Changing the permanent mods to level the playing field

[Percival Merewether]

I believe stacking mods is bad for this game… It encourages people to create ships that are incredible in one area and terrible in others. I suggest changing the permanent mods in such a way that you can only use ONE mod of each bonus type (e.g.: 1 speed, 1 boarding, 1 thickness).

Make only two versions of each mod, an example could be 2 types of Copper Plating:

• Copper Plating = 2% speed
• Superior Copper Plating = 3% speed

In my suggestion these two mods will be the ONLY speed mods in-game. The “bad” version of the mod should always be easy to obtain while keeping the superior versions rare.

That way the expensive ship will still be slightly better than a cheap model, but nothing that a few cannonballs can't even out. With only three upgrade slots the player is forced to choose which areas he wants a MINOR advantage in, but without it influencing the entire battle too much.

[Christendom]

The bad version should be obtainable from combat marks

The good version should be obtainable from pvp marks.  

 

Give your average player a chance to compete while still making the hardcore players feel special.  World of Warcraft has done something similar for almost 10 years now with different levels of the same gear with varied stats.

[Captiva]

2 hours ago, Percival Merewether said:

Make only two versions of each mod, an example could be 2 types of Copper Plating:

• Copper Plating = 2% speed
• Superior Copper Plating = 3% speed

I would suggest keeping it simple. You either have copper plating which gives a speed bonus or you don't. 

 

Edited February 20, 2018 by Captiva

[RedNeckMilkMan]

So you want to force everyone to have a jack of all trades ship? You should be able to create ships that fit your play style. Otherwise remove woods remove mods and remove knowledge. Now we have the vanilla boring game that you want.

Edited February 21, 2018 by RedNeckMilkMan

[Percival Merewether]

10 minutes ago, RedNeckMilkMan said:

So you want to force everyone to have a jack of all trades ship? You should be able to create ships that fit your play style. Other wise remove woods remove mods and remove knowledge. No we have the vanilla boring game that you want.

No?

There's still the knowledge slots.. But this would help people rebuild if they have lost a lot of ships - makes the knowledge slots and ship builds more important than the permanent upgrades.

[Sir Texas Sir]

1 hour ago, RedNeckMilkMan said:

So you want to force everyone to have a jack of all trades ship? You should be able to create ships that fit your play style. Other wise remove woods remove mods and remove knowledge. No we have the vanilla boring game that you want.

Your wood trim should dictate most of your ship stats not your mods.  They should only accent those traits.  So by making mods of the same type not stackable or limit to how many you can stack it keeps the stats more about the wood trim than special mods, that is what you use to round out and specialize things more to your play style along with of course the ship knowledges so I don't see it as cookie cuter.  IF they limit the stackign than they can bump the stats back up a bit since you can't put 3-5 speed mods/shipknowledge on top of each other you only would need one or two.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Percival Merewether said:

No?

There's still the knowledge slots.. But this would help people rebuild if they have lost a lot of ships - makes the knowledge slots and ship builds more important than the permanent upgrades.

I've played 550 hours and don't have any of the rare knowledges like art of Ship handling. I can't achieve what other players can with their better knowledges no matter what. But I can always make more gold to buy mods to be competitive. 

Knowledges are more of a problem then copper plating. 

[vazco]

Apart from sail upgrades and planking for 6th rates, which are OP, all other upgrades and books are already balanced by the last patch. There's no point in limiting customization options for people. If someone wants his ship to behave in a certain way - let him increase the customization and make more varied battles.

59 minutes ago, Flinch said:

I've played 550 hours and don't have any of the rare knowledges like art of Ship handling. I can't achieve what other players can with their better knowledges no matter what.

You don't need mods to compete, they are more or less irrelevant now - after last changes: changing wind, thickness, mast buffs etc. We just had a fight in 2 store-bought ships (Lynx and Snow) with no upgrades and skill knowledges, against 3 crafted snows with upgrades.The result was that two snows sunk, and a third one died in an explosion which killed everyone in a battle and created a draw. An enemy clan had an organization, mods and skill knowledge, 2.5x more guns and HP, yet they didn't win.

Skill is what you need, not mods. Right now I don't know of any OP mod (apart from those that I mentioned).

Edited February 21, 2018 by vazco

[SS Minnow]

Agree mods too much...basic wood should be more important than it is now.  Want to see more crazy ships?

crazyships.pdf

[Licinio Chiavari]

19 minutes ago, vazco said:

Apart from sail upgrades and planking for 6th rates, which are OP, all other upgrades and books are already balanced by the last patch. There's no point in limiting customization options for people. If someone wants his ship to behave in a certain way - let him increase the customization and make more varied battles.

