Anolytic

From Bani PB last night: My own recording didn't take, but I expect Reverse will share his stream recording. The battle started bad, with some of our small ships getting tagged and killed outside due to a misunderstanding of instructions. But the remaining small ships heroically kept the points while the fleet slowly turned the tide in the main fight.

Basic cutters should not be able to enter any battles, even those started as PvE-battles. I haven't been to the patrols for ages, but I remember them being a great annoyance there too. When all players are in basic cutters, so you have to resort to attack AI to get something to do, but then all the basic cutters come into your battle...

So I’ve been thinking about the announced, far-into-the-future, release wipe. It is far too early to worry about wipes, but the announcement/update form devs on how it might go about, sparked an interesting debate. There are those, who have played this game for long, who don’t want to see their efforts go to «waste». And there are those who want to see a completely clean slate for new players coming into the game at release, and old players as well. I find myself mostly in the latter camp with the «purists», and yet I do appreciate the prospect of getting to keep at least my hard earned XP post release. I remember the previous wipes. There was something novel about everyone starting in basic cutters. About the arms race that followed to grind to max rank and crafting rank 50. To build the biggest ships. The game was pure right after the wipe. Everyone was on equal footing (except for how much free time they had). New players could catch up to veteran players, when everyone started the race from the same position (discounting skill and experience). My suggestion to preserve the integrity of the wipe, is to have 1-2 weeks after release, where the slate is wiped completely clean. Where everybody is on equal footing that start playing on day 1 after the game is launched. To please old and returning players, give all the stuff we are supposed to preserve, as one big redeemable package. Be it XP, craft-XP, Ship-XP and skillbooks included if it may. But lock those redeemables down for the first 7 or 14 days after release. For the first 14 days, everyone starts as kadet/ensign/midshipman/thief. But after 2 weeks, those old players who want to, can get the XP from their old characters back and jump right back up to their old rank.

So I know there are a couple of other topics and guides about this, and a fair number of videos and walkthroughs on Youtube, but having been repeatedly questioned by different players on how to pass the tutorial exams I got tired of trying to explain without visuals, or simply suggest searching Youtube for videos. So I decided to make my own guide. The videos are not commented. I don’t think they are more helpful than other guides/walkthroughs by other players. They simply show my simplest approach to each exam. These were not speed-runs or attempts to solve the exams in fancy ways. I tried to make it as simple and replicable as possible. Apart from the final exam I did them all in one go, without restarting. For the final exam I wanted to find a way that was more reliably effective than boarding the first as I previously have done, without demasting which will be difficult for most, and without spending too much time just running and repairing. Feel free to add to this thread your alternative videos on how to pass the tutorials. Or discuss what are the best methods. Exam #1: Destruction Exam #2: Demasting Exam #3: Boarding Exam #4: Endurance Exam #5: Finale

I believe that admin's previous statements on this type of case has indicated that for griefing to be determined there has to be some kind of repetition or prolonged action. To tag into battle multiple times, or keep the target tagged without fighting for a significant time. Because it is possible to tag someone by mistake, or to tag with the intent to fight, but determine that the player is too good to allow the attacker any opening to approach his stern. And many other cases where the border between what is acceptable and what is griefing is blurry. So for how long did this action go on? According to the chat log it seems to only have taken about 6 minutes. What I do not understand though: 2 frigates against a 1st rate? Why not even try to go for the stern and fight the fight? If you loose half your broadside or a mast first broadside, yeah, you may have to disengage, but two frigates should at least try to press their advantage? There should be some sort of cost to being too careful. While this might very well be intended griefing, I am not sure that the tribunal can afford to set precedence by judging it as such, because there could definitely occur similar situations where griefing was not intended. If however this happens over multiple battles in a row, or for upwards of twenty minutes with no attempt at closing the distance, then it is easier to judge griefing, even if some griefing cases will slip through the net. And I do not believe in preventing this by mechanics really, as some suggest. Because to completely prohibit griefing would affect ordinary types of gameplay in significant ways. Stop posting this everywhere as if it was some general prescriptive statement by admin that applied here. Admin's quote is about people entering battle, taking a slot, and not fighting for their side, leaving their allies short handed. None of which applies here or most other places you posted this. Admin has made much more recent and more relevant statements on tagging and and kiting in open world battles that would have some actual relevance to reference here.

When you (@Reverse) are just looking for a big, good fight to put on stream, but everyone is conspiring against you.

