I've done three things:

* I've increased the quantities of cash dropped across the level range starting at 10. At low levels, the increase is slight -- about 1.2x as much cash will drop. At high levels, the increase is larger, up to 1.8x more cash from level 50 ships. Note that this is still below the crazy spend-happy days of beta.

* I've increased the quantities of junk loot that drops, which is the pirate-friendly money increase part of the change. This is a fairly large rate increase, potentially as high as 3x for some items.

* I've reduced the drop rate of economic items from all ships. What I did, basically, was brought the high end of possible economic item drops down a fair amount -- if the max dropped was 6 before the change, it's somewhere around 2 to 3 now -- and set the low end of possible drops to 0. Practically, this means that if a kill used to drop 1 to 4 of an item, it now drops 0 to 2. I also removed some very old, very wrong entries from the econ drop tables -- for instance, there were level 1 merchants with a good chance of dropping multiple gold ingots and fine wine. That's no longer true.

I did not touch Scavenge's tables at all.

MC ships that get speed boosts are the special cases, not the rule. It's intentional that the MC Raa does not have a speed boost. That may change in a future build depending on how the ships play, but it's not currently planned.

If you are holding a deed when the patch goes live you will have a 2 durability deed instead of a 3 durability deed. You will lose one point of durability on that deed. I suggest you use the deeds you're holding before the patch goes live.

The number of points of durability on your sailable 4th rate will not change. If you use a deed now and don't sink between now and when the patch goes live, you will still have three points on that ship after the patch.

The whole point here is to increase the price of the 4th rate, so I bet that 30,000 dbl price will go up. The number and type of materials didn't change, so the cost of production per durability point is going up by 50%. I expect that will drive increased demand for 4th rate deeds in the short term as people try to stack up as many durability points as possible.


Joe

We will be adding some changes to the Testbed server that will impact the cost of Fourth Rates, which you can read about by visiting this link.

Best,
Aether

Yes, the changes I made will be in 1.2. The spawn tables for French and pirates have been fixed and the timer for the second fleet has been made several minutes longer.

Remember that port battles last 2 hours, but the reschedule is for one hour, so you can still force enemy nations to make strategic decisions about which battles they want to commit forces to. You just can't use 3 to 1 population imbalances as a bludgeon.

And, realistically, if you force a battle every hour for 9 hours against a particular nation, the likelihood they'll be able to keep fielding their A-team is pretty low. Cooperating nations willing to make that kind of push against a common enemy can win by attrition, if nothing else.

This is exactly why we made the change. Underpopulated nations are often face with defending only one port at a time with multiple simultaneous battles. It's not that they aren't able to win the fights, or that they aren't willing to risk the durability loss, they just don't have enough players to defend multiple ports at once. The French on Blackbeard lost two ports out of three simultaneous port battles.

The patch notes aren't entirely clear on the subject, but here's how it works: Whenever a port battle is scheduled we look to see what other battles are scheduled with that nation as the defender. New battles are schedule such that they always start on an hour and never on the same hour as another battle.

An example:
1) France attacks England port A at 3/11 5pm - Battle is scheduled for 3/13 3pm
2) Pirates attack England port B at 3/11 5:01pm - Battle is scheduled for 3/13 4pm
3) England attacks Spain port X at 3/11 5:30pm - Battle is scheduled for 3/13 3pm
3) France attacks England port C at 3/11 6pm - Battle is scheduled for 3/13 5pm

English defenders get a crack at every port battle. English attackers can cause multiple port battles to happen at once because offensive battles aren't considered. If they're really paying attention that would enable a nation to launch a retaliatory port battle immediately after one of their ports went into contention and get two battles for a nation to overlap. If a nation is worried about that they should be careful when they trigger their attacks. They can also choose to abandon their attack (or send their B team) to favor the defensive battle.

This also still allows up to two port battles to overlap for any given defender. Players who are killed out of a port battle in the first 47 minutes will have a shot at the overlapping battle. Players could also conceivably leave a battle early to jump into the second battle if things are going particularly well (or particularly poorly) for their side.


The French players on Blackbeard were perfectly capable of winning a port battle against England's A-team. They demonstrated this by winning the one port battle they were able to defend against. They simply lack the numbers to keep up with the numbers on the British side. This change allows an underpopulated nation the chance to defend their ports instead of losing by default simply because they can't field more than one fleet of 24 at a time.

This change certainly reduces the ability of high population nations (or allied nations) to force a single defender to fight parallel battles. Before the change the maximum number of parallel battles was 9 (and we saw 3 a few times in practice.) Now the limit is 1.5 to 2 concurrent battles. That's a trade off I'm willing to make to help out the low population nations' ability to defend themselves in port battles.


Joe

It's nowhere near that rare.

All three of these are fixed in the testbed build we're pushing today. Thanks for the report.


Joe

.......

Ok.