I’m crossposting here from the Discord, sorry if anyone has to read this twice. My idea is for a difficulty level that keeps the combat on par with Captain or even Bosun difficulty, but scales up the economic/loot difficulty higher. I’m finding that playthroughs on the lower difficulties provide a relatively balanced combat experience, but I end up making way too much money too easily by finding all kinds of treasure caches, and I somewhat quickly end up with more money than I can spend. It’s very easy to finance a fleet of class 1 and 2 ships kept up solely through plundering small pirates and traders. I think that the hybrid difficulty that I’m proposing could encourage a more realistic gameplay style. Take on big targets = big money for big risk. Playing it safe and only attacking weaker targets would keep one restricted to a much smaller revenue stream and thusly a realistically smaller ship and crew.