Slamz

Ask @Chijohnaok about the Brit Discord channel, if you have not already done so (and presumably are a clan leader, officer or representative).

P.S. AUSEZ have probably killed their own clan if they went Danish. I don't know who they plan to fight. To the best of my knowledge, daytime France is too thin. For sure, Danes have no American time zone presence so if it's war, it's night flip vs night flip. Only AUSEZ and CCCP have any serious Oceanic time zone presence and the only thing CCCP does is mission grind. You'll also find CCCP is extremely uninviting to newcomers and will no-joke try to grief you out of the game if you're not on 100% on board with them. I can understand being upset at the Brits and wanting to switch teams but you should be fighting the Danes. They are probably your only real enemy. (If you had joined France, we would have been easily convinced to re-declare war with the Danes and let you fight them during your hours. I'm baffled at you joining the only team you could have had a fun war against. Even the Dutch would be a more interesting choice to join.)

To some extent this is how France works. We made a Discord for text chat (it's free! and runs right in your browser. I have still not downloaded the app). All clans coordinate and text-chat through Discord. Mainly it's leaders and representatives talking business. This is nice because we can casually keep up and ask questions and not have to schedule a meeting (ugh!) and Discord keeps a log of chat so you can log in 4 hours later and catch up on the conversation. So France is a mishmash of guilds but mostly we are on the same page via Discord. I encourage some British clan to set this up and start inviting other Brit leaders and officers into it. But another thing, which I keep bringing up and cannot emphasize enough, is that France is full of people who build PvP ships and go PvP. Pirates are too. This is how you get good at the game. When the port battle goes to hell and chaos breaks out, 25 individual captains who know how to PvP is better than the best "port battle commander". No PB commander can oversee 25 ships and dictate their every move. You need captains with real experience and Britain lacks this. British players on the whole seem to be people who think you play this game by building lineships, showing up at port battles and duking it out......having had little to no PvP experience during the prior week (or month, or ever). To get good at port battles, you need to start by going out there every day in something like a Bermuda Cedar Cerberus or Surprise and hunting and fighting. British ship builders need to turn everything on its head and crank out PvP ships for a week and just go "get sunk". 1 day's labor is more than enough to fully outfit a Cerberus. (Mix in some Surprises for front guns.) I mean, don't literally suicide into the enemy of course. Run from fights that look bad. But give things a shot. If you're not sure then fight a little and THEN run away. Britain needs experienced PvP captains and to get that they need PvP ships and PvP groups and....PvP. You cannot win through grinding missions, owning 1st rates or basically carebearing it up. Everything comes down to the basic need to go out and PvP.

Well..... this is indeed a fault of the British: they do not seem to build PvP ships and then regularly go out hunting. The people with "more experience" are those who did this -- built or otherwise acquired appropriate PvP ships and went hunting. Last night my group was x2 Cerb and x1 Surprise and we jumped x2 Pirate Frigates and x1 Surprise (pirate players). They spent the whole fight trying to run away (two of them succeeded but one of the PFs got sunk. We lost nothing). I think they didn't have any repairs on them because they were just running missions. Just goes to show, sometimes you can win fights that don't look favorable. Don't know til ya try. What I would like to see is the Brits try to shift focus for a bit. Start building: Frames from fir, teak or bermuda cedar. Planking of teak, bermuda or white oak. Experiment. Cerberus, Surprise, possibly Renommee as of the new patch. Cheap, good PvP ships. Apply +speed figurehead (even after the nerf, 2% is better than nothing). Go out solo if you have to but try to round up 2-5 players or so. Hunt. I really think a lot of players will be surprised at how NOT dangerous most PvP encounters are. Do this for 3 weeks and Brits will have a lot of captains with a lot of practical PvP experience. I bet a lot of their clans are sitting on tons of materials that would easily make all the 5th rates they need. If they're feeling ballsy they can try mixing in Connies, Endys and even Bellonas. But start with 5th rates and just go hunt. There is a lot of stuff out there they can find and kill with 3-5 Cerbs and Surprises.

