[Treacherous Danes - the French Cold War Goes Hot]

Please find enclosed [PURGE] opinion of [CCCP] using Indiamen in French territorial waters.

 

After-battle party on French deck got a little out of hand but it was okay.

[Treacherous Danes - the French Cold War Goes Hot]

4 minutes ago, Serk said:

You've already lost the race.Roseau is about to be flipped.

It's not a sprint.

It's a marathon.

The proper response would be to flip both Terre regions. Ideally we want to flip 1 Danish port every day until they get sick of trying to show up at 9am their time to defend them.

If I can find the people with the willpower to do it, we will flip the Danish homeland within the next week.

The Danes can flip it back but we'll just take it again.

[To all Captains are you tiered of a empty Server join EU]

US and Oceanic time zone people cannot fight in port battles on the EU server due to the restrictions on port battle times.

You need to mention that little tidbit unless you are intentionally trolling the forums in which case moderators should shut down this thread.

[Treacherous Danes - the French Cold War Goes Hot]

Secret video released of the latest French clan meeting as representatives of The Purge arrive at the ICS guild hall:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3w6c7RUbUs

[ICS].... I release you from this spell.

[Treacherous Danes - the French Cold War Goes Hot]

War
French Clans Urged to Fight

As many of you know, Denmark long ago declared war on France and stole our territory, including the vital regions of Basse-Terre and Grand-Terre which have the materials we need to generate war supplies as well as being our best coal source.

The French clan [ICS], duped from within by rumored Danish alt Johnny LaKron who shall henceforth be known as "Wormtongue", facilitated this "trade". The deal was that Denmark gets our land and we get Conquest Marks in return. Worthless baubles. Denmark would never return the two Terre regions, which generate both conquest marks and war supplies for them.

French Clan [PURGE] never signed or agreed to this deal and has been sinking Danish ships. Unfortunately we have stood alone in this effort.

We hear now that stage 2 of the Denmark / Wormtongue plan begins soon:

Denmark will take all of our territory and "feed" Conquest Marks back to those French they deem worthy.

France will be a 1 port nation, straight from the mouth of the Danes, and only the worthy will be hand-fed by their Danish masters.

It is not too late to fight.

France has many fighters. The sniveling Danes are +12 hours from most of us so they attack us only at night but this works both ways. We can also attack them during their night.

The Basse-Terre area is rich in Danish NPC fleets. With combined effort, France could flip Danish regions even faster than they flip ours. It will be a war of attrition but it's a war we can win. We can push this straight up into the Danish region until your current masters beg us to leave them alone. This is the only way to deal with tyrants.

 

I expect Wormtongue will recommend you flee. Some of you may seek out safer waters with the Dutch or British. [PURGE] is staying. We have fought one-port wars before. But it will be easier if all of France contributes.

Did you come to this new world to fight, or did you come to listen to the whispers of Wormtongue and bow and scrape to people he says are your betters?

Choose soon, France. You will find us in the fight.

[ICS Kill Competition *Completed*]

I feel bad for ICS, really.

Their rank and file are just players looking for a home and ICS is the only French guild (that I know of) that does open recruitment and accepts newbies without hesitation.

Like I dunno how much of a veteran Avro is but he or his guild should have advised him that the Aggie is not a solo ship and riding around in it is a terrible idea. If he wants a good solo ship, an Endymion is in the same ballpark of power and cost and is MUCH safer to solo in due to its speed. That is the kind of guidance players really need.

Unfortunately some of the ... more vocal ... diplomatic representatives ... of ICS have made a lot of enemies and pretty well pissed off the rest of the French clans, particularly all of the dedicated PvP clans, many of which left the Antilles because of ICS.

That the rank and file members of ICS should suffer for this is a shame.

 

I'm not saying you should stop. I'm just saying it's a shame. Like putting down Old Yeller. You know there's just no coming back from rabies but you just can't let it keep going on.

[Crafting: start new players at level 20]

...or revise the whole way crafting XP works.

Just a thought. I am a level 50 crafter now so this does not impact me anymore but when I'm talking about this game to people, trying to convince them to try it, I do have to admit to them that leveling crafting really sucks. Level 1 crafters can't make ships anyone really wants. That won't come until much later and requires a level 2 shipyard.