You don't need mods to compete, they are more or less irrelevant now - after last changes: changing wind, thickness, mast buffs etc. We just had a fight in 2 store-bought ships (Lynx and Snow) with no upgrades and skill knowledges, against 3 crafted snows with upgrades.The result was that two snows sunk, and a third one died in an explosion which killed everyone in a battle and created a draw. An enemy clan had an organization, mods and skill knowledge, 2.5x more guns and HP, yet they didn't win.

Skill is what you need, not mods. Right now I don't know of any OP mod (apart from those that I mentioned).

True. Still skill is built doing PVP.

And why should casual player engage in even PVP 100% getting sunk by superior gear AND skill every time... and 90% times learning nothing being ganked too?

And why should a casual not rich player should risk a ship (especially a modded one) if replacing losses is a pain?

So why the casual/new player should engage in PVP losing time and resources gaining nothing 99.9% the time?

So, conclusion, how casual/new player can skill up?

 

[Sir Texas Sir]

2 hours ago, Flinch said:

I've played 550 hours and don't have any of the rare knowledges like art of Ship handling. I can't achieve what other players can with their better knowledges no matter what. But I can always make more gold to buy mods to be competitive. 

Knowledges are more of a problem then copper plating. 

I have over 7K hours in game on my main and most of my alts are 3-4K hours.  Yes some of that is me falling alseep at the keyboard but the point I"m going to get at is I still don't have the full set for Art of Ship Handling. I have one book. I do have full gunnery set and only have the full Lord of Rings set cause a clan mate gave me the last book I needed since I board a lot more than him.  So not ever one has all the elite books.   So don't think every one has them.

[Percival Merewether]

7 hours ago, Flinch said:

I've played 550 hours and don't have any of the rare knowledges like art of Ship handling. I can't achieve what other players can with their better knowledges no matter what. But I can always make more gold to buy mods to be competitive. 

Knowledges are more of a problem then copper plating. 

I have all the books, so I should of course be careful with what I say here.. However.. That sounds like more of a problem with the knowledge book drop rates than a permanent mod problem?

Maybe we should address the issue of book drop rates seperately?

[Sir Texas Sir]

30 minutes ago, Percival Merewether said:

I have all the books, so I should of course be careful with what I say here.. However.. That sounds like more of a problem with the knowledge book drop rates than a permanent mod problem?

Maybe we should address the issue of book drop rates seperately?

They need to be special mission praises more than random loot.  Us PVP guys that don’t grind ai don’t have a means to get them other than pay out the arse and I refuse to do that and that is why it’s take. Me so long to get them compared to others.  That and RNG just freaking hates me lol

[vazco]

6 hours ago, Licinio Chiavari said:

True. Still skill is built doing PVP.

And why should casual player engage in even PVP 100% getting sunk by superior gear AND skill every time... and 90% times learning nothing being ganked too?

And why should a casual not rich player should risk a ship (especially a modded one) if replacing losses is a pain?

So why the casual/new player should engage in PVP losing time and resources gaining nothing 99.9% the time?

So, conclusion, how casual/new player can skill up?

 

I was a casual too. You learn by sinking, and you can learn even more by sailing with someone experienced. There are plenty of people wanting to share the knowledge. 

After you realize mods are not op now, you will realize that the problem is somewhere else. Noone wants to fight an elite player knowing he will most likely loose. People need incentives to fight people better than them. A good suggestion to solve this appeared here :

 

Edited February 21, 2018 by vazco

[Sir Texas Sir]

5 hours ago, vazco said:

I was a casual too. You learn by sinking, and you can learn even more by sailing with someone experienced. There are plenty of people wanting to share the knowledge. 

After you realize mods are not op now, you will realize that the problem is somewhere else. Noone wants to fight an elite player knowing he will most likely loose. People need incentives to fight people better than them. A good suggestion to solve this appeared here :

 

That is actually what we are trying to do with the US, every one farms the crap out of that nation cause it's manily a bunch of noobs.  A lot of good players in the training I say.  So alot of us vets that just recently switched into the nation are planing to take some of these guys under our wing and start to train them and share our knowledge.  Correct knowledge to cause a lot of the info they gotten in the past was from PvE guys that don't PvP.  Even worse the PvE ship builders try to tell them what they need and than over charge the crap out of it.  Some of the ship builds I seen folks try to say is good for PvP just makes me laugh and they wonder why they keep getting sunk.  Hope fully we can do some good for the players that want to learn and grow.