Fort Baai was one of those fights where lots of ships sank on both sides. I love it!

Pssst. Not too loud, or @Lord Vicious will come here and regale us with the story of how he and SORRY once had "the whole server" against them.

Last week we had another scrape at Coquibacoa. Apart from my own poor performance, everyone did great.

The boarding route to the final exam is not very efficient, accounting for the fact that most players will have to restart the exam 10-20 times just to wait for an instance where the second Cerberus doesn't destroy you while boarding. I rather recommend hugging them both down one after another. By trying to always keep the one you are hugging between you and the second one, hence reducing in-coming damage, popping repairs early, and using rum to keep your crew above the enemy ships so you can hug them safely without risk of boarding by AI.

For weekly events, you do not want them to restart automatically. If you want to do the event during the weekend when you have time to wear down some stronger AI, but unfortunately on Monday and Tuesday, after the event reset, you were sailing a fifth rate and you killed 4 cutters and 6 trader brigs, then you already did your 10 kills that week and got minimal BR out of it.

Hi @Azenya. Welcome back. I don't really know about the PvE-server, but assuming it's mostly the same as on PvP-server, being in the same battlegroup and being in the attack circle when the attack happens should ensure that you both get dragged instantly into battle in your relative positions. If the other player is out of the circle or from another nation, he would have to sail to the reinforcement circle. Different types of AI fleets sail in different areas. The game gives you some hints in the mission logbook, and you can sail around the map to learn where the good hunting spots are. There are still smaller fleets and solo AI, but your best bet for those might be to select Kill missions from a port.

This is a cool suggestion. I like the idea of being able to keep track of these suggestions. I would rather make it like this: X/309 Ports visited This one is PvE only. Having this statistic would mess with a lot of peoples' heads.

Remember battle screen loot after successful PBs. You couldn't fit it in a warship, so sometimes we would take traders into PBs when we knew they were poorly defended. People wanted to go to PBs just because of that loot of resources at the end. We should have something like that back. Give us a nice stack (2,5k) of a randomly selected, non-produceable, wood type at the end of a successfull PB, preferrably after returning to port so we don't have to bring traders to carry it home. Or, you know, paints chests. As has already been suggested. As far as doubloons goes, I have always advocated for less reliance on looting in PvP. Looting in its current form is a game-ruining annoyance. But leaving that aside, while the I agree that the doubloons tally at the end of your battle is meagre compared to the worth of the ships, it should be noted that the risk has gone significantly down since doubloons were introduced. Since doubloons are now much cheaper, being much easier to come by (too easy now if you ask me). Just yesterday I killed 2 frigate fleets (I really needed another skillslot) and looted about 9k doubloons.

As I’ve written about before the problem I have with PBs ever since Land in (Port) Battles and the 3 circle system is that not enough people actually sink in most PBs. A gamey tactic that has come from this fact is that superior fleets sometimes will actively avoid taking circles to delay accumulation of points so they will have the ability to sink more enemies before hitting the 1000 points that ends the battle. Another function of this trend of less people sinking in fights is the ability of small, fast ships to tie up circles against heavier ships, despite having no ability to fight for the circle. By simply being in the circle, they prevent the enemy from accumulating points, even when the circle is owned my the enemy and the enemy has a numerical and/or BR advantage in the circle. A Prince or Le Requin or other small ship can easily kite in and out of a circle to prevent it from gaining any substantial amount of points with little risk. This allows defenders to avoid going into close fights to defend circles, while simply running down the clock against attackers who have to bring a heavier fleet in order to be able to fight a close fight, and have to use at least some of their BR reserved for smaller vessels on mortar brigs in order to knock down the forts. We are thus back to defenders kiting to run down the clock, exactly what we wanted to get away from when we abandoned the old system of towers, a circle of death, and getting to twice the BR. And yes, some will say attackers just have to bring small ships of their own, but it is not always that simple. Especially so with the current low numbers and struggling even to fill some PBs. And also because you never know if this is going to be the tactic that defenders are going for, and if they don't and you bring too light a setup, then you have less of a chance in the engagement. The proposal is this: To make controlling a circle not simply a matter of having it without enemies being inside it, which allows any enemy in any ship to disrupt control of a circle. Instead, to control the circle, and get points from it, you should have to have at least twice the BR of the enemy in it. And conversely, to block a circle from gaining points you would need at least half the BR of the enemy inside it. So an essex could not block 2 bucentaurs (or even one) from gaining points for a circle, but if the enemy controls a circle with just a bucentaur, then a 3rd rate would be enough to block points accumulation from the circle until one of the sides is either chased out or sunken. That way tiny ships cannot kite to contest circles, instead you would need to send a ship or ships big enough to fight for it.

