[Calculation for stacking of trim, port bonuses and upgrades]

Yes.

Percentage modifiers affect the base stats of the ship.

(Unless something changed recently --- [I don't think anything has changed, my percentage calculations still match what I see in game])

 

[National Reputation Persistence (Karma) - Entry to enemy battles.]

Instead of tying it to nations, why not tie it to clans?

It will move us one step closer to the clan-based system this game needs to thrive, and one step further away from paper nations with troll/rogue clans.

[New Feature Proposals - DLC]

DLC pack with the old user interface.

Yes, the old blue interface with white/grey text, and no icons or decorative features.

The old UI was fast and very easy to manage, especially if you were a crafter.

[New Feature Proposals - Combat]

Allow us to disable random fire in settings.

• Almost nobody uses it intentionally.

[New Feature Proposals - Combat]

Allow us to mount 2 bow and 2 stern chasers on all ships that don't have any chasers there. (Maybe just one bow chaser on the smallest ships like the 7th rates with their fine bows)

Pros:

• It would increase the use of ships that are currently under-enjoyed, like Essex, Belle Poule, Pavel, and Cerberus.
• It levels the playing field among most of the ships. Ships that already had a strong chaser advantage like Trincomalee, Ingermanland, Wasa, Rattvisan, Christian, Wapen, etc, will still maintain that advantage.
• Its historically accurate (captains could move chasers from the broadside if they wanted to, or simply have their carpenter place some gunports in the bow).
• Larger ships sometimes have the caliber required to demast ships with their chasers.
• Chasers are useful for graping when you're close.

 

Cons:

• It would allow people to troll in more ships. Imagine a fleet of Privateers and Navy Brigs trolling a shallow PB fleet.
  • But since its been announced we're moving to a damage-based tagging mechanic, there's no need to really worry about this. 
• People will complain that maybe some ships didn't show chasers on their plans.
  • Go read the point above, and read some historical accounts about when captains would fit chasers to their ships to help chase their prey (or flee).
• Would require some modeling work on all the ships without chasers.
  • I'm not a programmer so I don't know how much work this is, but I think its a worthwhile improvement to the game.

 

Other comments:

Despite moving to a damage-based tag-timer-reset mechanic, chasers are still important. Chipping a few percent off your enemy's sails as you chase can make the difference between catching or not catching him.

[Cartagena Caulking Refit]

All % mods apply to the base stats of the ship.

L'Ocean base thickness is 76. 76*0.07=5.32.

 

101+5.32=106.32

[Ship crafting]

I want the old UI back. I'll pay DLC money for it.

 

Functionality > Aesthetics.

Tabs > Pop Up Windows

Names > Symbols

[Demasting]

Everything above. 

Also, double charge, Blomfields, damage to your structure...

The good news is, your masts should be immune to 24lb and below unless they build full penetration and are firing at very close range.

[Most Ridiculous Ganks]

Well, the fort almost got two or three of them. But almost doesn't count. RIP my repairs and cannons.

[Ratty can tag privateer, but privateer cant tag Ratty..]

3 hours ago, Thonys said:

well... give him a chance to sink.......

Its not going to happen.

3 hours ago, Thonys said:

i only see the benefits for the big fleets here

As someone who sails medium sized (3rd-5th rates) for PvP, sometimes alone, I do NOT want my time wasted by some 7th rate. For every one 7th rate skipper who wants to have a real fight (and is competent enough to put up a real fight), there are a dozen more who just want to waste time while a gank fleet assembles.

3 hours ago, Thonys said:

my solution: give every 7 and 6 rate  ship + 80 br points  for a start .(except the BC) 

And do what with port battle BRs? And doesn't everyone whinge that nobody ever takes 6th rates into PBs? Doing what you say, will only make the Surprise/Reno/Herc shallow PB spam even worse.

 

Sail a proper ship if you want to fight other proper ships. Use the small ships for what they were intended for (hunting traders and other small ships). A Snow or Prince or Niagara has enough BR to tag 5th rates and even 4th rates, last I checked. So sail those if you insist on trying to fight bigger ships.