My suggestion to the British: Tell the pirates "NUTS!". On one hand, I see the Pirates not wanting to break a nation and wanting to back off to give them time to recover. On the other hand, I find few things break morale so severely as being cowed into an agreement that mostly sucks and which you will have to carefully ponder when and how to break. This will lead to even more internal squabbling as some clans feel you're ready to break the agreement and go back to war and others feel you need more time in the bunker. Don't do it, Brits. Start channeling some Winston Churchill, tell the Pirates you'll see them in hell and figure out how to fight. (You also don't want to be "the peaceful Brits" and invite a bunch of leeches into your nation, which was part of the problem to begin with. Be seen as fighters and you can attract fighters. And what are you doing on "PvP-Global" if you didn't come here to fight? Saddle up, build ships meant for PvP and start using them.) More to the point, I think the game works best when it's a world at war. Make the Pirates keep coming after you. The more you distract them, the more the US will have some freedom to attack the Pirates. The more the Pirates win, the more tempting they look for an attack by the French or maybe even the Dutch. Absolute worst case, the Pirates crush you, crush the US and get the Danes (buffed by the Aussies) to night-flip French ports (with the Dutch either helping them or at least not helping you). Personally, though, that won't stop me from hunting people on the open sea, and I'd invite a chance to end our own agreement with the Danes and start sticking it to them as well (we'll see who can outflip who now that their little basic cutter trick has been fixed). Give em hell, Brits. Actually, learn how hell is given in this game and then give it to them. I would be pleased to have more extensive conversations about how to give hell in these circumstances.

One easy idea for this would be to make it so that the outer edge of the circle translates to about 650 yards in the battle. This guarantees that even an edge of the circle tag puts your target within Control range. @admin? I bet he could hotfix this as an experiment. It's probably just one number in the code. I'm not sure what the current translation is but edge-of-the-circle today seems to translate to at least 1000 yards in battle. May even be more like 1500. Right now it's possible for a tag to put someone out of any sort of cannon range which is a bit pointless.

There has always been a potential "game of chicken" here. We start a 4th rate port battle but you show up in 1st rates. ....but we show up in speed Connies spread out, you tag a few of us but can't keep us in and we enter the port battle and ignore your 1st rate fleet and win anyway. ...or we do this and try to split your 1st rate fleet. If you clump up you're safe but you won't kill anyone. If you split up and chase us around you may get some kills but you'll probably lose some first rates. Worst case, you enter the battle with 25 tank Aggies and guard outside with 25 1st rates. In that case we might just not be able to do a port battle unless we coordinate with some other team(s) to distract you (or we have to try and win with speed connies vs tank aggies). At any rate, we'll still be sailing around aiming to kill your ships as we find them on the OW. You can't bunch up in a cluster of 25 first rates all the time. So I think it'll be interesting to see what shakes out of this. For sure, 25 tanked out Aggies run a risk going to or from a port battle but that's always been true. We hit them with mainly Bellonas but it's not hard to imagine someone trying it with 25 1st rates. The irony is that port battle fleets are very vulnerable because it's dangerous to be on the OW without speed mods. There's a good argument here that this really comes down to a broken speed meta. Tank aggies stand no chance against speed Bellonas.

Well I think France answered that question tonight: we ignored the port battle and killed the screeners. Then when the port battle was over we caught a number of Aggies headed away from the port, going home after winning the port defense (because we never went in) and we killed them outside where we could use heavier ships (and presumably some of the aggies just stayed at port so we caught the ones who didn't live there, basically splitting their fleet). I think a lot of people hugely overemphasize port battles. It's really not about the ports. It's about killing ships. Start a contention grind and then ambush whoever comes to counter-grind it. Schedule a 4th rate port battle and then show up in Bellonas and just blow up everyone you can find outside of the port. Take that, screener fleet. Go setup outposts, bring a spare warship or two using fleet perk, loaded with extra repairs and go hunt their back lanes for a couple days or until they sink your ships. Size can be important but bringing the right force to bear in the right place at the right time and being aggressive matters more. A small team can sink a lot of ships if they're just aggressive about it and that actually hurts your enemy more than taking their ports does. A lot of people are fixated over 1st rates and victory marks but the real game as I see it involves going out and sinking enemy ships every day, anywhere you can find them, in whatever you can afford to sail (...rigged for speed).

