Slamz

Another possibility: Ship buy orders. Now that there's no RNG in ship making, I don't see a problem with being able to create a buy order for a "Live Oak / White Oak Indefatigable". This would allow people to create a buy order for a ship they just want someone, somewhere, to make, but it could also be used by clans -- I create that buy order for 1 gold because my clan shipbuilder is going to make it and this is just another way to get it to me.

Always thought it should say "sell to port" and "buy from port" or maybe just "sell to" and "buy from".

+1 We should be able to easily trade with allies, mainly to move repairs around. If Admin has some other way we can trade repairs without the long sail to a friendly/neutral port, that's fine too. Also agree with Vllad: you cannot allow cargo trading between enemies. Money yes. Cargo no. Cargo trading would create some abuses.

Even if every single port in the game was a free outpost and you had 100 dock slots, the important thing is ship assets. 100 dock slots means nothing if I can't afford 100 ships to put in them. Frankly I'm not sure of the point of limiting these things. As I see it, more outposts and more dock space = more PvP potential all around the map. The argument for limiting it is to create a sense of "locality" but the cost of locality is a lot of empty space and a lot of really long sails to engage in PvP actions. Giving extra bonuses to "Lords" is really my idea of a compromise. You want it limited? I don't know why but fine, keep it limited. But just this little tidbit would make so many PvP actions involve so much less bland sailing for so many people. They still need the ships, though, and you still have to get them there to begin with, but once there it would be easy to go back and fight.

Monk33y, how do empty port battles make this a better game? Why do you prefer 25 vs 0 over having defenders be able to easily show up? Are you just a conquest mark farmer and don't care about ship combat at all? Have you even been in a real port battle? You should try it sometime. It's a lot of fun. Maybe one of the best features of this game and it doesn't get to happen often enough. Anything that makes full port battles more common, I probably will support the idea.

I do think devs need to put more weight on a structural boost. Like if Cag was +20% structure maybe that would be something? As someone else said, once your armor is gone, that structure isn't worth much anyway. Nothing will bounce. Gonna need to be a BIG boost to structure to make that worth as much as as a much smaller boost to thickness, I'd think.

...and perhaps 1 free dock space that's only good for that county (i.e., you can park 1 ship there and it doesn't count against your total dock space). Just thinking this might drive more contested port battles, if we could more reasonably park a ship at the counties we are Lords of. I mean, you'd think they'd give a Lord a free docking slot at least.

I would like to request a feature for "guild docks", perhaps as part of the guild warehouse. It's just a place we can stick ships which anyone with warehouse permissions can pull out. EVE has this and it's very useful, especially for tighter knit guilds like mine. Basically, knowing we use Renomees a lot, I would like to be able to build up a few spares in the warehouse so that anyone who needs one can pull one out. Also handy for a guild shipbuilder to build a ship and leave it in the warehouse so the intended owner can grab it out later.

That would probably be the ideal. There is no "Traders Snow". There's just a Snow. Every gun represents a huge amount of cargo space, though, because it's not just the physical gun but also a representation of stored ammo and powder. In that case a cargo ship is just a warship with at least some guns removed. You would buy a Snow and just not put any guns on it to get a ship with a huge, empty hold. I have a feeling the game engine does not support this level of customization though. It might even be asking for a lot for the devs to add half a gun deck to the Traders Snow.

Just a thought: Trader Snow is useless, as far as I can figure out. The Trader Brig carries more and this is really the main thing that distinguishes them. Trader Cutter and Trader Lynx have different sailing profiles that keep them potentially useful as blockade runners (especially the Traders Lynx which is nearly impossible to stop) but the Snow's 180 profile is not especially stand-out given its reduced cargo hold. Trader Snow does have the upper gun deck but this is not a useful amount of guns. Makes it slightly harder to board but if you're at that point then you've probably lost the ship one way or another. What if the Trader Snow was a mini-LGV in the sense that we up-gun it a bit more? Still a reduced hold compared to the Traders Brig but enough guns to potentially shred the sails of an attacker and run away. Maybe give it 6 per side and 2 on the back? Class 9?

