Slamz

My intention is really that the 100% contention causes this "raid" debuff to go on the port without regard to the outcome of the port battle. Whether you show up and lose, show up and win or don't show up at all results in the same effect: 48 hour port debuff. (I think even if you win the port battle it's reasonable to assume the port is in chaos for another day, before it settles and is fully working again.)

I guess my definitions have personally been more like this: War: we are trying to take each other's ports and crush each other like bugs, camping capitals, hunting for traders, one-porting, that sort of thing. Hostile: this is the default state everyone is in. Kill everything on site but don't bother with RvR because meh. Some Kinda Deal: unusual state of affairs wherein there is "some kinda deal" in regards to who can attack what when. I hate keeping track of these things so I dislike deals but sometimes they can facilitate improved access to our preferred level of hostility. Peace: we pretend each other does not exist. Allies: we actively work with each other towards some fairly specific goal, probably for a limited, well-defined time. With those definitions, France is hostile with everyone except the Danes. Technically we are attacking British ports but really we still see them as Hostile -- we just could use a couple new ports. I'm personally not interested in "war" with Britain. I was interested in crushing Denmark but it was decided that Peace was less annoying than constant night flips. I think you're seeing "hostile" as "cattle farm" but for us it's just how things should be. Dutch and French should kill each other, because that's what we came to a PvP server to experience. Peace is boring and should not be a natural long term state of any two nations without some very specific, limited duration reason.

The Dutch keep bringing a lot of this on themselves. e.g., the Dutch fleet sunk outside Coq could have just not been there. We were literally bypassing the Dutch to hit the British, who were seen as a bigger, badder, uglier enemy. Had your fleet not been outside our staging area, we wouldn't have bothered you. (I don't know if you were intending to screen for the Brits or just figured we were going to hit Maracaibo but in that case you might'a still waited for a little contention to tick up.) I know some French clans are all about attacking the Dutch but the fact that we haven't ever taken any of your ports should be evidence enough that for the most part we're purposefully playing a defensive war there (and not really supporting the groups that were trying to flip you). Personally I think you should attack the gulf of Mexico or just do like Rovers and go wander the map, PvPing out of free ports. Dutch land is pretty boring. Unfortunately, due to your team size, your options are probably "pretty boring" or "getting completely crushed", at least in terms of RvR. But anyone can be king in roaming PvP. Just gotta figure out who you're willing to anger. (Try the French plan: "everyone".)

tl;dr: Putting a port into 100% contention causes problems for that team regardless of how the port battle turns out. Random thought of the day: If you build 100% contention on a port, this is a "raid" and lasts 48 hours. While in a raid state, the county generates no trade goods, will not buy trade goods (or only pays "1" for them) and player buildings produce labor hours at 50% rate. I was just thinking that while contention often generates PvP, a smart team that was confident in their port battle fleet could simply ignore contention grinds. Let the contention happen, show up for the port battle, done. Costs them less time, less risk, no counter-grind and they win. I think this is such a huge risk that when people realize what I have just said, nobody will grind ports anymore unless they were really sure they could win the port battle. It would be a tremendous waste of time to grind contention, get no PvP out of it and not be able to win the port battle. You accomplished literally nothing in that case. So let 100% contention mean something: It means the county is screwed up for 48 hours. Better go out there and fight those contention grinders!

Do advise us, oh annointed one. And it made me rich in record time. I am pretty curious what you think is more profitable than trade goods, though. I guess everyone else in the game is doing it wrong. You should write a guide.

Priorities.

Sounds great to me! It's another reason I'd like to see this be the piracy mechanic: pirates (countrymen turned murderers) should be everywhere, not glued to "pirate ports". Literally every nation should have a band of merry cutthroats roaming around. Keeps people on their toes. Also means PvP is more widespread rather than mostly along nation borders. Being a French-Pirate would mean you are French, use French ports, have French econ but can attack, and be attacked by, literally everyone, and you fly the black flag. (But you don't get to participate in RvR at all and you'd probably be super-gunned-for by everyone around you.)

That's the whole point. It's the real suffering that brings people to the negotiating table. The easier it is for players to avoid consequences, the bigger douchebags they will be, is my experience.

