Coal Fuel buff.
While the benefits of Steam Engines for Clermont and Savanna are cool, I feel that they're severly hindered by the fact that:
1) The fuel consumption is too dependent on IR, which can be hard for some players in some nations to achieve due to how IR works.
2) Coal fuel is limited, you can only get it in America or at IR ports for the most part.
3) Coal fuel is expensive, especially without IR in effect.
My suggestions would be to fix(or at least alleviate the issue as to make Clermont and Savannas more usable to players who own them as their main ship) are:
1) Make Coal Fuel consumption separate from IR, or at least let the player store more coal fuel beyond the 200 limit. Maybe if needed, make IR more frequent or as a permanent feature in some cases.
2) Make Coal Fuel be producible in private farms, as to make procuring said fuel easier even w/o IR
3) Cut down the costs of Coal Fuel from 100k ducats ea to around 25k ducats ea, or be able to make Coal Fuel via Coal through special means.
These are my suggestions for making Coal Fuel, and in turn Steam ships more viable to play in the long term of UWO. I do hope this helps give some ideas.
Comments
Respectfully– I am not in favour of any of your suggestions. Steam ships are already very potent, and there exists numerous ways to reduce the coal fuel consumption; possibly even more with the recent updates.
There needs to be some balance and downside to using steamers, otherwise there would be little reason to use any of the other marvellous ships, and that would make UWO very dull indeed 🙂