I eventually agreed with the others: just bring something like a Lynx with you. Maybe a Trader's Lynx, actually, so you can also move small amounts of goods in and out. They are almost impossible to stop, if you put some rig repairs on board. None of the upwind ships have forward chasers so they can't really even stop each other. Another option would be to just keep trying to run out in a Basic Cutter. Zero cost to you, zero reward for them if they sink you, and they still aren't that easy to catch. I have no doubt we will be hearing from trapped people, but I do agree the solution for this particular problem is there for those who plan ahead.

I don't, but not for the reason you state. I actually think piracy in the right area could be the best income in the game right now. What holds ME back is that I am also an RvR player who needs to help with contention grinding and port flips. I can't really commit my time to build a pirate outpost in distant lands and live there for 3 days, with home waters (and therefore relevant homeland RvR activities) being a 3 hour sail away. If I was a pure pirate I would absolutely already be out there, penetrating deeply into the enemy's most sensitive areas. Their poop deck would never recover. And I do think the income from sacking traders would more than offset my losses. But as an RvR player I just can't commit to that kind of move right now. It's not the economics guiding my decision. It's the logistics. Are you trying this? Are you not finding traders or having a hard time sacking them and selling their goods? Genuinely curious if there is a reason this is not working.

Actually you should be happy when that happens. You wanted to sell 20 guns at 2000 each. It worked! You sold out. Who cares what happens to them? You got the price you asked for and should be happy. Make 20 more guns and mark them up a bit. Keep doing this until you stop selling out. You will eventually reach a price point where demand slows down, the other guy isn't profiting by buying you out and now he's stuck with a load of guns he can't sell because you're still producing and incidentally undercutting him. He will have a hard time ever getting out from under his stockpile of guns that he ultimately overpaid for. "Buyouts" really only work when supply is very limited. I love how games like this are ultimately a lesson in real world economics.

PvPers should be happier than anyone! Well, maybe not duelists but "PvPer" in the sense of people [like me] who just want to go out and wreck people and take their stuff. I was driving around last night doing trading and thinking what an opportunity was being missed. Nobody at all hunting the waters. I guess part of it is that it's still too early. Everyone is still getting situated. PvP like this is a commitment. With Fleet perks 1 & 2, you could make 2x Renoms (or whatever you like), 1x fir/fir Lynx, load up with repairs, sail to enemy territory, go to their free port and set up an outpost. Now PvP with your Renoms (one at a time, so you have a spare durability back at your outpost) and hunt traders. Grab any traders you can, steal their ship (fleet perk!), put your warship in tow and use smuggler flag to go into the nearest port and just dump the goods for cash. Whenever you're ready to go home, take the Lynx as your travel boat, as it will be nearly impossible for them to stop you even if they're camping the port. With no teleport, it's a commitment but the more I think about it the more I think it will work and might make you a lot of money. I mean you could grab the right trader and blam, 250,000+ gold of trade goods on him even if you don't go to the ideal port to sell to. The only people who are really in the cold are fight-until-we-sink duelists. If you want to be a duelist, you'll need to find a real source of income to back it up.

I would say Teleports of ships and goods was the problem. I see no problem with teleporting your captain around. Saves a lot of trouble and makes an oversized, underpopulated map a little more populated-feeling. But you're probably right and the real answer to the main problem is to just bring a fir/fir Lynx with you and use that as your travel ship. It's still a commitment to go into a Free Port but I agree now it would be hard to blockade us if we're prepared with the right ships.

Will they? If not, are you okay with trading being forever a high reward, no risk money creator? Raiding traders is high risk and includes a very real threat of being literally shut out of the game. You will have to just log out, play something else and sneak out at 2am in a basic cutter. I think few if any people will do this, therefore trading is actually a no risk money fountain. The threat from "raiders" is purely imagined.

My fear is this just means nobody will do it. Which seems to be the case right now. I'm sailing through French waters, not a player in sight, day and night, because nobody wants to sail for 2 hours to our free port and then 2 hours back. Nations like Britain will be able to have deep-behind-the-lines trading meccas that simply nobody raids because it's way too much trouble. As an avid PvPer who would love to harass some shipping, I cannot fathom sailing 2 hours deep into British territory, setting up an outpost and then manually sailing 2 hours back out when I'm done, plus the threat of being camped in there. The threat of being raided is false if nobody wants to do it. Slightly alternate idea: Let Pirates, as in the team, teleport freely between all outposts. Anyone who really wants to do deep raiding on a regular basis becomes a Pirate. National teams remain restricted as-is. If I decide I really want to raid like that, I will switch teams.

