[Ship speeds, an adjustment suggestion]

12 minutes ago, Liquicity said:

How is it wrong to say that if you want a 15 knot frigate you can't have white oak or anything similar, and pretty much need all of your perm mod slots and even some regular ones to be +speed?

I said the post that you quoted is wrong, not your post.

You were only off topic:P

[Ship speeds, an adjustment suggestion]

12 minutes ago, Liquicity said:

I'm not trying to defend speed hardcaps lol

Just saying, for a frigate to reach 15 knots you will have to sacrifice a lot

I'm all for percentage caps

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.

[Ship speeds, an adjustment suggestion]

1 hour ago, Liquicity said:

Again, Surprise's base speed is significantly lower compared to the reno, e.g. requires more speed mods (or a lighter wood type) in order to reach the speed

In general, if you see a Frigate is not as fast as you, that's usually a good indicator that he's not set up for full speed / light wood but rather tanky - As you've pointed out, Reno's BR is lower, and small fish are supposed to run from big fish, if they know they're outmatched

If the Frigate is going 15 knots aswell, go give it a try as you know he can't be that tanky after all

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.

[Ship speeds, an adjustment suggestion]

12 minutes ago, Liquicity said:

You can still make a frigates life really bad when in a reno. And dont forget, for a frigate to reach 15 knots you need crappy wood eg. Cedar / cedar and a lot of speed mods while a reno can be teak - white oak and still reach the 15 knots with ease

In fact yesterday I had 2 frigates and 1 pirate frigate running away from a 1v1, while I was in a reno

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. 

[Ship speeds, an adjustment suggestion]

13 minutes ago, rediii said:

I do. Aswell as I remember a Endy meta. Uncatchable ships in your homewaters where you didn't even bother to hunt them. Even less than now

Huntingships will then be limited to 2 ships again. Reno and Endy

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.

[Ship speeds, an adjustment suggestion]

On 3.7.2017 at 10:59 AM, rediii said:

I actually think the speedcap is a good solution.

Without a speedcap everyone would sail again the fastest ships and only them. Right now you have atleast some variation if people want to spend expensive upgrades for ships.

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.

53 minutes ago, rediii said:

that's where you are wrong

to get a suprise to 15kn you need speedpermas. Speedpermas are (atleast on EU server) realy expensive. (several 100k each)

So instead you just take a reno with gaz and sail a cheaper ship.

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.

[Time to hit the Reset Button]

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.

24 minutes ago, Cecil Selous said:

xp-grind is ok I guess

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.

28 minutes ago, Cecil Selous said:

It's true that you don't see that many ships on the free market. But you can always ask someone to craft what you need and want. We need something for this. Like a blackboard. You can insert a crafting job you want to have done. For example: I wan't an Essex, this wood, this planking or refit and maybe these modules. You can deposit mats and gold for the crafter if you want. And if a crafter thinks this is a good job where I can also earn some good gold, he can accept this. But I get off the track.

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.

[Building Ships]

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!

[White oak frame part and planking Agamemnon]

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

[The Lineship 'Problem']

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.

 

43 minutes ago, JollyRoger1516 said:

• To reduce the RvR importance of SOLs the amount of 1st Rate ports needs to be heavily cut. It is no surprise that every nation yearns for 1st Rates if every second port is a 1st Rate port. I'd suggest a lot of these ports to be replaced by 4th rate ports and maybe introduce a new 5th rate port as well. These should be the main activity.  This is probably the biggest problem and the main reason nothing changes about SOLs.
• There needs to be a downward tagging limit as to decrease the effectiveness of SOLs in screening activities. I am not sure as to the possibilities here but the simplest choice would be SOLs can only tag other SOLs (join rules on other battles and counter attacks would be a problem here hence why I am unsure).
• This would fix the same meaning a lineship fleet wouldn't immediately create such a heavy imbalance.
• I genuinely think there still needs to be a reason to take out SOLs so PvE should remain untouched. However loading traders with decent goods mroe reliably and therefore making the fast boarders more useful would surely help to balance this a bit.

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.

2 hours ago, JollyRoger1516 said:

Lineships remain the best money grinders when it comes to PvE combat which in the current economy is a near must have.

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.

[Ship Durability suggestion]

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.

[Demasting too easy?]

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.

["REAL" TRADE BETWEEN PLAYERS]

27 minutes ago, Fenris said:

The game determines the value of money,you seem to forget this. You can not assume that YOUR money is more worth than mine,we all use GAME money.

