Archaos

I think a system where if a nation is reduced to their capital region they can then be attacked and that region captured. If this happens then the players of that nation get a choice to either join the conquering nation or receive a set of forged papers so they can join any other nation they wish to play for. If their capital region is later captured by another nation, that nation gets the option to liberate the conquered nation and all former nationals get the option again to rejoin their nation. This way if a single nation became too strong and started rolling the map then the conquered nationals could join and eventually become strong enough to stop the single nation.

All well and good, but I am sure that as this is done on a 3rd party site it will not be long before someone develops a very quick method of fixing position by simply inputting 3 distances from the trader tool.

I was not being critical of the work you have done but just trying to point out that at the end of the day we will still end up with a system whereby you know your position fairly accurately which negates the removal of GPS style position we had previously. Personally I am still in favor of being able to get your position once each game day and that in addition to some basic plotting tools would I feel make for a more realistic experience.

Nice work, but at the end of the day we will now have a system that can fix your vessel position just as accurately as the previous given Lat/Long position, making the whole removal of the position pointless. And from a more historical point of view there is no way the vessels could tell their distance off ports or points of land that they could not see. Even for a vertical sextant angle to be used to calculate distance off you had to know the height of the object being viewed and be able to see it. The type of navigation being done here is more like what was done using a Radio Direction Finder, which came into use a long time after the period the game is set in.

Not sure if anyone has mentioned it yet, but for me one of the most memorable times playing NA so far was "Black Wednesday" 31/11/16, when the Eastern alliance carried out a strategic attack on 7 ports simultaneously. It put us in a bit of a panic with initial thoughts of not defending some regions, but eventually managing to get enough fleets together to defend all and not losing a single region. There was some great battles that night.

I do not think anything should be done to make playing a pirate popular as it will already be a popular choice for new players. I think that pirates should get some unique game-play but it should be extremely difficult as compared to other nations.

I think in a case like this you need to be more specific in your search by entering "oak logs". But I do agree that a slider or some other means to see similar matches would be good.

How about if you had a teleport to nearest friendly port only if you were within a certain distance (i.e. close to) a friendly port. That would stop the people that jump someone deep in their own waters then avoid the revenge by teleporting.

Its been like this for a while, not sure if its a bug or not. If you attack a same nation NPC trader with contraband only the person initiating the battle gets into the battle. I think it may be something to do with not pulling in AI fleets as well when attacking NPC contraband traders.

still failing on authentication

There is no need to resort to abuse because you disagree with me. Remember we are testing game mechanics and hopefully upon release the game will have far larger numbers of players, so bringing in mechanics to the game now that suit the current game numbers may lead to a poor game on full release. Let us look at the "small nation" scenario in extreme, where a small nation has only 5 players, should we adjust the game mechanics so that those 5 players can fight on a level playing field against a nation of 200 players? I think some things will sort themselves out if left. If a single nation or alliance is so big that they can roll across the map too easily then eventually people will get bored of it and look for other ways to get good fights. This may be by people leaving to join another nation or by the alliance eventually dissolving. In the last patch with people logging out in front of ports the screening battles were almost nonexistant, which excluded a lot of players from the game. I hope this new patch will bring back some screening action. The screening has to be able to prevent the port battle if it is successful, if not it is pointless. If the game was just about port battles then we may as well just have a lobby where port battles are set up and run from there and forget OW altogether. Are you saying that even with the current numbers of players that the 4 nation alliance can only muster 25 people? I dont think so, because they managed to attack 6 ports at the same time. Imagine if that number were sent to attack one port, the screening battles would have been epic. And so what if the port battle did not happen sometimes, as long as a lot of fun PvP was had, who cares. I agree that something may need to be done to stop people respawning and rejoining the battle in throwaway ships, but to limit the number of players a nation can field or somehow even up BR in screening battles is not a solution.

I keep hearing people wanting things balanced so the "small nation" can compete, but the simple solution to this is, do not be a small nation, recruit more people, work better with your allies. With all the balancing you want all you do is exclude other players from participating in content. I get the feeling sometimes that some people like to be the underdog yet be able to claim "oh look how good we are, this small nation defeated the mighty ....". You cant have it both ways, you cant claim to be a small nation and have the playing field leveled yet still gloat that you beat a large nation. As you say yourself "...small nation of hardcore PVPers can't give a fight to large nation of carebears ..", which would indicate that the small nation is more organised and ready for PvP, maybe that is why they remain a small nation, because they do not make the so called "carebears" welcome. As someone else mentioned, if the screening battle can affect the port battle result, then maybe the nation with more carebears are at a disadvantage against a well organised small nation of PvP'ers as the experienced PvP'ers should make short work of them. Having a large nation of carebears is not always a good thing, have you tried organising a group consisting of many different clans many who are not on or dont want to use teamspeak? I have played other games where the most effective nation in RvR was the smallest nation as 90% of them were in the same clan and on TS. Maybe some sort of nation balancing is required, but trying to bring everything down to equal fights is not the answer. A small nation that can only field a port battle fleet shouldnt be able to reach a port battle. edit: BTW I do not think that the screening should affect the port battle result, as someone already mentioned, if the screening is sucessful then the port battle is avoided, and that should be job done for the screeners.

I like both solutions, but I do agree that something needs to be done regarding screening. I do think port battles should be able to be screened out and I think it adds more tactics to the game, but there should be some mechanism to stop the defender sending out wave after wave of screeners in 1 dura ships just to delay the port battle ships long enough.

The alliance system is still not fixed. In the last voting round there was maximum votes for an alliance between British and Dutch and vice versa, yet they are still enemies. I thought this was going to be fixed in today's maintenance?

I guess with 3 week alliances we dont get the issue as often, but I do agree with you that this bug needs to be fixed soon.

When there are not many people online.

Although the idea does have some good points, how do you counter people doing during server quiet times?

I am not sure as the devs have not made it clear how the new use of WS will be. It was posted in a thread that is not accessible to most of the forum members so we cannot see the full discussion and how it will be implemented.

But this is what one of the mods said was going to happen in another thread. He posted a response from some inaccessible area of the forum where the Devs stated that war supplies would be limited to 0 - 50% hostility generation in the next patch. I agree with you that it will not work and will either lead to very few port battles or a similar situation to what we have now where WS are stockpiled ready to be used when PvE missions have generated 50%. Its a pity they jump in with quick fix solutions rather than open up a proper discussion on the way forward.

There were two opposing answers to the question yet no one could step in and say which one was correct.

Why create a Q&A section on the forums and not use it to answer questions raised. I refer in particular to the question regarding voting and alliances where someone asked a question and received different answers from other players, yet no one could confirm which was the correct one. It seems a wasted opportunity.

Well it looks like my speculation of what would happen is the correct one, and I am sure a lot of Danes expected this to happen too, hence the timing of their attacks against 5 British ports the same day the alliance with the Dutch expired.

I like the idea in general but it would need to be fleshed out properly and solutions found for loopholes. For example what happens at server quiet times when there are only few people online? Will it be too easy to generate hostility then?

Freeports are not in regions and as such battles in them do not generate hostility for any region, so the issue of port humpers would not happen. The proposal would be exactly the same as it is now but just give more importance to PvP in hostility generation. Yes, a single person could generate enough hostility to cause a port battle, but that would be the beauty of the system, if the defenders did not carry out PvP in the region then they would have to defend the port battle. The idea would need tweaking but I think it would encourage more PvP.