Kraken said:
@Crowbar, point noted and a good strategy! I'm going to start another queue.
It is worth noting that veteran units are cheaper than the normal ones, so those queues fill up quickly. However, there is a not-immediately-obvious advantage in building those: because of the price difference, you can build only veteran off and predominantly (but not only) normal def. That tips the balance of units towards off, while keeping your gold and lumber in balance.
So, my 3 veteran queues are only off units (and only 1 kind in each queue, the one I decided was the best value for rubies) and, through time, my acc is getting more offensive than defensive. Also, add to that higher levels of lumber yard than gold mines, although that has a relatively low impact, due to the fact that most of my res come from raiding.
Of course, players preferring def can do the exact opposite.
Kraken said:
@All, this is a temporary solution to a systemic challenge - where is the challenge in the game?
That's a problem of infinite games. They expand indefinitely and you lose the challenge, especially because - in order to keep things in check - you get silly artificial limits (on raiding (both in the number of attempts and in the max. amount of res per raid), on the largest force that can to be sent on a Presidio or a Bastion, etc).
The game I played before Pirates was limited to 10 months rounds (not artificially... there was a goal that was usually met within 10 months by someone who would then be a victor and the game would restart after that). You start small, raiding tens and then hundreds of resources (not kilos!). In the end, you'd be raiding tens of millions of resources a day (some people would be sending 10k raids at once), and the big finale would've ended in big clashes of huge armies.
Sadly, that's out of the question with endless games like Pirates.
Also, that other game didn't have silly things like charts, whirlpools, and boosts, which bend the rules of physics and you get supersonic ships as the result. It gets far more challenging to raid someone when your units travel for hours and you can destroy buildings or even whole villages if they don't defend. In Pirates, I'd love to defend from raids, but how do you that when a raid takes mere seconds and you're usually not here, staring at it?
It boils down to the challenge of Pirates being only how much you can/want to spend, so most of us end up playing quite passively.
