Fastidius

the next content patch wont be a wipe then i gather. so it wont be pirates, and wont be democracy...i m guessing they are doing the port battles then.

OK so basically your saying we will implement a series of broken things and then go back and fix them after everyone has had a hard time using them for a series of months regardless of how new the feature is when it was reported or the fact it uses somethig that is already reported as issues in previous reports.... nice development model....any chance someone who will actually use the systems can get involved in testing.......and do me a favour and tell devs to design with input boxes not sliders on everything they won't be fixing for a while.....everything with a sliders suck to use. i suggest you learn from your previous bug reports on UI design....why create somethig to be fixed when you can not use a broken design.

OMG you want AI on yur side....i hate it in fleet missions.

i'd suggest a compromise would be a 7 minute timer on leaky leaving.....but i think its fine how it is. your meant to sink not escape

encourage battles get the ships there and let them fight

don't stress pirate changes will happen but i dont thonk its likely for 2 months...its at least a month till democracy and port battles

NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!! You just built it, it isn't right just fix the slider with an input box....there is a guy that JUST finished let him fix it while it is fresh. it isn't a suggestion its a critical bug report on a brand new feature.

As I mentioned in some previous threads i think the devs are going about the clan warehouse the wrong way.Rather than spend time making new functionality I suggest they leverage existing mechanics and remove the existing clan warehouse and implement my system which i will diplay and spec here. My idea revolves around Clans having a Trading post in a home port (similar to having a warehouse however a warehouse is only accessible by officers so and trading etc has to have a person waste playtime to transact with people. Ignoring the obvious need for logging which i will leave till after they actually design the shop if it happens. So i have mocked up what i think the screensshould look like. Wether they make screens have scrolls up and down to see items etc is irrelevant as long as these features are in place. This will make a clan warehouse actually work. Initial Screen A clan trading post can be setup in the exact same way as the current warehouse by the clan leader. I dont see any reason for change regards to this. A new rank is built which is Officer + Trading Post Managment - For this moment lets just call them SHOPKEEPERS SHOPKEEPERS This rank has access to the CHANGE option for each item so they can set values based on their needs. I will Suggest baseline values which make sense based on how AUSFC run their economy. This basically produces 1st rate ships at 1 Mill and Santis at 2 mill with everyone in the process making a profit. I can explain it all further later however for this moment i will simply suggest the numbers. PORT SCREEN CHANGES Personally i think having ships as part of the shop actually makes sense so I would remove ships from the top bar andactually creat it as a nested item inside the current shop interface. I don't see that as being a big issue for developers and it makes more sense because you are buying and selling ships from the port shop keeper who hapens to be the shipyard also......its a small change but makes room up top for a CLAN option. On entry to the port an additional check is made on loading in. Normal port appears but a secind DB call is made which is similar to the following var ClanHomePort as integer ClanHomePort = Select Scalar count(clanid) from DB where CurrentPortID=X and ClanID=Y (returns 0 or 1 if the clan table has that port has a record of a warehouse) if ClanHomePort = 1 then Add UI Item CLAN to MenuBar at top else Exit There has to be current structure similar to this for them to have the warehouse tied to a home port, I just think it should be part of the port as well as viewable from the existing Clan button on the chat bar. Image of the Main Screen with CLAN button Pressed The clan Warehouse already has a gold counter so the gold pool can be seen there and interacted with using the same warehouse functionality except there should be a text entry box not a slider. Resources Materials Upgrades Ships Are all available however you could apply a charge to open up each selection in a similar way to the clan warehouse is created and set flags on a warehouse table to see if the buttons are available. select from warehouses where clanid = X and port ID = Y If Resourses = 1 then Show Button If Materials= 1 then Show Button If Upgrades= 1 then Show Button If Ships= 1 then Show Button ShipSlotsMax = Shipslots Crating available = Crafting Table would look like ID ClanID PortID Resourses - Booleen Matrerials - Booleen Upgrades - Booleen Ships - Booleen ShipSlots - Int Crafting - Booleen this way you can set up a purchase button for each area and the ability to actually craft. On clicking the clan button Or as part of the Port loading function you query it to set what buttons are