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« on: August 14, 2013, 07:04:07 pm »
What about the gunner role itself, and the balance between roles? For someone who wants to play as a gunner, sometimes you have to "prove" to the crew you know what you are doing or that you are accurate enough a shot. Lots of captains would rather have all engineers than even one gunner that isn't very accurate because it "isn't worth it".
It seems that the general consensus for anyone playing this game longer than a week is to have no more than one gunner max on a ship. My thought is there are 3 roles in the game and 4 positions on a ship to man, so at least one role will be chosen by twice. But does it always have to be the engineer?
There is a good reason behind this; gunners only have more ammo types (and you can only load one ammo type at a time anyways), but if you pick engineer there is more equipment you can put to use for ship survival, fire management or buffing guns for damage.
I mostly play captain/pilot, and most of the time I do want two engineers for their tools. But other ship builds leave me wanting two gunners, and I have to constantly argue with others why two gunners could work. In particular, I enjoy piloting a long range galleon with flak on the port side and carronade on starboard. If I can get two skilled gunners below with explosive for the short-range side and lesmok for the flak, switching out either for incendiary now and then, we can take out the enemy before stopping for repairs (also the pilot can help mid-battle with balloon and hull). Having extra ammo types for my gunners to choose depending on the situation can be exciting, but is it enough to justify loosing ship-maintenance tools?
My point is there should be room for more mix-and-matching of crew roles. There will only ever be a need for one pilot, but pilots affect the entire ship, after all. So sacrificing tools for pilot skills can be justified. It just seems to me that engineers are a bit too commonplace (I've seen plenty of all 4 engineers!). There could be more reason to choose gunner than settle for 2-3 engineers because its "a safe bet".
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Now how could this be achieved? A couple of thoughts come to mind. My first idea would be to redistribute gunner skills among the roles. Maybe pilots and engineers cannot use other ammo types? Or maybe gunners can choose up to four? This would certainly change things up, although I am not too sure how I feel about such a big leap (I am usually one in favor of small, incremental changes over time). One thing is for sure this would make players rethink the role of gunners on a ship.
Perhaps a more subtle way would be for gunners to naturally have better accuracy. Heavy rounds could be an ammo choice for others, but gunners have it by default (maybe as their "normal" ammo type, maybe it stacks with other skills?). Maybe even Add accuracy without the smaller clip penalty. Or if that is too much, just add 50% more accuracy to shots.
It doesn't need to be a large change, just enough to make gunners feel more special. And that's what it comes down to, currently gunners feel like engineers without the tools. Just my opinion.
Any thoughts/ideas? I would love to hear what other have to say about this!
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