maturin

Until yesterday it was a certainty that pirates wouldn't be limited in crafting. Until yesterday it was vitally important for players to be able to teleport to port from a battle. Everything is switching around at a great pace. Heck, now we have hundreds of different types of trade goods in the game that are 100% useless because the AI produces nothing and they can't be crafted or captured (OK, maybe you seize 2 jars of Dutch Peanut Butter from an 800-ton indiaman...)

Just let pirates capture ships. Blackbeard didn't have to scour the entire ocean looking for the 1% of vessels not captained by a robot.

Which has nothing to do with historical naval warfare or even any of the romanticized swashbuckling adventure stories associated with it. I never thought it was controversial that the above should be the inspiration for gameplay. That's why I complain. My new topic will be called "Run Missions or GTFO"

If we are going to go down this extreme hardcore road for the PvP server, then the Missions needs to be removed immediately. If the new system is unworkable, as I suspect it is, then the absence of missions (no more immediate gameplay or immediate income) will prove this very soon. But with the missions remaining, their income will hide the flaws and allow an unfeasible system to limp along. Kill the missions! The devs have removed all the fun aspects of the casual game, while leaving the one casual feature that is soul-crushingly terrible. Remove the missions and I'll be willing to give the new extreme PvP approach a try. Maybe I will be proved wrong.

Cost of 30 cannons = 30,000 gold (and that's before the hotfix) Cost of light frigate = 70,000 gold Cost of Repair Kits = Unknown, haven't seen any being sold anywhere yet So if I lose a ship in this wonderful PvP that's supposedly going to be going on once there are more than 30 people on the server, I have to go and grind through 10 missions every time I get ganked? Didn't the consequences for loss just go off the charts? Enforced Basic Cutter Mission PvE ahoy!

Translation: Suffer through PvE missions in your basic cutter until you can actually afford a ship you can PvP in. Then get revenge ganked after your first battle, and start over with the missions until you can replace it. And there won't be a playable iteration of this pure-PvP system until the game's population is maxed out.

Naval Shopping Action Everyone *loves* shopping from catalogs. Almost as much as they love sending dozens of E-mails trying to find a contractor for work on your house. Those are your two options for getting ships now.

I think you forgot to write "Pirates removed." I probably won't be suffering through anymore of this Testbed, since it's going to be unplayable until the population is high. Crafter heaven and hell for everyone else.

Carronades disappeared entirely when long gun production began to benefit from the technological advances of the carronade.

If we don't want carronades to be dirt cheap, remember that they used a more advanced industrial process with much less windage in the barrel. So the manufacturing process was more precise and presumably complex.

More like they don't want to spend time coding something about as compelling as a slot machine.

They mean 'it is impossible to design great exploration systems in MMO environment.' One of those 'M's means 'massive.' Which means no one really gets to explore anything because in the first two weeks the massive player base has created massive knowledge about everything and posted it on the Wiki. You only explore the same way you would explore Brooklyn. By looking up all the coffee shops on Yelp first. Exploration needs SP and/or procedurally generated maps. We all know what the Caribbean looks like. Everything suggested in this thread (including by me) is more like Mass Effect planet farming than real exploration. Personally I would love an Age of Sail exploration game that revolved around natural hazards and logistics.

The Green party changed the course of U.S. history by electing Dubya

Then they'll be forced to eat each other. Or spend their entire lives in mission purgatory.

Fishing is pretty darn silly. But it's already coded.

AFK item farming is pretty pointless. But it would be nice if you could discover hidden Outposts and repair kits, theoretically letting you privateer on a hostile coast without needing to return to free towns all the time.

Makes no historical sense, and it certainly isn't fun. If there was ever a moral panic about people exploiting their way out of this game (now very fast XP grind), then I missed it. But either way there is no reason to deny XP for capturing AI. We don't get any satisfaction from stealing a grey ship from a computer, so there needs to be some source of endorphins there. For PvP captures we should be able to earn XP and gold rewards with the Send to Admiralty button.

Basically making every trader vessel super fast, since no one would ever choose any other skill...

Wait, why do LGVs get free ship knowledge? A bug?

This was the policy Lincoln favored. See Liberia. Of course, with the slave trade outlawed for generations, only a tiny minority of slaves had come from Africa. There were also only a few regions where coherent African customs survived intact. Most slaves had deeper roots in North America than the Union Army that freed them (with its large proportion of immigrants).

To properly game-ify reality, warships should face performance penalties for even small amounts of cargo, if they have full armament. Merchantmen should be unaffected until they are 30-50% full. Then we can strip guns from warships to improve hold, or add some guns to traders if we are running with light cargoes.

Yes. Works the same in PvP.

Cool beans. Is there a certain percentage of hold that's free from any performance penalties? Realistically maybe half of your cargo will just replace the essential ballast, such that a frigate with 6 months of stores is probably faster to windward (and heels less) than a frigate with 3 months of stores.

Why would there need to be a delay? No need to delay the wipe if existing cannons remain the same (or are just renamed). So long as there's no UI icons for items, new objects are just a few numbers.

That'd weird. I'm sailing a Merc with 120 crew, and when I take losses I've had to hire as many as 20 guys.