The big thing that needs improvement is the battle matching system. The current system rewards people for tanking their pirate ratings so they can fight easier opponents and so they won't get attacked by much stronger opponents. That's all backwards. It rewards cheesy play and it's annoying to get attacked by someone with much higher technology than your own. Matches should be made based on how much a player has spent upgrading their islands and pirates, not how high their pirate rank is. Players with higher pirate rankings could get other advantages in the matching process, like first shot at islands with more resources available for plunder. There should be some reward for playing well and achieving a high rank. One drawback with my suggestion is that it could penalize players for upgrading resource production. Resource production upgrades could be left out of the battle matching formula. Another drawback could be that it would reward players for using just a couple of well upgraded pirate types. Too many players just use brutes and gunners now. More attention needs to be directed to balancing the pirate types, but that's a subject for another thread.
