After you start progressing your fleet, you have to pay attention to it constantly while ingame or it kills itself.
If you don’t want that to happen, you have to completely pause it and let all of your invested resource and time sit there and do nothing.
Instead, I propose two changes that will allow people to utilize fleets without it taking so much of their focus away from the primary gameplay.
Minimum Resources:
As the game currently is, if you reach 15% supplies or food, your tasks will automatically pause.
What I propose is to be able to move that bar up to wherever we please.
Needing to constantly and continuously remind our fleet captains that allowing the entire force to desert is probably a bad thing is very annoying and forces players to regularly check on the bars to make sure that the fleet isn’t committing suicide.
This change would allow people to set the auto-pause function all the way up to a nice comfortable 50%, the threshold where desertions begin.
When this player-set bar is met, one of your fleet captains should send you a message saying something along the lines of:
“Fleet operations have been paused as ordered. The crew is getting restless, please send supplies ASAP”.
Fleet Raven
Now I already made a suggestion to get this earlier, that’s still a thing I want to see, but that’s not what I’m suggesting here.
When you have the fleet raven, your captains should stop sending you messages about their locations.
The moment you have the bird, that information is completely worthless to you and only serves to flood your inbox with spam.
I think ships should just auto rest when strength is low why do we need to tell the captains that they need to dock every day to avoid the crew killing its self
I agree in concept, but I’d approach it slightly differently:
If you can configure the auto-pause to pause the fleet at the desertion threshold, there’s no point for desertions to exist as a mechanic - it would just be a trap for new players who can still lose their entire fleet if they didn’t look up a guide that tells them how to configure their settings.
I agree with everything you said about how “babysit your fleet or it kills itself” makes the rest of the game less fun though. Personally, I would do one/both of:
Just delete desertion/sinking as a mechanic, and have the three fleet bars just go down twice as quickly and pause the fleet when they hit 0% (functionally the same as changing the auto-pause threshold to 50%).
Rework maximise profit such that it always causes ships to sink (though much slower than the current rate that fleets vaporize themselves at 49%), for greatly increased rewards.
The idea being that you can intentionally bleed your fleet for faster rewards, so long as you’re actively sinking ships to cover the ship losses.
As for the fleet raven, while you’re correct about it obsoleting the need for captains to send you messages, I think that fleet captain messages are often unwanted even before you get the raven, and after you get the raven there should be a mechanic that rewards you for meeting with fleet captains.
As such:
Meeting with a captain should provide a one-off strength recovery.
This means there’s a way for players who are actively sailing around the map and playing the game to run their fleets faster than a guy tabbed out at a camp/with a fleet raven.
you could even have this be the primary source if you wanted to be really radical, with recover being the inefficient idle option
also mb rename it morale, wtf is “Strength”
There should always be a button in the fleet menu to turn off messages from captains.
Even when I didn’t have the raven and my full attention was being devoted to my fleet, I usually didn’t have any use for immediate notifications on captain locations, and would prefer to just use the fleet UI.
Generally the thought being to replace these anti-QoL mechanics that punish a lapse in attention with new mechanics that reward attention and activity.
It would be awesome if we could set schedules for our fleets.
Like we could tell each Captain “When you get to (percentage) of (strength, supplies, or food) then switch to (task) until you are at (percentage)(strength, supplies, or food)”
So for example, you could tell Stewart “When you are at 50% strength, then switch to recover until you are at 98% strength.” When Stewart would get to 98%, he would switch back to the previous task, and the schedule would reset.
While we’re talking about Fleet changes, if we’re going to gut Trading as a money making option then we should probably reduce the costs to upgrade and run a fleet. Trading broke the economy yes but it was also the only viable way to run your fleet. Now investing into your fleet is a loss and you’re better off not using it unless you’ve already built it up.
I disagree.
I used fleet harvesting to pay for my entire fleet before trading was even buffed.
People buy reagents in mass, it is more than enough and will continue to be more than enough.
As long as the game gets new players, people will need reagents by the tens of thousands.
There are plenty of ways to make alot of money, especially with the economy in its current state.
but if that’s what you want, why not just suggest that
There’s obvious design intent behind having your fleet actions split into four sections, which can only be updated one at a time at unreliable intervals by sailing to a specific island, with three different upkeep resources to balance (plus ship durability), on top of a poorly explained risk mechanic that’s been bugged for its entire existence but is presumably supposed to be a consideration.
If you were supposed to be able to set the fleet going at maximum efficiency and forget about it, none of the above mechanics would exist, or they would at least be far simpler. Desertions exist to punish players who run their fleet greedily - setting their fleet to a more profitable configuration that requires player attention, but then not bothering to give it that attention.
It’s not a good system - your true intention is reasonable, but since you’re trying to hide the actual suggestion inside a “small” QoL feature you’re not explaining the underlying problem, and why this is a good solution. Anyone who doesn’t already agree that the desertion mechanic should be deleted is going to be unconvinced, which presumably includes vetex seeing as he added the mechanic.
You mention that there’s no good reason to ever go below 50%, but if there was a good reason to go below 50% would that fix the problem? Are desertions are a good idea implemented poorly, or are they fundamentally flawed? Perhaps desertions can work, but they’d require a bunch of extra development, so we should just remove them temporarily while we wait for a fleet rework?
This is especially true for some of the other suggestions in this thread - if fleet captains can manage themselves, or you can configure some settings to automate fleet management perfectly, why have the fleet management minigame at all? Why is everyone trying to be sneaky, can’t we just discuss this stuff plainly?
Every time I suggest to remove or directly fix something that’s actively detrimental to the players and hurts the game experience people freak out and say whatever they have to in order to put up some shoddy defense of it. Some of these people would rather die before they admit that not every design choice vetex makes is good.
Player jailtime, hecate essence, whatever other awful mechanics I’ve tried to speak up against.
Take a direct approach and people freak the hell out.
Take an indirect approach that solves the same issue and they don’t.
Believe me I get it.
The fleet raven should absolutely not take this much grinding to get.
However! If you want to get it faster: Fishing, harvesting, and exploring are super easy to level.
The former two offer loads of useful high demand stuff at later levels.
Trading takes longer so don’t.