Archaos

I agree with you, but according to Admin, these are here to stay, so what happens when we start losing ports to the AI, do people just recapture them and then spend time grinding to reinvest or do they just give up and quit the game. The Devs should be able to see the lack of interest in these events and act accordingly.

Why are there currently so many NPC port raids? Are many of these even being contested or are people just ignoring them? I have attended 3 battles but quite frankly it is impossible to even attempt to attend most of them due to limited outposts and teleports to move ships around and lack of repairs even if you can teleport your ship. I am really worried that when these go live and ports can be lost to the NPC then it will really mess up the game and lead to a mass exodus. People are not interested in taking part in them at the moment because there is no risk of losing the port, but when it goes live they will not have learned the strategies to defeat these raids and they will rage quit when they lose ports. Okay you may say it is their own fault for not using this time to test strategies, but at the end of the day it makes no difference whose fault it is when you have an empty server.

But the AI will always have the most favorable wind. So some ports may be very difficult to defend.

Notice the difference between Vera Cruz and Belize? In Vera Cruz all the circles are well within the defenders join circle so the defenders have more time to intercept.

Has any nation managed to defeat the NPC raiders in a port battle on the War server yet? I have attended 2 battles, the first was at Truxillo where most of us joined close to the docks so by the time we engaged the NPC fleets they were almost at the circles so we were too late. The second battle at Belize we joined as close as possible to the edge of the circle and even though we sank all the Indiamen before they reached the circles, the escorts that reached the circles racked up the points so fast it was impossible to stop them. The main issues as I see are the fact that the enemy rack up points too quick when they reach the circles and because they always start with the wind in their favour it is difficult to engage them far enough away from the circles to prevent some of them entering the circles. Now we know the spawn points and our optimal join points we may stand a chance but I feel it will be very hit and miss as if for whatever reason you do not get a full team into the battle or you do not get them at the first pass it is game over. To me it appears that these battles will end up as fixed tactics battles where once you find the winning formula you just apply that each time and hope no one slips up. My biggest fear is that these battles will be easily interrupted by other nations screening out the defenders as the defending force has to split into 2 groups, they can easily be engaged by a moderate enemy force.

Sean was busy being focus fired under orders of Captain Reverse.

I do not believe that it is possible to predict what the wind will be from the day before as it depends on what the wind starts at after server maintenance.

Hard caps will not work either as a person finding they cannot join a nation they wanted to play for or a nation where their friends are will just not bother playing.

The problem is deleting nations will not solve this issue. The nation of Russia did not have a big Caribbean presence yet currently have one of the largest populations in game while nations that did have a presence like France and Spain are struggling. The problem is down to players wanting to be on winning side leading to a move of players to a nation that has the upper hand. It does not matter if it is Russia or any other nation. The same would happen if you had fixed or voted for alliances, there would end up being an imbalance with a large coalition forming against the rest. As I see it the only way alliances could work is if they were handled by the Devs as a balancing mechanic with alliances constantly changing to balance the power dynamics of the server. But would smaller nations like that? imagine a small nation like Poland being told this week they are allied with the Dutch, then a few weeks later after the alliance is successful being told that they are now allied with GB or Russia?

Was not a port battle. They were intercepted on their way to raise hostility on Santiago De Cuba.

Not much to say really, we heard that they planned to flip SDC so a fleet was hastily gathered (some port build others not) and a good fight was had.

Yes people have tried to fight Russia but the server imbalance makes it difficult especially if it is an important port they do not want to lose. From the start the Danes with Havoc tried to take the battle to the Russians but were defeated by sheer numbers making it almost impossible to even get into the port battle. The Dutch have experienced the same more recently and even the Brits yesterday trying to take back George Town had to face 3 full fleets of first rates and were unable to get to the port. The Brits did well yesterday sinking a lot of Russians but in terms of RvR it becomes almost impossible to even enter the port battle due to sheer numbers if they put up a determined defense.

In principle it may appear to be a good idea, but in practice all it does is create an advantage for people who have alts and alt clans as they will just set up in lower nations to produce ships for their mains. Also if there was an exception for GB, France and Spain it would achieve your goal of the game being more historically accurate but all that it would mean in practice is that these would be the zerg nations so that instead of Russia, Dutch and GB you would have the 3 powers of Spain, GB and France.

This is exploitable. Get an alt clan to constantly flip one of the satellite ports as a defense mechanism.

You have to have a ship with the hold capacity for the mission cargo.

Do you have any verification of how you appear to others in OW while doing this? What you really need is a video from a third person viewing you as you log off this way so you can prove that others see you sailing along and then suddenly disappear.

You are preaching to the choir here. I agree with your suggestions as do many others, but we are not the people you need to convince. Many have suggested similar and they have been ignored, so I would not expect any difference now.

Your maths does not work out. If 500,000 others have posted about it how do you get 1 million posts? You have been told a million times not to exaggerate. 😉 Anyway you are correct in pointing out that such topics have been raised many times before and the general response is that it is a fighting game not a trading game and they are not interested in developing trading.

Its quite simple really if you look at it as a ratio 17.5 to 1 (17.5 kills to 1 death) now if it was a death/kill ratio it would be bad.

Did you cancel or delete the contract? If you deleted the contract then all is lost. If cancelled you should get the item back minus the tax.

If your ship is constructed out of the correct woods there is an increased chance of catching fire. You can also help it by installing certain mods such as open magazine (I am not sure of all the mods you can use). Once you have a ship that has a high chance of catching fire when being shot at you then have a fire ship. You then have to try and control the fire while trying to keep your ship maneuverable. This can be done by switching survival on and off while monitoring how many crew are assigned to fighting the fire. It can be quite tricky especially if you are still being fired upon as extra hits can make the fire spread faster than you can control and you explode too early, also when you are in fireshock you lose control of your ship so you have to be heading in the right direction. I once managed to keep a Santi in or close to fireshock for 20 minutes as I chased another ship around the PZ. I eventually sank without getting him but it was fun watching him run away. Fireship tactics are a bit hit and miss and it is not possible to decide yourself when the ship will actually explode.

I was not looking for an argument or discussion about good/bad game design, I was just pointing out a flaw in your statement that by joining Russia you got to face some of the toughest clans on the server.

Just pointing out that if you want to face more tough clans then joining Russia may not be the best choice. If you joined Poland you could face tough clans from Russia, Denmark and Dutch. Just imagine the experience you could gain there facing tough clans.

Most of the toughest clans are in Russia, so you are not really facing them.

It should be simple to solve, the BR should be the BR of the ship when fully crewed when calculating entry into the port battle. You may say an under crewed ship is less effective but that depends on how you look at it. In terms of single broadside weight it makes little difference as the side not shooting can shut down so an under crewed ship can reload and fire a broadside at the same rate as a fully crewed ship. I am not sure how the value of BR is calculated with under crewing, but what if there is a meta where by under crewing you could squeeze another couple of 1st rates into a 10k port battle, that could make a big difference to the outcome. It also raises the question as to whether people knew about this bug as it happened at least twice out of the 3 port battles last night. Did someone just try and join that was not supposed to or did they know in advance they could get in? I know for our port battles we work out what ships we bring in advance based on the ships full BR so unless some people were screened out and we had to hastily replace them with non planned ships we should never exceed BR. As I said in the OP I do not believe it had a huge effect on the results last night, but if this is a bug it needs to be sorted before it becomes a meta and people calculate how to maximize numbers of ships entering a port battle. If non-static BR is a feature then let us know and give us a way to determine what the BR will be so we can calculate which ships we can put into a port battle.