[Ratty can tag privateer, but privateer cant tag Ratty..]

It is intentional.

You need a certain amount of BR in order to tag. I believe the last numbers I read were that you can tag 5x greater BR when solo. Groups scale differently. Perhaps someone can confirm those multipliers, I'm not absolutely certain those numbers are correct anymore.

Its done to prevent trolling people. Before that mechanism was implemented people would buy a cheap ship, or even just use a cutter and tag in entire fleets and kite them in battle to waste their time. 

Realistically, you're not going to defeat someone with 5x your BR unless they're very, very, very bad, and you're very good. Or they're AFK.

[[Caribbean] Great battle results.]

Port Battle for Cayman Brac
Attackers: British LURE, Commander: Shocktrooper Basteyy (?)
Defenders: Russian VSC and friends, Commander: Christendom
Outcome: Russia defends

Despite not having the wind at the start of the battle, we were able to maneuver the fleet a bit and take the wind before we engaged the enemy fleet.

Many ships were damaged, and there were some well-executed blocking maneuvers by both fleets. We sank 4 ships and had a few more of them damaged. Points accumulated before we could sink more. 

Good fight, thanks to those who made it happen.

[[Caribbean] Great battle results.]

Port Battle:  Puerto Plata
Date:  13 October 2019 
Outcome: Russia Captures the port
Commanders:        Russia: Christendom        Swedes: Teutonic (?)

With good wind and sturdy ships, we formed double lines and cut the Swedish line in two. We lost a few of our ships early on, and an explosion severely weakened ships on both sides for a bit.  

The Swedish fought gallantly, but we were able to sink them faster than they sank us, while maintaining circle control. 

Thanks to everyone who made this fight possible, it was fun. 

As always, Santisima > L'Oceantrash, as evidenced by the K/D ratio of them in this battle

[Port ownership, bonuses, friends list - reworked]

Just go full out clan vs clan. 

Clan you don't like owns the port? Take it from them. Solo players can hunt whoever. Port bonuses and the other magic just needs to be gone totally. Go back to cookie cutter ships with a small pool of reasonable-percentage mods that allow for customization of performance. Let skill triumph over pretty pixels once again.

 

Agreed on "pass port ownership" option. Should already be in the game.

Agreed that we need larger friends list so more clans can be added. Why limit it to 15?

Somewhat agreed on having the shielding effect of capital ports removed.
I'd go with Hammy's suggestion in his thread about reversing the roles of capital and surrounding ports: first take the surrounding ports, then take the capital.
Or implement a sliding BR effect. So if you want to take the capital without first conquering the surround ports, you'll only have room for half the BR that the defenders can bring. Take more of the surrounding ports, and you can fit more BR into the battle. Take all the surrounding ports and you can fit full BR into it on both sides.

 

Disagree on what the clan ownership should entail. It SHOULD allow a clan to put pressure on other clans, by refusing the use of resources. It'll drive clan wars within a "nation." See above for my suggestion to go all-out clan based gameplay. Have the nations (and cut nations back to 4-6 nations max, no need for so many) be like a loose affiliation of players under the same flag, but clans fly their own flags and wage their own wars. Sometimes those are civil wars against other clans within their nation. If the friendly clan list can extend beyond nation boundaries, then we can have true diplomacy in the game. 

 

And one does have to wonder...if the friendly clan list was working well for you, would you be complaining about the terrible mechanics? When my friends who remained in pirates after some of us left the nation got removed from the friendly clan lists, it was all well and good in the world: because they weren't deemed "true pirates." Perhaps another pirate king has risen to power and deemed you unfit to be a "true pirate" and removed you from the friendly list. Perhaps power blinded some to the injustices they wrought. 

[Impossible join location into a battle]

7 minutes ago, Raekur said:

the join circle is not 6 minutes from the point of contact.

Depends how fast you sail, and how far in the join circle a person joins. 
 

