Slamz

Enough people are having economic problems, and it took me a few days to get a leg up on it too, that I figured a small guide might be in order. This is not a complete guide but rather, an intro to the basic idea. If you want fast (single login session) money (and ignoring PvP for the moment), you can: * Kill enemy NPCs for basic PvE income. * Open sea trading. The first is a flat form of income. You can expect X gold per hour based on what you are doing and how fast you're doing it. The second is a multiplier on your existing cash. This is important and this is what this (mini-)guide is about. To this end, your first job is to establish "seed money". This is money you keep in reserve for trading. Let's say your seed money amount is 500,000 gold. If you want to buy something that costs 250,000, you need to build up to 750,000 gold before you buy it so that you do not dip into your seed money. Resist the temptation of spending your seed money. You'll see why: Imagine there is a port that sells widgets for 1000. ("Widgets" is going to be some trade good. Violins. Pudding. Coffee. Etc.) You open the trader tool (in the map, in the game) and look up widgets. You find another port that will buy them for 2000. If you have 10,000 seed money you can buy 10 of them, make one trip and end up with 20,000. If you have 500,000 seed money you can buy 500 of them, make one trip and end up with 1,000,000. This is why it's important to keep a good amount of seed money on hand. Clawing your way up to a million starting with 10,000 is going to be slow and painful and you're better off just grinding NPCs. Clawing your way up to a million starting with 500,000 can potentially be done in one trading run. You want to go to that port that sells widgets and have the money to buy all of them. Profits will still be capped by cargo space and how many widgets the port has for sale but you don't want to leave a port sadfaced with room in your cargo hold and widgets left behind in the port because you could not afford to buy them. So that's why you don't dip into your seed money, however tempting that may be. Trade routes tend to be better the further away you get from populated areas. Everyone is doing this around your capital. They are buying trade goods up as fast as they appear and taking them away to sell, which hurts the value of the run and can mean you're scraping up the last 20 widgets when you had cargo space and money for 500 of them. What you want to find are the more out of the way areas where you can really load up. Try these steps: 1) Sail into some port. 2) Look at the trade goods for sale (trade goods, not resources) 3) Go to the trader tool in the map and search for them. 4) Does any nearby port have a "SELL [to NPC]" price that is higher than the "BUY [from NPC]" cost at this port? If so, there's your route. 5) Look some more. Is there ANY port ANYWHERE around here where you can buy this thing low and then anywhere else that you can sell to for high. Like you see this port has coffee. They will sell it to you for 400. You look on the trade tool and the highest buy price is 350 so this is not a good trade. But looking closer, you see another port, not too far away, where your buy price is 200. Score! Go there, buy coffee, come back here and sell it. Note that the trade tool is always out of date and the port may not have the item anymore but if the "A" column is marked then the port had the item at that price sometime in the near past and might have some now. The more people who do this, the more it wrecks a particular trade run, which is why you want to spread out to do it. But if you're wondering how everyone else is getting rich while you're still running missions in a Mercury trying to scrape your way back up to 50k gold, this is how they are doing it. With enough cargo space and enough money, you can potentially turn millions into many more millions, if you find the right stash of trade goods to scoop up. Addendum: Some ports consume crafted materials. Some of these items and ports are already tapped out but do look around for ports that may want to buy crafted materials from you. The price they pay may hugely exceed the click-cost to make the raws and assemble the item so make a bunch, load up and go sell em to the port. This is basically a way of converting labor hours to money, if you need the one more than the other. P.S. I wrote this guide knowing perfectly well that the more people who do it, the more they undermine my own profits, but I'm tired of people saying the economy is broken when it's not. Some people are filthy, mega-rich already and this sort of thing is how. Scraping coins together fighting NPCs is really only what you should do to get together basic seed money because you're broke (perhaps because some pirate sank your last trade run....) P.P.S. I write this guide so that you, dear reader, become rich and happy and totally not because I want to see a lot more fat traders on the high seas which I will absolutely demast, board and rob. And then keep the ship. And then maybe sell it on the market for even more money.

