tl;dr:
A general rant on the importance of counterplays or why pirates are poorly implemented.
Pirates are currently arguably one of the most enjoyable ways to play the game. This is because they offer a very unique way of playing, where instead of conquering other countries you abuse them, by pirating them, raiding their coasts and overall not being too nice. It’s amazing that the game tries to offer such ways of playing. With that said, there’s a fundamental issue with how pirates are currently implemented into the game, in how they are enjoyable only if you are on their end of the stick. They are absolutely no fun to play against, and that is because there is virtually no counterplay to them.
By switching up the formula for penalty to privateer efficiency from hunting pirates the initiative for declaring the war and doing offensive stuff can be moved onto the pirate, instead of their poor victim, which adds a ton to, otherwise extremely simplistic, mechanic of privateering.
- Decrease pirates’ trade bonus to +15% or remove it completely.
- Increase pirates’ income collection efficiency to 80%.
- Make the penalty to privateer efficiency from hunting pirates be multiplicative, instead of additive, ie. maximum penalty should reduce the efficiency to x*(1-99%) rather than just -99%, to provide countries with a meaningful counter-play against pirates.
A general rant on the importance of counterplays or why pirates are poorly implemented.
Pirates are currently arguably one of the most enjoyable ways to play the game. This is because they offer a very unique way of playing, where instead of conquering other countries you abuse them, by pirating them, raiding their coasts and overall not being too nice. It’s amazing that the game tries to offer such ways of playing. With that said, there’s a fundamental issue with how pirates are currently implemented into the game, in how they are enjoyable only if you are on their end of the stick. They are absolutely no fun to play against, and that is because there is virtually no counterplay to them.
- There’s literally no way to reasonably defend yourself from raiding coasts beside straight up killing off the raider nation, which is just silly.
- While for privateering the targeted countries technically have the option of using “hunt pirates”, it has a silly feature where if pirate has any bonus to +% privateering efficiency(which was made far more abundant since 1.29) it will offset the penalty from the penalty incurred by “hunt pirates”.
- To give an example of this: if a small pirate nation can use its light ships to get, say, 10% control of a trade node via privateering with 0% bonuses to privateering efficiency, then the targeted nation can use its heavy ships to remove that by -99% down to 0.1%. However, since that penalty is additive and not multiplicative, if the pirating nation has any bonus to privateering efficiency there’s nothing that the targeted country can do anymore. So it’s enough for the pirate to get offensive/naval/maritime/exploration idea groups(which are already a standard set for them) even with -99% penalty from hunting pirates they’ll have exactly 10.1% control in the same trade node. At which point the only thing the suffering nation can do is declare a direct war on them. (which, especially in MP, is often impossible)
By switching up the formula for penalty to privateer efficiency from hunting pirates the initiative for declaring the war and doing offensive stuff can be moved onto the pirate, instead of their poor victim, which adds a ton to, otherwise extremely simplistic, mechanic of privateering.
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