Actually maybe Cerberus, Surprise and Reno should be moved to level 1 shipyard, so there are a few 5th rates they can make without having to upgrade to the relatively expensive level 2 shipyard.

 

I can think of lots of ways to revise the whole crafting XP system to make it more useful and fun but "start new players off at level 20" is almost as good.

And "20" is arbitrary. Maybe it should really be 25 or 30. All I know is that I would like to not feel obligated to inform potential customers that it sucks to level up crafting and they will spend many levels churning out useless junk that nobody wants.

[White oak frame part and planking Agamemnon]

Sorry for the formatting, just doing a cut and paste from the super top secret guild spreadsheet.

(For further breakdowns, you're on your own.)

    GENERAL                
    Provisions        500        
    Medium Carriage        42        
    Large Carriage        26        
                    
    HULL                
    Rudder Parts        62        
    Tar        18        
    Knees        64        
    Frame Parts        449        White Oak Frame Parts
    Planks        513        White Oak Planks
                    
    RIGS                
    Rigging Parts        50        
    Canvas Rolls        50        
    Blocks        178        
    Cordage And Oakum        100        
                    
    FITTINGS                
    Cables And Howsers        17        
    Iron Fittings        19        
    Wooden Fittings        45        
    Furnishings        10        
    Ballast        54        
                    
    Total Labor Hours Required (Ship Only):                1323
    Total Labor Hours Required (Total):                3440

[Realism vs Game]

Rewards for the loser:
This was taken out of the game due to people abusing it. They arrange matches, shoot each other up and exit and do it again and again and again. (This is why we can't have nice things.) You can never reward people more than the amount of repairs you cost them and that's pretty close to zero, so we can't award "damage". Only sinks. You CAN get an assist by doing sail damage though, so that works.

 

I really reject this entire "reward" argument that has been coming up, though.

Would you people seriously not PvP at all if there were no rewards for it? I still would. I do like the rewards and wouldn't mind seeing it increased but I'm sinking you because I enjoy it. I enjoyed the simple fact of the open sea hunt, too, so even if you surrender right away that's great. Back to the hunt! I know some people see PvP as "honorable duelists engaged in manly fisticuffs" but that's not what any open world PvP game anywhere is about.

Open world PvP is always about Killers.

Being fair is not in our blood.

[The Lineship 'Problem']

The problem right now is that everyone is making them but nobody is using them.

Get one good, real showdown between some lineships, with some actual sinking going on, and the tears will flow again.

PvP wolfpacks could also be bagging a whole lot of traders and even the occasional lineship if they risked it and figured out where to go.

[No, seriously though, we need more guild warehouse slots]

Guild warehouse, when used by builders, does not have enough slots to contain the different woods, planks, frames, cannons and refit materials.

Increasing the number of distinct items that can be put into the warehouse by about 30 would be a huge quality of life improvement.

[Constitution vs Endymion]

The theory as I see it:

Endy speed advantage is still an advantage because if you want to speed cap a Connie you have to cripple it. We'd need to do the math to be sure about this but I'm betting that if you got a Connie up to 15 knots it would be by making it fir/fir, putting several speed mods with various negative effects on it and maybe even reducing its guns.

In the end, you would have a total piece of crap Connie that's mainly good at running and is terrible at fighting.

Meanwhile you take an Endy, build it and mod it with SOME speed improvements but also with SOME tanky features and you have a 15 knot ship that is actually worth a damn and can still fight.

In summary, yes, I bet you can make a 15 knot Endy and a 15 knot Connie and the 15 knot Endy would totally kick the 15 knot Connie's ass.

[Trader Ships Too Slow]

17 minutes ago, Kanay said:

Yup, if they change delivery missions a bit, this wasn't present when i left the game, looked a bit into them and it seems like a complete waste of time to even try them.

The only person I know who does delivery missions does them mainly for the crafting XP. He also does this:

* Find a delivery mission for a crafted material that has a destination of your capital.
* Make an outpost at this mission location.
* Go to your capital and make a huge number of that crafted material.
* Hop back and forth between outposts, picking up the same delivery mission over and over and over and just completing it in the capital where you have the stuff stockpiled.

