Salty Del

From my experience, and what the game gives you as info on the blueprints, handling sails are badly misnamed.

What handling sails do is provided acceleration and give you more power at severe angles to the wind. Your speed sails have to be pretty much red before they’ll give you a boost. They also raise/lower and turn faster than the other sails.

Pre-wipe, our galleon had 4 speed sails and 2 handling sails. It still turned like a pig. Our new galleon has 6 speed sails.

What I’ve found helps, is to turn the sails slightly off the wind and partially close them. De-powering the sails does allow you to turn quicker, relatively speaking.

Our galleon is strictly an A to B carrier. It has four rear facing cannons, and with enough time and ammo could sink any Ship of the Damned, but we put a dinghy on it to retrieve the drops, as turning it around took too long.

If we’re fighting Ships of the Damned, it will be with a brig or schooner.

We haven’t gone Ship of the Damned hunting specifically, just ones we’ve incidentally encountered. 

We’ve mostly gotten fine and under blueprints, but we have gotten masterwork medium gunport and legendary medium plank blueprints, and I think masterwork ballista and large cannon blueprints.

So better blueprints do exist, but they are rarer drops.

Only one person at a time? That’s unfortunate, if accurate.

We spent three evenings out looking for a monstrous sperm whale, and found two just as we were giving up for the third time.  At least those ones we all got the achievement for.

I recently built a legendary large ship yard, and the galleon I built from it has a quality of 123%. I have no idea what that means, and I likely won’t find out anytime soon, as the galleon is strictly an A-to-B ship.

I do want to build a brig for Ship of the Damned hunting though. That one may see higher levels sooner.

I am so going to try this when I get home.

Picturing a sloop with a diving platform and a dinghy dock WITH a dinghy, it has to look ridiculous, if you can do it.

No, I’m pretty sure that the max level is tied to the ship skeleton. Adding higher quality planks affects only those pieces.

I believe that the smallest ship you can put the diving platform or dinghy dock on is the schooner. Mentally picturing one on a sloop, all I can see is the sloop capsizing.

I've got a discord server setup, should anybody wish to join us:

https://discord.gg/3mnV33s

We're up to 37 island points, with a few people interested in joining, and we should have enough gold to start a claim when we get enough people.

Happy sailing!

4 minutes ago, Winter Thorne said:

In-game CS ain't what it used to be.

So you’re saying they have in-game customer service now?

I can see some EU players trying to get a claim on the NA PvE because they were unable to get one on EU PvE.

I’m somewhat disheartened by the new claim system. It is setup in such a way as to benefit large and very large companies, give medium sized companies some opportunities, and give very little opportunity for solo and small companies.

So, this is what I’ve decided.

I want to form a company that is made up of a large group of solo and small companies. I want enough players that we can take over one of the big islands.

All members can interact with other company members as much or as little as they want. Keep it civil and respect other members space and feelings.

I haven’t tried setting it up like this, but I would like to let everybody pin code their structures if they want.

Every company member will have a plot on this island, and will be able to build whatever they want in it. People found building in uncommon or rare resource nodes will be asked to move, then unfortunately moved forcefully if they do not move. I doubt that will happen, but I want you to know beforehand.

There will be a 10% tax rate on the island, but any resources besides gold will be put into a community chest so that they can be used by anybody.

There will be a dock area with shipyards and crafting tables for all members that wish to use them. If you’re using a shipyard, please be able to finish your ship quickly so others can use it as well.

Part if the dock area will be a place to setup a shop, with access for all visitors.

There will be taming pens setup in several places around the island with unlocked gates. Anybody can use them, even companies just visiting.

If you make a temporary taming pen on the island, then I just ask that you completely demolish it when you’re done.

Treasure maps can be done on your own or you can ask others to join you. I find small groups to be quite enjoyable, and not cumbersome to organize. Donations for island upkeep would be greatly appreciated.

Power stone runs can be organized, and eventually the kraken as well.

If you want to join up, you can respond in this thread, send me a PM, and/or meet us in A5 on EU PvE. We’ll be building up supplies and gold to be ready to claim as large of an island as we’re able to. I’d like to have the group assembled by 5 PM UTC to claim the island and we can get started.

Happy Sailing!

Del

It’s been live for less than 24 hours, but I already have several concerns about the new claim system for PvE.

There is a very finite supply of islands that a solo or small company is capable of claiming. After the 15 and 23 point islands are claimed, I think that the next point value is 53. The island points that a company can have seems to be 30 + 1 for every additional member. My wife and I have 32 island points available to use.

This means that to claim even the 53 point islands, you need a minimum company size of 23. That’s quite the jump from solo, or a few friends. There is also a possibility of a large company starting off in small pieces to claim several of the smaller islands, only to merge together later.