I've had battles before and kept a careful eye on my speed and direction, and instructed my allies to join on top of the enemy. Its always fun to watch the tide turn so quickly and go from running for your ship's safety, to turning and sinking some gankers. And my allies get to finally make use of that prepared perk I always nag them about (I think its useless most of the time, but it does have its moments). I digress.

 

Anyways, the join circles are positional. If you know how they work, you can generally control where you put the join circles in the initial tag. Putting them in unfavorable wind positions for your enemies is great. Putting the join circles in land or in shallows is even better.

Furthermore, join circles allow quite a lot of positioning room inside them. Notice in the join circle how far back in the circle the Hercules joined. He has at least a minute or two of sailing just to make it to the front edge of the join circle where he could have joined. Then he's got to get to about where the crossed swords are in OW, (which appear about where the ship that was tagged is). Thats another minute or two of sailing in the instance.
Meanwhile, the Trincomalee is communicating with his friends outside, telling them how far he has gone, and in what general direction. Another minute or two has passed, and at this point, the Hercules and his companions are starting to get inside the enemy's join circle. The second rates join the battle and erase a third rate. 

 

Nothing seems amiss to me, but Ink has already responded that he'll look into it. 

[Another mechanic for repairs]

Again I suggest we just go back to 1/1 of each and be done with it.

And go back to the "tank" of repairs like we used to have. Say you can carry 10 repairs in the "repair gas tank." You can fill these up in any port for a few reals. If you want to carry extra repairs,  you can carry crafted "repair kits" in your hold. Just like we used to.

Simple, effective, focuses on skill.

And it doesn't require you to participate in the "engaging player driven economy" that is essentially price gouging on repairs, which hurts primarily new/learning players who aren't in with clans that already truck around thousands of repairs to every outpost before operations. 

 

And I don't see anything in your suggestion about mast repairs. Now I'm not a fan of regrowing masts (its unrealistic and annoying). I feel like if you get demasted, you should stay demasted. But many people feel the need to have some kind of mast repair available. Enough that admin has said in the past that mast repairs will probably stay. (I think he even said multiple repairs would stay, but I hope he might change his mind on that).

So I suggest (again) that we compromise with having only 1 hull repair and 1 rig repair (that also repairs masts). So you get one chance to regrow a mast and recover from your mistake.

 

 

I like the idea of individual sets of sails (furthermore, if you have a set of light canvas for speed and heavy canvas for a little damage and fire resistance), with the option to replace only certain sails in a set, so if you get damaged topsails and courses, but your topgallants are OK, you can just replace the damaged ones.

I also like the idea of getting to select where my repair goes. I don't care about my bow and stern HP. I don't care about the missing 10% on my right side. I want the missing 60% on my left side repaired! 

But all that, and what you propose, is quite a bit of work to implement I'd imagine. I doubt we'll see that in NA. Maybe NA2 .

 

I would offer caution regarding the structural limitations you suggest. (I'm assuming we're speaking of the center bar as the ship's structure). Structure goes FAST when you get a good rake. Like 3-4 rakes and he's at 20% and has crew permanently in survival, masts are ready to fall over, and sides are laughably easy to damage.

We can argue all day the merits of the new combat model that was implemented this year. I do not like it one bit, the old one was so much better. It was much more balanced, and had much more focus on the skill of a player, less about if you have enough cannons of large enough caliber to to just spam broadsides till you win. But arguing about the merits of the new combat model is pointless. Devs have said its here to stay.

So if you limit repairs to only "armor" (I'm assuming you mean the side HP bars), then all that has to be done is core out enough of your structure that you begin to lose significant amounts of thickness, making your side HP drop very easily. So it'll shift the focus away from angling, smashing broadsides, and the occasional rake; to more of a focus of raking ships to death. I'm not sure if thats a good shift in combat strategy or not. On the one hand, proper raking takes more skill than the average noob has, which means skill is rewarded, which is good. But on the other hand, fights where all we care about is getting stern rakes is maybe not the most enjoyable thing either. 

Its a fine balance. And as much as I dislike the current combat model, at least it somewhat rewards both careful positioning and proper raking. It doesn't reward careful positioning as much as it should though. Battles feel way too much like "point the first rate guns at the target and watch it be deleted." Where before it took skill to delete someone using your first rate. 

