The below is in response to the recent implementation of gold costs for ships:
My suggestion is that Blue Printed items (i.e. planks, sails etc) cost gold to make, that way we're still able to shit out common ships and have a blast at sea, while still making gold highly valuable and allowing players of all tribe sizes to spend the time investing into higher quality ships. This would also indirectly add a 'maintenance' cost to Blue Printed ships, because if you were to lose a few planks/sails on your mythic Galleon, you're going to need to spend gold to re-stock said planks.
This could apply just to ship-related Blue Prints, or just Blue Prints in general.
In my opinion it's the most balanced way to keep naval PvP fun and constant while still offering opportunity 'climb the ladder' in regards to ship development.
At the moment naval PvP is completely stale and boring because either people don't have the ships in the first place, or they're too scared to bring them out to fight (and rightly so) after spending so much gold to build them.