available. Selecting Resources looks like this The Clan Warhouse on build should create rows for each of the Items possible to be Stored so that items that have Zero Stock etc are still shown. The idea around this is that there is a clan shop where you can buy and sell into using clan set prices. RESERVE is Officer only buyable and will fill up before Available is allowed to be filled this allows the clan to set a pool of Clan Resources for Shipbuilders only if they manage it that way. The RESERVE is the quantity actually available in reserve. The actual value is only available to the Shopkeeper and clan leader in the change window. WAREHOUSE ONLY MODE - For those who just want the officer only access warehouse If you set the default prices to Zero and the reserve to 999999 you get the exact same functionality as the current warehouse until you have more than 1million items in the actual warehouse. LIMIT - The maximum Number of items of this type the clan is willing to buy AVAILABLE STOCK = Warehouse Line item Quantity minus RESERVE and is the quantity a general clan MEMBER can draw upon. BUY AND SELL - Almost the identical system to shop and withdraw in the current warehouse excepting it uses the clan money pool as the Creditor/Debtor BENEFITS: No interaction between officers required to perform clan in/outs with money transfers for basic transactions. Allows crafters to pull resources without being made an officer. CHANGE BUTTON FUNCTIONALITY Look at the materials section for info - same thing but no Hourly Rate MATERIALS VIEW Same deal as the resources. CRAFT BUTTON. If clicked an unavailable get similar error to warehouse access from non available port however depends on if Crafting is true from initial warehouse query The maximum Craftable value should be checked against LIMIT and Hours. no reason for there to be a max value on the slider beyond those limits. Values for ingredients are linked to the warehosue quantities not the users. The user is payed for the hours used ONLY and allinteractions happen via a transaction in the DB Craft Transaction Transaction Start check values of each quantity required are available (multiple people accessing one DB so have to confirm the data pre transaction) If values = available Change ingredient quantity to new values update created material value to new value transfer gold from clan money pool to player adjust crafters hours if all transaction = true apply else error = not enough materials/gold available at this time. requery the quantities and refresh screen. THE CHANGE BUTTON this button checks if the rank = SHOPKEEPER or CLAN LEADER and throws an error if not. THIS SCREEN ALSO NEEDS LIMIT ADDED - Will redo image shortly SHOPKEEPER/clanleader Sets these values. RESERVE is designed to allow a restricted amount of items for use for CLAN shipbuiling only so that you dont run short of the items required for X amount of ships at any time. Anything over that amount is available to any clan member. An extreme high number like 999999 means officer access only. LIMIT is the maximum number the clan is willing top purchase. and extreme value like 999999 allows purchase without restriction. Hours rate only appears on materials and Upgrades check against the item type on click Hourley rate is the money payed when crafting this. There are a few ways people do this but we set a subcrafting rate on anything other than notes and upgrades and pay extra for levels used to make these. more obvious on the upgrades button. UPGRADES DISPLAY Same deal however with a filter setting at the top as per the current design. again each item possible is shown and limited. A second set of filters for Quality might be of benefit here for managing the pricing. SHIPS SCREEN SLOTS - You set a limit on the number of ships allowed in the clan ship shop and purchase prices for additional slots. Crafters list them in the normal fashion only difference is it only displays to ClanID people. the only change i would make is that there should be an option for Permanently available rather than a timed sale. This way an officer can choose to Buy it off a crafter and relist it as a clan assest and reimburse himself. That way the clan has ownership the crafter has cash and anyone who wants to buy it will be able to without the issue of a timer. CONCLUSION This uses almost all functionality already built with minimal adjustment and provides the most automation of the clan processes that take time away from officers inour system. PLEASE BUILD THIS. Side Benefits. You can write an API dump for clan warehouses which can be interrogated and ranked outside the game showing the wealthiest clans as a ranking system and assuch create avenues of people to rate clans in some fashion Once you have solidified this structure you can add Audit logs to the transactions which are tied to a clan and create a daily dump and wipe of that data to textfiles for the clan shopkeeper to acquire and use for audit purposes keeping your database clean but also keeping transaction for review. Adding ranks will allow you to create access to variety options just by adjusting permissions on the clicking of a button type giving you a granular security option if you wish to develop this.