@AvroArrow Pretty sure Ink is wrong on this, or at least is leaving out an important detail: when you order your fleet to retreat you need to wait for the ships to actually vanish from the map. You cannot just order them to leave and then pop out. If your fleet ships are still on the map when you exit, they simply surrender and are lost. I think there's even a pop-up warning dialog for this?? For sure this is 100% true and verified in PvP instances. I assume it works the same in PvE. Specific example: I spot a British player sailing a Trader Brig with Indefatigable in fleet. I attack. British player orders the Indef to attack me while he sails away. I'm pretty sure he then ordered the Indef to retreat (it turned away) but I was still shooting it, so it was locked in combat. The British player escaped with his trader and the instant he did this the Indef stopped, displayed a white flag and had 0 crew. I just sailed up and claimed it. It did not continue to try and retreat or fight or anything. It was lost the moment he exited. Meanwhile, I frequently run missions with a fleet ship and I have never lost it: If the battle is completely over, you can exit and keep your fleet ship. If you order your fleet ship to retreat, and wait for it to vanish, then you can also ESC out and keep your fleet ship. One time I actually died in combat, my fleet ship continued fighting and won the battle, and then I escaped out. I materialized at the port with my ship dead but the fleet ship was still with me. So I think everything works correctly, just do not leave a map while your fleet ship is still in the map [unless the fight is won, done and over].

The game encourages trading more now. That's your money maker, not PvE grinding. There are some incredible money makers that involve selling manufactured items to ports that will consume them and by moving "trade goods" between capitals and free towns (or, if you think you can do it, between one capital and another). The more enterprising people in my guild have made literal millions doing trading, already. Some of the trade runs were also very, very short. There was one port where they were making iron ingots (I think it was) and selling directly to that port for huge profit versus what it cost them to get the raw iron and coal. (Most of the real easy money is already farmed down so you'll have to figure out what the next hot commodity is.) The game also clearly encourages you to shop around because ports may have raws for sale that are a good deal under the click cost from production buildings. The only frustrating thing is you don't how much stuff a port has for sale until you get there. Bottom line, as relevant to this thread, is that you should not legitimately need to PvP in a basic cutter. If nothing else, it's very little grinding to get into a Privateer, a real Cutter or something like a store bought Mercury.

I think I would let Basic Cutters be attacked but they cannot start or join fights. Once in the fight, of course, they can fight as usual. They just can't initiate or join on the open world. Yes it means there's newbie bashing but that's nothing new at all. If your team's newbies are being preyed upon, that's up to your team's veterans to put a stop to! Always has been. I think we solve this by again making the basic cutters be attackable but not initiate an attack. So if your team has been totally screwed and this is all you have, then you group up and do missions (to raise cash). If a camping enemy attacks then he ends up dragging your whole basic cutter armada into the instance and then you just cause him as much damage as you can and he has nobody to blame but himself. So a camping enemy has to decide if he wants to leave you alone to go raise money, or attack you and have to burn rig repairs at the very least because you're going to spend the whole match putting chain shot through his sails. He can waste your time but he can't totally stop you. Able to be attacked also solves the spy problem.

This is more an example of returning veterans being confused by the changes. As a new player, I would think seeing "0/24" implies you need to buy 24 cannons. I actually remember a year ago people buying 10 cannons for their Mercury, not realizing they only needed 1! It's actually less confusing now, imo. But I do agree in general that the game lacks tool-tips and other little UI features that should help new players (and returning veterans) understand the game. Something like Rimworld's context-driven automatic help popups would be great. But I suspect that's a lot of work and the devs are going to wait for the rules to actually settle more before putting in that kind of time.

Idea: Basic Cutters are only available in capitals. Everywhere else has Trader's Lynx for 0 gold instead of Basic Cutters. I see this doing a few interesting things: #1, while long distance PvP with a Basic Cutter is still possible, it's "one and done". After you sink you will need to go back to your capital if you want another free combat ship. It won't prevent Basic Cutter "gank groups" but it'll be a lot more time consuming for them to keep coming back. If they want to base locally they need to bring real ships. Killing them will at least represent a time sink for them. #2, free Traders Lynx gives everyone a decent money maker (and prevents anyone from ever being stuck with no ship at all). You'd still much rather have a Traders Brig (which has 3x the cargo room) but if you ever need a free, small trader to get back on your feet with, there you go. #3, camping people's capitals will be riskier because THEY have unlimited free combat ships right there and you don't. What do you think?

