Fargo

I think any kind of restrictions are bad, not adressing the cause of the problem. Having less first and second rates around in general would be best, making them expensive and the crafting time consuming. So maybe wait for the upcoming changes in crafting. Another idea is to increase xp/time needed for high ranks again. Im thinking about the time after steam release. Grinding ranks took much longer, but as a player you felt important sailing brigs and frigates, cause there were no larger ships and npc fleets around. OW felt more plausible in general. If 3rd rates would be sufficient for portbattles, achievable for all casual gamers, the upper ranks could be some kind of late game motivation for the more hard core players.

Why no softwipe yet? - Huge amounts of gold got exploited farming broken pve rewards (month ago already). - Economic changes cant be tested like this. -> People might be wasting their time in some discussions and upcoming changes are most likely to be imbalanced again. - Players are testing the game, possible wipes got announced.

2-3 month ago before 9.97 you had to craft or buy them from players. 40-50k was a good price for both sides btw.

I would assume its a mistake. When i played last you could buy/sell for 40-50k. The npc price was 75k i think, so no reduction at all. Maybe somebody just forgot a 0?! If this really is a known problem, why is there no simple solution yet? Hints in the loading screen, simple Information windows when you click something the first time. Some basic starting suggestions linked in the sign in window, just something?!

What im asking for is the definition of "profitable" and "decent profit", thats the point. If they dont know how to find med kits, they will get to know that, its not that hidden. The majority is using med kits and the reason for crew cost was to make running larger ships expensive. If you balance npc crew to achieve this, med kits will negate the effect or end useless. Its pointless to have med kits when you dont treat them as a core mechanic. If low rank rewards are too low, change the fixed mission rewards. Crew cost needs to be related to high rank combat.

Use npc medkits right now and its only x 72. With player crafted prices it was x 300 some time ago. Why not use med kits? I guess buying crew in harbours is ment as a last resort in case there are no medkits availiable. The problem is if you balance general crew cost, medkits will become imbalanced, not worth to craft. Players crafting stuff drives economy, players buying npc crew does nothing. "180363-143500=36.863 For spending 50 mins, with 5 kills made and 1.5k damage etc... " What would be a fair reward?! Nobody can answer this right away. You have to see this in relation to prices etc., how much time it takes to buy a new ship of your rank, the actual numbers cant say much. And talking about new players we should test with lower ranked missions. Your example using player crafted medkits would result in 95k profit. A new Bucket would be about 2mio, about 17 hours of pure pve in your case. With labour hours you could make 200k profit/day in addition. When you play about 4 hours/day its 8 days for a new bucket. This could be discussed for example. And it wont make sense to adjust mission rewards to actual inflation prices, this should be done with the economy update and asset wipe.

You dont get my point. Lets assume you are able to land all shots that close on full speed, try it with battle sails then, going upwind, or when the enemy stern is turning with your ship... close raking is not an option.

I said "close", and i mean really close. Its technically impossible to get all hits in, no matter of your skill (unless the enemy turns in your favour). You can land a good amount of hits, but not straight and only if your ship goes fast enough.

Auto fire seems stupid, but it would be helpful if you could change the broadside speed. Its always unloading in 5 seconds and for larger ships its just not possible to reach this speed (~20kn) to get a close rake in.

The large amounts of millions are the problem here, not the larger count of contracts. Trading and crafting with the aim to make profit is one of the basic conditions for a working market, freedom of trade is another one.

How can you make sure he sinks? The RUS Essex got graped down to 70 crew and did not sink, shooting leaks when the ship is already lower in the water might not work either.

In general im enjoying the tournament so far, huge compliment for the organisation!! However, i think you shouldnt mind changing rules if they are conflicting with current game mechanics, in this case pumps making some kind of ships nearly unsinkable in time. Rules are the same for both sides so its not "unfair", but in the end every team will be pump and repair fitted cause it provides the best odds. Thats boring, we like to see fair pvp, not broken survival tactics and it might be most annoying for the teams themself, participating for good and fair pvp. Yes teams should be able to win using the clock, but achieving this only by mods and perks and with ships already taking water has not much to do with skillbased pvp. Its not even possible to counter this effectively with grape or somehow. The TDA vs RUS match is a perfect example how only pumps could easily decide a match in favour of the "worse" playing team. Its good that balancing issues got revealed now, but you should address them for the next stages of the tournament.