I'm not sure that's true. My experience has always been that all that really matters is what you can do with your own guild. [PURGE] alone can work on flipping a port. Yes we need help if 20 enemies come out to get us or if we want to get done faster but I can say "tonight we are flipping this port" and I don't need cooperation from anyone else. We just go do it and if other people show up, great. If it's too hot then maybe we try a different port next time, further away. If we can't fill the port battle and 25 enemies show up then oh well but it's still a task we can try to work on without having to wait for some kind of team consensus. It's actually the meta-organizers that can frustrate me. "Okay we need your guild and this other guild and you guys over there to all agree on this before we start." No ya don't. I mean if it's a new nation-impacting declaration of war, peace or land give-aways then you should probably coordinate with other clans but if you're just going to go "sink some pirates" or work on contention or something then just go do it. If other people like what they see, they will probably join you. Anyone with a clan of at least 10 active players has enough people on PvP-Global to be a mover and a shaker and it's up to them to lead from the front. Anyone with less than that probably needs a committee to do anything but also probably finds nobody wants to listen to them. Look at your own guild, come up with realistic things you can do on your own (PvP patrolling being an easy one -- technically you can do that solo) and then go do it. If you need 4 other clans to sign off on it then your plan is probably too complicated anyway and you need a better, simpler plan.

I hate to see a big team getting their butt kicked, really. This message is therefore part advice, part request and part admonition: the Brits need more captains willing, able and capable of going on patrol. "Patrol" to me means you (and ideally 1 or more friends) suit up in appropriate PvP ships (which generally means they are fast and of an appropriate class) and you go out looking for trouble. If you hear about trouble in your home waters, you patrol there. If not, you pick a spot where you figure loose enemies might be roaming around and you patrol there. Maybe this happens and I'm just not seeing it but in my experience, only the French, Pirates and sometimes the Dutch have patrols (maybe the USA does but I never go up there.... as much as the pirates kill them though, it looks like they don't). Brits have plenty of players but whenever we go pay them a visit we catch them solo and running triple-trader fleets with not a care in the world. At best, some revenge fleet comes boiling out of a port but even then half or more will be tank-built slugs, totally inappropriate for PvP. (I don't seriously consider it to be a "patrol" if your average speed is 12 knots.) In the interest of making this game better for everyone, I encourage more British captains to investigate what it really takes to make a good PvP ship and then group up and start patrolling. Frankly it looks like you guys are getting rolled and there's no reason it should be like that. Every team needs good patrollers. It's vastly more important than grinding up that 5th slot on that 1st rate you'll probably never use because your team will be dead before you get there.

Just a thought: Different paints could be handed out for different rewards, some of them being specific to that exact ship. * Red paint: PvP only. This exact ship has killed at least 1500 total enemy crew. Only counts actual cannon shots, not deaths due to sinking. * Black paint: PvP only. This exact ship has sank at least 5x its own BR worth of enemy ships. So a 100 BR ship can be black after sinking (kill credit, not assist) 500 BR of enemy ships. * White paint: PvP only. Dealt at least [I don't know] total damage to enemy sails. "Exact ship" meaning the stat is tracked for that physical ship -- not the model. This one Surprise of yours has earned black paint but that doesn't mean you can put it on any other Surprise. When it sinks, the black paint goes with it. (Should paint follow the ship around? If someone else steals it or you sell it, does the paint stay? I'm kind of thinking it should. Nobody repainted the Black Pearl.) Other paints could be earned as a captain, like a ship knowledge slot. The 6th knowledge unlock is actually a variety of paint schemes you can always apply to that model of ship, because you earned it via XP. Just thinking that when/if paint actually gets here, there are some interesting things to consider other than just looting or crafting one and slapping it on and having it mean nothing.