 

Anyways, the combat model and the repair model are intimately connected. Dramatically changing one without changing the other can be tricky. And I don't think the changes you propose would work well with the current model. Maybe with the older combat model it would. 

[Repair friendly ships in battles]

1 hour ago, Teutonic said:

we should be able to trade while in battle - similar to how we can trade in port and in the OW. having to trade through a sinking ship is rather irritating and I can see situations where someone uses all their repairs and being able to trade repairs from another ship could be a nice addition.

Now THAT is something I (and probably many others) could go along with.

 

It should have been in the game a long time ago, IMO. If within looting range of a (still floating) friendly ship, you can trade with him.

 

Even go a step further, and allow us to trade with enemy ships in battle. Chasing that trader who swears he'll pay you well if you don't sink him? Have him heave to and you sail near his ship and trade with him. Then you can choose to be the honorable captain and allow him to go on his way, or be a cutthroat pirate, throw your honor out the window, take his money and sink him too!

[Repair friendly ships in battles]

1 hour ago, koltes said:

No.

Amount of HP repaired in battle is still the same as it is now. You choose to repair someone and you yourself is out of repairs.
You choose to bring repair ship and instead of fighting ship and it lowers your team fighting ability, but increasing survivability.

Most successful games have classes, e.g. WOW have healers. EVE Online - logistic ships. War Thunder - repair assist available to all tanks
Something the class is specialized for. This brings more teamwork.
 

I don't think you understand what I mean.

You damage me. I repair my ship. My alt brought repairs in a fir/fir requin and joined my side. My alt repairs my ship again. I get 2 repairs for the price of one. 

Or you damage me. I repair my ship. My clanmate who hasn't been shot at because everyone focused me lets me have his repair. He repairs me and plays cautiously for 12 minutes. Meanwhile the enemy team is doing the same thing. Nobody is sinking because even focused fire of 4-5 ships against 1 is not enough to sink it the moment it turns away to angle and repair. 

If your goal was to make sure fewer of your teammates sink, then your suggestion will accomplish it. But it'll also mean fewer of your enemies sink (unless you only fight inexperienced players who won't know the proper tactics to use the repair meta). 

1 hour ago, koltes said:

Or a gank fest without escape chances

I escaped many ganks under the old 1/1 repair. I know for a fact you did too. 

In fact, I'd argue it was easier to escape the ganks then. Because then I could string them out in a line behind me, chain, demast, or even sink the fastest ship, pop my repair and get away.

I remember doing just that to you guys before I joined BLACK on PvP2. The remnants of our PB fleet got tagged by a whole bunch of you guys. I had a Bellona that wasn't particularly fast, but it was faster than your ships. After a while, only one of your ships (Connie?) was keeping up with me. I slowed down, tricked him to turn, filled his sails full of holes. Repeated after he did his repair, popped my repair, and sped away to safety. I had a blast, and I remember the satisfaction of out-maneuvering a superior fleet. 

Currently with the multi-repair meta, the game encourages ganks even more. How would you defeat a super fancy gold Bellona that does 13.8kn+, has northern master carpenters, and unbreakable masts? Easiest method is to bring something fast to keep it tagged and get some chain, and a couple tanky ships to brawl it out and sink it. Sounds like a gank to me.

 

You've been out of the game a long time. Perhaps you haven't seen a battle where ships get smashed to the point of almost sinking, pull away for a few minutes, print a new ship using hull repair, and jump right back into the fight. I have, and its not as fun for either side. What would make it even less fun is if we could have an alt (or someone dedicated to staying out of the action) sail away with them and repair them completely back to full.

 

Bottom line:

Allowing a player to use more repairs is not a way to add depth to combat. What it will do, however, is make sure players sink even less often.

 

6 minutes ago, Georg Fromm said:

Is NA slowly becoming a fantasy game?

Sounds like some players would like it to, sadly.

[Repair friendly ships in battles]

No.

