I've been play-testing all my changes and making improvements for awhile after I mentioned it, and never got around to posting it on the forums because of real life distractions. The goal in mind was to make things a little more balanced and to fix all the things that didn't make sense based on actual research that I did. There was also the annoyance of certain ships having radically different stats, but were the same ship etc. All ships of the same type have the same stats and the only difference between them will be the random stat generator based on nationality that is already built in. So stats *will* be different in-game depending on your nation.
Each ships stats will be based on where it sits in the list of ships, the top of the list are the weaker ships of a specific class and the bottom are the best (you will see that with the change in required ship class). I divided every ship into a "class" like "Frigate" or "Brigs" and you will see that on the far left side. Further, ships are seperated into 3 categories: military, merchant, and balanced (which is based on trade/war being true/false in the Ships_init.c file.
Once everything was categorized I started building the stats of each ship from scratch using a few formulas that I came up with myself and also using some that other member's came up with in the forums. While doing this I followed a general guideline that I came up with to make things more balanced in-game. The guideline that I used is at the very bottom.
Once all the stats were made (which, believe it or not, took me almost 2 months to do) I classed each ship. Each ship of the same class, and across categories, should follow the guideline I made to the letter. For instance, if you look at the stats of a class 5 military ship, it should have more hull strength, gun caliber, crew, and cost than class 5 ships in the balanced or merchant category. You will also notice now that in each category is a nice flow of ships from class 8 to class 1. Now if your purpose in the game is to be a merchant, and thats all you want to do, you can feel motivated and rewarded for going up in class all the way to class 1 which has the best merchant ships (which were classed based on cargo size). It was a real bummer to play a merchant in the game and have no logical progression of ships you could go through, let alone the best merchant ships were no higher than class 4 and there was no reason to try and get your skills any higher after that.
The next major undertaking that I did was to change all the names of the ships in the game. There are only a few ships that did not undergo a name change. The new names are to show the differences in stats or categories now. Basicly every different model and every ship with differing stats has a different name. It allows for a better understanding of what your looking at in the shipyard, but also allows you to shop for a new ship based on the name and using this excel file. One good example is the Light Brig, which can be found in both the balanced and military categories. They are different ships because of this and so the military one has "Naval" as a prefix.
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