Schwabbel

At previous pages there was a discussion about ship prizes beeing too high and a small number of ships of the line offerd for sale in the shops. The devs had react at once with this patch. The removal of the doubloons reward for economy missions will lead to a shortage of doubloons at least for trade based crafters, a higher price for doubloons and therefore automatic to higher ship prices (4th rate and above) and a decreasing number of crafted ships of the line. For new players and for not battle specialised people this was a way to get doubloons and take part, but now as the doubloons this people will be gone soon !

I think the problem is the bundling of the ship-boni to the ports and not to the crafter/player. Easiest way would be to install a system analogous to the shiphandling. If you craft a ship you get craftingXP for that shiptype and you can open slots for crafting-books which give boni to the crafted ship. (Technicaly the same as ship handling => code reuse;-) What you get are specialized crafters wich are not bound to ports and clans but to shiptypes and good ships will be available for all. If you want more port battles than remove the combat medal bound permits for the Ships of the line !!! (Why do I need to do PVP to craft a ship ? Thats like you could only become a mechanic, if you have 10 years of driving experience)

Dear developpers, I think you were write the crafting needs a refactoring, but on my opinion this is the wrong direction. For people who want to sail a ship after a 3 clicks - therefore their is a shop ! The huge richness of details belonging to ship crafting was the charme of this game and makes it comfortable not only for doom- but also for anno-players. If you remove the intermediate materials there is no longer any challenge in managing the crafting and every 7-year-old midshipman could handle crafting a Victory. When I walk through the shipyard I could smell the teak planks and see the reflection of my petroleum lamp in the gold of the furnishings. I fear in the future I only smell the the plastic of my keypad and my mouse. A pity, just another software whith a bunch of missed chances. What will be next, a 'Kill-Button' which appears after 1 minute of NPC-battles to decrease the mouse-clicks at sea ?

Dear Developers, why don't you create the same mechanisms with ship experience for crafting as for battle. For each type of ship crafting XPs enable book based knowledge of advanced crafting abilities (for example trim types). So the 20th Bellona will be better than the first because of the gained experience. This would lead to a specialisation of the crafters on 'their' types of ship (as in reality, noone built trader brigs and first rates at the same level) If you use the same mechanisms as for battling (knowledge, books) you could reuse code structures. In a second step built-in upgrdes coud be integrated via special books in this mechansims also.