Aetrion

The problem with tying port battles to the economy is that whatever faction controls the most ports also has the strongest economy right now, because it gives them cheaper resources. That snowballing effect is why people are calling for diminishing returns in the first place. There is also just a ton of content that this game isn't properly exploring yet IMO. Port battles are fun and all, but actually capturing ports should be the most demanding and damaging thing you can do in a war, not the one and only thing. Right now not enough of the game's economy is tied to anything that actually happens out on the open seas, and that means actual map control isn't in any way important. I mean there isn't just an issue with the fact that capturing more ports doesn't get harder the more you have, there is also an issue with the fact that actually holding ports doesn't get more difficult the more of them you have, and that generally the economy of the game isn't effectively tied to actually controlling the map. Right now it's just way too easy to drive a steamroller because the game doesn't require you to actually pacify any areas for them to be profitable. One thing Eve Online gets right is that a single guy in a cruiser can potentially shut down an entire system. With the right kind of ship you can make mining and hunting in a system so unsafe that people have to spend their time trying to hunt you down rather than making money, which means you can cost them hundreds of millions of ISK in profits with just a few players in cheap ships. In Naval Action you can't do anything like that, because profits aren't dependent on having safe areas. Fast little ships like privateers employing pirate tactics and patrol ships like Frigates to counter that also lose a lot of their historical relevance precisely because those factors don't apply in the game.

Putting the focus of the economy on building invasion forces or whatever lets you attack a town would be nice.

Well there isn't a whole lot of reason to stay at sea, right now, and any port can instantly do full repairs at a super cheap price. If they want to actually expand the tactical depth of the game those are things they will have to change IMO.

So what? You think because you decide over everyone else's head to go for the capture they should just stop playing and leave you to it? For that matter, what if someone else is also trying to capture?

Which is perfectly legitimate, as long as there is no way to switch to another nation it'd would be entirely fair to completely flip the script on people who spent a lot of time establishing themselves under the current system.

It's not fair either that the person who boards the ship gets all the reward while everyone else gets shafted if they hold their fire. What the game needs is an implementation of Prize Law, because it was actually completely illegal to keep ships for yourself after capturing them back then. You had to take them before a prize court and get an adjudication of whether you took them fairly, who deserved money for the capture, and what they were worth.

As far as I'm concerned the biggest thing to consider to make the pirate life more difficult would be the admiralty money, since it makes little sense that pirates get money just for attacking things and not actually stealing anything.

Currently there is absolutely nothing you actually need to carry in your ships cargo hold to stay in combat for a really long time. Water, provisions, ammo etc. basically don't exist at all in the game right now. Sailors simply pop back to their full number even after a fight where 90% of them died. There is no need to ever look for more of them, nor can additional troops be kept on board even if you have cargo room. Repair kits have their own special counter that stores them somewhere other than the cargo hold. Special equipment a ship would take on for specific missions currently doesn't exist, but that would also be kept in the various holds of the ship. Basically there is absolutely nothing that ever goes in your cargo hold except for raw resources, but that doesn't make any sense, the cargo hold of a ship at the time was it's staging ground for whatever mission it was going to undertake. A warship carried munitions and provisions and troops in the same place where it might have carried sugar or passengers during peacetime. I think the game should put a lot more emphasis on cargo, even for ships that are in combat. For one, cargo vessels always play an essential logistics and support role in naval warfare, but because you don't need cargo space to do anything in this game there is basically no point in having cargo vessels be part of your fleet. The game would be a lot more interesting if there was a logistical aspect to it where sinking a fleets supply ships would severely cripple them and force them to head back to port, and that would do all kinds of wonders for making fleet composition more interesting and give small, fast ships a way to actually do some serious damage. Generally shifting the logistics aspect of the game away from "Stockpile 100 ships!" toward actually having to maintain supply lines of actual ships having to ferry actual goods to the front line would make the game a lot more interesting, because that's an actual tactical element, not just lame grind. At the same time, concepts like blockading a port would become a lot more valid if it was actually possible to sustain a fleet at sea indefinitely as long as the supply lines stay open. There simply shouldn't be any reason why a trade ship can't bring you more repair kits while you're out at sea.

Which is why bar-shot existed for longer range fire. I said chain shot because bar shot isn't in the game.

It does have a lot less range and accuracy ingame than ball ammunition. The problem is that the sails are a huge target, you can fire 20+ guns worth of it at the same time, and you only need to score a dozen hits or so to see a serious reduction in the targets speed.

The reason why people didn't fire chainshot over 1km and hoped for a lucky hit in real life is because gunpowder was expensive. A lot of the concerns with going into battle are distorted in this game because some things, like sailors or munitions are completely free, so using them in a wasteful manner becomes standard procedure.

Personally I would rather see ships have generic names than be named after historic ships, because to me personally it makes no sense to say dozens of players are all sailing on the Renomee or the Cherubim, but it makes perfect sense to say they are sailing on a Frigate.

They definitely need to include some mechanics that counteract the snowballing effect that PvP servers are experiencing, where once a faction is gaining momentum it gets easier and easier for them to keep going rather than harder and harder for them to control that much territory.

I would really like to see the ability to launch longboats added to the game. These were absolutely essential to everything a large sailing vessel did back in those days, and I think there are some interesting uses for them in this game as well. Every ship would have a number of longboats it can carry (at least 1) and you would be able to launch them to undertake different kinds of missions. The procedure to launch a longboat would mechanically work similarly to a cross between preparing a boarding crew and switching your ammo type. You would hit a button, this would open up the menu of long boat missions, you'd hit the corresponding button to what you want that longboat to be able to do, and then a counter would go up as your crew get into the boat. Once fully counted up the boat would be in the water and become a kind of AI companion that can be commanded on battle map, and also can be commanded to carry out it's special function. The missions you could equip a longboat for: Boarding You row a longboat over to another ship and attempt to capture it. This would put 20-30 men into the boat, so it would be a very high risk maneuver. This would basically be done in conjunction with the new upcoming crew system where you need to keep people deployed to repell a boarding attempt. If someone manages to sneak a longboat up on a ship that has nobody ready to stop it the boarding crew might wreak a lot of havoc and capture the captain or something. Sabotage You row a longboat up to an enemy ship and inflict all kinds of damage to it. Throwing grenades through open gunports, taking axes to their rudder, dousing their hull in oil. There are all sorts of nasty things you can do if you manage to get that close. You just better be ready for a hail of musket fire when they notice. Relief This basically works the same as boarding, but instead of initiating a fight on an enemy ship you row to a friendly ship and simply give them 20 of your crew. 2-3 more men then row the longboat back to you. Kedging The technique used to move ships around when using the wind was not an option. Basically you'd load a small anchor onto a longboat, take it as far out as it would go, drop it in the ocean, then haul it in to move your ship toward the anchor. Don't know how useful this would be in the game, but it is how ships were moved around when sailing or towing wasn't an option. Combat wise a longboat wouldn't have a lot of health, and even small cannons could kill it pretty easily. Grapeshot would be devastatingly effective against longboats. The biggest threat to a longboat would be the musketfire coming from the decks when up close, but in an ongoing battle the large amount of floating debris, and powder could make it hard to spot a creeping longboat. Maybe longboats would be able to fire muskets themselves if small arms fire is ever implemented as a way to inflict crew damage at very short range.

Work hours should not have increased generation at a high level. They are there to to ensure that when you're making ships of the line you need to rely on lower level crafters to make the components and notes to build them at the same pace as you could build mid-sized ships. Giving high level crafters more hours breaks that. The whole point of crafting hours is so that crafters rely on each other. It creates the basis for making a crafting guild or trade between crafters. