Do not consider this a whine even if it may sound like one, my purpose is just
to bring some points across that I find are not in balance. I do appreciate
all the hard work and time you've put into this.

There's been a lot of noise about latest tunes to ship combat, so today I
tested it a bit for myself. For reference, I'm using a class 6 ship with all
the crew at rank 7 or higher. The npc crew of the opponent ships were blue in
holz and I shall make the assumption that equals to five when it comes to crew
rank.


First off;

I went after a pirate ship that a six gem compass was pointing to. After
managing to scan the class 6 ship's name before it left scanning radius, I
pursued it and initiated a ramming combat. This one didn't try grappling me,
so I just rammed it down all the way, took me about four minutes.

At this point, I had already asked for a tarm and a def to come kill the crew
with me and we were set to board. Killing all the crew members took us about
11 minutes.

Spoils of victory: +54 pirate reputation, 50k cash, about 20k exp each and 9
crew points.



Next target, a class 5 navy ship;

This one proved to be a bit more difficult, starting the combat with grappling
hooks. With a couple of tries, it managed to grapple my ship. They managed to
hurt my crew and ship a bit before I broke free of the grapple after 39 failed
attempts (39 makes sense, I only have a total rank of 75 on my defenders and
this navy ship probably had full boarder quarters, which would result in
12*5=60 ranks).

So I began cruising further away from the target and trying to blast it down
with assault magi and cannons. This proved to be nerve-wrecking with the npc
ship trying to stay in the same room and me trying to keep 3-4 rooms away.
Cannon and magi damage seemed rather weak, and more often than not they
countered my cannons. Yeah, I tried to weaken their shields with magi blasts
and disrupt magic (disrupt magic doesn't really seem to do anything, but had
to keep trying it anyway).

Maybe they blocked my cannons so much because - at the point I was modifying
my ship - I opted for assault magi instead of cannoneers and ended up having
only a total rank of 79 among my cannoneers. They probably had full defense
magi (which would equal 20*5=100 ranks) and it was sufficient to keep the
shields up versus my 210 ranks of assault magi and disrupt magic.