Means if you do not have enough money on your account in game,like new players,you will not be able to BUY things that you need,but make them REALLY slowly on your own.

And exactly THAT is the cause of PLAYER MADE INFLATION. You will spend a lot of money to craft resources or buy them,and you want your money back by selling your products.

And sellers will demand ridiculous prices.

To prevent THIS, you need to set FIXED prices on selling Contracts,which is BS.No inflation,but also no goods

You see the dilemma?

When there is no ENOUGH GOODS available for all,prices going up, everyone is crafting for his own, or his own CLAN.

Nobody sells anything,but things he can make, and mostly in own nation.

 

On the other hand, if i am able to set a contract where i OFFER goods/Resources(or Money), and DEMAND Goods/Resources(or Money), everyone is SAVING money,which doesnt mean you are not allowed to SPEND it.

You just need to make Contracts VISIBLE for all players in each nation,which can be placed in Free Ports.

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.

 

[Durabilities - hardcore mode]

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..

["REAL" TRADE BETWEEN PLAYERS]

43 minutes ago, Fenris said:

 Money is restrictive in the game because it has no value.

If i have to choose between 50 medium or large carriages, and 100 000 Gold/money, i would always take carriages. The player determines the price of something in the game,when he is selling it, not the "market". Why? Because not ALL NATIONS have same access to ALL GOODS and RESOURCES.

Thats how trade begins.

And some resources you can not buy with money

 

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.

["REAL" TRADE BETWEEN PLAYERS]

51 minutes ago, Fenris said:

Money is limiting my options because i can only DEMAND money for my materials right now. And that is not a good option

You can demand whatever you want for your surplus, even Fir Log, because it COULD save your money and Labour hours, because you don`t know what am i crafting on the other side of the map,and i do not know what are you crafting.

Demanding money does not mean it makes trade easier, its restrictive and does not use the potential of the players.

That is the whole point of another kind of trade.

Nice argumentation...  the question was why is it limiting you when you can "only" demand money for your stuff?

53 minutes ago, Fenris said:

Demanding money does not mean it makes trade easier, its restrictive and does not use the potential of the players.

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.

59 minutes ago, Fenris said:

Btw,you are giving a totally wrong examples of possible trading. I guess nobody would offer 50 Large Carriages for 180 Barrels(LOL?). Why would anyone with 50 functional brain cells do something like that?

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.

1 hour ago, Fenris said:

You can offer 50 Large Carriages also for money,gold,silver,woods,rum,mahogany,bermuda cedar,live oak,coins,WHATEVER YOU WANT.

And what is the point not to use one uniform currency instead?! 

["REAL" TRADE BETWEEN PLAYERS]

14 hours ago, Fenris said:

I think we should be able to CHOOSE not only WHAT are we selling, or BUYING, but also what are we OFFERING.No matter  if selling or buying.

Dont think this is a good idea. Just imagine a market with not only dozens of items, but in addition dozens of different offers per item... We have gold, or money in reality, because it makes trading less complicated. When it was hard to find buyers in the past sometimes, with specified offers it would be much harder.

Also works against competition. When someone puts a expensive contract selling x, you dont have to go cheaper, just choose another "currency". You would basically need to know the actual values for everything to keep an overview. For example someone is selling 50 large carriages for 180 Barrels, and another guy 50 carriages for 1700 Wooden fittings. You own both, now find out whats the better deal. How? You finally calculate the gold value, cause everything uses the same fixed production, and more or less fixed labour costs. 

You sound like money is limiting your trading options, but thats not true. Where is the limitation when i sell my barrels for money, to buy the 50 carriages for money? I need to set more contracts, but this means more competition. When contracts are limiting, ask for mor contracts. 

[Until items in the hold affect speed like cannons, there is no point to chasing human traders]

2 hours ago, Borch said:

I agree that it used to be the case on live servers but on testbed economy is changed tottaly making it absolutely dependand on traders/crafters/miners.

If you will make PvP raiding easier than hauling goods (which is still tes case in my opinion) then traders will be gone from the game. Needless to say that this scenario will result in lowering playerbase (no resorces, no money - no craft - no crafted ships - no new game experience).

What would you propose to somehow help the traders if the cargo weight speed debuff would get to the game?

Dont forget that waters become more save on the other hand. Also when more traders are traveling the same routes, its easier to organise fleets and escorts. Just two LGVs not made of fir will beat a Surprise or Frigate quite easily.