Repair meta is strong enough as is. Crew 4 + Northern Master Carps + Carpentry Combat Reports + Carpenter perk is too much repair spec as it is, yet everyone is running that (or the poor man's version of that) anyways because its the best.

 

 

Better idea as I've suggested dozens of times already:

• Go back to max 1 repair of hull, 1 repair of rig in battle. No necromancer Rum repair. No cooldowns.
• Reduce mods to a maximum (all stacked) of +/- 5%

 

Result: Game goes back to more skill-based combat, not repair and gear meta.

[[Caribbean] Great battle results.]

Battle:  Cayman Brac
Attackers: Russia
Defenders: Great Britain
Outcome: Russia successfully captured the port

The British fleet appears to have been composed of mostly AI-captured ships.  I'm all for making first rates available to the masses, but I'm not sure this is the intended result.  But this was definitely more enjoyable than a no-show like many of the smaller PBs are. So props to the British fleet for creating some content with us.

 

And thanks to everyone in the Russian nation who helped out before and after the battle. 

[Pirate security (PvP)]

 

It seems some folks are really out of touch.

Whilst in Pirates, VCO fought plenty of nice battles. And not just against the garden variety noob, as BL4CK has always done. 

Off the top of my head: Prussian wars, Spanish Wars, British wars, US wars... I seem to recall fighting quite a few good fights. I don't know though, if BL4CK says they've done more in a few months than we did in two years then they must be right! 

 

Before we get to that though, I think we need to have a quick refresher of what happened just before BL4CK went inactive in the second half of 2017. 

It started when PvP2 was renamed to PvP Global earlier that year, and we got a handful of more skilled opponents to face (not the eager, but less skilled opponents BL4CK had been enjoying sinking for the past years [I should know, I was on the losing side of BL4CK fleets many times]). But when those more skilled opponents showed up, this started happening:

People started getting sunk by WO and their friends in the OW. Ships were lost left and right in embarrassing screenshots. I'm sure if you do enough digging, you'll find them. I remember the attempts to make deals with WO to prevent losing more ships to them. They never lasted.

 

And Port battles that before looked like this:

(lossless victory vs a less-skilled group, and most of the escapees were sunk in battles outside the port)

Started to look like this:

(still a victory, but only a few ships sunk, several of our ships also sunk).

 

Then our leadership started going to play other games, leaving a skeleton crew behind with nobody really definitively put in charge. Things like this started happening when we were left to lead our own battles:

 

So a few of us, including myself and Doug Maoz decided to step up and start fulfilling our roles as officers. After the shaky start above, we developed an effective method to lead us to victory against more skilled opponents (something the glorified 'old guard' didn't really do, since there weren't many skilled clans on PvP2 when the 'old guard' was active):

As Tenet mentions, you'll note that many of those players in that screenshot do, in fact, fly the VCO or VSC banner. Funny how that works out. 

 

 

Now, several asked for some VCO victories. I'm lazy so I just scrolled through some of my posts in one of the battle results threads. Within the following spoiler, you'll see that we can not only fight less skilled opponents a la BL4CK, but that we can also fight against opponents who have a degree of skill that wasn't present on PvP2. Note that we fought in large brawls, and smaller fights. You'll also note that just because I no longer have the BL4CK tag, doesn't mean I've lost my touch in 1v1s either. 

(wall of screenshots incoming):
  

(Spoiler didn't post properly, has my closing paragraph inside the spoiler, and I cannot edit it and move it outside the spoiler).

 

 

I've got more screenshots, and I know plenty of my clanmates have some nice screenshots too. But I believe I've posted enough here to prove that we are, in fact, capable of fighting. Should anyone ever doubt this, I'll happily meet them in a first rate or Trincomalee duel. I may not win, but it'll be proof enough that the VSC/VCO tag can fight.

 

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my time in BLACK on PvP2. I sailed with some good people, and I finished my transition from US Noob to a skilled PvPer whilst sailing under the BLACK flag. Some of my favorite battles happened while I was under the BLACK flag. We were a force to be reckoned with on the PvP2 server.