They were so low because they had to focus down a ship that was technically out of the match... Pirate had to sacrifice a lot of hp just to make sure the trinc sinks in time. In a normal fight he would have been able to fight the cerb with about 40% hp on both sides. If anything is boring than your max firepower, pump and repair mod tactics...

Immersion?

http://www.bilder-upload.eu/show.php?file=159736-1472035485.png Roughly estimated this 42pd cannonball (19kg) weights about 1500 kg Is there a reason cannonballs are displayed so huge?!

I like it, but the chance for a specific trim and 3/5 slots is just 12.5% right now. You might have to craft 8 ships and scrap half of them for stiffness reasons. Maybe this gets reworked with the upcoming crafting changes, then contracts might be a nice feature.

All three numbers equal 200k for me If you want to be that precise you also cant calculate with 5% and 10%. If you want to sell a ship for 2mio, adding 10% equals 2.2mio. If you put it on sale for 2.2mio your fee will be 220k, you sold for 1.98mio. To sell for 2mio you have to add 11.11%. For resources its 5.26%. The best option is to craft nothing yourself other than ships

I think repairs often protract battles unnecessarily, because its so hard to focus down ships. Sometimes you loose large amounts of hp when you have to stay next to enemy ships, waiting for repairs to finish. In port battles ships get seperated and destroyed, minutes later they fight again with about 30% hp (And suddenly they sail very defensive). Repairs could be desabled once your side armour got destroyed completely, to reward good players/fleets, speed up battles, and make repairs more tactical. Repairs should stay, but it should be a risk to repair close to enemy ships. Taking damage could also reduce the amount of restored hp significantly, or damage to crew could increase while repairing.

I know Just saying that 81.5 is pretty litte for something with that high resource value. Ratio of lh count and resource cost is about 5 times different for carriages for example. You cant dictate it while you cant dictate market prices, but you can calculate it for actual market prices. Depending where you are in the chain of ship production, the highest valuable ships are dictating your price/lh. You dont need a formula, the market tells you. If your tool is able to read out the market prices for everything, you could add a column for lh prices. The results would be pretty funny right now, but as a shipbuilder it would tell you what materials are currently overpriced, depending on the ship you are going to build, and what ships would provide most profit in general.

Ah i just read the wrong colums... it fits with your high resource prices. Fraction of lh is pretty low for medkits. You should include a guide for lh, because thats what people are struggling with. Whats the value of your lh, how do you estimate it, how is demand and supply for ships affecting it. Its nice to know the resource cost for mats and ships, but thats usually the smaller fraction. Another small suggestion, maybe arrange ships in their classes and for increasing amount of lh. Would make it easier to compare similar ships.

Medkits seem to be too expensive while you dont include lh.

I dont think 1 dura in general would be a bad thing, but forcing people to buy golden "trash" ships wouldnt fix the cause of the problem. The "perfect builds" could be removed with minor changes to the crafting system and wood types (already suggested this here: http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/15142-crafting-suggestion-less-rng-more-diversity/). The issues are that speed as an essential trim will always cause ships to rot as long as it depends on rng, rigging quality and crew space cant keep up with the value of strenght or planking, and liveaok providing so much value of stats that teak/oak without speed cant compete with it. Compare oak vs liveoak for example: Oak + stiffness vs liveoak + speed = lesser heel vs +1.1% speed, +7cm armour, +5% hp Oak + speed vs liveoak + speed = +2.5% speed vs +7cm armour, +5% hp One additional perm slot for copper plating would compensate the disadvantage for liveoak, no chance for oak to compensate armour and hp.The only reason for teak/oak is to stack up speed with additional upgrades, speed is requiered. In addition people are forced to craft golden ships for blueprints, instead of beeing able to focus on actual demand. Giving the possibility to grind bps with lesser quality ships would give other crafters the possibility to sell golden ships depending on demand and for good value.

No cannons equipped?! Inbuild Speed gives a fixed 0,4 kn bonus, but it matches the 3,6% in this case pretty good, so thats no explanation.