Multiple people can try to claim the same island at the same time. You end up with a confrontation with the claimers basically griefing each other until the other(s) give up. And if you’re the one that ends up losing, congratulations! You’ve lost the claim AND the gold it cost to drop the claim flag, so in the early rush you may not be able to even try again.

The tax rates seem to default to 50%. 30% was stupid enough, but now in PvE you give up half of everything you farm, including gold from treasure chests, to the claim owner. Now the settlement owners can just sit there with a 50% tax rate and not have to do anything.

The whole setup feels like it’s intended to cater to large companies. I haven’t done a count yet, but I believe that the majority of the islands will only be claimable by very large companies.

Unless the small companies are lucky enough to get a claim early, lawless is looking like the only really viable option. Which is probably just as well, since getting gold after the islands are claimed getting gold will be twice as hard, since you’ll only get half as much.

I know I’m being a bit pessimistic saying this, but they’ve really made me feel like they don’t care about PvE at all, aside from the cash the PvE players bring in when they first buy it. They remove one of the PvE maps to add a third PvP map, they setup PvE to almost solely benefit large companies, and it really seems that they didn’t think this through at all.

The old system definitely had major flaws, but I think it was way better than this new claim system, at least for PvE.

Oh god. I can now see a bunch of people making characters with dark skin and naming them Kunta Kinte, saying things just like that.

For the record, I am not suggesting anybody actually do that, nor do I think it would be appropriate in any way, shape or form. It would be funny for about 5 seconds, until they think about what that actually represents.

I should also point out that actual slaves had no say in who their masters were. You may feel that the new claim system is like forced slavery, but in that case at least you get to shop around for your master.

For what’s being discussed here, my own testing is somewhat limited. I’m a PvE player, so my extent of testing the ability to remove others structures on our claim was to try the pinwheel once, assume the foundation was there before we claimed and move on.

Giving hostile companies the ability to spam foundations on your island at anytime is far less than ideal. Perhaps this could be solved by only allowing allies to build in peace time, but anybody can build during war time.

Having the timer on hostile forces ability to use land mounted artillery does sound like a good idea. They can only be placed during the war times, and the timer gives the defender a reasonable opportunity to “remove” them before they become useable.

If hostile forces were allowed to drop a cannon and use it immediately, I can see them dropping several cannons, one per attacker, firing maybe two rounds, and then picking the cannon back up. They could also relocate for guerilla style attacks from different locations, forcing the defender to have to move their defence. Thankfully, that does not sound like it will be a concern with how the system sounds to be working.

Not having the ability to remove structures via the pinwheel before 12 hours has lapsed is most likely a bug, and will hopefully be patched when it goes live.

2 hours ago, Bolognapwny said:

Did you actually play or did you just skim through what others were saying.... because as a Land owner YOU CANNOT demolish anything on the island that isn't yours.  You have to destroy it.  The people you allow to live on your island cannon build cannons during peace time... During 9 hours of the day in combat phase however they can... so not understand why this is even a thing... when they can just build them anyways.....

 

Secondly this was not proper feedback... as you can tell he missed most of the things that need to be tested... this is literally just a post about what he "claims" to have done... when he made the statement about demolishing stuff I knew he hadn't actually played the PTR and didn't do any actual testing... other than buying an island maybe.

You are correct, in that I did not actually try to demolish any of the structures that were built on our claimed island. I did try to use the pinwheel on one, but the option did not come up, so I assumed that was because it was built before we claimed the island. I don’t have enough interest in that feature to test it further.

I provided as much feedback on the systems and things that I felt were most applicable to me. You apparently feel that other systems and things were more important, and that’s ok. That doesn’t mean that your or my feedback is more or less important, just on different parts of the game.

I have not read your feedback post, but I gather that there were some comments made about it, probably in a negative fashion. I’ll look up your post when I have time later so we can discuss how our experiences were different in a constructive fashion.

Thank you for your feedback.

2 hours ago, Wichtelman said:

tbh i dont think larger companies need people on their islands at all to help with upkeep... any random people that are not splits of your own company are a risk to turn against you... i see foundation spams on the good islands to prevent said stuff...

That is certainly one possibility. The best case scenario that I see is that having other groups on your island, if you develop a good relationship with them, can provide better security for all. There’s a higher probability of somebody being around when the island is attacked, and more people available to help defend.

In Empires, mega companies won’t have a need for this, but with the company size limits in Colonies there are benefits to grouping together. With the right groups of people.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot! This may have been unintentional, but you can build in the freeports. Maybe the structures there have the same decay rate as ships do?

Yes! Please do this. And make pressing escape also cancel whatever you have queued to craft in your inventory. It takes too long to stop crafting, when you’re unexpectedly attacked.

Having played a reasonable amount on the PvP PTR servers this weekend, I thought I’d share my thoughts on it as feedback, as well as get others to talk about their thoughts as well.

