They seem totally off, compared to the rest. 7000 echoes for a transport ship, where as good guns are costing 300 echoes and the best ones 800? Seriously…
Same for the rest, to get a frigate, you need 5000 echoes I think. By the time I have saved 5000 echoes, I’ll have probably scouted all the map. That the zee is very tranquil don’t help.
This about how much it costs to buy a cannon for a ship and how much it costs to buy a ship. In real life that is.
Probably, I can understand a weapon system is much less costly than a whole ship, IRL. But this is a fantasy world and we are talking about guns which have weird properties.
What is more important is the game balance anyway. If you can buy the best guns before being able to change your ship, not even to the best one, but an average one, then there is a problem.
As you said in other post, the starter ship is enough to do everything it seems. Please don’t nerf the starter ship, but reduce the costs of the others ships or improve their stats.
On one hand you’re right about the gun costs, especially the carminus yards ones, but then again new captains would be royaly screwed if any usefull upgrade to give that scummy trampsteamer some punch costs a fortune given how hard it is at the beginning to make a dime.
The catch about ships is they’re not completely done yet. Speed and weight and the influence of engines on them are not implemented so far. There will be a day when you have to choose a ship like you’d choose a class in a RPG, between a slow but spacious cargoship with two feet of steel as hull and a swift but small and fragile smugglers corvette, an unsinkable dreadnought covered in guns and armour but in need of half a battalion zailors plus a sea of fuel and a beast of an engine or a highspeed spyyacht that only needs a handfull crew.
The prices for new ships are unbalanced, I’m really not sure how Failbetter decided on how much each would cost but it is not based on size or stats, and you don’t get a trade in value except with the starting tramp steamer. I’m sure that this is something that they will be looking at in the future.