Yes, they are going to have problems when people join the EU server and don't realize what that actually means: no port battles in their time zone, ever. PB time restrictions should be listed in the server selection screen (adjusted to the user's local time). Should not be hard to do!

To my understanding, my choices are PvP Global where some port battles will be in my prime time and PvP EU where none of them will be. I also will be very surprised if every team can field 25 defenders at all times. Until that day comes, the issue I have raised is real and will be a major cause of "team griefing" if left as-is.

Nevertheless, the point is that you can reduce most nation's Conquest Mark income by arranging off-hour port battle attacks against them, even if you don't intend to show up. Britain owns 4 regions with 25 captains per region getting income so Britain is generating 100 Marks per day. AUS Clan starts flipping those regions at a time when the majority of British players can't be online. Each British port is defended by 5 people who can show up at that time. Britain total income is now 20 Marks per day instead of 100 and you didn't even have to flip a port to do it. It would not be a problem if every nation could always mount a 25-man defense at all hours but that's obviously not true at this time (and may never be true). Off-hour fake-attacks will be the new meta for reducing Conquest Mark income. For a proposed solution perhaps in a port battle where there are 5 defenders, the 5 new names do not totally displace the 25 old names. Instead, they bump 5 people off the chart. Ideally this could be ranked somehow but "randomly" is probably good enough. In this way, off hour attacks can benefit new people but can't be used to easily undermine a nation's total income. (Thinking some more... "Lords" are stored by name and damage done in the battle. This port was attacked by 20 people and they won so there are 20 Lords. Later, during a 5am attack, there are 5 defenders and they win the defense. They are simply added to the list so now there are 25 Lords. Later, during another 5am attack, there are 3 defenders and they win the defense. The 3 Lords currently on the list with the lowest damage total are bumped off and replaced by the 3 latest defenders. So someone who did a lot of damage during the attack and is rated as the #1 damage dealer on the list will be hard to bump off the list without another full 25-man defense, which will bump everyone.)

Not at 4am.

Yes but the defense part is very "gamey". France owns Bridgetown. We actually need to pay someone to come schedule a port battle for it (and then not show up) so that we can join as 25 defenders and start collecting marks for it. There's no sensible roleplay / lore reason for this behavior. We will do it because the game mechanics reward us for doing it. It makes no sense and is "gamey". I like the idea of attackers being rewarded. That makes sense. But I think the defender reward needs to be reconsidered if we do not want this sort of "gamey" action to become commonplace. (We will pay the pirates to come schedule fake battles against us, just to give us income, and we will pay Oceanic teams to schedule fake attacks against everyone else, just to spoil their income. All very gamey.)

Yes but in the scenario I'm proposing, defense victory is guaranteed: the attackers did not intend to show up. So after capturing X with 25 people, our nation has 25 people getting Marks every day. After a successful defense of X during prime time with 25 defenders, our nation still has 25 people getting Marks. They are probably different people but our nation has the same income. After a "successful defense" of X during an Oceanic time-zone fake-attack, where only 1 person could attend the defense, our nation has 1 person getting Marks. We still own the port but nobody is being paid for it.

If I understand correctly, there seems like an easy way to ruin people's income, especially on PvP Global. I capture X. I am now getting paid. You arrange a port battle for X at 5am my time (or 3pm on a weekday, when I must be at work). You don't actually show up, but the battle is scheduled. Unless I log in and join the "defense", I will lose my pension? Whoever joins the defense will get the pension. So on PvP Global, the new meta will be to arrange off-hour fake attacks with the hope that instead of having 25 people getting paid, you end up with maybe 0-5 defenders getting paid because those 0-5 people were the only ones to show up. I'm imagining an Australian clan whose primary job is to arrange port battles. They never need to attend them (in fact, it is better if they don't). They just need to schedule it during Australian prime time so that most people can't defend and their pensions are lost. They are sort of a "spoiler" clan. They don't capture anything but they can spoil everyone else's income.