 

But its stop living in the past. Take off the rose colored glasses for a minute and look around. We're not on PvP2 any more. There are player groups more skilled than any BL4CK could ever field. That was a tough one to accept for me, coming from a server where I only feared a duel with a few other players, to a server where there are plenty of people who could have mopped the floor with me at that time.

Really, its hard to accept being the little guy, when you've grown so used to being the biggest fish around. BLACK couldn't accept this two years ago on PvP Global, and it doesn't appear that BL4CK can accept this now on PvP1 Caribbean War server. 

 

 

Yes, I was thrilled to see my old clanmates come back to the game. I hoped we'd work closely together and build a combined fleet that would be able to crush anyone who set against us in our primetime. But I quickly realized that would never work out. BL4CK has an ego problem, and the salt in this thread is only further evidence that I made the right choice staying in Naval Action, rather than following BLACK to other games. Because by staying in Naval Action, I ended up falling in with a great group of people, who fly under the Voodoo Shipping Company flag.   (not to mention I didn't accumulate 2 years of rust and a lack of knowledge of mechanics) 

 

Note that all 'BLACK' references in this post reference the PvP2 clan BLACK, known as BL4CK on the Caribbean War server.

[[Caribbean] Great battle results.]

49 minutes ago, HoneyBaddger said:

Things havent changed. You still suck! 

Oh, but things have changed. BL4CK has been out of the game for too long, and has gotten rusty. If the most they can manage out of this fight, having more BR than us, is to sink only a DLC boat and an oak/crewspace 3rd rate, then I fear you best curb the trash talk before you embarrass yourself further. 

I look forward to seeing how long it takes for BL4CK to figure out how to play again.

 

Oh, and feel free to duel me anytime and prove what terrible players VCO are. Everyone knows I'm literally trash, I lose to AI all the time . Surely you would defeat me.

[BL4CK joins hostility WITHOUT CANNONS to Intentionally sink!!!]

CLEAR violation of the rulings of the Cap Francais no cannons fiasco. Surely similar punishment will be fairly given in this instance. 

 

As an aside, I'll echo what some of my old clanmates have already said above:

I used to proudly uphold the BLACK banner on PvP2.

I was honored to be an officer in that clan, run some port battles, wreck some folks in the duel room, etc. It was great fun. I sailed with some good people. 

So I was thrilled to see my old friends back in the game again, and I'd hoped we'd work closely together. It became obvious very quickly they had no interest in that, which saddened me a bit, but that's ok. But never did I think they'd do such dirty dirty things as what they have been tribunaled for these past 3 times (one tribunal deleted by mods).

With this latest flouting of the rules, it has become completely obvious to me that BLACK from PvP2 no longer exists outside of our memories. The 'A' in the name wasn't all that was damaged in the shipping. This BL4CK is an ugly shell of a once excellent clan. People used to see the BLACK tag and know they were facing a tough opponent (well...as tough as you'd find on PvP2...heh). Now they see the BL4CK tag and chuckle.

I can only hope that swift and firm clarification of the rules and punishment delivered by the development and moderation teams will cause my old clanmates to see the error of their ways, and start anew to rebuild the old clan from its foundation. I want to see them be a great clan again. But this is not the way.

 

1 hour ago, van der Clam said:

I'm still confused as to why 1st rates are allowed to raise hostility against a shallow port. This should've been changed like a long time ago.

I see deep water all around the port in question. What do you see that would limit first rates from sailing there to grind hostility?

If you want to only use shallow ships to grind with, there are ports which will spawn missions in shallow water for you. Simple. This a tribunal for players deliberately trying to sabotage by coming into battle without cannons and the intention to sink. Lets not derail it too much, or the mods will step in.

 

16 minutes ago, Loco Bandito said:

The game lets you put cannons on or not? its your choice to sail with our without.

How is that a broken game mechanic or exploit?

End of the day Captains choice. Games fuct anyway.

You can sail without cannons if you want to (a reminder pops up letting you know you are sailing without cannons). What you can't do (per past tribunal rulings) is join battles without cannons and no intention to fight. Thats a violation of the rules.