In my experience, wars in Naval Action are never continual. Someone folds. Heck, the British and Pirate war seems to have flared up and gone stale over the course of 2 weekends. France and Danes are a great example too. We really hate each other but the war is so mutually harmful that it made us hammer out an agreement we could both live with and that has been the end of that. With internal strife, there seems to be no resolution for it. It's like a forum troll with no moderators around. It can't escalate very far but it can't be resolved, either. It just keeps going til someone gets bored and leaves. Nothing is driving an agreement to be made and both sides feel they can hold out forever.

No clue. I did not inquire as to what the terms may have been. I lost interest when someone said "terms". I just assume it involves some sort of NAP to which, as with the British, I say "nah". It's not even so much that I oppose the concept of letting British (or Pirate) ships pass by unmolested, I just don't want the drama of official deals and therefore confusion, random people breaking the agreements, trying to get all clans signed on, etc, etc. I want to avoid official diplomacy as much as possible and just have the freedom to play it by ear, day by day. I think for France, as an outsider, that's our wisest move -- avoid any deals unless absolutely necessary. Britain and the Pirates benefit from long term deals but smaller nations like France generally just get screwed by them. I'm more of the mind of looking at it from a pure strategic standpoint. Currently, the British are being pushed back RvR-wise by the Pirates. Retaking Georgetown should be a priority because that is a fantastic county for raiders. I would think Brits should be running contention up there on the regular and PvPing any pirates they spot. Like that should be their national passtime right now. I don't understand why it isn't. Strategically, then, it makes sense for the British to focus on that while trying to back away from the French aggressors, provided they aren't taking anything too vital, in the hopes that this leads the French into the backs of the Pirates. The risk is that we will work with the Pirates but I can tell you that MOST (not all, but most) French clans DO want to fight the pirates. Some will keep raiding the Brits no matter what happens, as they have been doing for weeks now, but there is a possibility of dragging French PvPers into contact with Pirate raiders if the British play the right map strategy. The current British map strategy seems to consist of "protect all the dots" and that's some pre-patch 10 thinking. Give up some dots. See if one of your enemies will attack your other enemy by bringing them into contact. Worst case, it doesn't work and you retake the French ports and deal with the Pirates alone again. (Personally I was not interested in Santa Marta but again I think the Brits should have just let them have it, given the state of things. When Santa Marta was first envisioned, it was as a base to raid Britain with. But then the Pirates came in and now any French raiders coming out of Santa Marta and going around the coast would run past the Pirate holdings and into potential conflict with Pirate raiders. To my eye, that looks like something the British might have wanted to try. By keeping clans like BORK out of Santa Marta, you gave them no route to clash with the Pirates and may have simply pushed them closer to turning to the Pirates for a deal instead.)

This is an interesting point that I had not thought about. There is room for a "NAP with Protectionism", meaning we don't kill each others' ships EXCEPT for outlaw flagged traders which may be killed on sight. Outlaw flagged traders may be entering our ports and siphoning our goods, basically committing economic warfare. Non-outlaw flagged traders would be given a pass since they can't enter our ports. So it's a NAP but you can't come into our ports. (This is pretty much what the Swedes want, too.) Yeah, the hard definitions of the first message don't really cover the situations players actually come up with. What we wanted with Denmark (CCCP) from the start was a "neutral" setting -- we sink you, you sink us, no RvR. To them, though, there is no such thing as "neutral" or "NAP/Trade", even. You are either 100% at peace with them or 100% at war. It was why we found them to be impossible to deal with. Anyone can make a French alt, go sink some CCCP and we'll probably be at war again because CCCP does not understand the politics of a real nation. So we are 100% at peace with them to avoid a return to night-flipping games but we are not their ally. If I saw a Dane 1st rate being killed by literally anyone, I would laugh and take a screenshot.

