Fargo

Sorry, but these ideas of BR based restrictions are nonesense. Groups of players outnumbering you is not a problem but a viable tactic. It just becomes annoying when people only use specific gank ships, start to run from every even fight, and nobody is able to catch those groups. To prevent this, think about mechanics that arent favouring those ships and tactics. Wood types are imbalanced. As a result fast ships loose all combat capability and there are no other choices. Laser guided sternchasers let you escape easily with those ships. OP repairs on one hand allow you to escape very easily, on the other hand they compensate your hull weakness while youre aiming for crew and boarding. Too powerful boarding mods also increase efficiency of those ships. Etc.

Either description, or boni are the wrong way round. F11ed it already.

I would remove all repairs from the battle inctance. Since we have repairs its a very simple system that gets abused. Invulnerability while sailing with 0 hull until you repair. Imbalanced repair mods. Run and repair tactics now.... Like OP says, when you beat a fast ship, he simply turns away and repairs sails. He can even keep you in battle for 10 mins to repair hull again. When you simply increase the timers, such fights would last even longer. I recently watched a PB stream and the amount of armour ships are able to repair with mods is still ridiculous. I guess repair mods still increase total percentages. While many are complaining about the actual speed meta, note that the actual repair system increases the importance of speed by alot. If repairs, then with a serious drawback. Make repairs only possible in battle sails e.g., many problems would be solved. Also repair mods should not relate to the total HP. When 25% is default, a +10% mod should make it 27,5%, not 35%. Also repairs should not be able to repair anything back to 100%. Repairs in battle were alway improvisations not able to reach the original quality. It could be capped at 90% for example. It would make sense to regenerate a small amount of crew and cannons over time, but not simply back to 100% via hull repair or "repair crew" button.

Youve seen that i made this topic to think about a fair victory mark system, not rewarding alts?;) Comment on it, or let it be, but posts like this arent helpful. This suggestion is about a fair way to distribute Victory Marks within a nation, to promote PvP and RvR for the nation by rewarding players doing PvP and RvR. How conquest points work, or how many marks each nation should get, is a different topic i think. Its not contradicting, cause its not ment to force you into crafting. Reputation from those ships should be very minor compared with what you get from PvP and RvR. Its only ment to promote the shipbuilders to craft more for the nation.

I think the idea of rewarding each player of a nation depending on the nations success is genius, cause it could promote PvP, RvR, and acting for the nation in general. But just handing x Victory Marks to each player is way to simple... Its not fair, cause some players did more, some did less, some did nothing, and some are alts. Its not rewarding individual actions. Players are promoted to join successful nations, not to do more PvP and RvR. Especially for new players free tradable marks equal lots of free money. How it could work: 1: Measure individual effort. Keep it simple. Take the kill counter, and extend it to "amount of BR sank/captured in PvP". Participation in a port battle provides extra boni. Maybe call it "National reputation points". Optional reputation gain for specific PvP could be increased, for example within your nations area (coast guard gets rewarded), or while a PB is active to reward screeners more. 2: Multiply Victory Mark costs and rewards. You cant hand out 0.25 marks, multiply all numbers by 100. 3: Bind marks, Permits and BPs to the character. The goal is to reward individual effort, not the rich guys and their alts sitting in port. Also people shouldnt be able to sell their marks or items only using marks, cause thats destroying the income-cost-balancing. It would make sense that ships including a permit cant be traded aswell. 4: Remove permits from shipbuilding. The current system only works with tradable marks. In general it would make most sense that each player cares for his own permits, not the shipbuilder selling the ships. Add an additional slot to place the permit in, without permit the ship cant leave port. To trade the ship, players need to delete the permit. 5: Fair distribution of marks. The winning nation gains a pool of 100 marks per active player (14 days). Each individual player gains Victory Marks = [player reputation / average reputation] * 100. I think other nations should be rewarded aswell with less marks per player, but thats another topic. 6: Balancing. 7: Think it further. Maybe reward economic actions aswell, to promote more people to craft for the nation. Each ship you crafted e.g. could grant a tiny amount of reputation when someone else (from your nation) sinks someone with it. I think we had this with XP already, did we? Should be easy to implement then. Tell me if i missed something, if you see problems, or if you got other/further ideas. Thanks for reading!

1. Remove unnecessary/unreasonable mechanics: Why speedcap instead of reasonable ship/wood/upgrade/skill balancing? What is the current hostility system doin positive? Why marks instead of reasonable cost-income-balancing, or a reputation system (similar to marks, but reputation cant be traded)? 2. Improve ROE and escape mechanics: Why are ships still spawning and escaping right next to each other? Why is defensive tagging possible? Why are revenge ganks possible again? Why do we need BR limits to keep ships from starting unwinnable battles? 3. We dont need reduced ship cost yet, but a functional economy. Ship value/cost is affected by: Not existent material market. Why are people able to self supply everything? Rare upgrades. Why arent upgrades player crafted consumption goods using availiable/craftable resources? People cant buy their own permits. Why force shipbuilders to buy the permit for ships they are going to sell? Ships crafted with goods from the market include ~20% fee. Why are auctionhouselike fees punishing us for using the open market? Rare/expensive and imbalanced wood for frames and planks. Why are only 1-3 out of 9 wood types competetive for combat ships, why are those woods limited by NPC production? No trade with player related goods. Why is trading seperated from player economy via npc trade goods, instead of e.g. having different production rates and costs for different regions?

I said the post that you quoted is wrong, not your post. You were only off topic:P

The example you quoted was just bad and wrong. Reno still has an advantage in turn rate. There is a reason to sail a reno over a frig, but compared with stronger and similar turning ships, like surprise in this case, there isnt. Sure as a low budged hunter without need for upgrades, but thats not balancing. No ship should have a role like this.

Again, the higher base speed of the reno cant compensate its weaknesses. And if it could, it still would be a weird system. Why not make the reno slower and tankier by default then?! You wont find arguments in favour of a speedcap. Instead of a speedcap you could give all cappable ships equal base speed, and adjust their hull strenght according to actual balancing. It would be exactly the same situation, but nobody would get to a weird idea like this. Strenght of a Surprise and a Reno might fit their BR, but we dont get variation that way. Lower BR ships need specific strenghts to give them a use. Like ships of different classes. You use 5th rates over 4th rates for speed and turnrate. It needs to be the same within a class. When all 4th rates only differ in hull strenght, there would be simply one best ship.

Ofcourse you can beat it in a reno, but thats unimportant. You can beat a frigate in a snow with enough skill difference, but this has no meaning for ship balancing. The point is that you can do it in a surprise even better, while it does nothing worse. Imagine you should duel an equally skilled player, why should you currently choose the reno over a surprise? Even a teak/wo reno has weaker armour than a teak/bermuda surprise, the surprise is faster over the whole sailing profile, has +6(4) guns per broadside and more chasers. Your only advantage is that you can pick 1-2 more non speed upgrades. The reno also isnt ment to be as powerful as the surprise, its not the same BR.

I havent really played anymore when we got the endy, so maybe thats true. Changed stats for those ships with the wipe? The renomee became weaker, but i cant say if this happened with the wipe or before. Its not a problem to see specific ships in specific roles, ofcourse hunters use fast ships at best with chasers. But these ships need to be balanced when it comes to combat or other ueses. Thats not a reason to give all ships the same speed. And its not changing much. Now the surprise became the best hunter, cause it was a very good allrounder before. Now its a very good allrounder as fast as the ships build for speed, even faster upwind.

Either you do proper ship/wood/upgrade balancing, or you set artificial restrictions like this to avoid it... Thats just bad game design, and lazyness. I dont see any argument in favour of a speedcap. It makes no sense when you think about it. What was the problem before? I dont remember a renommee meta. Look how weak the reno is because of its speed, or how bad the endymion sails. There is no use for these ships anymore, besides beeing cheap throwaway ships. I dont see variation, i see uncatchable surprises everywhere. In case only renos would be used, you would just nerv its stats... but no need for a speedcap. Ship balancing seems not too bad, just nerv those stackable upgrades. Every other game has mechanics to reduce boni when you stack them. When ships are still too fast, reduce base speed for all vessels, or fast wood boni. Yes its cheaper to speedcap them, but thats not balancing. Youre on the wrong way here. You cant balance a ship in terms of gameplay by making it cheap. Thats like saying an OP upgrade isnt OP, cause its rare. Not true. When i want to invest in a good ship inc. upgrades, i should have the choice to pick a renommee or endymion. I currently can use more upgrades for turning or so, cause i dont need that much speed upgrades, but this cant compensate the weakness of those ships. They are build for speed, not to be a good allrounder. Maybe its working to build a very tanky endymion and speedcap it, but how stupid is that? When the difference base speed - speedcap defines how tanky you can build a ship, you would simply make it slower and tankier in terms of base stats. A fast connie would probably still be stronger and better.

When people can pay twice as much and more for upgrades than for a 5th rate itself, ships are definitely not too expensive. And again, durability has nothing to do with ship cost. One dura is most reasonable and we should be super happy that devs didnt hear on the majority talking against it neither having any clue what theyre talking about, nor a single valid argument. Upgrades should be consumption goods crafted by players, to generate an upgrade market and make them much cheaper and accessable. Good upgrades can use more resources or labour, so they become more expensive this way. Could also someone explain why most important logs need to be excluded from player production? This will always cause overproduction, shortcuts and weird pricing, cause its not dynamic. Assume we even can successfully balance it, it would only be balanced for actual player counts and ship consumption. Upgrade power level is still way too high in my opinion, and when they dont want to change this upgrades atleast need to be accessable for anyone. Making such important items rare cant work. Overall balancing is also a problem, using a fast wood build forces me for example to use all speed upgrades. Otherwise slower builds with speed upgrades would get to the same speed while beeing better in any other aspect. Personally i like to optimise my ships, so i wont use many ship without good upgrades for PVP. And ofcourse im not taking much risk with a ship that has two times its value in upgrades equipped, while i dont even have access to new upgrades. Then PVP mostly results in chasing or running, cause ROE allows battles to open without fights to happen. Even if people have good chances of winnig they run, and when they get picked up one after another and half of them escaped already chances became 0 and as the attacker you wasted time chasing for a boring fight and poor rewards. PVP is risk, and this needs to be rewarded. We should atleast increase marks from pvp by x3 to motivate people a little more. That cheap ships and economic easy mode, PVP just for fun, is not resulting in more PVP got proofed pre wipe when everybody owned everything. Making paints or special ships accessable only by PVP, some kind of special reward is needed. Is it okay that 90% are max rank is the question. A healty rank distribution would help with problems like frist rate only PBs and would give ranks more meaning, make high ranks special. No, we need a working market. When you want more ship supply, you need more people selling materials. Either their is no mat supply, or mats are super expensive cause there is no competition. We should do "professions" to stop people from self supplying, and a fee system that doesnt punish you for not bypassing the market. Also crafters having to use the permits for crafting is a stupid mechanic. They have to buy expensive marks, while people wouldnt bother to use their own marks for the permit. A connie itself is worth 500k, but currently you need to put it in the shop for 760k+10%, 850k. The only option is to bypass the market and let people buy the permit for you.

Remus guide is pretty good, but its a guide for self supplying. As a shipbuilder with the goal to sell ships, maximise profit and supply the market, you only want to use your labour for the ship itself. This way you can craft about 3-4 times more ships. More XP, and more profit. Youre also helping the contract based market alot not doin self supply. All resources can be bought via contract for pretty much the same cost as harvesting them yourself and often below, dont waste gold in production buildings! When you got some gold to invest in something, start to buy materials you need from the market. It can take a while for material contracts to fullfill, so start buying before you run out of mats. When contracts dont work, maybe team up with someone who crafts materials for you, or buy the resources and pay random people for crafting the mats. Its important to know for what prices you can buy materials for, depending on the prices you can sell ships for. With fixed resource harvesting cost you can calculate a labour value for any crafted good. When ships sell for 100g/lh, buy your materials for 90g/lh. This is where you make profit. When youre selfsupplying, youre only selling your labour for a certain amount. But this way each material included in your ship gains you a little margin. Not much, but it adds up. You can use simple lists like this: https://www.docdroid.net/58eQDoN/price-table.pdf.html, to check for what prices you can buy for. This is a very basic one though. Always watch the ship markt and what ships people use. Compare prices to see what ships are currently selling for good profit, and what ships are selling fast. When a ship is not supplied, and you see people using this ship, it probably sells well. Traders lynxes are well supplied in our capital e.g., but not traders brigs. I crafted one earlier today, and it already sold. But e.g. dont craft traders snows even if the market is empty, when you dont see anybody using it. It might be just a bad ship, what is true in that case. Dont craft "trash" ships. Combat ships should always be made of teak frames, while the best planks are whiteoak, sabicu and bermuda. Teak/bermuda is a good pvp speed build, but on a ship that already is very fast (renommee e.g.) it doesnt make sense, cause there is a speedcap. Use sabicu only when you dont have access to whiteoak. Even when you need to buy whiteoak for a high price, as long as your ships sell for an accordingly high price, youre fine. Good luck and have fun!

There is a multiplier for planks on all ships. Its 1,9 for whiteoak.