As the saying goes, don't walk into a theater and yell 'fire' then spout 'freedom of speech' when the authorities show up.

4 minutes ago, Loco Bandito said:

Its a sandbox MMO you can do what. So many carebears.

See above, carebear. 

[Tie woods used in ship build with guns weight]

12 hours ago, Archaos said:

But what you are referring to here is in order to maintain the same strength and has nothing to do with speed. If you build a ship out of weaker woods you would have to increase the dimensions and thickness to maintain same strength as a ship built out of stronger woods, but the net weight for both ships will be almost the same. To build a fast ship you have to build out of lighter weaker materials to reduce weight for the same class of vessel and thus the OP suggestion is valid.

No. It doesn't quite work that way. Ships float at a designed waterline. If you make the ship lighter, you add more ballast so it'll still float at that waterline. All building out of a lighter wood does, is make the hull itself lighter. Which means you carry more ballast (or stores/cargo); which brings the center of gravity lower and makes the ship stiffer (sails better). Fluffy Fishy had some more insight into why lighter wood types were sometimes faster the last time this topic came up. Perhaps he'll chime in.

The idea of lighter = faster is something people get in their head and can't get out. Lightening the ship to gain speed (by dumping stores, pumping the fresh water overboard, or dumping the guns) was a last-ditch effort. You didn't just decide "oh, I wanna go faster, let me make my ship lighter" and sail out to sea.

 

As a side note: the fir ships would *theoretically* be able to carry more or slightly heavier cannons, because the extra ballast stowed low would make up for the extra gun weight up high. So the opposite of the original suggestion. 

 

8 hours ago, Baptiste Gallouédec said:

Fir don't make your ship faster in real life, fir was just more abondant bc faster to grow, and allowed easier shipbuilding but was less durable (shorter lifetime for the ships) same as live oak didn't make the Constitution a slow Brick, while Santisima  was a slow brick while in mahogany ..

Wood stats in game have very few links with real life, so they just have to be balanced in stats / costs / accessibility, nerfing their broadsides would be too weird imo.

^^ This captain gets it. 

If live oak and white oak were available cheaply, all navies would have used it. If fir wasn't so cheap and available, it wouldn't get used much at all. 

Wood shortages were pretty much the biggest driving factor in deciding what to build a ship out of. 

 

 

Again, the best way to balance woods is to nerf the bonuses/negatives so that the bonuses are extremely small. If this is done right, then why make a paper fir/fir ship when a sabicu or oak ship is only a little slower and is tougher? Why make a live oak ship if oak or sabicu is almost as tough and is faster? It'll be the first step in balancing the game less around gear and more around skill. Of course, all of us 'hardcore' RvR and PvP players will get the best woods so we get our 2-5% bonuses over the people using cheaper woods, but the bonuses will no longer be crazy OP. 

And again, artificial choice limits are NOT a balancing tool. What the OP reads like, to me, is this: "You can choose to build a fast Constitution, but it won't be able to fight anything because it'll have less firepower than this live oak Trincomalee." Uh huh. Thats only the illusion of a choice. 

Limiting max gun class to only tanky ships will mean that we all just go to sailing live oak/sailing 4/copper/navy hull/naval clock ships. Even more gear meta, don't worry though, we won't be spamming any more fir/fir Wasas with that meta though. 

[Tie woods used in ship build with guns weight]

1 hour ago, Hethwill said:

For example, a USS Constitution built of Live Oak and Oak would be able to carry the heaviest guns for her - the 24's and the 42's. But a Fir and a Teak construct wouldn't be able to carry that heavy armament.

Increase moulded dimensions of timbers = can carry the weight.

When substituting weaker woods, boat designers tell you, (often its right there on the plans), to increase dimensions as necessary to compensate.

 

Better solution: wood type has little/no effect on ship stats at all. LO/WO is +5% HP and Thickness, --5% speed.   Fir/Fir is -5% HP and Thickness, +3% speed.   Simple, historically accurate. No magic or artificial limits.