Learning to Build New Ships, an Immersive Approach

[Kalthios]

Current system for gaining new ships is completely random in learning to build the specialty ships down the line, either by breaking them up or by building the base ship (i.e. break up a Privateer or build a Lynx or Trader Lynx for a chance to learn to build a Privateer).

 

Having it purely luck based isn't very immersive: Trader Joe has built 100 Brigs but still can't build a Navy Brig, but Trader Jeff broke one up once and can build it just fine. Joe is frustrated (no gains from the huge amounts of resources) while Jeff is getting rich just from being lucky.

 

So lets change it from a lottery system to one of hard work and investment paying off!

 

Two different approaches that are much less "gamey" and add to immersion:

 

Simulate Gained Experience:

 

Have the chance of a ship note dropping increase for each ship built/broken up.

 

 

Simulate Shipwright's School:

 

At key crafting levels players gain the ability to "craft" courses in building specialty ships. For example:

 

At crafter level 3, under Craft/Ships, you gain a new BP called "Course: Privateer Design". It costs 1000 labour hours and 100 gold coins. It produces a Privateer Note.

 

At crafter level 10, "Course: Navy Brig Design" It costs 1,200 labour hours, and 120 gold coins. Produces a Navy Brig Note.

 

 

[maturin]

I'm all for killing the Random Number Game.

I just don't like the idea of taking naval architecture courses. No one did that.

 

Instead we could pay a hefty sum to take the lines off a vessel we break up, jump through some other hoops (delays, location requirements) and receive the BP. But the first blueprint received will only allow creation of low-quality vessels. We have to build several, unlocking new levels of quality each time. This represents the fact that new designs were arrived at incrementally, by experimenting on a base of existing vessels.

[Kalthios]

Think of it as a journeymen learning from a master shipwright. You don't have to use such a strict definition of course, but it needs to be a small enough word to fit into the UI. "Lesson" if you want, but "Apprenticeship" is probably too long.

 

The benefit of the Shipwright School approach is that it takes advantage of a system that is already developed within the game. Simulating gained experience would require user date to become even larger as it would have to track how many times a player has broken up/ built a ship.

 

As for your idea, it is even more complicated and harder to implement.

 

The easiest to implement idea that improves on the current system making it more immersive and easier to understand for new players is the shipwright course system. It explains itself as the character advances in crafting level, the current system is only understood if the player studies the forums.