[Sparkydog]

I don't think there is anything wrong with stacking mods- we already have an upper limit as to how much bonus you can achieve with stacking.  As you already said,  stacking mods make you strong in one area and vulnerable in another- which leads to rock, paper,  scissors the way it should be.  As long as there are vulnerabilities they can be exploited.

[GrubbyZebra]

1 hour ago, Sparkydog said:

I don't think there is anything wrong with stacking mods- we already have an upper limit as to how much bonus you can achieve with stacking.  As you already said,  stacking mods make you strong in one area and vulnerable in another- which leads to rock, paper,  scissors the way it should be.  As long as there are vulnerabilities they can be exploited.

except with certain mods and skill books, you can have it all if you combine them right, which leads to tanky 14 kt ships that can repair half their hull in 1 go. 

Adding the rng to ship crafting only made this issue worse (now more slots, plus the small 5 or 10% built in extra buff potentially)

Edited February 22, 2018 by BPHick

[vazco]

2 hours ago, BPHick said:

except with certain mods and skill books, you can have it all if you combine them right, which leads to tanky 14 kt ships that can repair half their hull in 1 go. 

I would advice you to read before posting. What mods would you combine to get a tanky 14kn ship that can repair half of its sides in one go? 

Edited February 22, 2018 by vazco

[GrubbyZebra]

11 hours ago, vazco said:

I would advice you to read before posting. What mods would you combine to get a tanky 14kn ship that can repair half of its sides in one go? 

I would advise you to actually try things out in the game before trolling.

You can get an Aggy to 80cm thick, 7000 armour HP, and 13kts quite easily. This, in my mind, is a fast, tanky ship. Add on some repair mods/books/perks and you can repair 2700 HP per turn, which if you do the math is ~40% of the side armour value.

So factor in a bit of intentional hyperbole on my part (the 14kt and half instead of just under half) to try and make a point, and you get a fast, tanky ship that can repair half its sides in one go.

[Farrago]

1 hour ago, BPHick said:

So factor in a bit of intentional hyperbole on my part (the 14kt and half instead of just under half) to try and make a point, and you get a fast, tanky ship that can repair half its sides in one go.

But wouldn't it be far more fun instead of discussing the problem to just make trolling comments being deliberately obtuse? You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think. But you tried.

But seriously...

I used to be against mods. Then I was against stacking mods. But then I changed my thinking: I'm now okay with them but would prefer that stacking brings diminishing returns and rather than a randomness in crafting and drops, I would prefer purposeful crafting. But I must admit because of randomness, I've tried and liked setups that I wouldn't have normally tried.

We all seem to operate on the assumption that there is one meta and everyone is striving for the same exact ship. In port battles that may be true to some extent but I've started to notice that I love ships that teammates dislike and vice versa. I've also noticed that while I've carefully picked out the mods I use and the perks I choose, other players who presumably have also given their choices some thought make very different decisions. Customization which is only possible by wood choice, mod installation, and perk choice is a very good thing. It helps give me more confidence to enter or stay in the battle and while I there, I can fight according to my style.

Edited February 22, 2018 by Farrago

[Slim McSauce]

On 2/20/2018 at 5:29 PM, RedNeckMilkMan said:

So you want to force everyone to have a jack of all trades ship? You should be able to create ships that fit your play style. Otherwise remove woods remove mods and remove knowledge. Now we have the vanilla boring game that you want.

The ships themselves already vary pretty well. On top of that you can choose a lighter wood for a faster version of any ship. Mods and mod stacking only exaggerate ship qualities beyond a factor of obtainable and easily replaceable. We all know how mods are more expensive than ships in some circumstance, the importance of mods is way too over represented. It's like 50:50 to the ship they're put on (also considering ship knowledge which is a subsection or maybe even primary to perm mods) when it should be closer to 70:30

As for a lot of things that don't really work the same with NA, mods are one of them. NA is too based in reality to be throwing +8% speed buffs on top of fir/fir ships. It could work alright with random crafting bonuses IF every crafting ship gets at least 1, we keep it random so instead of crafting 5 ships to try to get ANY bonus you have to craft 23 fir/fir ships to get a very fast bonus on one that maybe you could put a copper plating on but nothing else for speed. Otherwise a very fast bonus or copper plating on something like a teak/fir Trincomolee will be a nice touch, but NOT gamebreaking by creating a +/-9% spread of speed making you way overly fast for your class. Like abnormally fast to where you can escape any battle where the opposition doesn't have one of these abnormally fast ships.