We want more to do in the OW, uncatchable traders dont help with that. Giving traders saver routes instead of motorboats should be the way to go. Its a big difference between beeing able to attack a trader with a risk (balancing), or not beeing allowed to attack (restriction). Instead of denying either trading or hunting in general, we should favour trading in home waters and hunting in less secured waters. 

Btw. thats also the general problem when all ships are able to sail on speed cap using speed mods, nobody can catch anything.

[Limiting SoLs]

Wait for the new eco balancing. With less income, no gold exploits and reworked ship cost balancing, maybe were going to have a nice 3rd rate meta.

For those still not understanding that artificial restrictions are bad for this game, they really are. Restrict first rates from entering ports and the first rate fleets will sit infront of the ports. Restrict the amount of ships per player and people will stack resources instead of ships. This is not solving anything, just shifting the problem.

[Partial removal of fast travel]

Sounds like a good compromise. No whole fleets teleporting into your nations area makes much sense.

Maybe its a better option for privateers to remove "send ship to outpost" for free ports instead?! They capture ships in this area so they dont really need to send ships. For others the effect should be similar.

Removing all "magical" teleports in general would make no sense, as long as "invisible" ships can be delivered. It would bring more ships in the OW, but only free afk sailing cutters. For more OW action ship deliveries need to be removed instead (not saying its a good idea). 

[Should leveling up be revisited?]

The leveling concept isnt a barrier or just ment for learning. A rank also is an achievement. Why important? Because it motivates players. When there is nothing else to do you are always motivated to just open a group to just "grind". Cutting leveling time by half already removed most motivation, but thats not a reason to get rid of leveling, but to make it harsher again. A slow paced sandbox like this needs some long term goals/achievements. 

The meta is important. With lots of 6th rates around e.g. your brig becomes much more useful. Look at first rates for example and why you need to grind max rank atm. Because nearly everybody is max rank and first rates are the PB meta. You could remove XP completely, but the meta would be really boring. The XP system defines a rank distribution, what together with eco defines the possible ship meta. Aiming for diversity of ships/a good meta, a well balanced XP system is key. 

"Grinding" isnt a problem. If grinding means playing the pve part of the game, nobody is forced into it, pvp also grants XP. If grinding means playing the game below max rank, someones understanding of the game is wrong. 

[Re-thinking demasting]

We should think more about accuracy in general, also for general gun balancing. Assume we had more powerful guns with less accuracy. The difference is that damage decreases steadily with distance/smaller target shape. More punch close range and less punch with distance would give tactical opportunities. Dodging damage also becomes much harder close range, increasing the risk. Effective demasting and raking would only be possible close range (<100m) on the other hand.

The problem to balance hulldamage, demasting and raking is that these are 3 seperate victory conditions. When aiming for hull you ignore good raking/mast shooting opportunities, because its not helping enough. Those would need to become so powerful, that raking/demasting alone would be op. To fix the issue we need to connect those conditions/spread damage. When hull damage kills enough crew aswell, raking becomes more useful automatically. When aiming for hull weakens the masts aswell, this also gets connected. Less accuracy is a good way to spread damage on medium distances and to enable high risk high reward tactics close range.

 

[Bring back random elements to crafting]

3 hours ago, Remus said:

Look, we are never going to agree here.

I contend that gold balancing is needed, and so I think do you.

I contend that there is no need whatsoever to 'balance' labour supply, resource supply, hauling times, maximum nunber of buildings or any other crafting limitation I may have omitted, at least not for 'ordianry' production.The balance needed is to provide interest and difficulty so that some players like crafting and others are willing to pay for their services (the two groups of players could be the same people), and this is what drives the economy. Elite ships and builds, such as the current live oak argument, may need very careful balancing indeed in one or more of the areas I listed, but these are special cases.

I have absolutely no idea why you seem to think it desirable for labour hours to be a limiting factor but 'resource availiability or production capacity is not ment to be a limiting factor.' Labour hours aren't either. Why on earth have a PvP ship combat game where players are prevented from building ships to fight with?

Gold has far more purpose than ship productioin. I'd hazard a guess that more gold is exchanged for random drop upgrades than for crafted ships.

And no, of course a situation of inflation and overabundant labour supply isn't fine. But it's only inflation that would be the problem, not the overabundant labour supply.

Anyway, we clearly have either a fundamental difference of opinion, a problem of communication or both and I see no point in continuing this discussion. If you reply I'll read it but I won't respond.