Replace distance control with the lattice system (link is to a blog entry by one of the main Planetside developers, discussing how their game came to use the lattice). What if port battles were rare but won you the entire county, but there was another way to flip individual, minor ports.

The Pirate/French War of PvP2 Not sure if that's too broad of a "magic moment" (it lasted, what, 2 months?) but more than anything else, that war cemented NA for me as a good game. There were nightly open world hunts as Pirates tried to do missions and level up and we tried to stop them. The pirates were more numerous and higher level but we were able to hold them pretty well at Pedernales, where the shallow port defense negated their level advantage. There were epic amounts of smack talk. There was a lot of open sea hunting, gank attempts and counter-gank attempts. We were in each other's faces every single night. If you wanted PvP it was not hard to find. Once that war was over I tried to recapture that feeling several times and failed. I guess I won't go into the list of reasons why we failed to recapture that moment somewhere else (including after moving to PvP1) but suffice to say I think a lot of changes over the past year will help make it easier to get into this kind of conflict next time. At the time, game design made it a fluke -- rarely did two nations overlap that strongly, but that's what you want for good wars to occur. To me that is the true epic gameplay Naval Action offers. Almost any game can give you a "good fight" but it's hard to find a game that makes me want to log in every night to continue a war.

I was just reading the Glorious First of June battle and noticed they did towing in the battle. Lineships can apparently call for a frigate to come help them. The frigate can bring its firepower but in a lineship battle I believe frigates generally stayed out of it unless called upon specifically to help. The Bellerphon (a 3rd rate) called up the Latona (a 5th rate) and got a tow during combat as the Bellerphon had been demasted and wanted to get out of the fight. This would be pretty useful in PvP too -- calling up a smaller ship to throw on tow lines and at least help get a demasted ship pointed in a better direction, either to keep fighting or to tow it out of danger. It might be late in development for such a big mechanical addition to the game, though.

I think I vote to make it free (for captain only, not ships). Basically I think the map is too big with too many ports. Captain teleportation between national ports grants the illusion that a nation has more people than it actually has. They still can't fight in two places at once but they don't have to totally abandon one area to work on another, assuming they have the physical ships to spread around. Plus, as a captain, it means you are never entirely defeated, so long as you have other ships in other ports. If one area of the map is overrun and you've lost all your ships there, then rather than be done for the night you can teleport out and continue playing elsewhere. Making it cost marks runs the risk of getting stuck if you have run out of marks.

I think that, at least, has already been handled. You would log in and the timer would prevent you from joining any battles.

First you need to understand why invis was removed: because of the problems it caused. Then you need to recall and understand those problems. Then you need to come up with a different solution that does not have those problems, but still has the desired effect.

The problem with teleport is that this can send you REALLY far away. What might be good, though, is to say that you can teleport to the nearest friendly port within a certain range. The idea being that if you are playing defense or trading near friendly ports then "escape to port" is an option for you. If you are in enemy territory hunting them then there is no escape option. You give up that free escape by leaving friendly space.

Have to really think out the grief scenarios of this. Lower BR attacks higher BR either to tie him up (waiting for allies to show up) or just to grief him. Low BR runs away and then gets invisibility which should help him line up for another tag -- the victim can't see him to avoid him! So maybe rather than "low BR gets invis" it's "defending side gets invis". Tagger never gets invis, tagee always get it, regardless of BR. Or I have my friend on another team attack me. I then run away and pop out and use the invis to snoop around and line up a perfect hit on someone. Even if there's a delay on when I can attack, the fact that I had 2 minutes to close in and line up means they're probably not going to get away. Removing invis on exit was meant to solve these kinds of problems. I has another idea: The exit screen gives you a map of your immediate area. Within a certain radius of where you got attacked, you can click and it will just put you there. You have, say, 30 seconds to decide. If you fail to pick a spot then it will drop you at the point you got attacked. (Popping up a map and giving you a point to click on seems reasonably easy to implement and seems harder to grief. Even if you wanted to use it to attack someone, clicking on the map is not going to give you the speed or precision that a 2-minute run up would.)