He says the missions switch up every day but stay constant throughout the day so every day he just has to find a new delivery mission, move his temporary outpost to there and then do it repeatedly until he's out of crafted materials or is tired of doing it.

I have not tried this, no idea if that's really worth the trouble, but I think that was how it worked.

I can certainly see the sense in only doing delivery missions for things you already have at the destination, though.

(The REAL money making "delivery" in this game is selling crafted materials to free ports or doing trade good runs anyway. I think delivery missions themselves are a leftover from the old days.)

[Trader Ships Too Slow]

I think it's fine. If you want safe trading, use a Trader's Lynx, which are super-difficult to stop (especially if they actually bring rig repairs).

For anything else, you need to do escorted sailing. With NPC fleets in the game you can escort yourself to some extent. The standard solo pirate is going to have a hard time with a fleet that like's 3 armed Indiaman and 1 player-sailed Constitution. (The AI is not that great but it's good enough for that.)

You can still get ganked, of course, but them's the breaks.

You can make tremendous piles of cash in this game via open world trading. It needs to stay risky. We shouldn't need specialized PvP speed ships to catch a loaded Indiaman, LGV or Brig.

[Under Pressure: a new port flip mechanic]

Related idea B.

Enemy ports do something to your ports, if they are too close. Maybe their mere presence cuts down on trade good generation. The best trade goods come from areas that have no enemy ports anywhere near them.

Getting those enemy ports out of your back yard is imperative for money making.

Maybe an enemy port that has been unmolested for a long time generates a really big area of disruptive influence. Eventually we'll need to attack those deep British ports because they're just so old and they bother everyone else on the map....

[Under Pressure: a new port flip mechanic]

Thinking about marks and mechanics, here's the problem I see right now:

There is no particular pressure the game puts on anyone to attack. Maybe I want more marks but I can get them next week just as easily as today. We're going to sit back until we have 537 First Rates and then we're ready.

What we need is war pressure. I need to attack you today. Today, with this half built fleet and store-bought Surprises. TODAY. NOW. READY OR NOT, HERE WE COME.

 

To that end, what if ports generated contention against each other automatically? Neighboring areas just contend with each other all the time simply for existing. It can be influenced by players through various means (particularly to adjust the time it's going to land) but even with 0 player activity, ports A and B are putting contention on each other.

So the British and the French didn't really want to fight over Haiti. They weren't quite ready. Only 487 First Rates built up, not time to attack yet. But now there's a port battle scheduled because of automatic contention generation and any couple of random British newbies who blunder in there are going to take the place over unless some French defend it. And, you know, here's this small British clan who wasn't much into RvR or contention flipping but you know, since the port battle is right there, just inviting them in, why not give it a go? Better bring more French defenders now. And who wants to leave those poor British fledglings by themselves? Might just bring a few first rates, just for a show. So the French better bring some too....

The game basically pushes us into port battles.

This is also a mechanic for upsetting alliances.

You'd better have 100% of your team on board with that Pirate-Danish alliance because when natural contention generates a port battle between them, it's not going to take much to turn that into a flip....and then maybe another flip....and another. Sooner or later someone is going to have to take real action.

 

Conquest marks encourages defense.

I think we need generated pressure to encourage offense.

[Alternative To the Conquest Mark system]

28 minutes ago, admin said:

Any thoughts on why?
To much land giving pensions?

Honest assessment: people are so risk-averse they do not want to risk port battles with each other.

They seriously do not want to start until they have their "fleet of 25 first rates" and right now it's labor and materials holding them back moreso than conquest marks.

 

Maybe......

Maybe what we need is a game mechanic that doesn't just make you desire owning new ports but makes you desire owning them NOW. Not next week. Not two weeks from now. But NOW.

How do we do that? What does that mean? I'm not sure. I'm just imaging that I'm sitting there with a partial fleet, "not yet ready" but some game mechanic is pressuring me to attack now rather than wait and build and wait and build and wait and build which is what everyone is doing.

[counter SORRY reviews!]

6 minutes ago, Gizbo said:

you have 993 posts 1111 likes 

Day's not over yet.

[counter SORRY reviews!]

1 hour ago, Gizbo said:

so i am a twat then i play and love the game but why would i tell ppl it's ok to buy this game but if you post / say anything the dev's / mod's dont like or even be in a clan they seem to hate with a passion posting the leaders ip (with no apology)

B.S.

