I like the idea of shallows port battles. I was a long time POTBS player too.
I would rather not have an avcom solution to port battles. That system was very easy to defend with just a few people and a wrong pull could destroy the enite attacking force.
I would lean more to more kinds of port defenses, such as cannons, heated shot if the game is going to be ship based then the outcome should be determined by the best sailing and ship setups.
After traveling around the map so far in the beta, I would not be in favor of traveling to the port battle. While many gamers have nothing to do in their lives but play games, most have limited time periods in which to play and having to spend 1 to 3 hours getting to a port is exessive.
The POTBS port battle was 2 hours long and it was easy for one side to time grief the other side. I would like to see a more varied approach to how a defense could be won or how an attack is sucesseful or the victor is determined by the most objectives obtained.
Ships destroyed
port defenses destroyed
etc.
I would also shorten the PB to 1.5 hours of real battle with a 10 minute prep time. The prep area should allow for the necessary docks and merchants necessary to prepare properly especially if there is not going to be a way to trade between players.
I liked the options for upgrades to each side depending on what they did to prepare for the PB in POTBS the more NPC's your killed in the pb zone the better the options in the PB, more doors, better fort guns, etc. I think most like the perks but grinding the npc's was never a great time as much of it was done during off times with little risk around the attacked zone.
There should be economic options to assist in the attack or defense of ports such as very specialized components that would only last for the battle.
The port governor option was fine but it had to issue of dividing the faction because of egos. I would rather see more ship based perks over ground/avatar type solutions if Avatars ever come into the game. Port defenses should be upgradable through economic means
There should be stiff penalties for losing ports, conversely ports should be very difficult to take. 50 percent more to produce items or 50 percent less produced or something along those lines.
The one issue we saw in POTBS was that you could totally destroy one faction by simply taking all their deep water harbors, rendering them unable to produce large/huge ships. Once a nation lost all their high value ports, people either switch sides or stopped playing until the "Map Win".
Will there be a "Map Win" or should the ports after a certain amount of time reset back to the owner with a period of protection?
A careful balance needs to be maintained on the winning conditions so that certain sides do not just fold. There must be protections in place that do not allow a zerg nation to simply roll over the less populated nations because of popularity of say Great Britain during this period historically.
Port battle awards or rewards should be based on contribution. We always had a few players in POTBS that would join a PB and sail off on their own or stay for the 30 minutes to get their reward and click out. You will always have some lone ducks that refuse to help so maybe some type of vote system to remove these players. Friendly fire is always an option unless there are plans to remove this, which I hope is NOT the case. Friendly fire makes ship combat much much more difficult and tactical.