We're open world PvPers. We are going to open world PvP someone. I'm tired of "deals", except on an ad hoc basis. We (well, PURGE anyway) would prefer to kill Pirates but as long as you keep putting yourself between us and them, I guess we'll be fighting you due to lack of alternatives. The counter-offers we've seen have not met the needed criteria: must give us a reasonable position to attack the pirates from; cannot be a port the pirates will have any fun attacking; preferably serves as a jumping off point for other ports so we can't simply lose 1 port battle and be thrown back to FR again. The Tampa area fails the second two checks, for example: Pirates would gladly just go take it and then we're done. My original idea was to start at New Orleans and sweep east (Pirates could kick us out but at least it's a long sail) but we were told Britain said "no" to that, because I guess territory up in Louisiana that 3 of you use is super critical to your strategy right now. Of course Pirates might take Santa Fe from us too but I'd be amused watching BLACK sail around Cuba in 25 6th rates. We didn't defend PaP or Les Cayes because your Aussies took them at literally 8am US east coast time / 5am west coast. Not much we can do about that. (I actually got up for Les Cayes and we did defend it but only so much you can do 12 vs 25 at 8am.) We were probably killing more British pirate trader alts up there than actual Brits, too. (This was actually a point of contention with BLACK. They thought their agreement with us should include safety for their alts. We disagreed. Clan tag or death!) Pfft, we've been killing their heavies every night. Last night was the first time we lost a ship and we still killed another Indefatigable. And then CKA teleported down to Santa Marta and got killed by WO outside the port battle. Same guys who were fighting us. Looking at the British strategy is like watching the Romans send their legions off to fight the Picts while Rome itself is being plundered by invaders. I do enjoy fighting you guys but I hate to see a bad strategy. Just looks like stubbornness to me. (I mean we're stubborn too but we really have nothing else to do. There's nothing to do in the Antilles and we are tired of living out of free ports. YOU guys have lots of options but only seem interested in fighting the Picts while Rome burns behind you.)

We need teleports that get us out of the corner. You have literally like a dozen completely useless ports. We picked Sante Fe because it's probably the least useful area on the map, but it does give us a teleport to and from FR. Clearly nobody is using it because trade goods are stacked up like firewood around there, but you won't even give that up. There is still talk of making a deal with the Pirates to give France a couple ports in Haiti again. I imagine "the deal" would be that we don't attack BLACK anymore, or their British trader alts, and instead just focus on raiding the Brits (that was the previous deal). I've been naysaying this plan because I want to kill Pirates but you're not really helping. As it stands, we are killing the British because you are literally in the way. We have no practical means of getting at the Pirates but we can get at you. You are facing a classic 3-way battle scenario. When your two enemies are both beating on you, fall back in such a way that they can get at each other and then see what happens.

From what I've seen in France, that happens anyway. The reason France didn't engage in the port battle last night was because one clan, who shall remain nameless, refused to join the Teamspeak with the rest of the clans. And we can't join theirs because they've banned too many people. Nobody wanted to do a real, full blown port battle on mixed comms so it was decided to just abort the effort. This is all the old fallout from the original French split, like a month ago. So it already looks permanent. Problem is we can't do anything about it. If one clan just shows up to ruin your team's port battles, what are you gonna do? If someone did that to BLACK, then BLACK could simply kill them on the spot in an outlaw battle. Other nations probably need this choice too. I do wonder what solo players are thinking to accomplish. Their best bet is probably to do PvP patrols but they could also look for contention grinds to join in on and contention to counter-grind -- everyone is happy to have help with contention. In the end, though, this is a clan game and soloers are making themselves be the odd man out. If they don't like how the clans are run, it might be time to start their own. Probably all the alts. Brits are too spread out and it makes them the obvious choice for alts who need to sneak supplies over to some other nation. Really the British strategy is just terrible right now. They did the old pre-wipe plan of "gobble the dots" but that's a distinctly bad plan now.

Brits are still being reactive rather than proactive. Problem is they are the only team that really has the numbers to be proactive against the Pirates. USA can't do it. France can't do it. If the British were just out there every day raising contention on a Pirate port somewhere -- anywhere -- they'd probably kickstart this war. I think Brits have the mindset that they "need to wait for the weekend" when "everyone is on" but there are certainly weekday clans that play enough. No reason they couldn't be running up contention and making the pirates fight fires on a daily basis. I do wonder what it is the Brits do all day during the week. So as it stands, not much is happening right now, except for OW PvP. Pirates have mostly stopped hitting British ports. British have mostly stopped defending against the Pirates. France has been trying to take a base closer to the middle of the map so we can get in on this war but the British don't want to give up anything and we can't take a Pirate port since the British aren't fighting them. I assume USA is in the same position as the French: they would like to take Pirate ports but with the British continuing to sit on their hands, there is nobody to seriously distract the Pirates and USA isn't gonna beat them head to head.

