Improving the game experience

[Ghost]

The risk in using big ships is not only in the possibility of loosing them but also in in having Levi's cast on them after a raid.

Some of us prefer not to raid for ships but rather for the gold coin the larger traders carry, casting two or more 2 HN's. Smaller raiding ships are used due to the risk of Levi's being cast which would zero any profits.

Port blockades or attacks would be an ideal use for MOW's or SOTL's, also as escort ships to trading fleets.

Perhaps increasing conflict between nations would be a nice way to do this and reduce boredom. This is a rough idea which may need some more thought:
1)Reduce the tax earnings nations get from the port population alone and increasing tax earnings through trade ships selling and buying at certain ports. This could force larger nations to compete for profitable ports through blockades and constant attacks on trade fleets.

You could also play around with the relation of port population levels to the ability of traders to sell at certain ports, forcing more active port management. Smaller port population would mean less goods being sold or bought therefore less tax income.

2) There seems to be a mismatch between guild & nation loyalties. One guild may have players from several nations. How about having the guilds within nations? For example: A Spanish player can only choose between guild A, B or C which consist of Spanish players or create his or her own within that nation. Strong nations would be able to coordinate their guilds to the benefit of the nation.

Smaller nations could align themselves to a larger nation, perhaps agreeing to send their fleets to certain ports securing a small percentage of the trade taxes or even discounts on trade. This might be a way for nations that don't hold ports to increase their treasury. Alternatively nations assisting others in blockades or wars could be rewarded with direct payments to the treasury.

[Maha]

Guild based trade buffs that has to be earned by the guild through competition.
Each week these buffs are granted to the winning guilds.
The competition is focussed on skirmish wins and losses.
A guild gets 2 points per skirmish win and loses 1 point for a defeat.

When the buffs are significant enough to compete for, the amount of skirmishes will increase and new defensive strategies developed.

Will this lead to reuse of MoW's? Not sure, but with better defended fleets, the attack fleets need to become stronger as well.

[Slindur]

With what Maha said, that will lead to less fleet diversity and not more. People would only want the better ships to defend their ships with, and the less valuable fighting ships would be less used (i.e. howker).

I think that Shadowood (guild based NPC fights) and Haron (port blockades and wars) said are ways to get the big guns out there. Make it so that once a ship is in the blockade, it is basically like it is in a marina as a defense from voodoo. It cannot get buffed from voodoo, but it cannot also have bad voodoo cast on it. This also would be an incentive for the attacking fleets to bring their big guns to combat the MoWs in the blockade or port defense and to Bless them to fight the other big guns. These ideas would help get the MoWs back in the waters of Avonmora, but they would not help for diversity of tactics and use of ships.

The main issue that I see with ship diversity is that ships are used either for fighting ability, cargo capacity, speed, or cost (to be able to have large #s of ships/fleets sailing and not pay as much for tail ships). There are 19 ships types currently, and with only those aspects being relevant, there are only a few ships that are worthwhile for your needs. So for trading, you will see howkers and LMMs mostly. For traders that have been raided a lot you might see more war/flag galleons. For fighters, you see cutters, frigates, and some capital ships. To see other ships out there, there needs to be a thing that they are best at. Some voodoo cards help the galleons, but that is not enough to really have players want to use them. If diversity is a goal, then there needs to be some more diverse benefits or reasons to use different fleets. Until then, you might keep seeing players use the same fleet configurations (and sometimes the same names of fleets) because it makes sense to do so.

Slindur

[Most Lee Harmless]

Agreed : some ships do have a 'special ability' : the brig, for example, which is reqd for RFA & EC to counter Swarm of Worms and auto-repair damage : other types get favored by certain voodoo : the frigate is beloved of Advanced Piracy and so finds a natural place in the pirates fleets. It would be good to see other types find a more specific role or voodoo buff and thus become more widely used.

[Sebena]

With what Maha said, that will lead to less fleet diversity and not more. People would only want the better ships to defend their ships with, and the less valuable fighting ships would be less used (i.e. howker).

