Shallow Draft Upgrade

[glossy kettle]

I assume you mean to allow tier III ships to operate in tier IV, V, VI, and/or VII waters?

There are zones of tier IV waters where tier I-III ships cannot go. There are “shallow waters” effects for every ship higher than tier VI, it just depends on the zone in question. If you haven’t explored the map yet, you can google “zenchess wosb map” to see the zones. The Roman numeral within the zones on the map indicates the highest tier of ship that can be used in those waters.

Regardless, allowing any ship to operate as if it’s one tier lower would break the game. -5% speed is nowhere near harsh enough to balance out the obvious advantages of running a ship against others an entire tier lower. The penalty would need to be so harsh as to effectively make an entirely new ship, which would rather defeat the purpose of adding more ships to a given tier.

You must not have the entire map explored…. Again I would advise you to google the map. San Christobel, Aldansk, Severoangelsk, and North Bastion are all in Tier IV waters wherein Tier III ships cannot go.

I didn’t say anything about economics? I’m saying it would break the game because being able to sail a tier III Bellona into tier IV waters and blast away at players in Tier IV Constitutions would completely defeat the purpose of having the tiers. The idea is to allow newer players to avoid getting ganked by people in super strong ships while simultaneously creating an incentive to continue using small ships even after you’ve upgraded to bigger ones. -5% speed is not enough of a penalty to offset how much more powerful a tier III ship is to tier IV