Genma Saotome

I didn't propose looting warehouses when people were off line, I said some percentage of home port warehouses. If the warehouses of people who were not playing are protected then by definition the remainder are "some percentage". That percentage could be anything... arbitrary... some ratio of losses/damage in the port battle, whatever -- I'm not welded to any any specific answer there. And if setting aside the warehouses of people who are offline is what makes for both fair play and common sense, fine by me. The key point I was trying to make was to greatly reduce permanent conquest of ports. Give the winners a reward of some kind (e.g., looting) but kick them out PDQ. Give the losers reasonable protection so not everything is lost. What's wrong with that? What the Dev's have done is take away most national ports. I liked national ports. As for what to do with neutral ports, around 9-12 months ago there were national wars and national alliances. Seems to me any-ship access to ports could be given within alliances and trade ship access to anyone you are not at war with. That would be pretty broad access while retaining the national character. WRT all those new countries... there are reasons why they were not there in the first place (along with why there wasn't Ukranian Grain and Russian Vodka): Too far away, too poor, no navy to begin with, and late to the great game. Let's not forget the overlooking of Portugal who happened to have a huge colony in the new World -- Brazil. Perhaps it's too far from Kyiv to warrant mention in public schools. IOW it's beyond nuts. The way things are now the DEV's have an equal justification for adding Japan, China and the Maori. They'd be fun too. Can you imagine boarding parties of Maori? 37 killed by gunfire, 225 captured, 225 livers eaten.

I know this reply is awfully late but the comments above represent, IMO, the root cause of what ails NA: The cost of losing a ship or a port is too high. Consider that taking a port away from another country -- and keeping it -- would require a fairly large number of troops. That's expensive and so what was much more common was plundering the port and leaving. If something like plunder and leave was in this game there would still be port battles but few to no takeovers (e.g., maybe it should cost something like 10-20 million gold to buy an occupation army; very expensive but still could occur). The effect would be countries will remain closer in balance over a longer period of time. Similarly consider that Captains were "issued" ships, they did not buy them. So instead of crafting (or buying one) for yourself all combat ships com e via the Admiralty and are issued to Captains based on their experience. Lose your ship? Admiralty replaces it within, say, 24 hours for NA and less than 1 hour for Legends. Crafting would be done for the Admiralty so those who enjoy that aspect of the game can continue to do it. Want to make money instead? Sail in trade ships. My point is the DEV's will never be able to find a balance that allows all factions, whether they are countries or clans, to remain on equal footing (allowing perpetual even conflict) simply because similarly skilled persons play at different times and in different numbers. The balance they want is a hopeless quest and players who come up with the short end of the stick (re-read quoted comments above) will more often than not throw in the towel and leave. OTOH if the consequences of losing a battle are addressed over a very short time any player suffering a loss knows he will be made whole again by tomorrow -- he will be back tomorrow to play again.

IMO this change is incredibly stupid. If the problem was about individual Nations getting beat up and run out of town the solution could have been to make the consequences of a lost port battle plunder instead of occupation: Some percentage of home-port player inventory could be offered up to be stolen. Some percentage of buildings could be destroyed by fire and many (limited to available crews) of the ships at dock could be cut out and taken away. But after a couple of days (at most) the invaders have to leave and cannot come back for some period of time. Anybody who lingers could either be teleported home or "destroyed" by rioting locals. True invasions require a lot of troops... that's VERY expensive, which is why it didn't happen all that often. So maybe a permanent occupation can be obtained for, oh, I dunno, 10 million gold. Changes of this sort would greatly slow down the rate at which one country is diminished or enlarged and this nonsense about everything is a neutral port could have been avoided.

Europe maps have been debated before. IMO one map for Europe is waaaay too large and when you consider that where its land and water are located is the inverse of the Caribbean you'll understand the problem: You cannot sail thru the center of the map... there is no as the crow flies journey. Everything in a Europe map is done around the outer edges. Talk about a grind!! IMO one map for the Med would be perfect: not as tall but about twice the width so the sailing area is about the same as NA.

Repeating myself from other posts, IMO the dev's will never find the answer they are looking for -- a game system that doesn't allow one team to completely dominate the others, a game system where who is strong and who is weak shifts around over time, a game system that they don't have to intervene in every couple of months with big changes -- unless they change their thinking about losses. Consider: NA PvP today is no different than walking into a casino for an evenings entertainment. You can win big... you can lose your shirt, a most importantly in many, many instances the guy who loses his shirt didn't want that confrontation in the first place. His ship, many hours of game time to acquire, is permanently lost. His nation's port is lost to what is effectively permanent occupation. No wonder the player count over the last 20 months is down to about 10% of what it once was. IMO guys leave because too much time is expected of them to acquire the assets they want to use... and it that asset is lost, too much time is required to replace it. IMO the idea to consider is to turn player assets into permanent asset the player can carry from map to map, from week to week, w/o regard to having it sunk last night. Let players have a limited number of ships they have crafted, captured, or purchased. When one sinks, use a cool-down period, maybe 12 hours, maybe 24, maybe several days, but whatever the period is at the end of it the "lost" ship returns to the inventory. Perhaps there is a small cost in gold, but the player does not have to spend a week of evenings grinding out enough gold and resources to rebuild that ship and the DEV's don't have to spend weeks on analysis and coding trying to make everyone happy again. Similar w/ ports: Whoever wins the port battle doesn't permanently occupy that location but they do get a certain number of hours ... 12, 24, maybe more, to pillage it. Some (not all) of the port goods are stolen... some, but not all of the warehouse goods are stolen... maybe even a tiny percentage of buildings are burned down... but then the port battle victors have to leave and that port remains a no-fighting port for some period of time, maybe a week, maybe a month. The key point is it is returned to the country it originally belonged to. IOW there is no need to make almost every port a neutral port and there are no circumstances where one team can wipe out another's resource base. What this means is the human cost to engage in PvP combat is pretty much eliminated. The whole game becomes more like a sports event: You may lose this weekend but you keep your equipment and play another game next weekend. The way NA is today is when you lose this weekend you team loses its shirt, shoes, and equipment and you are just SOL. And when you are SOL, why come back to play again?

