The Pirates of the Burning Sea official site has been updated with a beta devlog about ships of the line, and the challenges Flying Lab has had balancing these powerful vessels.
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.
From the start, our goals have been for SOLs to be very rare, very hard to earn, and to be deployed only at port battles of great strategic importance to a nation. We havent met these goals very well. In the closed beta, SOLs were earned by getting a Writ, and the most efficient way to get a Writ was by mindlessly grinding high-level NPCs. 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.
;)
Read more here.