The Makeup Artist

AI Boardings at the moment are a gear check. AI Boardings. If you have boarding prep on you will win if you have marines equal or higher than the enemy. If you have boarding parties also then you will win faster. There is very little chance the AI will outplay you if you keep prep up. Santis fall in 3-5 rounds because they attack if they have more crew and make their decisions too early. It is only challenging on Fine gear. With MC and higher your pretty safe to cap 2 or 3 1sts in a battle. Not sure how you feel about this as developers. As a player i think this is about right because AI is for teaching IMO. Means people don't take on ships without gear and that gear is required to the point you choose boarding or DPS specs. Perhaps tune their decisiontimes based on their ranks....ie a rear admiral decides in the last 3 seconds. Commodore 4 seconds, flag 5 seconds etc etc. PVP boarding is more challenging but again if you out gear them you will generally win. I Personally think that you should have a marines upgrade slot on all ships so that boardings are generally more equal. you can still focus on boarding or DPS but by having a mrines slot on all ships there is always a fighting chance. green marines VS no marines is still a significant advantage when equal crewed. Having a better understanding of the statistics in the UI would be good IMO. Gunnery builds are overlooked by most people and perhaps if you make a marines slot you could add sharp shooters as feature to musketmen with it's own mod type. give it a defence boost feature so that a sharpshooting gunnery setup kills more when defending and bracing against an attack. At the moment Swords setups just brute force most options. My honest goal for the whole Upgradesthing would be. Remove Duros completely (this will help build the economy) Remove port production and let the players set prices to fix economy issue. You can tweak crafting hours regen to make economy work better but having any supply and pricing set by the AI will hurt the economy designs. As time goes on you will find that the players will come to the right prices. I know our clan's economy works and is pretty stable and is based of building production values. The only headaches come from when someone buys bulk stock from a AI vendor. make all non permanent upgrades not disappear when a ship sinks. Make marines a seperate slot not in the upgrades section so that you can have them on everything however each time you lose a ship it derank a level of skill. ie EXC Marines die they become MC. and say each time you win 5 times your marines uprank. I think this would be far more appropriate design for marines, Ships and Marines in my opinion and would benefit crafting and economy in a general sense. It also somewhat deals with marines being a crew adjustment rather than and stat adjustment. Also gives you a reason to board everything you can and keep ships alive. If you ever want to talk about economics I have pretty much everything you would ever want spread sheeted and am happy to help Devs with this area.

So a one off item used only in blueprints and produced by ports but also by players......in the current world a pretty nothing change so whatever. I really do think you have to get away from this port production stuff and make it a full player economy or else there is no money in resources.

i'd rather have statistics and the option to ignore them than not have them and never have a way to compare. Also it is fundamental to getting an achievement or else your just wasting time.....carrots are there to be eaten. You don't have to eat them but there is a number to achieve for those that are looking for something to live for. Debuffs/Buffs. I'm looking for ways to encourage ships to go hunting and do it in small packs of like 1-6....thus creating a psedo-pirate environment. The ranking idea is very much like an admiralty. screw up and lose a ship get verlooked for promotion, screw up bad and lose a ship against a weaker enemy, demoted only sail lesser ships till you get good. absurd amounts of money is dependant on the perspective... Scalingof money for the year is probably not too horrible....we have santis fo 2 mill in clan but 6 Mill in KPR/MT so i think thats the right sort of money. the fact you can earn 1 mill an hour is a bit wrong but 200K an hour is probably about right if we want to turn over 4th rates the way we used to disposable 3rds. up front notice on battles will have limited affect with low population...i'm hopeful that it will work but i have my reservations and I personally think they should be treated with teleports....screening fleets are bad IMO i want 25 vs 25 battles On schedule and with lots of fun and low risk or losing when you win...ie safe haven for ships home etc. I'm ok with seeing what comes but i don't want to stop looking for better ways while in alpha. teleports are free already.. basically to do stuff with port battles somewhere distant, you basic cutter there, set up an outpost and then go home capture traders/each other to teleport your ships there. This is Standard operating procedure now because we now have 3 different ships needed for areas in some cases. Basically this cuts out hours of sailing in which we actually dont want to engage targets. Teleport zones is the best of both world....you have to sail to a jump area but not the whole hour or 2 to get there depending on ship. I know realism is that we wouldnt teleport our ships everywhere but then we also wouldn't have to sail so far to engage in port battles if there was enough population to have a constant front line. You can currently zerg entire areas without and real defence due to low population. A grand design would scale the size of the jump area to smaller levels and maybe bring the islands back into play however when your dealing with a population so small compared to the size of the world you can't expect people to accept things like "AFK sailing" being a thing. noteveryoneis willing to give up their game time to do this and will just jump ship regardless of how pretty it is.

With open world, I'm all for having 10 minute sails to a jumpzone and 10 miniuts from them. and being able to sail for hours along the coast lines. I't just the stupid ones accross the dead sea...or accross the sea that only has ports for historical reasons not because its needed in this game... alacranes labemeja. the only reason they exist is for flag pulling and hostorical nonsense. it is clutter and sailing across those big open areas should be faster by a a significant magnitude if not by teleport. think of the map as a giant circle. make everything fit into a band around the outside edge, anything in the center gets cleared away....once you leave the band you can jump to any entry. the band is big enough to screen in but small enough that AFK sailing is not a thing

if they build it like a shop instead of like a warehouse it would be better design. you can always set the costs to zero to make it a warehouse but adds capability. In regards to the ships, just take the ships button away make it part of the shop and have a maximum number of ships of say 20 in there and the problems go away do they not? Charge for a clan Tradepost to open up the resources tab Charge extra for each tab including an upgrades,ships tab. At a future date they could add rental to the tabs if they wanted to and they could add cap limits and a crafting button to the materials tab if they want to allow craft hour use in the shop by combining the craft functionality to the shop. just seems like a no brainer that this would have been the best and cheapest development avenue as all the mechanics are there. even database wise you just set up the shop as a shop the same as the AI version but create a new key that relates to the clan. setup a basic ui tied to a new rank called shopkeeper which is an officer but also has access to price changes officers can bypass to assist people if they choose to withdraw gold then buy the items at clan rate then you have a log of both the cash transaction and the shop prices are not tainted so you can scrip an economy and you can have basic logging via the API as shops can be seen. Using the API you can also create a clan rank by applying a weighting system to item values and then clans can actually have a clan wealth rank via a website. Really everything about this leads to a win for the developers if they would just listen to people instead of half arsing their way through things ill just write up a UI spec for them so they see it My grumblings come from a desire for the game to succeed and be awesome so rather than just pointing out shortcomings ill try and give them solutions in a polished manner

the reason this is in support is because it is something that should work and doesn't. please address it in a hot fix..its not a amazing change but a massive functionality issue with the bank. I could list a heap of other things that i want it to do but this is just fixing core functionality not picked up in testing. Prove to me that you care about features you create by at least responding.

Labour hours are a good thing, channeling of them is a problem but the reality is rear admiral should not be end game, there should be a fame mechanic and xp should be removed/

So rather than go down a completely realistic line lets have a look at how we can actually encourage PVP and keep an active testing base So basically there are 2 problems in my view, Density and Funneling So here is my idea of what i think the devs should be doing to make things better faster. 1. Just turn pirates into a nation and remove the anyone can turn pirate option. Deal with it in a focused and smart way but ignore it for now until you actuall get a game that is going to hold attention. There is too much unknown and arguing about what ships they can sail and what ever. when you do a wipe remove pirates as a nation and create a new style for thembut for now just disable the ever expanding option. 2. Give ships that win fights a buff. give them 1.2 strength and 1.5 open world speed. for 30 mintues if they re enter openworld within 5 minutes. This way of you sail a fleet into enemy waters you get a battle hardened crew boost for winning your first fight which encourages a fleet to take on revenge fleets rather than trying to hightail it and split the enemy up again. if they are outnumbered they can choose to run but it isn't a long drawn out process. Suck it and see if people hate it or like it but it is an easy way to get people to re engage if they think they have a chance. 3 MOVE DUROS - KEEP NON PERMANENT UPGRADES - PVP CAPTURES KEEP PERMANENTS - I can't stress this enough because of 2 reasons. The economy is fubar. Gold spews from the ships in fleets, crafters cant sell ships or charge too much. Removing duros increases permanent mod sales, Gives crafters the ability to actually sell ships. 4 Economy - Remove all baseline pricing and any port supply and consumption...just make the places buildings can be built. let the world balance it for you. TRADERS will make money and create trade fleets. Make fleeting less lucrative to make combat and trading VALID options for cash earning. 5 Make Jump zones. Rather than having a massive open world, take the little islands out and create a hyperspace type zone with entry and exit points toward each area of a nation. Give PVP zones as a area between jump zones and friendly ports so that you have a free fire zone but when you enter an enemy waters there is an announcement to the local ports and players that there is PVP in your area. Takes the stupid AFK Sailing aspect away, funnels people to areas of PVP. and allows an escape paths if you capture ships and want to remove open world teleport. As population increases move the size of that jump zone smaller if needed but the vacant water is a waste of time. content does not equal afk sailing 6 Fix the chat UI a little.....not a lot, i understand the reworking of the whole thing is a massive thing but, add a few channels Nation trade, Nation Announcements. Nation Hourly Message with the nations war stances. 7 Fix crafting a little - Just remove sliders make everything an entry box so the number of clicks is reduced and the database updates are not stupid. Remove BP drops and expand the crafting levels to say 100 but make it so you dont have 5 ships all open to you at one moment make it more progressive. Most current crafters wont be affected but new crafters wont get stuck in the stupid ' need to build 25 gold frigates box. Add bonuses instead of BPs like build a 4 or 5 upgrade permanent ship (5% chance masterpiece). 8 ADD SCOREBOARDS AND CARROTS So the funny thing about PVP is that people need to know how good they are in what ships etc. World of tanks style stat tracking is essential give them scoreboards fame. You can on sail ships you are rated to sail Batlles won give you a + battles lost give you a - pvp battles give you a multiplier to that based on BR Number of times you sink 3+ ships in a battle Number of assists Number of battle escaped - neg to fame but not a big hit Fame = crew capability (this willgive you your undercrewing mechanic) Distance traveled KG/lsbs traded Shipsbuilt of each type(increases the chance of a better pemanent slot number) Number of ports visited (smuggler ranks) Tader ranks allow you to sail bigger traders You can make any number of acheivments and ranks that give fame but make it a fluctuating system so that all the rear admirals are ranked. Basically start fleshing out the Ranking system so it has an impact not so its just a grind number.

Why have it at all if the net change is people spam the same repair kits they do already.....you cant nerf repair kits with a cooldown because then people wont go into danger zones to fight and risk chain battles. What you want is a buff to people who sail into enemy waters and win battles. make them actually stronger so that the enemy has to bring multiple ships to combat them.

Not really sure how we can use this, can you round it to 100s or 100s or something, at the moment is is unusable

It might be on a dual screen PC where you can play something else while your sailing for no apparent reason. There is a reason the phrase "AFK Sailing" is commonly used. the AFK doesn't stand for "awesomely Fing Keen"

The point is we don't sail 5-6 hours a day now because of teleporting and ship teleporting......the best change in the game over the last 2 months has been no timer on teleports. I think the argument is that the Devs want us to sail our ships to FOB rather than teleporting them which to be honest sounds to me like a huge timesink with zero excitement and fun. The other byproduct is that capturing ships means we get depleted crew and have to sail as a fleet of sub par crewed ships. The whole problem with this concept is it detracts from combat and goes for more time sinking ...it isn't immersion its frustration.

so Wait is the active word there....not play..wait

people do realise this means you can't cap enemy pvp ships anymore yeah...because as soon as you pop out of battle you have enemy around you from them saying come help in TS. The whole idea is novel but effectively broken. concept is nice but reality will prove it to be wasted time..... cap a santi in a port battle. Lose 2 of them getting home as they are both undercrewed and surrounded. all this will do is make people not capture anything unless it is an AI trader withing 3 minutes sail of their home ports...

i proposed the same thing with also options for crafting a month before they released "DodgyBank"

ask the council how many months ago we were telling them we should all go black and force the mechanic to change.... some people got upset, some of us were ready to turn pirates months ago.