Aetrion

I really like the idea of having crew be a limited resource that needs to be preserved more than ships, but at the same time, I feel like if the game has a crew system that gives such a significant drawback to using a ship of the line then the fact that they have arbitrarily reduced durability just kind of turns into a double tax on them. It also seems to me like losing crew only when durability hits 0 just further encourages scrapping 1 durability ships instead of taking them back out to sea to avoid the losses. Personally I think having the game based more on your ability to recruit and retain crew than on making captains buy their own ship makes a lot of sense. It opens all sorts of avenues for interesting gameplay that is more in line with how battles were really conducted back then, because a huge amount of it comes down to a human element, where morale and honor and loyalty were just as essential as gold and cannonballs.

I think there is an argument to be made that crew should be a limited resource and capturing ships should "cost" some crew.

To be fair, the mast for a larger ship at the time wasn't just one piece of wood, it was a core of wood surrounded by multiple trunks that were cut into sections that would fit around the core and then held together by iron bands that were fitted while hot so they would contract and keep the entire thing tightly compressed. Destroying one of those masts was extremely difficult, since they were basically a bundle of telephone poles held together with iron bands. In the movie the mast collapses after just two hits.

I generally agree the game would be a lot more fun if it had some systems for allowing you to specialize and find your own niche and play style, but I think these suggestions are way too specific to simply agree with. A lot of the profession ships are from an entirely wrong time period and would be woefully outclassed by anything in the game already.

No, PvE should not be tedious and boring in the first place, and people should be free to play the game with however much of either one they enjoy. This idea that PvP requires loss because you don't want to fight the same person 100 times in a row just shows the blatant elitism at work there. You want the other person to actually be forced to quit fighting if you beat them a few times because you're tired of them getting another go at you? Seriously? I mean fuck their enjoyment of the game right? Being on top shouldn't be easy. Being ahead shouldn't just get you further and further ahead. That's exactly why the open world combat has already self destructed into just a few nations owning everything and people mass migrating to Pirates.

Ships of the line don't come with 5 durability, and even if they did, all that does is somewhat reduce the amount of upkeep grinding you have to do, not make it into a game where you fight over rewards rather than punishments. Sure, but I can only say once again, the clans that actually want economic PvP could just as well have it if all those big costs were incurred with things like harbor defenses and troop ships, rather than forcing that aspect of the game into absolutely every possible mode of play by going straight to the one thing you need to play the game at all with, which is ships. The whole fear of "everyone is in a 1st rate" is a symptom of the fact that there is no good reason to use anything else, and that's what needs to be addressed rather than simply saying "Well obviously everyone would want to use this one thing, so we just need to make sure not everyone can have it".

The problem with PvP losses in this game is simply that it's your ability to participate that's under threat when your ship is under threat. You're not losing your chance to accomplish a certain goal, you're losing your chance to even get back into the fight, and that's entirely different. Dark Souls is a game that does this right. In Dark Souls you don't slide backwards. You don't lose gear you already have, you don't lose levels you've already gained. All you lose when you die is your progress toward the next milestone and you get to try again immediately. That's why Dark Souls is fun despite the fact that you die a lot. That's entirely different from how this game operates. You lose progress you've already made when you get sunk here and you don't really lose progress toward a new goal, you instead have to regain your capabilities before making another attempt. People try to identify things like 3rd rates as the problem for zergy tactics, but the issue isn't that people have too many ships to use, the issue is that they didn't actually have to work hard blockading ports and stuff to enable a harbor battle and don't lose the progress they've made toward that goal when they get rebuffed.

Yea, this is really the core of the issue. Even people who just prefer smaller clans get squeezed out by the current system.

Effort and skill, fine. Demanding people sacrifice their time to be allowed to have the best stuff in the game is just stupid though. That's not a measure of anything positive.

The problem isn't with the idea that you need to spend time to earn rewards, the problem is with the idea that you need to spend time proportionately to using those rewards to keep them. That simply isn't the same thing. People aren't saying "Play for X# hours to get your first rate", people are saying "Play for X# hours to earn the ability to play with a first rate until you lose a fight". That's completely different, because it doesn't make it about how much time you've spent in the game overall, it makes it about always using a portion of your time in the game on upkeep rather than actually doing the thing you play the game for. At that point someone who plays 8 hours a day might be able to get a few good fights out of every playsession, but someone who plays 2 hours a day three days of the week can go two weeks without doing anything other than upkeep, and at that point there is no reason to play the game for that person anymore.

If that was the case then the whole debate about them being disposable would be pointless either way. I don't want everyone to just have a 1st rate factory in their backyard, what I do want is a system that gives good reasons to use other ships other than just not having so much time for grinding that you can afford using them.

This should be a skill based game, not a grind based game. This whole "I earned this because I spent more time than you" defense is simply bollocks. Spending more time in the game doing boring upkeep tasks just to be allowed to participate in the competitive content has nothing to do with working hard or playing well. If you have any kind of job that values quantity over quality of work you're basically just waiting to get replaced by a robot, so no, the game shouldn't strive to simulate that experience.

All ships should have the same durability when crafted. Making a ship that's already 20 times more expensive than smaller ships have less durability so that it costs even more to maintain is just a stupid kneejerk fix to "I don't want everyone to have 1st rates, only the cheesiest grinders in the game should have the best stuff!".

Incentivising people through punishment rather than reward doesn't make for a fun game system, especially when one side HAS to lose for the other to win, because it means you can get punished despite having done nothing wrong at all. Also, I just don't agree that the cheesy ganky tactics you get when people try use "tactics and strategy" to avoid ever losing a fight actually make a game more fun. It sucks all the skill out of the fights if everyone just tries to maneuver for a gank.

I don't see how losing something and then grinding to get it back adds depth to a game. You're still just doing the same thing over and over, there is still no actual meaningful reason to do it, and specifically in the case of this game the activities you need to do to get new ships are a thousand times more brainless than the actual fights. Depth comes from being able to play the game in many different complimentary ways and having to make hard decisions, not in cluttering up a singular endgame idea with a lot of repetitive extra steps. The whole "Everyone will just hang out in a first rate" to me is the real indication of lack of depth, because it means that there is no real reason to use anything else other than simply not being able to afford it. That doesn't indicate to me that people have a lot of choices or decisions to make in the game, more than simply getting hit over the head with a bunch of boring grind with a very obvious and one sided goal they need to shoot for to be at the top of their game.