I am pretty far from being a passive fan of this game. Over 1000 posts and I don't shy away from it when there's something in this game I think is broken or just don't like and I have yet to be slapped down by the devs. I campaigned for a while trying to convince the devs to flat out get rid of XP and ranks because I thought it was bad for the game (I still mostly think this, but I gave up arguing about it).

The problem is some people have no sense of style.

You can't just yell at the devs, throw mud at the game and post memes and think that's going to work.

Talk like a rational human, get treated like a rational human. If this dev banned people for disagreeing with him, I'd have been gone about 1000 posts ago.

[counter SORRY reviews!]

6 hours ago, Gizbo said:

i wont ask anybody to post a false review just so the game get's more like's.

Nobody's asking for a false review.

We're asking for people who are actively playing and enjoying the game to actually say so.

Remember that in Steam world, a negative review really says "Nobody else should buy this game, the developers should stop development on it and not get any more money and I will never play it again."

Anyone who has left a negative review and still plays is being a hypocritical twat.

[British using basic cutter exploit.]

Guessing:

They attack the NPC fleet and it pulls you in?

I know that was an old trick back in the day. Sit near an NPC and keep cycling attack on it, then let it go through when an enemy was passing nearby. He thinks everything is great and then poof, he's in a fight and probably in a really bad position.

Workaround (if true) --

Watch out for cutters shadowing NPC fleets and avoid that fleet.

[I AM BORED: Why I am thinking of quitting Naval Action]

Just wanted to chime in and say that a Fir/Fir Trincom is only about 80k to click out. I think I made more than enough money for several Trincs yesterday just casually grinding XP on my Surprise to unlock boxes.

Granted that assumes an ideal communist clan environment and doesn't account for hauling times and so forth, but just in terms of pure cash you need to build one, that's about what it takes: 80k.

What's crushing a lot of people is this insane need to build line ships.

And I wonder how many of them are going to quit when they lose their first line ship.

Could probably fight 25 1st rates vs 25 5th rates, sink like 3 of the first rates and win the war because those 3 people quit and never come back whereas the 25 Trincs and Essexes just shrug and click out another one. A few battles like that and they're out of 1st rate pilots..... (and 1st rates).

 

This game is not as hard as some of you make it be.

[counter SORRY reviews!]

I agree with OP.

Contact your guilds. Get on their private forums and make a simple request: give this game a positive review. Even if it just says "gg, would play again", the important thing is the uptick.

There was definitely a douchebag campaign to downvote the game and then uptick all of those negative reviews and all we need is a slightly counter-adjustment by people who actually do enjoy the game.

EVE has almost 1500 negative reviews too. And to be sure, I'm not saying all negative reviews are fraudulent. There are legitimate reasons to not like this game. But a negative campaign by butthurt douchebags has thrown things out of whack and we need to get it back to normal.

 

To be clear, this game has faults but the #1 fault is that it needs about 4000 more active players. There are good, logistics-oriented PvPers out there who would love this game but we need to give them some more positive reviews to look at.

[Guild Warehouse: Ship Storage?]

Just another thought on why we could actually use "guild ship storage" -- ship sharing:

I make a couple of Indiaman. It makes no sense for them to sit in my dock while I'm at work but it's hard to get them into the correct hands every day. I wish I could dock them into the guild warehouse so that other guildies [with warehouse permissions] can take the ship, use it and then redock it for the next guy.

Would also be nice for grinding lineships. We would just have a few common ones we store in the guild warehouse and share.

This would be a big quality of life improvement for guilds.

[Revisit: Ship buy orders]

tl;dr: we should be able to place buy orders for ships now

In ye olden days I believe the argument was that buy orders made no sense due to RNG (random number generation) in the build process. You needed to look at the ship to really see if it met your needs.

Now that there's no RNG, I see no reason we can't have ship buy orders.

I place a buy order for a FIR/FIR Traders Brig for 75000. Works just like any other. Anyone who makes one and is willing to sell for that price can fulfill the buy order.

This will also solve the problem of clans making ships for clanmates and trying to arrange meetings to move the ship. Clan member who wants the ship just places a buy order and the clan shipbuilder fulfills it. (He can just set a buy price of "1" or whatever.)