I don't like that really, because you're still done for the day.... but maybe buy them with marks? Like teleporting between nation outposts is always free but you can also teleport to/from neutral ports for a cost of, I dunno, 10 PvE marks or 5 PvP marks or something like that? I dunno what a good price is but it should be enough that people can do it but it will hurt them to do it casually.

Edit: Belay! After discussion I agree that this is not really a problem. It is a great commitment to base yourself out of a free port but the risk can be greatly mitigated by just bringing something like a fir/fir lynx with you so you can always get out of there if you need to. Original message: As I was sailing my trader around last night, happily trading and making a lot of money deep in French territory, I thought, "this would be a great time for someone to gank me" and "why isn't anyone trying to gank me" and "these neutral ports around here should have people based there who want to gank me". Then I realized the problem. If you base yourself out of a free port deep in enemy territory then you've really trapped yourself. You show your face, gank a couple people, run back to port and now you're camped. They're out there waiting for you and you have no way out. You are done playing Naval Action for the night unless you like alts. Maybe we should allow captain teleporting between outposts, regardless of if they are Free Ports or not? Another option might be: * You can teleport from one nation outpost to any other nation outpost * You can also teleport from one neutral outpost to any other neutral outpost In this case, our intrepid pirate only needs 1 other neutral port anywhere in the game so he can teleport out and play somewhere else for a while. Switching from neutral port raiding to nation defense involves a little sailing time, though. I guess the counter argument is: We don't want raiding to be too easy. If you go to raid British shipping out of a neutral port, this is a serious commitment and only dedicated raiders will do it. ...but I don't like the idea that you could simply trap raiders in a neutral port. To my eye, it overly punishes that playstyle. I personally would like to go setup a raid base out of a neutral port deep in enemy territory but I don't want to have to live there or get camped in.

Stopping production of regional woods might be interesting. We wouldn't want anything that halts fir and oak production, for example, though. People always need a way to make ships. But raiding free towns should actually be legit. The only people using the Free Towns for trading in French territory are, mostly, French, so raiding "our" free towns would hurt us more than anyone else (might hurt the Swedes too, because they like to sneak in there... but mostly us). And I dunno about "mostly capitals and free towns". Last night, for example, I made most of my money trading back and forth between two French towns almost right next to each other. It wasn't the 100% profit (or more) I could have made by moving it to a capital but it was still about 40-50% profit hauling trade goods from one French town (which had the lowest price in the region) to the town right next door (which had the highest price for quite some distance). In this case, raiding either of those towns would have wrecked my easy money making last night (...and probably tonight, if nobody else is stripping the place!)

I don't like that as much actually. As I was writing up this raid idea I realized one obvious flaw would be that for it to really matter, it needs to last a fair amount of time. With even a smaller team having 20 ports to trade between, raids/blockades that impact a port for 2-3 days is not going to really hurt them unless you're raiding/blockading like 2-3 per day, ever day, forever. The raid dropping trade good prices to 0% and then +10% recovery per day, though, means you could hurt a region pretty badly by doing 1 raid per day or even 1 every other day. It's a longer lasting and therefore more disruptive burden. You still can't exactly ruin Britain (which just has too many ports) but you could certainly shut down particular locales. Your idea does make me think of how raids could work though (this despite saying I didn't want to talk about how raids are created....) Make contention be both port based and county based. County contention is the sum of all port contention within that county and basically just works like today. 100% contention = port battle scheduled. If you focus your contention on an individual port, though, then getting any port to 50% puts it in "raid" status and has the effects described above. So conducting a raid is really about going to a port and sinking everything near it, just like port battles, but lower requirements and can be done at the same time as a county flip attempt. Or maybe you don't even intent to attempt the flip and you just build up contention all over the place to cause these "raid" conditions to occur. But also, I think it's important that this impacts only trade goods (and maybe NPC ship selling). We have to think about a player on a low pop nation basically logging in to "dead gaem" because all his ports are raided/blockaded and he can't really even conduct normal business. By limiting it to trade goods, we pull the rug out from under the big money maker but there are other ways to make money and the player to player economy is still functional. (Actually he can still trade too, but he'll have to smuggle flag and go further out and take chances!) Raids should be felt without being crippling to a team.

