Yes, settlements without ships nearby are basically helpless at the moment, except their ability to return fire. When the attacking ship has some of the new Buccanners on board, things get a lot harder too - Chipper, Grappler.
Thanks for all this feedback! Iām logging all these ideas and issues for working on / considering over the next couple of weeks before we release the game proper! Please keep them coming if you have more ideas!
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Iāve also thought it might make more sense to treat settlements more like ships. They could be capable of attacking, recruiting buccaneers, and even gaining advantages from the buccaneers whose abilities could apply to them. Buccaneers would still board the next ship you made, but it would give you another way to help out your settlements and it would let you essentially build a ship with a buccaneer already on it by building them both on the same turn.
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Settlements should at least aid their ships in fights when the fight is occurring in their direct radius. It would be just like a fort in naval combat.
We started with ships and settlements being very different things and over the course of developing the game they have become more and more alike, and then we decided to make the settlements crashed ships.
I do think it would be interesting to enable Buccaneer abilities in settlements, but I also worry about the inconsistency of some of the powers not working / not being applicable.
Hiring Buccaneers in settlements makes even more sense than hiring them on the ships. I wonder what it would be like if you could only hire them in settlements or while in a port.
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I wish I could throw buccaneers overboard sometimes, to reduce cost of new ones. Or have them hop from one ship/settlement to another adjacent one. Or decide if I wanted settled ones to board newly built ships.
I wish I could unsubmit turns (actually, Iāve never had to do this, but it would be nice as an option)
I second or third or whatever the suggestion to undo marketplace transactions
I wish, when you clicked on a ship or settlement (or the list), there were more icons showing what upgrades/hires/builds were being done there- as it is, I think it just shows ships attacking/moving, building a new settlement, and settlement upgrades (and only when upgrading the size of it).
I possibly donāt understand how it works, but I wish I could choose if/where the bouncer bounces.
I possibly donāt understand how it works, but I wish I could choose attack priority for my ships somehow, to ensure that dredgers and slavers (and maybe chippers) are utilized if I have multiple ships attacking. Or just say they always do, regardless.
I agree with being able to change dock placementā¦for a price!
Seeing gold without having to go to the marketplace is a great idea! Seconded.
Iād like my trades to be visible to me without going to the events tab. And Iām not sure how I feel about other playersā trades being visible either. Speaking of the events tab, could we see ship destruction and/or settlement conquests in there?
Iād like a pretty longitudinal graph of our stats throughout the game, like in NP
Sorry, I didnāt mean to go on so long!
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What about a new buccaneer that āhealā other ships?
I think that would be nice, though it would make the Slaver a bit more powerful 
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What might really be neat is if you let buccaneers be built both on ships and in settlements, but for settlements next to rare resource tiles and for ships in rare resource tiles buccaneers that require that resource get it for free.
I disagree with most about being able to move the dock. I wouldnāt like the ability to get ships to the opposite side of an island so easily.
I feel like if you want the ability to put ships into a certain body of water you should have to get your ships there first, especially if itās resource rich and the player thatās controlling it doesnāt want to share without a fight!
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You mean where the settlement sits between two different bodies of water?
I donāt think that happens a lot though, most of the island Iāve seen were either 2 tiles deep, or so small you could easily get around them anyway.
Maybe make it so changing the dock position makes you move it to a sea tile adjacent to the ādockā tile? Then with a small cost it should prevent people from moving their docks too casually.
Speaking of whishlists:
I wish I could have a better overview of the piratepoints:
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see which pirate points people earned (how many of them were from buccanneers, how many from bounty and how many from booms?)
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Have an overall ranking somewhere, not just comparing between you and one player/the leader. This should easily show you how well people are doing, and wether they keep missing the points by a small amount or are getting completely overwhelmed.
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For that matter: Have a general overview where you can see everyoneās income, ships, settlements, points etc on one screen, instead of having to flip through six different player pages to compare.
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being able to see town levels and buccanneers on the main map screen.
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maybe a āresource viewā where all the resources would have their icons pasted on top (think civilization)? This should give you an easy overview of what kinds of resources are where.
Agree with a number of comments here.
Would definitely appreciate a Np2 style Intel page. Graphs less needed but ability to compare all pirates for each pirate point category.
The dredger and grapple seem massively powerful, maybe too much.
Settlements do seem a little weak but at the same time I have to remind myself that this isnāt civ 5. Itās a pretty short length game where you have to focus on which elements you think will give you the most pirate points
Another one: whenever there are conflicting orders from multiple players (two players wanting to move into the same hex for example), have a clear method for determining who will win. Currently this is random, but it can often make the game a bit of a game of luck, and itās probably the biggest luck-dependent aspect in the game atm.
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###Suggestion: friend/foe color toggle.
