Captain Skills by ship size

[Joeb]

I was sitting here scratching my head and thinking (always a dangerous thing) about the game and in particular how skills are earned and used. I am sure this has been discussed at length at some time but I haven’t seen it and thought I would throw in my thoughts.

As it is, skills are discrete upgrades selected from a list and normally activated by a button push. These are added to ship fittings to create a skill set that sets a player and their ship up differently from the other player in a fight. These are very similar to any other MMO with captain skills being like spells/damage skills and ship fittings being like armor or weapons.

One thing that this game doesn’t have is increases in passive skills as a result of levelling. In most MMO’s you would get a small increase in your base stats for achieving a level. As the game is right now there is really no need for these, however I think there could be a use if they were applied based on ship size. Here is my idea.

Whenever experience is earned using a particular size ship that experience goes towards a set of passive skills that can be used only when sailing that size ship. As you level up in small ships you gradually add base passive skills to be used in small ships. When you graduate to medium ships you have to earn experience in those ships to get the additional passive skills. This would not be out of line from a role playing perspective as the skill sets need to manage/sail a sloop are certainly different from sailing a large frigate or SOL. Ships size, crew size, number of guns, tactics, etc. are all somewhat different as the size of ships changes. In real life a new naval officer is not give an aircraft carrier as their first command. They have to learn the management skills to handle things on a larger and larger scale as they move up the ranks.

I see a couple of advantages to this approach.

1. People are given a reason to work up experience in larger and larger ships rather than sticking with the same smaller ships all the way to 50. I can easily level to 50 in an MC Raa but I would only be getting experience in a large ship. If I wanted to enter a PB with a captured 4th rate I would be at a real disadvantage as I would not have developed any skill in the larger ships use. This could have the side effect of forcing 50’s to spend their time in the red in larger ships instead of packetboats because they need to experience in the big ships for the PB’s

2. It would give people at 50 a reason to continue earning experience so they can improve their performance in all ship sizes.

May be impossible to even implement this now but thought I would throw it in for discussion.

[Benedict Aubruchan]

Originally Posted by Joeb I see a couple of advantages to this approach. 1. People are given a reason to work up experience in larger and larger ships rather than sticking with the same smaller ships all the way to 50. I can easily level to 50 in an MC Raa but I would only be getting experience in a large ship. If I wanted to enter a PB with a captured 4th rate I would be at a real disadvantage as I would not have developed any skill in the larger ships use. This could have the side effect of forcing 50’s to spend their time in the red in larger ships instead of packetboats because they need to experience in the big ships for the PB’s

Quite a nice idea, definatly makes a lot of sense, my main fear though is that this will increase the grind to 50, most people stay in smaller ships because they are a lower level and therefore will allow said player to get more experiance per npc kill, this is why many people stay with the much loved MC Raa.

Although saying that i guess there are huge sized ships at the Mc Raa's level and even lower levels (the myrmi and defiant come to mind).

I really feel this would actually add more diversity to the player base as smart players pick a speciality, people who love line fights will stick to their huge ships while people whjo love OS warfare might want to stick to large vessels like the Raa.

Originally Posted by Joeb 2. It would give people at 50 a reason to continue earning experience so they can improve their performance in all ship sizes. May be impossible to even implement this now but thought I would throw it in for discussion.

This i'm a bit nervous about, what's to stop 50's grinding experiance in a small boat and making the super cutters or medium sized fail boats all but uncatchable?

What if at 50 only experiance from pvp would increase these passive skills? suddenly we have real incentive to pvp.

Like the idea hope it is possible to implement.

[Danicia]

Moved to Community Suggestions