Ship equip !

You obtain it by buying packs or by attacking other npc and players.
There are 5 grades, common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary.
Each equip has up to 5 attributes. Attack, defense, -gold cost in trades, +turns an hour, ship health, +gold on skirmish, and many more possible scenarios.
All attributes on equip are RANDOM, with a random range from x to x.
So you will have to find the one that fits your needs most.

Equips work per fleet. So 10 fleets = possible 10 equips
Equips can be stolen in pvp.
Equips can be traded freely on market and between players.
Equips not needed can be sold back to game at a loss

This will add a lot if depth, risk but mainly more personality per player.
Maintaining many fleets will be more expensive and risky. But can be rewarding if you can pull it off.
Pirates will have different strategies too, but will require an investment and a potential risk to loose it when being reckless with your ships.

Havnt thought about too many details, just a rough idea.

sounds interesting. With some work I think it would be a good addition.

Like where your mind is on this, Bigtea! A lot has been offered on the subject of future ship type customization, ship specific tech, and even artifacts found through discovery and exploration that would provide a form of what you are suggesting here- all of which I would assume you know. Still waiting to see what comes of all of that.

If you have not looked into those things in the forums yet, I'd be interested to hear more of your thoughts on this subject after checking out some of what has been shared by the community on the subject of ship/fleet customization.

I would be in favor of the general idea as a form of the artifacts for player/guild bonuses that has been made but not as a substitute for more detailed ship or fleet customization. I will try to find the artifact thread later and share it here if someone does not beat me to it.

I like that these can be stolen, i think it has the potential to create action between like minded players. Merchants hunting merchants for merchant equips, pirates hunting pirates for pirate equips. Ect

Assume these would sell in a market similar to ship market.

Dont think you should be able to flat out buy them.
I would prefer that you buy a pack of npc targets.
So for x number of credits you get 5 targets. The targets are randomly assigned to ports. You must find them and defeat them to get the equips. Equips are randomly assigned to the targets. No gaurantee all the tagets will have an equip. But gauranteed a minimum amount spread between the targets. So you may get 1 epic or 1 legendary for finding and fighting all targets. You may get 2 common, 2uncommon, and 1 rare. 1 carried by each target. You may get 3 rare for fighting all 5. Any combination may occur but you will get a minimum return for invested credits.
It would be really cool if you could get equips by completing challenges. Maybe a merchant based cargo movement or profit mission. Solving puzzels, or riddles.
Or a clue based mission that leads you all around the map looking for equips.
Suggest challenges / missions cost either bar, gc or credits depending on the challenge and the more difficult the challenge the more rewarding the equip prizes.

Adding after reading Thalius' Post artifacts might be a good name for these. Although i remeber they had a different suggested use before

There is actually 2 more ideas that is similar that was made before, one by me, another one by someone else (don't remember who).

The mechanics between mine and bigtea is pretty different, but they are similar in the way of what they are, so I don't really care if BigTea or mine is accepted.

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viewtopic.php?f=4&t=188&hilit=pieces+of+eight#p966

William one eye wrote:I like that these can be stolen, i think it has the potential to create action between like minded players. Merchants hunting merchants for merchant equips, pirates hunting pirates for pirate equips. Ect

Assume these would sell in a market similar to ship market.

Dont think you should be able to flat out buy them.
I would prefer that you buy a pack of npc targets.
So for x number of credits you get 5 targets. The targets are randomly assigned to ports. You must find them and defeat them to get the equips. Equips are randomly assigned to the targets. No gaurantee all the tagets will have an equip. But gauranteed a minimum amount spread between the targets. So you may get 1 epic or 1 legendary for finding and fighting all targets. You may get 2 common, 2uncommon, and 1 rare. 1 carried by each target. You may get 3 rare for fighting all 5. Any combination may occur but you will get a minimum return for invested credits.
It would be really cool if you could get equips by completing challenges. Maybe a merchant based cargo movement or profit mission. Solving puzzels, or riddles.
Or a clue based mission that leads you all around the map looking for equips.
Suggest challenges / missions cost either bar, gc or credits depending on the challenge and the more difficult the challenge the more rewarding the equip prizes.

Adding after reading Thalius' Post artifacts might be a good name for these. Although i remeber they had a different suggested use before

The thought behind the fact you can buy then is that the attributes and bonuses are random.
Plus you'd get majority common, some rare and very rarely a epic, legendary.
So you have to sort through hundreds of equips to find the best RNG and bonuses. This would give these equips a decent value to have the perfect RNG. Thus resulting in better bonuses but also more risk because people would want to take it off your hands to use or sell.

RNG generally makes things more fun.
If they were hard to obtain plus RNG it would make the good ones way too expensive.

Maybe a solution would be that you can buy a pack of 5 random ones, but also be able to farm them from npcs.

It would in general require luck and time to get what you're looking for.
A lot of quantity for better quality.

Example would be that maybe a pack of 5 would be 1 mil gold.
Let's say it cost you 250 mil to get a really nice epic or legendary. I can totally see that equip being worth 100-500m gold. Which would be an insane thing to sail around with.

Ships would become a tool but the equips would be what people would be fighting for.

Another potential solution would be that if the equips were strong enough people would need less ships to do same results.
A pirate fleet with crazy equip would be for example 4x stronger. This would allow people to use less ships for attack but also risk more.

Maybe the very powerful equips have also negative bonuses.

Example would be that you can only have 50 ships at sea.
But the equip would make up for it. So a merchant would instead of 1k ships have 50, but they would earn the same gold.
Then you have an option. Either have 1k ships with no risk or 50 with high risk.

It would be easier to manage and also easier to raid a merchant with 50 ships.

There is just so many scenarios this could create which would completely eliminate the idea of more ships is better. But instead more powerful ships.

Wealthy pirates would be hard to beat, but if beaten there would a huge reward. It would be a team effort to take some of these guys down. Almost like a boss fight haha.