i think you both misunderstood my point, El Draque and Magnus the Red.
Magnus, what i meant is that in every game, a newborn goes faster cause he makes cheap ships, a veteran goes slowly but has huge ships. till the newborn reaches more or less the stage of the veteran wheb both have huge and powerful ships. But here it's a bit the opposite, captain da vinci made in the same time 100 ships for sure more powerful than my 20 i produced. So as a newborn, i can't expect to reach the level of a veteran if they also increase the gap
i don't say to stop veterans, just to give more realistic opportunities to newborns.
For example the concept of siege that could be linked afterwards with the Fort feature. X fleets merging to attack other fleets.
For example i have 5 friends and we are all newborns, we merge our fleet with 5 sloops each together and we have 25 sloops all together in the port XY, and there we attack a fleet with 5 ships of the line and we plunder it ! of course we will have huge damages, but this will permit to play in squads and to winning. By being more active, more coordinated, ... a newborn can win. While at the moment, in 1vs1 a newborn loses at 99% against a stronger one. And i am not complaining that i lose ! it's normal
just that i don't see other possibility than focusing more on trading ... and in the last day of trade i login less frequently and at the end i play only twice a day, sad for a community game, cause my trade fleets go automatically on the best routes i calculated.
I really wanted to be more aggressive, but my experience here is quite complicated ... i skirmish merchant fleets and usually i loot 10k, then 99% of the times there is a fleet of 5 sotl parked in every port which will plunder me and steal 30k ... so technically i always lose money whenever i skirmish, and i can't hide me outside the map
there is always someone plundering me. Again, i don't complain ! just that i am almost forced to focus on trading than on plundering cause i need to save my money !
El Draque, i never said to make the game communist ! And more trade fleets doesn't necessary mean that you receive fewer attacks. From what i heard from some guild mates, there are some "untouchable" fleets cause nobody wants some problems, so the point is that some fleets plunder everything beyond 2 of danger and even if they increase a lot their danger, nobody plunder them. So the point is that we risk that if i got plundered, i can only pray not to be attacked the next time
i have no other tool to protect me ! and this is the disappointment, that instead of making the game more intersting and inducing people in finding solutions at skirmish, here i see a concept of trade company where a veteran will manage other people fleets (or directly a totally new fleet) and afterwards provide profits back to the shareholders
so at the end i don'^t even have to buy my own ships, i make only a few and if the CEO is plundered i don't care, until he gives me my profit ! and this will induce in a decrease of merchant fleets. so the opposite of what you would like to see.