAFTING You have resources as we do know, but instead of waiting for the right amount of Labor Hours to generate, you now wait an X amount of time for the construction of a mod, of Cannons, or a ship is created. This could be of varying times and I definitely don't have the answer for what times would be best, but i'll place some examples: A. It could take 15 minutes to craft a Spanish Rig Refit B. It takes 1 hour to craft 10 - 12 pd Cannons C. It takes 5 hours to craft a surprise Crafting would be similar to how extracting resources would work, you'd wait for the job to finish and then be able to take the item or ship to your warehouse or docks once it is complete. There are a few differences though. 1. You can have as many Jobs created for different tasks. I.E = you could have 4 module jobs, 6 Cannon jobs, and 3 Ship crafting Jobs happening at once OR you can have a numbr of jobs happen at the same time up to a limit of (lets say) 10. 2. Labor Contracts could "speed up" the process. Before you start the job, there could be an option to "increase job productivity" and you would input X amount of labor contracts to speed up the job process. Not sure by how much, but for an example, each labor contract could decrease the time it takes for a job to finish by 5-10%. 3. Current player-owned port enhancements could further reduce the time it takes to make items or ships I believe there is both pros and cons to this method. Pros - --Allows players to extract resources on their terms and on their schedule. --Allows the player to know that they will get exactly X amount at a certain time. --During extraction a player can be doing other activities in-game, such as sailing, trading, battling NPCs or players. --A player can have ships and equipment being built while they do other activities Cons - -- European Trader would most likely have to go, be erased as a mechanic, or changes to also be a "Real time wait" - being able to instantly get resources now from the EU trader I feel is a "cheat" to get past the irritating Labor Hours limitation and it just covers up an issue with how crafting works. --May make resource extraction and equipment/ship production feel "longer." It may make people feel that things take longer to make instead of being able to click "craft" and done. (we already sort of wait anyway) --Further on players having to wait, it may make lineships take a long time to finish. it could be that a 2nd rate "job" would take 10 days to fully complete. --It is possibly a waste of Dev time to convert to this method as overall it doesn't make crafting "faster" it just changes the method of how materials and ships are crafted. I.E. = Now we wait for labor hours and then craft, this method would be that we craft and then wait for the job to finish. Overall my goal of this suggestion was considering those who believe the Labor Hour generation limits crafting in a negative way as well as players considering Labor Hours to be "more useful" when used in one way instead of another. I want to promote the ability to not be limited to a particular "resource" that forcefully limits players from building or crafting certain things. Instead (and I know it may be ironic) I am promoting the ability for a player to be delayed (or not delayed) by time BUT be able to crafting anything they want on any day with the only limitation being the resources they have in their warehouse. My other goal was to "level the crafting playing field" and promote players who play more casually or "not everyday" to be able to run extraction or crafting jobs and not feel like they are "wasting" valuable labor hour generations. if someone hasn't played in 5 days, and we assume they are level 50 crafting, they have "lost" a possible 3,000 labor hours to work with, whereas someone who has played everyday for 5 days is ahead of that plays by roughly 3,000 labor hours. Maybe that is alright in some people's eyes, but I believe it creates a growing gap between these players and then is further exaggerated when a "casual players" loses a ship versus a hardcore everyday player.

Hi Captains, The other day i just got an idea about totaly different ranking system, closer to the real world rankings, ranking that is based on skill not just grinding alone. So to get further into explanation, my idea was that people still have to grind to reach a next step but after they reach it they unlock a test, test that makes you rank up and show your skill worthines of that rank. I remember some games i ve played in past that wanted "boss challenge" or certain score in limited time to be colected before passing to next level but i ve never seen it in online gaming where grinding is usually the only measure of someone strength. I am really happy that ranks here are limited and not like in other games where when the players reach max level they only add more levels and skills. BUT, i have noticed that as soon as i reached the final Rear Admiral rank game just lost some of its charm, yes its always great to have some goals, before reaching RA rank it was grinding to get there but after that it was just something missing, and i was not the only one that noticed that, also other clan members became less frequent players after reaching RA rank. Next question that came to my mind was what would be the challenge and i thought fighting AI ships is too predictable, but fighting lets say against two players of the same rank with at least 2:1 BR in their favor would be something that could be "Rear admiral" difficult, for example. So lets say that difficulty gets harder and harder more you rank up, really difficult to get to RA rank, dificult - Commodore, moderate - Flag captain, and lower ranks easy. So yes those hight rank players would have some benefits of bigger crew numbers naturally but it would at the same time mean that PBs could finnaly become more diverse since not all would be able to crew biggest and baddest ships. This would introduce much more strategicaly diverse battles combined of lineships and frigates. Atm the system forces us that we all sail only Victorys and L'oceans in 1st rate PBs, its a huge loss if some noob player with Surprise accidently joins the battle. But bad side is that this system could get abused if aliances, let say US and Brits are allys but they agree to become enemys for the sake of promoting themself up, cheating. So aliances would have to become fixed that oposing armys would fight fiercly not wanting the enemy to get promoted and rank up, getting stronger. Also lets face it, we havent been changing aliances a lot. Its mostly Brit-USA-VP vs FRA-SPA-Danes-Swedes. Well it could be also set to different aliances based on historical facts or some thing like that. So to actually make this rank up there could be "Promotion event" or something like that accesible in missions window on specific hours when the server population is at its peak and opponents would be picked randomly. Defenders or lets say the ones fighting against player that wants to rank up would get certain rewards for participating or maybe something else, something to motivate them that best players would join. I was thinking that it would be even better to put this battles in OW but realised this could get abused by players with multiple accounts in different aliances. Atm we already have a large base of high ranked players (including me) and it would be a bit dificult to convince all of them that now they wont be able to sail big ships right away. But lets say we all keep our grinding XP and people only would have to do "Promotion battles" to rank up properly to whichever skill rank is suited for them. If they are good and skilled this means only few battles for reaching RA rank and im sure that would be a epic battles. This new rank system could surely add some excitement to the game. Just imagine how proud would a flag captain be if he sank a rear admiral player. Just imagine diverse ship port battles. Well its just an idea, might work or not, depends how it would be implemented to find the right ballance.