I realize this is a painful task to ask of mods but it may be something they could work on in spare time: Go around to various forums and re-evaluate the sticky-threads. Some forums have way too many and should be consolidated into a "Sticky Post of Links to Other Important Posts", as was done in the Guides forum. Other stickies are simply outdated, containing information from over a year ago that nobody has talked about or updated and should just be un-stickied. The "Sticky Post of Links to Other Important Posts" could use a going-over as well, to see which of those links are still relevant. Delete the ones that have gotten too out of date. Some things (like a link to a post describing manual sailing techniques) are pretty timeless but I bet some of the others, dealing with specific mechanics that have changed a lot, are no longer valuable. I do not envy or volunteer for this task. I'm just sayin' the outdated sticky-post situation is probably about due for a good looking at.

I think part of why the "raid" idea keeps falling flat is just because, well, what's the point? What does a raid do that makes it worth the trouble? I think the answer could be in the new trade goods economy. That is a massive money maker and seems like it could be an interesting raid idea. The Dutch are making millions trading between their capital and the British capital! What if you could raid the Dutch capital and in doing so: 1) Disable all trade good production for 5 days 2) Disable all trade good consumption and buying for 5 days Used to be the capital would buy widgets for 250,000 each but since you raided it, it will not buy widgets at all. It does not impact resource production or trading because we don't want to shut down basic ship construction, which the game needs to survive, but we COULD shut down trade goods which would actually be painful. And "disabled for 5 days" is highly negotiable.... it could simply create a "-100%" modifier to the sell-to-NPC prices for that port which then returns to normal at a rate of 10% per day. So right after the raid the port will pay literally "1" for widgets but then goes up to 25,000 on the next day (10% of normal). You probably paid 125,000 to purchase widgets so it will take 5 days to reach the break-even point and 10 days to return to normal. This would make it valuable to just raid all up and down someone's main trade routes, ruining their best, easiest, most traveled money making lanes. What, exactly, a "raid" consists of mechanically I would prefer to leave to other threads. This is just an idea on what effect a "raid" might actually cause that could be interesting and worth doing. Thinking of "exploits": You could dodge the effects of severe raids by creating alts in other nations but I think the idea is still sound because ultimately raiding is going to disrupt the normal flow of traffic. Brits raid my French ports so I make a British alt and just trade over there for money. But then the Pirates raid the Brit ports. Now what? Create a Spanish alt, I guess? No matter what I do, the raids are going to push me around and scatter traders in confusion which is really the whole point. It stops the status quo from being so....quo.

Yes, at least on PvP servers, because traders are risking so much more than grinders. Grinding is pretty safe, easy, guaranteed income that you can do in one spot that you have identified as being pretty secure. You often can do this in large groups, increasing security even further. The downside of grinding for cash, therefore, is that it's just not as good gold-per-hour as trading. I do think that NPC traders could stand to be bumped up on their average load, though. Right now I do not find them all that interesting. The work to reward ratio never seems worth it. Maybe I've just been unlucky but I feel like the income from this is worse today than it was a year ago. On PvE servers I could see an argument that grinding should get a flat 5x gold income bonus that the PvP server does not have precisely because traders are taking zero risk. On the PvE server grinding must be a huge waste of time.

Hence, this guide, actually. It shouldn't be skewed by a very few players. Actually the reason those few players got so rich so fast is because there was no competition. Ports generate a certain amount of trade goods and if literally 5 people are using them then those 5 people will have money coming out of their ears within three days which is pretty much what happened. But if, say, 100 people are online at any moment of the day all doing this then the money payout thins out. It's harder to load up 4 million in trade goods because not that much is sitting around in one spot. It's getting sniped by the 100s of competing traders who are all looking for the next hot thing. So really I think this is an economic model that works best [for the game] if more people do it. It also adds to OW traffic and the potential for piracy. Personally I think it's great. Both people who like peaceful sailing to do buy and sell trades AND PvP pirates (of any nation) should like this system. My real ideal is that eventually I will not need to do this to raise money because my money will come from ganking traders who are doing this. :-p It does give me hope when I go out hunting, though. Someone, somewhere, right now, is sailing around in 2-3 Trader Brigs loaded with Textile Machines that you could sell for 200,000 each.