Stop Balancing ships and start balancing the game itself in other ways around the ships.

[Destraex]

I always see talk of balancing ships with regard to this game because people are so used to all the other MOBA\MMORPG games on the market. I would like to suggest that balance is boring and leads to boring gameplay that is much more akin to playing sports than fighting a war.

I keep saying that the ships need historical thicknesses, armament and all the rest of it according to how much planking they used and type of wood etc. 

THEN they need to be balanced in game in other ways. For example:

1) Ship cannot be dry docked for repair in most ports - connie

2) Ship replacement parts or time taken to repair cool down harder to find so that she remains in a persons dock rather than at sea for longer after a battle

3) Ship consumes more supplies at sea 

4) Ship is subject to national missions and therefore cannot just sail around picking off targets as an OP ship. If she is sailed against these orders then the captain will become a pirate. This means that people will not sail them as often because they will have to do national missions because they are national ships in a big navy first. This of course still favours those with buckets of time on their hands. I guess paying an exorbitant bribe should be able to circumvent these missions, if the person is a member of a clan the bribe will go up correspondingly to the active members in that clan. Leaving a clan has a cooldown of 1 month for re-entry. This starts to get really complex. 

5) Take all ships considered game breaking but historically accurate and put them in an admiralty pool to be distributed by the admiralty as naval commands. Hero ships if you will. These hero commands should be rare drops and very expensive to maintain once again according and in proportion to active clan membership.

6) Ships taking on these ships get triple points and gold for damage. Because they will damage less. In this way smaller ships will be more efficient to make money and the captains will be more willing to face OP but historically accurate ships.

I could go on and on. But in the end as you can see their are many other ways than nerfing a ship to balance the game. You don't nerf the death star!!!! That is not fun that is just boring like all the other MOBA balance games out their.

[The Spud]

I think the devs are trying to find a balance between realism and gameplay. And the stuff you mentioned would benefit the "immersion" of the game, but it would not benefit the gameplay in any way (unless your thing is realism).

All ships have their own characteristics, their pro's and their cons, and I would agree that they have brought these differences closer together for gameplays sake. If some ships stood out significantly, that was compensated by the fact they only had one of those ships in service. In this game if one ship stands out in its class, you will only see that one type of ship.

For example the ingermanland is probably one of the oldest ships in this game, I can't imagine this being so close to the constitution as it is in game. The nerfing of upgrades made it actualy more difficult to make for example tanky but fast ships.

 

[Thonys]

well a docking repair slot is an option for building in the game

you need additional build skills in the port for doing stuff (skill system)

a foundry for example 

and a dock 

sail factory (quiality of sail repair)

(repair is always @85-99 % < 100%)

and so on

now everything is for free ,not realistic also

 

Edited December 27, 2016 by Thonys

[Wesreidau]

Consuming rum for a slight OW speed bonus would create new dynamics of rum production and consumption, shipping and crafting. Ships would then have their crew size carrying a certain maintenance cost if you wanted optimal (pvp-ready) speeds.

[The Spud]

If you implement extra gold/time sinks to acquire or improve basic things in this game, it will have a negative effect on the majority of NA players.

If you need rum for speed bonus, you just know nobody will sail without rum on board. Just like nobody is sailing around without the light ship, frigate or line ship master perk on. It won't add anything extra, it'll be one more thing added on the basic battle set up list. And for most of the NA players it will just be one more time/money sink to do PvP, and it might just be that one time/money sink thats just too much for them. PvP is allready a loss or break even most the time. 

I do think there are a good number of people out there like you guys who would realy like added realism, no TP, no increased OW speed, authentic gun layouts, nation specific ships, etc. and I hope after release the devs put some time in making a seperate server for people who would realy like this as this game has the potential to be a realism game as well. But I think for the majority of players its not adding anything to the game in the contrary.

[Wesreidau]

Nobody will sail without rum on board, sure. Everyone will have an interest in sugar ports, rum crafting and shipping, however. It becomes the game's petroleum and a huge economic engine. It isn't a gold sink, because the money goes to other players. It isn't a time sink, because players earn other player's money when they make it.

For all the casual crafters like me, its great. I spent a long time making medkits before the NPCs started throwing them out. People will happily spend time making these consumables. It generates merchant traffic and merchant traffic generates piracy. Its a commodity being shipped so its easy to liquidate once you stole it.

[Baptiste Gallouédec]

Coming back to the op: historical data for ships i'm all for this !

About your balancing suggestions, i think at this stage of developpement, your ideas are too far from the actual gameplay.

Except the rewards buff for the ships the less efficients maybe.

I could think about making repair kits requiring costly cafting the more you progress in class (basic ones for 7th up to exceptionnal qualitiy repair kits for 1st rate for exemple) and suppress port generated kits at the release.

 

 

[Destraex]

I guess with real fleets they went with what they had and could not simply build the perfect ship of the day because all others would not be competitive. Perhaps we need a system where people cannot simply build replacements so quickly and only own one of each ship type at a time. This way it would force people to use the non-perfect ships. Say a 4 week cool down on SOLs lost. You can build one and dock it but not sail it until the manditory replacement time is up. In the mean time you have to sail an alternative right? I dunno... how else do you make inferior but interesting ships worthy.

[Wesreidau]

Every time your suggestion says "force people to X", you need to reconsider it. Force, no. Encourage? Yes. Like this rum thing. You don't have to do it, you just should do it if you want to be optimal for OW speed. We shouldn't force people to be unable to buy a dozen ships of the line, we should make it expensive to keep ships of the line. What if line ships took up two slots in an outpost? What if ships slowly took damage rotting in harbor? You could still have all the line ships you wanted, it would just be a money sink.