I imagine if I was a new player coming into the game today I would mostly just be baffled at the empty world (and awful port UI). My review would probably be "game is dead". As it stands, I am a forum whore so of course I know what's really going on and why population is all but dead but I also know there are big guilds lined up to play the game again, maybe after this test/reset but definitely on release. This is, maybe unfortunately, a multi-player game that would only get me (and I suspect most people) only so far without any other people to talk to or play with. And I think Admin knows this -- the sooner we get this game to a release state, the better. Sink or swim, it can't be an early access title under threat of impending reset forever. Barely related question: Is there also going to be an asset reset for release day? I have been assuming "yes". That is, we are going to reset for this next test and then, if all goes well, we will reset again and release?

Yeah I don't like the idea of pirates as a regular nation. I've been thinking that a lot of the game's recent changes will drive nations to collide along their borders. When we could teleport between free ports, deep raiding was a daily activity. We'd park ships in free ports near British and U.S. areas and just teleport over to raid them whenever we felt like it. Without that teleport, though, deep raiding will be too much of a commitment. If you go to a free port deep in enemy territory, you're going there to LIVE for a while and that's probably not realistic (especially with 1 durability ships!). So deep raiding as nationals is probably out. And I think that's a good thing, really. It will actually help concentrate the fights: along borders. But if NOBODY can deep raid then there will be huge areas of "safe trading" that just generates loads of free cash. So.... let Pirates operate out of free ports. They can teleport between outposts there and they become the deep raiding team. Maybe take this idea even further and say that pirates can never take over ports but instead they are always "smuggler" flagged and can always enter any port and buy/sell there and maybe produce as well -- but at a markup. Like maybe pirates basically have a 30% tax ("bribe") for all their financial transactions but the tradeoff is they can treat every port in the game as if it was a pirate port. (This is partially to discourage people from making pirate alts just to have easier worldwide crafting.) I dunno, I guess I shouldn't necessarily turn this into the "general pirate idea thread Mark 32" but I'm pretty sure it all begins with letting pirates spread out more freely and gather intel more easily.

Half-Baked Ideas presents: Pirates get spies. (I believe this idea will be very easy to implement -- it's really just a log and a new UI element to read it.) A pirate captain can sail into an enemy port and, for a certain fee, create a spy there. As long as he has a spy there, the pirate can mouse over the port and it will tell him the last player ship to have left that port and how long ago they left. Maybe even include a little nugget about cargo. "Le Gros Ventre left Pedro Cay 12 minutes ago carrying 3500 cargo." Basically I'm thinking of some way pirates might know where to go, rather than sail around aimlessly. With the map being so huge there's always a danger of "safe zone trading" going on and it would be nice if Pirates could: Teleport between Free Port outposts (body only, not a ship or cargo) Somehow get some free intel telling them where some juicy trading may be going on I don't want them to have TOO much info. That LGV could be solo or could have 5 escorts. Could have gone north or south. And the pirate still has to have some idea of sweet spots so he can go there and place his spies (he may be limited to a certain number or the cost may go up exponentially). But we make it hard to have "safe areas" in this game. The pirates have ways of finding out what you're up to. If we want something a bit more true to life, maybe rather than a spy (who apparently has a cell phone), the pirate can go to any port and obtain a more complete log of the last 24 hours: who arrived, what they bought, what they sold, what they left with. "Lorewise" the pirate is just bribing some local who keeps this information (because he knows pirates want it), then he can come around and look at it whenever he wants. This would not give a pirate good immediate intel but he could scope out areas over time and look for active spots so he knows where to start hunting. Like he drops by 10 ports in a row and each one shows little or no activity but the 11th port, in the middle of nowhere, has a long log of ships coming and going. This is where they are doing their trade runs from. Now he knows where to keep an eye out.

That's probably true. Also a good reason to make sure pirates CAN teleport between free ports. I wonder if it would be reasonable to feed pirates a little intel while we're at it. Some way they can mouse over a port and see when the last ship left there and what it was. Or maybe just a way for pirates to install "spies" in enemy ports that gives them this particular ability for ports they install them in... Basically go ahead and let people teleport but give the pirates the intel and the means to harass them. No place should be safe from pirates.