I'm going to address the rest of the point tomorrow Unseelie, as I've had entirely too much gin tonight, but I'm just going to ask you one question right now.
Quote:You're quite correct. There's a couple of us who just don't understand, because you've made an arbitrary decision to favor the pirate.
If Pirates didn't have the edge in a pirate vs transport situation, what would be the point of piracy? You would see zero, zilch, nada, not a single pirate because it would be a complete waste of time. I'll say it again, you want to have your cake and eat it too.
Hey guys. After reading some pros and cons of tradeships with big guns and whatnot, I must direct you to few ships above 1000 cargo that you can trade with and be safe.
Capital ships. Look at Geb. His cargo is decent. Noone would pirate you in a geb! It has more cargo than any freighter, its an obvious choice for a trader after he wants to trade without risk.
But Geb is expensive. So is Aquilon or any other big capital ship. But he offers that protection.
Reason east indian trading company built "capital ships" to trade with is because you cannot really have "escorts" on sea. Ofcourse you can, but there was no radio links, you couldn't scout the area ahead and you're pretty much screwed when you see a pirate coming.
Here, you can hire scouts and have that cargo : survivability ration in favour of cargo.
The trick and the most beautiful thing is that you cannot balance the two, and win.
So that leads us to our personal choices. I see people wanting to fight with their trade ships, instead of fortifying them better. Why not cash out 200mil and buy that cap armor for your trader. If you think it won't hold until that base? you're wrong. Capital armor helps alot. And with your 5-12 guns (stork - shire), you stand a great chance of surviving the encounter.
There is really no point in beating the pirate. Sure.. It feels great, but that's not your job at the moment. Isn't it really little unfair to ask of your trader to be able to take down a gunboat while trading, and on the other hand pirate's gunboat cannot trade, but can take out gunboats.
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As for pirate transport
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It's a sweet ship. You can't make as much, but whatever you haul will be relatively safe. Trust me, even with cap8, if I get caught by two bombers, I'll hardly make it out of it alive if they're skilled.
But for piracy? It's a great ship!
People it has over 3k cargo.
People are pirating with Ankii (500 cargo freighters) these days. Do you know why? They're small. They can mount 5 deb turrets and 3 codename weapons. Screamer mine. And they have space for 480 ore.
480 ore equals about 3-8 mil, depending on what ore is being plundered.
So trust me. Opportunities are big. You just really need to use them in the right way.
Thinking that trader should fight the pirate is wrong. Trader needs to survive.
And if that means hiring a frikkin repair ship to escort you, then by all means - do that.
What Ivan has said is of course brilliant. He's smart as...well...and everyone should have him around.
' Wrote:I'm going to address the rest of the point tomorrow Unseelie, as I've had entirely too much gin tonight, but I'm just going to ask you one question right now.
If Pirates didn't have the edge in a pirate vs transport situation, what would be the point of piracy? You would see zero, zilch, nada, not a single pirate because it would be a complete waste of time. I'll say it again, you want to have your cake and eat it too.
One of my consistent points is that this is a multiplayer game, and people who work in groups should be rewarded. Now, this is a get escorts argument, and but for one simple idea, works just as well on transports as it does pirates. The key, then, is that transports are reactive, and pirates what they react to, and the source of the pvp actions. If one pirate needs a buddy to win, there will likely be bunches of pirate buddies around, rather than any lone pirates (now, the lone pirate is already reasonably rare, which makes one tend to wonder why transports are balanced for fighting just one pirate, but that's beside the point). Piracy would still happen, just not in single unit groups. A lone transport against a pair or more pirates would still be epically screwed, but rather than pushing the start of the group reward system onto the secondary participant in a PVP, you lump it onto the first.
I'm not asking for transports to overpower pirates on every turn, I am trying to create an environment where most of the pirates are in transports themselves. The focus of my argument isn't why the pirates (of whatever ship) beat the transports, but why a fighter is supposed to have a chance against a transport.
Its already more worthwhile to pick up a transport partner while pirating, Ivan, in fact, reports that there's more Ptranses than Tridentes. I'd like to see more transports of the Ptrans style, and, again, lawful counterparts that balance with the Ptrans inside its class. I'd also like to see cargo worth 5 or 7 million more per load, to encourage the pirates into the transports (plural, you notice, with the hope that we'll see more than just the Ptrans and the Raba in the future..but that's an open market ships argument, and here isn't the place).
No one change derails the whole, and nothing is perfect, as Ivan suggests. One change affects another, and a third. While we're a reflection of vanilla, transports have become the overly expensive punching bag, simply because the pirates enjoy their fighters and their bombers(the coup de graw of disco). You want to make piracy real, rather than protection rackets and taxing? You make cargo more expensive, you make transports stronger (or better, at least, against bombers) and you see how that affects the game. New and interesting ways to play, I suspect.
I'd like to say that, to those of you who haven't read the full thread, I'm not an advocate of transports getting class 8 turrets, or a huge boost at all. Rather, I'd like to see their guns a mite faster, and with a great more variety..and I'd like to see them given CDs, to emphasize that they are not vessels meant only for pressing f2 and f3.
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