I think that Shadowood (guild based NPC fights) and Haron (port blockades and wars) said are ways to get the big guns out there. Make it so that once a ship is in the blockade, it is basically like it is in a marina as a defense from voodoo. It cannot get buffed from voodoo, but it cannot also have bad voodoo cast on it. This also would be an incentive for the attacking fleets to bring their big guns to combat the MoWs in the blockade or port defense and to Bless them to fight the other big guns. These ideas would help get the MoWs back in the waters of Avonmora, but they would not help for diversity of tactics and use of ships.

The main issue that I see with ship diversity is that ships are used either for fighting ability, cargo capacity, speed, or cost (to be able to have large #s of ships/fleets sailing and not pay as much for tail ships). There are 19 ships types currently, and with only those aspects being relevant, there are only a few ships that are worthwhile for your needs. So for trading, you will see howkers and LMMs mostly. For traders that have been raided a lot you might see more war/flag galleons. For fighters, you see cutters, frigates, and some capital ships. To see other ships out there, there needs to be a thing that they are best at. Some voodoo cards help the galleons, but that is not enough to really have players want to use them. If diversity is a goal, then there needs to be some more diverse benefits or reasons to use different fleets. Until then, you might keep seeing players use the same fleet configurations (and sometimes the same names of fleets) because it makes sense to do so.

Slindur

In most cases you are right but recently with spanish galleons tech I see people using galleon ship types for fighting (flag and war) and TG as merchant ship. You'll see some players having brigs due the card so following your string of thought to get diversity in ship used maybe make trade ships like merchantmen,galleon,large fluyt,fluyt bringing extra earning for certain resource for example large fluyt brings 1 gc up if it sells food. Certain war ship bringing something extra from battle either plunder income or certain buff aggainst other ships (I believe someone proposed it) Sloop of war having 3% more damage dealt to frigate for example and having let's say brigatine doing some extra damage to flag galleons and Brig of War extra damage to SotL.... or frigate having buff aggainst MoW. Having MoW sailing gives you 20% plunder or buff in damage (not stackable) to all ships... This way pirates would keep MoW sailing others would want protect their MoW and it would bring other mighty fleets.

[Most Lee Harmless]

I wonder if there is any mileage in bringing in relative fleet speeds as a factor in battle : for example, the cutter is 'Very Fast' and, realistically, if pursued by a lumbering slow warship it would skip away unharmed, being able to stay well beyond range of even the most accurate and powerful guns. So, to my mind, as the Age of Sail was so dependent on ship speed, and tactics were based on gaining and keeping the weather guage, a faster fleet should have the chance to fully evade any attack upon it. As we have an evade chance in skirmish, why not bring that possibility into other fleet actions too? If it was weighted to include relative fleet speeds, so much the better. A Bow/brig fleet should not generally be able to run down a sloop/sow/cutter fleet unless it catches it totally unawares : equally, a BoW/brig fleet would invariably run down a LMM/howker fleet : let's have that reflected in game.

[Donald Trump]

I honestly see no need to improve game experience via ships.

People aren't making em because they are scared of losing em. And sorry but if you just keep patching it so no one can lose em; that shuts out an entire game play style that this game is modeled after. I dislike some of these new additions, because they have been paraded by players who are clearly one sided merchants.

And that is why there are less pirates than merchants drastically. Fall of ZomB, PK, FoX. All their pirates are down or simply not plundering anymore.

This is basically the logic I know players like Wolfie will bring up:

"You know that people are using less high end war fleets, because Pirates steal em so if the game favors merchants, then merchants will make more war ships which means pirates can defleet more ships."

Well that is just stupid because there will be no more pirates if the game mechanics keep going in this direction.
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I say there needs to be a balance, and since there are 100 merchants to every pirate, clearly things aren't balanced how they should be.

