XP over just having pure gold play?

[Ronald Speirs]

Its a nice combat game but still has a few things to work on, I'm wondering why do they have XP, experience as i know as XP comes from battles and the more you participate in the more experience you have, im thinking why have XP and as such XP for damage, your getting gunnery XP but not promoting good growth and progress when you make people wanna outfit with fleets and cannonades just to level up, just make the gaming world purely gold based, if ships are expensive then hard to maintain then those that PvP over PvE surely have a better chance of using them, if the PvP rewards are doubled to promote the use and trying to make players PvP more and without AI fleets earning more to stop people using then just to farm or get cheap kills or wins, if rates were more expensive and harder to maintain then i bet players will be more inclined to go for what suites their playing style and picking a things that suits them, realistically surely those that = were well off rich people the brought big ships without the experience by using their prestige to buy ranks over those that did their job and had the XP got more of chance or had them hired or put to them for privateer duties, money can buy alot, but if you want to buy into a bigger ship without the XP then you have a big battle on funds ahead of you or you could pull off and maintain a steady flow of battle prep, if you had a firm backing or money saved then you could have a chance to try bigger and better things if money would have it rather then i have the XP so i can crew what ever, if crew and everything was revolved around money and protecting crew was a far better option i bet we would see far better immersion and strategy rather then just wasted and grinding over XP and throwing away crew like it is.

[admin]

We were discussing this internally today.

 

While being an interesting option - it will require too much work and potential rebalancing on other fronts.

Instead we can just be more generous with xp and provide more money sinks in terms of maintenance, repairs and general cost to build.

 

But we want to hear more detailed proposals on how this new xp free environment might work 

[maturin]

I think pirates would be the ideal testbed for low-XP or XP-free advancement. They can gather crew from prizes, but the bigger the crew, the smaller the captain's share of prize money.

 

In general I would rather see XP-based no-gold advancement for naval officers, but this wouldn't work for merchants and privateers, so it would mean designing too many different systems at once.

[Ronald Speirs]

Port Royale series was a cash based ranking progression, your net worth of assets depicted your rank, for this a mixture of reputation/ notoriety, wealth/ assets and even battles participated in.

Numbers and XP shouldn't depict someones abilities, reputation/ notoriety can consist with successful missions passed, battles won, ships captured, nation battles participated (like port defences)

Wealth and Assets is pretty self explanatory, number of outposts, ships, materials, and cash in the bank

In terms of Naval ranks i was thinking something like POTBS style where you had assessments to pass to rank up, at the end of the day a number doesn't tell the player how experienced he is at controlling his vessel.

Those that want to control the flow of rates around the open sea shouldn't be restricted by rank but by general maintenance of crew, the ship repairs, taking it out on the sea and days at sea should slowly deteriorate the armour making repairs a must, making cash flow and savings allow those that work hard for them be able to maintain them, smaller ships cheaper and easier to maintain so more will tend to use them.

If anyone has any ideas on things they could see work or tweak or think may not work let me know and i can tune them and find solutions.