It should also work that the bounty is a total payout that gets paid out based on the value of the ship the player is sunk in. No bounty if you kill them in a basic cutter. Also no bounty for stealing their ship. Sinking them in a Cerberus might be some fraction of the bounty, meaning there's still money left for the next guy who sinks his next Cerberus. Sinking them in a Victory might be worth the entire bounty. Bounty could be based on something like 25% of the click-cost of everything that player sunk. Payout is a maximum of 75% the click cost of the ship they were in when you sunk them. Basically there's still a net financial loss going on, meaning exploits will just be losing money, but it's a nice little bonus for whoever kills them.

Defensive tags will be riskier now. Previously, defensive tags would give you a good distance and probably split the guys chasing you. Anyone not in range of your defensive tag (centered on you) against the closest ship won't get pulled in. Now, your defensive tag will put the entire enemy gank fleet in the tag circle (centered on them) with you alone on the edge, more likely splitting your own group if you had one. Hope none of them are too fast or have good front guns. Of course, similar-speed attacks against a fleeing opponent on the OW are always the worst tags and that won't change much. They'll probably get away in that case. But we all know this. The best tags are the ones where you can somehow surprise someone or box them in and get nice and comfy with them before the tag completes.

Not sure that makes any sense. If he's fast enough to get away from a good tag then that should be the end of the story. Unless you tagged him with 2-3 people close in and have him bracketed, he's getting away. Props to him for having good speed and probably some good moves. Tagging someone early "before they get to the fort" was really just a way of doing a cheesy revenge-fleet setup. He's ahead of us but presto-magic-o and now we're all around him because we purposefully hit him with a bad tag to let people on the outside get into position. Tagging followed by revenge fleets is magic for the attacker. Invis and speed is magic for the defender. All things considered, I would rather have magic be on the side of the defender. The attacker had their chance to settle it and if they can't then oh well. Some ships are just really hard to stop.

Your first tag is your real chance to kill them. Miss that and you blew it. Maybe you get another chance but it should be far from guaranteed. I recently had a situation where the same guy tagged me like 5 times in a row. He was faster than me on the OW but in battle was no match for my stern chasers. He was never going to win that chase and it was basically just him time-griefing me as I tried to get to a port so I could log for the night. With this change he would have a hell of a time trying to get me retagged. We could discuss other ways to accomplish the same thing but yeah, good riddance to the re-re-re-tag. Get it right the first time.

Well that's sandbox gaming for you. Usually even if there are goals in a sandbox game it tends to feel fairly lame and almost contrary to the gameplay. (I'm looking at you, Rimworld.) I wouldn't hold your breath for that one. In my opinion, developers chasing storyline type content are digging their own grave. It's a ton of work to create content that players will blow through in a few hours. I think every fantasy MMORPG has suffered from the "not enough content" complaint despite having dozens of hours of custom content. Unless you're Blizzard I don't think it's a good goal. Which is a fair point, I think: that the sandbox allows us to create silly goals. Really the goal should be the fun of the fight. Britain takes Haiti and Cuba not because they give a damn but because they hope it will create fun fights. Some have the mentality of "we don't need more land so why bother" to which I say, why bother?? Why bother?! They should bother because it's Naval bloody Action and sitting at home doesn't create any action! They could also play Rimworld and sit in one hut with one dude doing only the very minimum for the whole game and complain the game isn't fun but really they'd just not be playing it in a fun way. Should sandbox games force players into actions? I would have thought "no" but watching NA players on average maybe it has to do more to push them. Patch 10 did add some pushing but maybe we need even more. (Like maybe missions should always send you to enemy waters, never your own waters. Maybe everything you do should create contention or counter-contention and essentially force fights to happen. There are some things that could be done to keep the sandbox but shove players into fights more often.)

Why is someone from the Dutch complaining about an overpowered GB? Dutch have been in bed with them since day 1. You probably could have easily pursued some French deals early on but you made it hard when you allied with the Brits. Oh but I'm sure you personally were out there sinking British traders left and right, helping prevent them from building up so quickly, yeah? I am willing to bet the French have done more damage to the British than any team over the last 2 weeks. We're all up in their business on a daily basis (particularly [WO]).