General idea:
I wish I could push a button that would change all of my towns/units to one color (e.g. purple) and all opponentās towns/units to another color (red). Late in the game the map starts to get pretty messy, and it is quite easy to lose track of an enemy ship that might be about to attack one of your towns. A friend/foe toggle would make it really easy to zoom out and see at a glance where trouble is brewing.
Little details:
- Rather than color the towns/ships, you could put a transparent shade over the entire hex. That might be a bit easier to parse than ship/town color changes.
- Colors - Try to avoid using red and green as a courtesy to the ~8% of men with red/green colorblindness.
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It could be interesting to allow upgrading Attack and Armor (and possibly Health) more than once per turn. The current limitation is interesting because it gives the advantage to early and regular upgrades, forcing to trade off with other actions and to do them before you are sure where they will be needed. On the other hand it is hard to catch up, even when you have enough resources, and a few high level, constantly upgraded ships might be close to unbeatable. A possible middle ground would be to allow multiple upgrades but to increase their cost exponentially when done in the same turn. So increasing Attack by 1 would still cost 4 Metal, by 2 would cost 4+8=12, by 3 would cost 4+8+16=28.
(This would not have the issue of resource transmutation we had with multiple Buccaneers)
Not sure on this one, what do people think?
By the way, I noticed the volume on the BBB forum has reduced a lot, are you guys (especially the developers) busy with other things right now?
@ruisselet - Grapplers and Chippers go a LONG way against those behemoth ships. Iām finding a lot that, as you start to enter the end game, the leader has so many more resources compared to the other guys that this might serve to hinder the other lower guys more than the leader.
Hey guys, on the ship in harbor thing - I actually noticed it and used it very successfully in a backstab attempt. Using pointers I suddenly blockaded 2/3 of my former allyās harbors, making his resource advantage useless as I have already leveled his border towns by the time his reinforcements got to my ships.
If the harbors can be moved, I would really prefer it carries a cost. Right now, manuvering ships the extra 2-3 turns so your harbor is strategically placed can have huge consequences 10 turns down the line. The strategic importance of controlling your frontier harbors and denying the enemy the use of theirs is very interesting in the game.
That said, it would be nice. Just reduce or decrease the effectiveness of former strategic considerations.
I would also like to be able to boot unwanted buccaneers.
I wish thereās a blockader-style unit that can prevent production. This can be used to start shutting down a player with huge cities which you canāt afford to seige down yet. This forces them to shift production to ships to kick yours out.
I wish thereās somekind of defense oriented-buccaneer. Either a stack defense buccaneer, or some kind of aggro-buccaneer (like grappler but āgrappledā ships must attack the aggroing ship if they are able) or automatic defense buccaneer.
Also, more interesting terrain would be interesting, if not necessary. Reefs that block movement and do something extra? (double nearby resources? double fish resource? gives gold directly?)
Ranged attack buccaneer? Less of a wish list and more of a theorizing.
An undo-submit and/or undo-sale or undo action button would be great!
Maybe ability to combine ships into a single larger ship? Would that be broken, as you can build a bunch of ships, upgrade them all, then combine them? Perhaps itāll cost resources to combine them? What about the buccaneers? Eh, donāt like this as much now that Iām thinking about it more, but Iāll still throw it out there.
NPC towns with high health players can fight over? They can automatically use resources to upgrade itās defenses (mostly health, so the winning player donāt get an obscene armor-town).
Some buccaneers seem very powerful. Othersā¦ not so much. Instead of nerfing the powerful ones, maybe buff the less powerful ones? I often find games are too fast for the resource buccaneers to do much good, although once I did keep getting dippers on my Ship of Doom so enemy slavers nab it instead of my bouncer.
āhealingā or āarmorā boosting buccaneers seem cool. Especially if they incentivize large fleets over tall ships a little bit more. Maybe, to make it less like just armor, it allows you to spend gold on a second health boost in a turn? So 1st health boost is 8 wood, second health boost is 16 or 32 or 25 or w/e gold?
Oh! Just want to add I think that hiring buccaneers only in settlements, only 1 buccaneer a turn, and having to manually put ships in port to move buccaneers onto the ships, is a pretty interesting idea! Itāll add even more strategic thinking, but it miiiight be also strategically limiting.
For example, I took down a huge ship by zombie-swarming it with no upgrade ships with slavers and chippers until I took down itās stats,
then I sent a medium sized ship with a dredger to dredge all my lost ships back, and then a large ship with a grappler to finish it off with broadsides.
If I could only hire slavers in settlements, thereās no way I could have hired enough for the swarm to be effective. Might be a necessary loss though for the increase in strategic depth.
EDIT: Another random idea (not wish), what about Hero buccaneers that can level up? Haha thatās a bit too crazy. Probably.
I agree the current way has benefits, I just wanted to share this idea about an alternative mixed approach: make multiple upgrades costly rather than outright impossible.
@lichuckles I actually find the buccaneer leveling up idea intriguing, do you have more details on that?