[William one eye]

If merchants used more escorts or had more defense ships in their fleets and used Royal Auxiliary, these stronger ships would be required to perform raids. so you could encourage merchants to upgrade

I agree special abilities for Sotls and Mow are also a good idea.

one i can think of is harpoons - perhaps this costs extra att points, so instead of you standard 60 att range - SOTLS and MOW now have somewhere between 65 and 70 ATT spots to select from - The extra 5 to 10 att assignment is for harpoons. for each Harpoon att increase the onboard harpoonist is able to kill 1 levianthan. I was thinking perhaps the full 10 - may be over powered, so I suggested a range to choose from.

sample for a 42 att ship
setup may look like this

Ship Upgrades Ship Resources
Round Shot: 8
Bronze Cannon: 6
Harpoons: 4
Copper Plating: 3
Iron Scantling: 7
Double Hammocks: 6
Cotton Sails: 8

to fully optimize this one would need extra master craftsman

I would be interested and open to other suggestions for special abilities

I also agree that the NPC fights and blockades and wars would encourage the use of the larger ship types.

EDIT _ after some consideration and discussion, this may work better as increased % chance to stop a leviathan attack.
Since incoming levi's is not a finite number

[fullfathomfive]

Continuing to dance around the real issue of lack of allegiance to a single entity be it Nation or Guild seems to have solved little. Reading overall form posts makes this quite clear as the largest majority of posts are of the I and me variety rather than the us and we. Divided loyalty's create weakness, singular loyalty's with established goals create strength. Think twice concerning an attack of a players warships no matter how great you think the fleet might look in your docks, if you know 15 active aligned players in his/her guild or nation are definitely going to be coming for you with their combined force. This scenario does not exist currently, so players sail what power they feel that they alone can based upon what limited individual resources they may alone have available to protect.

The same holds true for voodoo cache. Singular counts of a players voodoo suggest only their own individual ability to create disruption and provide protection. Consider for a moment what the impact of a powerful force of multiplayer voodoo shedding their combined forces upon you might could result in.


In reality PG is predominately a single player game even though both a nation and a guild exist to base from. Again, overall reading of form posts clearly point that out.

[Most Lee Harmless]

I honestly see no need to improve game experience via ships.

People aren't making em because they are scared of losing em. And sorry but if you just keep patching it so no one can lose em; that shuts out an entire game play style that this game is modeled after. I dislike some of these new additions, because they have been paraded by players who are clearly one sided merchants.

And that is why there are less pirates than merchants drastically. Fall of ZomB, PK, FoX. All their pirates are down or simply not plundering anymore.

This is basically the logic I know players like Wolfie will bring up:

"You know that people are using less high end war fleets, because Pirates steal em so if the game favors merchants, then merchants will make more war ships which means pirates can defleet more ships."

Well that is just stupid because there will be no more pirates if the game mechanics keep going in this direction.
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I say there needs to be a balance, and since there are 100 merchants to every pirate, clearly things aren't balanced how they should be.

There are few successful pirates because, in my view, there are few pirates who are any good at it. Soon as some gain any sizable plunder they want to play at being nobles with ports and nations, or at being traders themselves. They choose to take themselves out of that aspect of the game, which is hardly other players fault. You can be a successful pirate, but it means being a pirate full-time : not dabbling in aspects of the game which limit the freedom necessary to be a good pirate, aspects which leave you open to counter -strikes that weaken you and restrict your ability to raid and plunder freely.

Merchants are not in the game to provide rich and easy pickings for pirates : There is no rational reason for them to make life easy for pirates, or to provide high- value treats for them : merchants dont really need high-end ships in daily use, save for vanity or for retribution. The daily pirate doesnt want them either : a good pirate wants masses of weak laden trade fleets and phat purses that can be milked for regular income : ship stealing is a tasty bonus, not a reason d'etre for the true pirate.

Why are there no pirates? Cos few think and act like one : dick-wagging your occasional trophy ship-steals is not piracy : its one-up-man-ship, its bragging rights : the true pirate picks your pocket and moves on, and most of the time, few even notice.