DEV's can put multiple game worlds on one server by changing the existing .json files so they include a high level reference to which world they are to be used and to the code to make use of that specification. No changes to the map is required. Put several PvP worlds in there as well. It's simply one computer as a server running one application. Whatever any player sees is limited to the game world -- and .json files -- he requested when he logged in. It would be no different than running excel and opening two or three different spreadsheet files (they don't get mixed together, do they? Same concept.). Dev's get better use out of the servers they lease and PvE players don't get treated like second hand trash.

Make rewards a function of both the strength of the ship sunk/captured and the combat XP of its captain. Sort of: a wolf eating two hundred mice = a wolf eating another wolf... you can choose to grind or you can go big and take the big risk.

I'll repeat a suggestion I made earlier, different thread: adjust the pricing of building ships to the strength of the country. The strongest pay the most. The weakest pay the least. Sort of like professional sports drafts where the worst team in the league gets the first pick.. That'll probably mean all ship building materials are owned by (and crafted on behalf of) the Admiralty. Maybe that's where tax revenue goes too. Personal profit gets limited to trade goods and specialty war materials, like better gunpowder, special sail cloth, etc. etc. , while all armed ships carrying more than 4pdr guns are from the Admiralty. Crafting remains as is but again, materials are Admiralty goods, not clan or personal as do gunpowder and shot (which should be inventoried by each ship... no longer unlimited quantities on hand. Doing something like this is a helping hand to those who have been kicked to the curb and a leash on those who do the kicking. If it works, no need for more map wipes.

There was an suggestion earlier about how battle sails might require changes to existing animation. That's normally a change to the 3d model. If they have to go back to the mesh they might as well be looking at all of the animation changes people would like to see -- the point of my post. So not so far off topic as you might have thought. That said, I take no offense at your thought. In future may I suggest you complain to the moderators (always better than one member trying to seize the authority of mods for their own use)? It's their job not yours. IMO the mods here are remarkable inactive. Perhaps if they were to be woken up now and then they'd see there are a whole lot of threads that would benefit from ordinary topic splitting (a feature of IPB board software).

The change sounds good, being able to animate sounds even better. Since new animation / model changes has been brought up, can I add open gun ports in battle situations only? Real Studding sails too? Side comment: When the sails go up in a blaze a lot of flaming tar falls from the rigging. Big Problems!

QUESTION: What are the (unintended) consequences of these changes to PvE? It's all so obviously intended to address PvP issues but AFAIK it's still just one program for both PvP and PvE. Is there a PvE impact? Taxes perhaps (some clan gets a big head and tries to scam everyone else into paying taxes)?? Seems reasonable to me that any player should be able to change to Pirate at any time. It is what happened in the era. As for no nation for Pirates, that too seems reasonable but i suspect it would require a fair amount of code changes... just getting rid of the Admiralty would mean changing the entire permit process just for Pirates. That might not be so bad from a historical sense (no permits, just what you can capture) but even basic code changes need testing and the Admiralty has a lot of features built into it. Is it really a priority??

The reason I asked is the last three, maybe four bottles I have recovered have been some combination of <200 tons of iron ingots, tobacco, and a few gold or silver bars. Maaaybe worth a couple of thousand gold. This would be, oh... after the first week of July. Before then (and before the big wipe), it was as all of you described. Now all I see is dregs.

And some people don't understand why we PvE players want nothing to do w/ PvP.... A suggestion to Dev's: Make the Admiralty cost to do anything an inverse function of the total battle ratings of each country. Add something similar for number of ports too if that is worthwhile. Have the Admiralty contribute crafted materials with costs per those functions. It would do wonders for helping those kicked in the teeth to rebuild and fight back. Consider excluding Pirates from the above. Being criminals they have no central government to help them.

Some weeks ago one could expect juicy rewards from finding a ship wreck mapped by a sealed bottle. It might include stuff like Black Ironwood. Nowadays you get iron ingots and not much else. It used to take a big trader to carry away the loot. One only needs a Lynx now, sometimes not even a Trader Lynx. So is it just my bad luck of late or has the value of sealed bottles gone from fabulous to not worth the bother? And why?

I'm looking for the book titled User Manual. Anyone find that?