[GrubbyZebra]

48 minutes ago, Farrago said:

But wouldn't it be far more fun instead of discussing the problem to just make trolling comments being deliberately obtuse? You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think. But you tried.

But seriously...

I used to be against mods. Then I was against stacking mods. But then I changed my thinking: I'm now okay with them but would prefer that stacking brings diminishing returns and rather than a randomness in crafting and drops, I would prefer purposeful crafting. But I must admit because of randomness, I've tried and liked setups that I wouldn't have normally tried.

We all seem to operate on the assumption that there is one meta and everyone is striving for the same exact ship. In port battles that may be true to some extent but I've started to notice that I love ships that teammates dislike and vice versa. I've also noticed that while I've carefully picked out the mods I use and the perks I choose, other players who presumably have also given their choices some thought make very different decisions. Customization which is only possible by wood choice, mod installation, and perk choice is a very good thing. It helps give me more confidence to enter or stay in the battle and while I there, I can fight according to my style.

I think in my ideal system, realismness would be paramount. Mods, what mods there were, would be things that could realistically be built into ships with plausible buffs/penalties (like iron knees, diagonal bracing, copper plating, reinforced masts, lighter yards, extra planking, etc). Woods would not determine speed to an appreciable extent, but softer woods would be thicker at the expense of HP, harder woods the inverse, wood density would factor into pen along with thickness, and also would factor in to crew damage (due to splintering characteristic). Skills would be officers you hired (bo's'n, carpenter, gunnery, master) and would "learn" over time the traits of a ship and get better at sailing, trimming, loading, repairing, and fighting. Sights and light carriages could be crafted into the guns themselves (with buffs and penalties as appropriate), and repairs, shot, ammo, powder, and provisions were crafted into the ship (were limited except for provisions for gameplay reasons) and would not have to be loaded before each sail.

But, my ideal system doesn't exist, at least not in this game, and so I have resigned myself to just hoping to tweak the game we have to be balanced without being RvB. To that end, my only gripe with mods (other than the rng nature of getting some of them) is that there is no stacking penalty.

[Slim McSauce]

I like your idea a lot OP. I made a little visualization of combining your idea with what I think would work well.

I like this because it gives us even more customization options with the crew knowledge slots, while fixing the issue of 2 of the same types of mods being stacked together for large, overly large bonuses.

The crew knowledge because crew is separate from what fits the ship has and shouldn't share the same space.
So you can finally put marines/muskets/ladders without it interfering with our ship's performance.

The crafting perm bonuses would hold things like bostin refit, black sails refit and good hope refit. I believe every single crafted ship should get a pair of these bonuses regardless of RNG. But never the same two bonuses.

Edited February 22, 2018 by Slim Jimmerson

[vazco]

4 hours ago, BPHick said:

I would advise you to actually try things out in the game before trolling.

You can get an Aggy to 80cm thick, 7000 armour HP, and 13kts quite easily. This, in my mind, is a fast, tanky ship. Add on some repair mods/books/perks and you can repair 2700 HP per turn, which if you do the math is ~40% of the side armour value.

So factor in a bit of intentional hyperbole on my part (the 14kt and half instead of just under half) to try and make a point, and you get a fast, tanky ship that can repair half its sides in one go.

Dude, check your math, it doesn't add up  You will never have 80 thickness on Aga. If you go 40% repairs, you won't load anything else. You can have 13 kts with the wind, however your Aga will be only good for running as a result.

You can try out an Aga with a similar build against me - I'll take Wappen with 2 ship knowledges, or Inger. You will be dead in the water, as you won't have any maneuverability 

 

It's funny - when mods were OP, people thought they're fine. Back then I made a post:

Mods were fixed afterwards, and now people start to complain they're OP

[Slim McSauce]

2 minutes ago, vazco said:

Dude, check your math, it doesn't add up  You will never have 80 thickness on Aga. If you go 40% repairs, you won't load anything else. You can have 13 kts with the wind, however your Aga will be only good for running as a result.
 

An Aga with 7k HP at 13knts repairing with 40% repair sounds like cancer. Mods are definitely not in a finished state whatsoever.

Edited February 22, 2018 by Slim Jimmerson