I had been having some frame rate issues on the live servers that I could not fix. My wife’s laptop was buttery smooth, while my tower was stuttering, and my PC is significantly more powerful than hers. Maybe something else, but I’ll chalk this up to performance improvements in the patch.

The new claim system. If you own the claim, it’s a good system. Upkeep can be a bit excessive on medium to large sized islands for solo/small company players, but small islands are easily manageable.

So far as I could tell, the gold cost to claim an island is on a sliding scale multiplier. The more island points it is, the higher the multiplier for the gold to purchase and upkeep the claim. The scale seems to be around 2.x for the smaller islands to maybe 4x for the larger islands. For example, we claimed a 53 point cost island. The upkeep cost is 162 gold. I think the purchase cost was the same, but I wasn’t paying attention. To happy to have found an open claim we thought we could afford. 162/53 gives you  3.06 as a multiplier. The bigger island we first looked at had a multiplier of about 3.6, and the smaller island we looked at after had a multiplier of about 2.3ish.

If you don’t own the claim, settling on a claimed island is a step up from lawless. Kind of. Yes, the claim owner has a period to demolish your structures and you have no recourse at all. But, I think some claim owners will realize that having other groups on the island are mutually beneficial.

The claim owner and other settlements do not have to worry about building deterioration (possibly PvP only), and the claim owner can mediate between settlements having a disagreement. Or just blast them both to bits for annoying them (PvP only).

The tax rate. Oh, the tax rate. If you thought it was bad before, have I got news for you. The 30% tax rate was bad enough, but the developers didn’t agree. So, they made it worse, by increasing the tax rate to 50% max.

I think that there’s a couple of side effects to the tax rate though. A low tax rate does make sense. I think that 10 to 15% is a fair tax rate (we set ours to 10%). My reasoning is that the claim owner has to pay upkeep on the island every 12 hours in gold. The smallish island we claimed was 162 gold every 12 hours. If you’re not online for 3 days, you have to have 972 gold sitting on the claim flag to pay for it. Imagine how much you’d need for a two week holiday.

Easy enough at 6x rates, but when they go back to 1x that could become difficult for some. If you have somewhat limited play time, a not insignificant amount has to be spent on getting gold to pay upkeep. The taxes do offset that effort by providing the claim owner resources that they may not otherwise have time to gather themselves.

The other side effect is that if an island has 50% taxes, you can be reasonably certain they don’t want anybody else settling on their island.

Do gems exist on the PTR at all? Across several islands on several different servers, in several biomes, we could not find any gems at all. Was this intentional to prevent people using the war declaration? We had originally planned on settling in the south-east temperate, it the metal there is silver, which requires gems to make alloy.

The new ships of the damned are really nice. They’re all still relatively easy to kill without many problems, except that now you’re more likely to encounter small fleets than just individual ships that just happen to be in the same area. The galleons do drop enough gold to be somewhat worthwhile. Oh, just make sure to stay out of range of the galleons. They have a lot more cannons than the brigantine ships do.

The shipwrecks are a nice addition. You can stop your ship above them and freedive down for the treasure. The treasure is just an upgrade of the flotsam loot, but enough so that we always tried to get them when we came across them. The diving suit I would say is a must have for treasure seekers. We’ve found three variations of the sunken ships so far, with each having a different path to the treasure.

The large stone walls are a nice addition for those that feel the need to hide behind massive walls. Fewer parts than gates, and I think they look a lot better than a wall of gates. Less flexibility for exit strategies in PvP though.

We sailed through a golden age ruins server, and I thought at first that the dark islands on the map were placeholders for islands that weren’t ready yet. We sailed towards it and saw nothing in the water there, except for a bit of a glow like you sometimes see on the islands. I didn’t realize until a few minutes later that that was actually one of the ocean trenches. I don’t think the diving suit goes for enough for you to get into the trench, just to the top edge of it, but we didn’t try.

I know there were several other small things that I noticed, like the fine treasure maps seemed to have more army of the damned than they used to, but those were the bigger ones that I found.

If you played on the PvP PTR this weekend, what did you think?

We spent hours trying to find gems in the south-east servers. Originally, that’s where we had identified as our ideal location when the patch goes live.

But, the metal in those servers is silver, which requires gems to make alloy. No alloy, no ship mounted weapons. No ship mounted weapons.....

You must have built a large cannon. Medium cannons can swivel, to some extent, but large cannons cannot move at all. Why did they put them on wheels though?

I was also completely unaware of a 20 minute timer when placing a cannon down in PvP. Is that only when in combat?

TL; DR - We had a relatively mild PvP experience and survived without a scratch. Not everybody can play PvP, even if they want to. Don’t shaft PvE players solely to benefit PvP players. Read on at your own discretion,

It was relatively unremarkable, but it reinforced to me that while I was mildly interested, PvP is not for me.