You have to look at both sides of the coin. First rates are quite expensive, but PB ships also dont sink currently. Our nation had maybe 1 PB each 3 days, not a single one was defended, not a single ship was lost in the PB itself. Only when you loose so many PB ships, that it becomes too inefficient to keep up a first rate production, 3rd and second rates would be produced. People just got all time to build an aga fleet, and a first rate fleet afterwards. All those artificial restrictions will never be a good solution. Even the devision between 4th rate and 1st rate battles was supposed to be only temporary (to test 4th rates) and should be removed again. Suggestion: Improve hostility/use another PB system, to increase the amount of PBs happening. Remove 4th rate PBs, so more 1st rates are used and lost. Maybe change the three circles, and make it the major goal again to destroy the enemy fleet or port defenses. When the PB frequency stays low, firstrates need to be even more expensive. When PBs allowing first rates happen only once a week, then a firstrate might need to consume a week of labour. Cost needs to be balanced after losses to keep those ships special and rare. If possible make loosing a port, or RvR in general more meaningful, so nations have better reasons especially to defend. With an ROE that results in a battle after an ow attack happens, we wouldnt even need strict BR limitations. Some 4th rates attacking a first rate fleet would just result in the loss of those 4th rates. On the other side a larger screening fleet would be able to take down a few firstrates, to send in a few fire ships or to delay the fight long enough. -> More defense opportunities for nations with less powerful fleets. Repairs are limited, especially on the ow, so even damaging the enemy fleet means something. Agree. Line ships should have high upkeep cost, to make grinding PVE not that much more profitable than it probably is. I think repair cost is the only possible variable, and it could increase massively for those ships. When you earn 200k per fleet loosing half your hull, 100k to repair in the harbour, 120k to repair with hullrepairs.

Youre missing that a 2 dura ship would cost twice as much, unless youre changing balancing aswell, but thats a different talk. So nothing would change, just the access to ships would be more difficult, cause i always need to buy two ships at once. We can discuss about ship cost balancing, but thats hard to tell just 2 weeks after wipe.

What about decreasing the hitbox size, atleast in height, basically deviding the mast into more segments? So to demanst i need to focus on a shorter mast section, it remains a valid option but requires more aim skill. Just an idea.

The game determines production cost for resources, not the gold value. This is highly dependant on player income/playtime and playstyle. No inflation is simply caused when people sink less ships/money out of the market than income generates. Its usually a slow process and always happening. To prevent high inflation, you need optional money sinks. Like offering paints or other cosmetic items for gold. Sellers can only demand rediculous prices, when enough people are willing to pay rediculous prices. This requires enough people to own rediculous amounts of money, inflation. Then when people demand resources/material instead of money, why should they suddenly offer fair deals and not rediculous prices?! It makes no sense. Its no difference to demand 100gold, or resources worth 100gold. Its has no advantage to safe gold, but to give away items of the same value instead. The only purpose of gold is to buy stuff.

What exacty are the reasons 1 dura isnt going to work? As often made clear in the 1 dura discussion: Its not a change of ship cost balancing. When ships turn out to be too expensive, we can decrease costs/increase incomes. The only issue i see is ship transport/removal of ship delivery. In the past we could transport up to 5 ships at once, even more with fleets. I think ship deliveries are necessary between outposts with 1 dura ships, but i might be wrong. But thats no reason to increase durabilities either, only to eable deliveries again..

Are you talking about the live server and gold exploits?! Forget about it, money will be valuable again. If i have to choose between 50 carriages and 100k gold, i look at the market. It tells me the actual labour value, then i can determine a fair price for carriages and make a decision. No sellers dont determine the prices directly. Yes you can set your prices however you want, even give stuff away for free or super expensive. But if you act sensible aiming for profit, you need to stick to the market. Each nation has its own market, different access to resources means different supply and different prices. But thats not allowing sellers to determine prices?! It enables long trade runs to be profitable, while you might be able to buy stuff cheap that has low supply in your home market. All resources are produced using gold, unless i missed something. For other currencies, like marks, there will be an exchange rate.

Nice argumentation... the question was why is it limiting you when you can "only" demand money for your stuff? Ofcourse it does, how should it be restrictive?! With money i can buy/sell everything, with items i need to find a trade partner offering exactly what i need, demanding exactly what i offer. This is restricting. Probably people wouldnt even use the direct offer/demand contracts unless you remove money, because its so much easier to find someone to trade. Thats my point, you look at the pure numbers and it tells you nothing. 50 large carriages have roughly the same value as 180 barrels (for testbed), the trade would be totally fair. And what is the point not to use one uniform currency instead?!