Im sorry if i offended you, it wasnt intended. But this isnt much about opinions. If you claim nonesense and then try to defend your believes for all means, ignoring points, twisting arguments and searching for discrepancies, its going to be harsh. 

Look, i never said anybody should be prevented from playing the game how he wants to. I explained why labour needs balancing and why it makes sense to restrict production capacities by labour. The difference to only gold is that labour is independent from playtime (and gold). A rich crafter or clan is not able to pull out more ships than others.

Economy is driven by demand. Its the same issue you have with gold sinks. Not the production is important, but the amount of goods needed to be replaced that dictates it. Thats why gold balancing needs to be based on consumption goods needed to be replaced. Labour is seperate, it cant generate gold or gold sinks. And you finally agreed on that above, so we can end it here nevertheless.

You know that rare upgrades all stay forever? You should inform yourself how money sinks work, if you dont trust my words.

[Bring back random elements to crafting]

46 minutes ago, Remus said:

Well, we're never going to agree here either. Inflation is specifically about gold. If gold is overabundant, whatever is in short supply goes up and up in price. I've been looking at labour, but it also applies to rare drops and other things as well. If labour is overabundant, crafting the same ship doesn't consume more and more labour over time; if oak is overabundant, ships don't start needing more planks to make. Gold is special.

Then call it overabundant supply if you have problems with the word inflation, but stick to the point. When labour is overabundant, its value is decreasing, and it looses its function as a limitating factor. Thats the point, because gold also lost that function. Youre talking about other limiting factors, but resource availiability or production capacity is not ment to be a limiting factor. Those would intervene much too late.

Things are much more simple in the game, because the only purpose of gold and labour is ship production. In terms of gold it is no difference to own gold value to gather resources for 100 ships, to own resources for 100 ships, or to own 100 ships. 

You cant serioulsy tell that a situation of inflation and overabundant labour supply would be fine. You cant fix broken gold balancing by breaking up labour balancing as well. In any rational way this makes absolutely no sense, and you can easily proofe that it isnt working that way. 

 

[Bring back random elements to crafting]

11 hours ago, Remus said:

Labour inflation - now what on earth is that? Labour generation is fixed, labour for each recipe is fixed and the amount that can be stored is capped, in this game as in every other I've played. Okay, NA effectively allows infinite storage with labour contracts, but who will use these if labour plentiful, and neither of us like LCs in any case.

What you seem worried about is labour devaluation. Currently LCs can sell for over 500k. If labour were plentiful they would become almost worthless. What is wrong with this this? Eco won't crash unless players either don't want new player-made ships or they cannot get the gold to pay for them.

Inflation is a process of devaluation, not specifically for gold. When we generate much more LH each day than needed to be replaced, low demand and high supply would decrease value. The amount that can be stored by yourself is limited, but you can store infinite labour within crafted items, unless gold is restricting you. 

Thats the difference between the actual situation and the example (not ment to reflect the actual situation). When we have equally too much labour and gold, nothing is limiting production, labour and gold both loose value equally. But the actual eco is much more inflated by gold, labour is limiting, thats why prices are high and the market isnt flooded. (Probably also because its dead anyway.)

Im only worried about, that you might just not want to understand. Your point is that reducing labour cost/increasing production rates works as a gold sink. Stacking resources, materials and ships is no gold sink for two reasons. You can trade those items back into gold, and they never rot/keep value forever. You can see it as different currencies, trading one for another 1v1 doesnt sink anything. Yes you payed the npc, but it doesnt matter if everybody is rich of gold, or rich of ships and therefore gold and labour, economy and crafting become meaningless. Eco is "crashed", when it becomes meaningless, when players stop caring about profit.

11 hours ago, Remus said:

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.

Well, than you must be ignorant.

11 hours ago, Remus said:

Ships bought from NPCs in the shop or captured off NPCs. I've only got three or four player-made ships myself, all crafted by myself; all the rest are NPC ships.

I ment competetive high quality ships, not grey ships or one dura ships you cant use with mods.

11 hours ago, Remus said:

I don't understand what you mean. I don't mind assuming resources don't require labour

Then i misunderstood.

11 hours ago, Remus said:

In any case, I can only ever say that gold per labour hour is too low,

That isnt helpful. x/y=1 has infinite solutions, i cant say if labour balancing, gold balancing, or both are causing the issue. You need to estimate x or y, and that would finally mean estimating the amount of labour or gold that needs to be replaced. 

Also that you can calculate a ratio doesnt mean that labour is affecting gold balancing. You can calculate ratios for anything.