Four hours to flip a port? Please...kill me now... We flipped a port that's a first rate grind using 2nd rates 2 weeks ago. It took about 4 hours. On a Saturday. Never again. (@Tiedemann) Regarding war supplies, I wouldn't mind having them back to circumvent the AI-grind. But it is a system that is even easier to manipulate than the conquest flags, and I'm not sure we need to go in that direction. Though some variant of it could be considered. I've analysed that idea before myself and came up with something that mixes war supplies with conquest flags as part of this write-up: I also mention single circle battles here, and I've always wanted a system with one circle, about the same area as the 3 circles we have now combined, positioned close to the fortifications, where defenders have to make sure they stay in the circle, and attackers have to push the defenders out or kill them to gain control of the circle and get the necessary points. My greatest issue with the current PB system, apart from the fact that I miss the good old 25v25s, is this: Not enough ships sink in PBs. With 3 circles people go to the 2 circles where the enemy has none or less ships, and try to keep the main enemy fleet busy by sending a small kiting ship into their circle to deny them points. PBs now are all about avoiding the big clash, and even when a fight is going a certain way, the points accumulation means that if you captured the circles the battle will be over long before any significant number of ships have sunk. This has devolved into gamey tactics, where if there is a big disparity in skill between two fleets the superior party will actively avoid taking circles in order to give themselves more time to sink the enemy. Controlling circles gives too many points and killing ships give too little, but at the same time, if we changed this, then the defending side could simply avoid the engagement to slow down attacker's accumulation of points.

Mesteparten av RDNN har hovedaktiviteten vår i [REDS] i Russland nå for tiden. Men det er fremdeles noen som har hjemmet sitt i RDNN.

So we all know about AI sailing through land in the OW. Now it also happens (with players) in battles. Some clan-mates of mine had this happen in their battle the other day. It was F11 by at least some of them (@Tiedemann), but thanks to @Hači_CZ there's also a recording of the bug:

You mean it's just a snapshot of the placeholder information before the actual ship information is loaded in the UI? So just like when I load into port on an indiaman and the UI aways shows me the picture of a Wappen instead before refreshing. Then I don't think it's really a bug, and certainly has little to do with the Madagaskar refit.

There is. I once recently pressed the remove button and got past one of the warnings, but I stopped myself short of writing "delete" in the last warning.

Which is better for gameplay. You proposed to get votes based on activity, right? And how would you weigh this activity? By most PvE or what? Because if you weigh it by PvP and K/D, then I'm pretty sure @DreamMaker would be the Grand Duke of Poland, not PRIV: In Russia, Lenin's alt-clan is consistently top 10 in the leaderboard. In Denmark, before the leaderboard was fixed to take into account other factors than just port ownership, my alts alone once got more PvP-kills than the ten clans on the leaderboard combined for two weeks straight. You are greatly underestimating players' determination and potential to subvert other nations' diplomacy using alts.

You do know that there is no official diplomacy in the game, right? There's just unofficial agreements between players. Nobody actually has to follow them. You're asking for them to be forcibly moved to pirates, but there's no mechanic for that, and they did absolutely nothing wrong. If you want to trade in Willemstadt you should be more careful.

Even though the test we did have of mechanised diplomacy wasn't really a test, for reasons of poor implementation, I still feel that diplomacy being entirely player-driven and enforced is the better option than some kind of game-enforced system. Why should the average player be absolutely bound by the diplomatic whims of the biggest clans of their nation? Oh, you sweet innocent summer child... No! Only traders and PvE-ers would enjoy this. Why should you have to declare war on a faction to hunt their traders? This isn't even historical. There was plenty of commerce raiding between nations that weren't formally at war. Whoa!? A council? Pushed by the game. No thanks!

Your options: P hotkey in-game for the game to take a screenshot for you. F11, and the game takes a screenshot attaching it to the bug report. F12 to have the Steam client take a screenshot. PrntScrn button for Windows to take a screenshot. And you still chose to take a picture of your monitor with your phone...