We ended up in a golden age ruins, forgetting it was a golden age ruins in our quest for buried treasure. We risked a sunken ship spawn to see what the drops there were like compared to the rest of the ocean (spoiler alert, no difference in loot at all). My first mate stripped and used the diving suit to go down and retrieve the booty. Despite being between two fleets of the damned, they never actually came close until we were leaving.

As we sailed off in our brig, I noticed a schooner threading its way through the same fleets we had just avoided. It came to an almost parallel path to us, and was slowly catching up. As we got closer to the border, I saw that it’s rear was loaded with cannons, which made me watch him more closely, just in case.

Not wanting to risk being caught unawares, I turned sharply with the wind, turning our course from the west to due north. When they started to turn, I knew they were going to try and sink us with their rear wall of cannons.

Not being experienced at all in PvP ship combat, I did the only strategy I could think of to keep them from shooting us;  I started tacking with the wind so that they had to keep changing directions to follow us. I had our four rear medium cannons start firing, hitting them several times, and it seemed like they were going to back off, until they started coming about again. The problem for us was that, unknown to him we had just taken down four of the galleons of the damned, as well as a few schooners. We had 26 cannonballs left to fight them off at the start, and we were now down to 10.

So I sailed for the border, and after crossing turned due south, as we were near the southern border as well. As were were comin*up to the southern border, I saw them enter, and then shortly after start turning towards us. My first mate was telling me that she thought they were giving up, but I didn’t agree and decided to try and lose them in a quick series of border crossings.

We ended up going east, and then north, back into the golden age ruins. We sailed north for a short ways, and then turned west to follow our original course, with the schooner no longer in sight. We made it home safely, docked, and then started makin our plans for when the servers go live, based on our experiences.

I know, hardly a riveting story of daring and heroic battles. It cemented in me that while we absolutely love playing the game, PvP is not for us. When he started turning to chase us down, at first I wasn’t too bad, but shortly after it really triggered my anxiety. So much so that my hand holding my mouse was shaking uncontrollably. My first mate had already complained a couple of times about me risking our ship, to which I emended her that this was all temporary at best; I wasn’t worried about losing the ship or anything on it at all. We hadn’t even been fired on through the whole encounter.

And I guess this is the real reason I’m posting this. I know that as soon as the PvE servers are back online, we’ll be on and back to adventuring on the high seas, and loving every adventure. When they took down the EU PvP servers to setup the PvP test server, at least the NA PvE servers were still up for those that wanted to play. But, then they took down the NA PvE servers to set them up for Monday for testing, leaving PvE players with nowhere to go except to try their luck in PvP for the weekend. They left the EU and NA PvP servers up, and then added a third PvP test server, all at the cost of the PvE players.

I’m sure that I’m not the only person that can have a negative psychological impact from PvP, and I would describe mine as mild at its worst, but I can see that others may have worse reactions, Possibly bad enough to give up on the game entirely.

I would just ask that the developers not completely shaft the PvE players so obviously. Some of us PvE players are actually interested in the idea of PvP, but for varied reasons may not be able to actually partake in PvP combat.

The reality is that I, and others like me, are unable to get any enjoyment out of actual PvP combat. Not necessarily because we suck, or that we don’t want to risk losing our precious ship, but because we may have a strong psychological and/or physiological reaction to an interpersonal, combative situation. Or perhaps have a physical condition that limits the ability to be competitive in PvP combat, but PvE is doable.

No, nobody forced us to play on the PvP servers. We could have waited until Wednesday for the PvE servers to be up, when we’re working long days and would not have the time or ability to try out the changes so that we know how things will (possibly) work when the update goes live. We knew what we were getting into, I just had no idea that I’d have that reaction.

Holy crap. That turned out much longer than I thought it was going to be. If you’re still reading this, congratulations! Meet me on the NA PvE servers when the patch is live and I’ll give you a present. Maybe some thing small, maybe something big. But probably something small.

We plan on trying to get an island for ourselves, but part of it will be a public dock with full crafting capabilities and space for npc vendors.

Or, if my assumptions that it’s an NPC that you can place anywhere are incorrect, then ample space for vendor huts.

I can definitely see a network of vendor hubs popping up, with the potential for making profit just by buying local resources cheap from a vendor in one area and then selling them in your own vendor where they’re worth more.

If such a thing is possible and happens, I think it would be appropriate for the Freeport commodities vendor to either drastically increase the costs for the convenience, or be dropped entirely so that an actual player economy can be created.

7 minutes ago, Yuli1961 said:

Is it here?? Did the PTR show up? Feels like waiting for Santa to come

Well, have I got news for you then. You see, much like Santa.....

Hmm. Did they ever say specifically April 4th, 2019? Maybe they’re actually almost a year ahead of schedule.

You've just been Jat-trolled!

(No, I don't blame you Jat)