Bermuda/Bermuda Connie has 1" more side armor than a Teak/Teak Endy. Question is what's the best wood you can build an Endy out of and still hit max speed? Teak/WO Endy would actually be thicker than the B/B Connie and still gives a 3.5% speed bonus. But I would agree that even if you can eek out a better build at the same speed it surely wouldn't outweigh the other advantages of the Connie. Endy might really just be the more-noob ship in the sense that if you don't yet have all the fancy speed mods, it's easier to make an Endy that can at least keep out of reach of max speed connies, versus trying to make a noobish Connie that won't outrun a single thing.

Random thought of the day: Admirality store can turn war supplies into conquest marks. No idea what the exchange rate should be. But basically if you need rated ships and don't have any, you could produce war supplies and the admiralty will give you conquest marks for those. They're kinda hard to make and the resources (saltpeter and sulfur) are not overly common so it's not trivial to make these things but it might be a nice alternative for a team that's down on its luck. Also gives you something to do with your war supplies if the war has moved on and it's just too much trouble to try and move them.

(Well I did say a meaningful Aussie time zone presence. That particular clan has not been meaningful since the reset. They can really haul a lot of coffee and pudding, though.)

Here's the problem: The Aussies kicked us out of Haiti because we don't have a meaningful Aussie time zone presence. Any attack we do on the British is going to have the same result: the Aussies will kick us out when we're asleep. The ONE WAY we can hope to prevent this is basically to see that they are busy fighting someone else. They should be fighting your Danish allies. But your Danish allies have a peace treaty with the Aussies and won't fight them. And you don't have the numbers to fight them either. How about this: Go tell CCCP to stop being completely worthless scrubs and to actually help you do something. Tell them to break their treaty with the British and fight. I guarantee France will be there to flank the British on one front or another if we see they are actually being engaged by a force capable of distracting them. French clans are in British waters killing Brits but there is no point in attacking a port so long as Pirates and Danes continues to sit on their hands. We would just lose our ports if the Aussies are not being distracted. To be clear, CCCP acted like huge douchebags for weeks so we don't like them and by extension we do not like you either. We will, however, engage in some incidental cooperation should you create a situation that allows for it. And I don't mean a weekend warrior 1-battle-and-everyone-go-home. We can't just instantly react to take advantage of a one time, one hour chance. I mean if we saw a sustained campaign start up, it would give us something to join in on. Personally I want France to be the 3rd faction that helps push against whoever is winning the Pirate-Brit war but I look at contention every night and conclude there is no war to weigh in on. We can go poke the Brits tonight but the result will be Aussies night capping all our ports which is just the Dane war all over again. Go kick chailang and tell him to get to work. Then maybe we'll see some fireworks on this server.

That 72 hour timer can start whenever the French clans decide they want to. You do realize we can one-port Denmark and Sweden any time we feel like it, right. And the current political climate with the Brits and Pirates not fighting each other is really boring. France is bored. Bovenwinds and Road Town are starting to look real nice. Grinding port battles every night until CCCP quits is starting to look like a better option than what we're doing now, which is nothing.

You're probably right, which really says a lot about how useless first rates really are. The first rate fights I've been in mostly consisted of 4th and 5th rates catching a 1st rate on the high seas and stealing it. I would bet more 1st rates have been stolen in this game than have ever been sunk. They're more like a trophy than a practical fighting ship.

I'll take a guy who goes out every day in a kayak looking for a fight over all of these other do-nothings who park their 1st rates outside of their capitals and never actually use them or do anything risky what-so-ever.

stockpile for 2 months lose 1 ship rate game 1 star complain about economy complain game is boring Welcome to half the reviews in Steam. I think the game does itself no favors by allowing people so much peaceful coexistence (missions, pirates that aren't, huge safe zones that are just so far away few if any enemies ever want to go there, etc). They get into that mindset and actually end up being unhinged when they finally lose a ship. In my opinion, the game should be so dangerous and fraught with peril that going a whole week without being murdered feels shocking and makes you think the game is dying. (I mean, it would be true, for that reason, just like it's true today.)