Pirates of the Burning Sea DevLog: Ships of the Line

Flying Lab Software has a new beta DevLog out for its Pirates of the Burning Sea MMO. This edition focuses in on the powerhouses of naval warfare, Ships of the Line.

Ships of the Line (SOLs) are the rulers of the sea. They are a symbol of power and naval dominance. In Pirates of the Burning Sea, the presence of SOLs shapes the outcome of port battles and thus the conquest system. Groups of SOLs are very tough to defeat.

After reviewing the beta test results on SOLs, the dev team found that some rebalancing was needed to make obtaining them more fun, and to encourage players to move up the ladder rather than jump directly to the top of the line.

Since grinding would get you an SOL, they were seen frequently at port battles where they utterly dominated. This meant that getting an SOL was a sucky single-player grind and that many players got them and used them in every battle they could.We also had a problem with cost. The progression of costs across the different SOLs was not in synch with the progression of power. When a First Rate ship was so incredibly powerful but only incrementally more expensive than, say, a Fourth Rate or Third Rate SOL, players tended to skip over those middle SOLs in favor of going directly to the First Rate. Those middle SOLs have important roles to play and should be more common, but few people built them due to the small cost variance.

For the dev team’s solution, read the full DevLog on Ships of the Line at the Pirates of the Burning Sea site.