MAYbe. The only way I could see this working is if the devs invented a new wood called "common wood" that was just awful. -10% armor hp, -20% armor thickness, -4% speed, -10% turning, -10% acceleration, etc. Usable but noticeably bad. NPC shop ships are all made out of this. You might even find a Santissima for sale but it's going to have those stats. As it stands, the "bad" NPC ships are just regular ships with crew space instead of planking, which is not hugely different from what a player would make. The point of permits is to make some ships intentionally "rare" in the sense that they use an ingredient that can't simply be dug up by 1 alt account who plays for 1 hour per week, which literally every other ingredient can be. Marks help create a concept of "rare". I assume you mean "outposts". I think about this a lot too and this could be its own separate thread, really. I think in the original vision, outposts were a way to limit players to particular regions of the map. But now that we can teleport between friendly cities, this concept no longer applies. I'm not sure "outposts" as a concept even makes sense anymore. I think any non-enemy port should probably just count as an outpost for you. Limited outposts are a pain in my backside and I have a hard time seeing what they are adding to the game today. As per my "8 teams is too many" thread, I do agree with this. I would like to see admin create 3 separate blocks. You can still have 8 flags (hell, add 20 more if you want) but in the end you are part of 1 of 3 alliances. I like that there is a decision point to be made after capturing an enemy ship: try to get it back to safety or sink it now. Now that we have 45 seconds of hyperspace it's not as risky as it used to be but capping a Victory a long way from a friendly port is still a big decision. I don't think it should just be an easy "send to port" option. You want that Victory, you gotta get it home safely, just like the guy you took it from failed to do. I don't want ships to teleport at all, ever, for any reason. Only thing I would like to see added is an ability to do a captain teleport from a free port to a nation port. One-way only. It would keep it meaningful to drive a long way out but at least you don't have to make TWO huge trips every time you want to go adventuring.

I tend to agree that some way to fight clan vs clan is probably better than the alternative, which is dragging everything down in nation chat because that is literally your only outlet. Favorite Conan the Barbarian quote: "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." The actual ability to declare a clan war (to go rogue and start attacking your own nation) actually makes me think clans would be more inclined to hash things out with each other in polite fashion because they know the alternative is cannonballs. I'll say again that I think this is what "pirates" should be -- not a real team at all, but a way for players to go rogue, maybe temporarily to hash out a few....details....maybe permanently because that's just how they play. Something not as easy as flipping a switch but not as horrendously inconvenient as switching to a new team. You're still British and can use British ports but you're a "British Pirate", fly the black flag, show up as an enemy and can attack anyone (you also can't participate in port battles, contention flips or Victory Marks). Let the disgruntled people be pirates for a while and see what shakes out. I would have done it last month if it was an option. We'd have sorted out France's little problems real quick.

I would suggest, easier than the above, just get fleet perk 1, at a minimum, build 2 ships for PvP, stock some repairs in them and sail to a neutral port vaguely near enemy waters. Park one ship, go PvP til you die, then use the second ship and do the same, then go get more ships. I've always thought the problem with port battles is you tend to get a lot of captains in there that have no PvP experience. Even if they attend every port battle, so many of those result in no serious action that it's hard to build up your PvP expertise through port battles. I realize there is a group that plays this game purely for the 25v25 experience and disdains anything that is not a port battle but it's just a sea full of self-declared admirals who have no real combat experience. They need to spend time out on patrol, to work their way up and really earn the helm of that premier warship. Just sliding into it after 500 hours of PvE does not really qualify them for it.

That's basically my feeling as well. The current repair mechanic goes very well with the current ship cost and durability (1). Mostly what I see is it creates increased survivability and cushions mistakes. You're caught in a gank but thanks to 3 sail repairs you're able to finally get away. Or you're fighting it out, armor repairs saving you from that one mistake of getting too close to the guy with carronades, who is saved from his mistake by being able to sail rep late in the battle and run for it. You can't make it be a brutal fight to the death with few repairs and also 1 durability expensive ships. If we roll back how repairs work then we must also roll back to multiple durability throw-away ships which I feel is a whole different discussion. As I recall, 5 durability did not make anyone braver, they complained about ship loss just the same, and the lower repairs mostly just made battles shorter with less chance for a back-and-forth.

