Suggestions to Improve Privateer Suggestion No1. - Forward Facing Cannons or Rotateable Turrets Originally suggested on the Privateer forums, most players requested that their be an addition for forward facing cannons, or Ironclad Turret system. The reason this system should be either looked into or added or more-or-less for more combat diversity, as well as allowing smaller ships to be able to equip "mortar-type" cannons. The forward facing cannons would not give any damage buff, but would more-or-less act as a first-strike system against other ships. Another side to the original suggestion was to add a platform similar to the Spacebuild Turret sent which allowed for left and right traverse of a cannon, but no up and down. This system would require another player to operate, but it would also give the operating vessel a wider range of combat capabilities. Suggestion No2. - Fishing, Fruit Farms, and Distillery The name of this suggestion should be a dead give away that this is about some form of currency system which would create a pacing mechanic for the game. With fishing, the user would either use a fishing rod, long line, or crab pots, to catch fish and multiple other sea creatures. The fish could be sold to an NPC or eaten by the player for possibly some buff to ship or land combat. Fruit Farming would be a currency grind[similar to fishing] where the player would go to one of the islands, and set up a small farmland and grow random types of fruit. These fruits can either be sold to an NPC, eaten by the player, or used in a distillery process. Distilling would be a process of taking fruit[or even fish!] and creating alcoholic beverages that can be used to create a magnitude of weapons, post-process effect beverages, or just simply something to heal healthpoints that are taken away during land combat. Suggestion No3. - Different Cannonshot..? All though not many cannon ball types could be made[at least non-cosmetic types], having stuff that could damage speed, slowly damage boat hp, or slowly wound the player controlling the boat would be a great benefit to gameplay. Stuff like poison shot, flame shot, chain shot... All though theirs really only three or four things which could be damaged, stuff like this would very well ~tactical~ to gameplay. And then you could add cosmetic stuff that wouldn't change damage values and such, but instead just change the sounds of the cannons and add trails to the cannonballs lol. Suggestion No4. - Platnium Pointshop. Hats, Trails, and other shtuff. Yes, we all dread the concept of TF2'nizing any BB Gamemodes, but honestly... Privateer would be the gamemode where most of this stuff could be done to a reasonable degree. Players could buy hats, ...trails..., and other purely cosmetic items that they would gain from donating to BB. Suggestion No5. - Crews Pirate Crews, Teams, whatever you want to call them, they would defiantly make the game a hell lot more entertaining. Having crews slug it out to capture random control points across the map[very Battlefield style] would create an interesting aspect to Privateer, and also would create a teaming mechanism which would force players to fight against one another. Suggestion No6. - Highscore Boards Players like to have bragging rights. The original Privateer used Gametracker to monitor the kill-tally for captains. This system was very competitive at points with people constantly fighting to simply get to the highscore. The problem was though that without something like, "Top Killers This Week!" most players would only come by on the last week of the month to do battle against one another. If a system was added that properly monitored the kills on the server, and saved them to a scoreboard, players would have a greater emphasis to go and kill each other. Not to mention this could tie into Suggestion No4, and you could probably reward people with temporary platnium for being the top player of the month :v:
Various forms of fishing are currently in the works, not limited to standing there with a fishing rod, but also various forms of sea-fishing.
What about some kind of reward for getting kills, which goes towards unlocking new types of cannonballs (like the ones Joey stated)
I'd imagine "Plunder" or otherwise whatever the boat is carrying. Examples of this could be special cannonball types, fish, and whatever cargo the boat happened to be carrying. This would "Piracy" a much more profitable venture, but at the same time, something would have to be implemented to combat piracy outside of the simple, "Player X takes down Player Y" I'd imagine some form of bounty system would be easily exploitable, so possibly something like EVE's FullSec zones could be applied to the default ports, and auto turrets would shoot down boats owned by players with a high Pirate Rank. Players who take down these pirates would be able to get whatever Plunder they were carrying, and possibly be given a reward of more points for the kill.
At the moment it's actually a very basic system of fish and gold on the boat, simply because I can't justify at this time having a full on inventory system for what is basically going to be fish, gold and a few cannonball types. Maybe down the line, but for the sake of having a basic easy to understand system, it's how it'll be for now.
The hell if I know, I was talking to Vendetta about it, and he said that the entire thing for it was pretty much dead-ended. He modified it for his cargo holding bits.