I'm thinking it's because you boarded it. I know if you board and don't sink it, it doesn't count, but maybe there's a bug that if you board it at all, it doesn't count, even though you sink it later...? Just a guess. As long as we're on the topic of possible bugs, I also think there's this going on: I get 3 assists worth 20 marks and do not appear on the board. I get 1 kill and 2 assists worth 20 marks in total and I do appear on the board, with 20 points. It's like marks = points and assist points will count but only if you have at least one kill. IMO it should just count your PvP mark income regardless of if it was a kill or assist. Seems a shame to have a hard workin' killer not get on the charts just because they were also a group player and only got a lot of assists.

Times I've seen it, they were so intent on running away that they made no attempt to finish anyone off. I don't think "3v1 repair rotation" is a serious problem worth changing the entire strategy of the game over.

How much effort was he putting into keeping up with the wounded? Finishing off wounded people is just part of the meta. (So is running them out of repairs and balancing number carried vs weight based slowdown.)

That's extremely unlikely. Huge ocean, 45 seconds of warp speed and you happen to pop out in the exact 0.0001% of the map that contains a huge enemy fleet? Is your ship powered by an Improbability Drive? Let's at least shoot down ideas with realistic scenarios, not something that will quite possibly never happen once if this game runs for 10 years.

I like it the way it is because I feel it allows for more depth of strategy. Rather than get hurt and having to simply withdraw and be done, there's a possibility of repair. And the decision point of armor vs sails can be interesting. It does lead to more escapes but in a world of 1 durability ships I think that's actually fine. Not every fight has to result in someone going down (or in all people on one side going down). Weight of extra repairs vs speed is also an interesting consideration. The only think I might consider adding would be the old Star Wars Galaxies concept of "black bar damage" -- basically a certain amount of the damage you take cannot be healed while in battle. Like in a usual RPG, health goes down, heals take it up, health goes down, heals take it up, potentially forever but in SWG the "black bar" would slowly start taking over your stats -- unhealable damage. You had to be entirely out of combat to fix it. Of course SWG did it to try and force a social aspect to the game but I could also see something like that allowing multiple repairs while still reflecting that yes, you have taken some damage and that is not going away no matter how many hasty repairs you slap on it in here. A hastily repaired armor planking should not be 100% "good as new". Repairing it twice and three times and four times should limit how good it can be. At some point you need better repairs -- either in dock or at least out at sea.

I wonder about this, really. I know when France got one-ported back early in 2016, I personally thought it did a world of good for the team. Yeah some people quit but let's be real: those people are carebears who don't really like the game. The people who stayed -- and it was a good number -- all had a blast. We fought those pirates so viciously that in the end, it was them who quit! It's kind of like..... One time I was dating this girl and she was just super needy. She had shows she liked to watch that I couldn't stand but it was unacceptable for me to just go do something else while she watched her show. Nope, I had to sit there and watch it with her. She hated it if I went to the bar without her (it was happy hour with the coworkers! They're all dudes, even!) Of course she said she loved me but I came to realize she loved some idealized version of me -- the version that exists in some parallel universe that likes doing literally everything with her -- instead of the actual me, who likes playing online games, hitting a bar with the coworkers now and then and not watching her dumb shows. For both our sakes, I dumped her and god speed her to finding someone who actually matches what she's looking for. People who quit Naval Action because they got one-ported are just like that old girlfriend. They love an idealized version of this game which is not reality. If they loved the game they'd also love being one-ported. They'd love to fight against it, to the death, and they'd be cranking out the PvP ship of the day to sack pirates wherever pirates can be found. People who love this game would tell pirates to go to hell even as the steamroller hits them. So in my opinion, the only thing you can do is wake some people up to the reality of this game and see if they like the real Naval Action, or the fictional version that exists only inside their own head. And god speed those people to finding a game that matches what they really want, instead of sitting here in this game, making us all miserable.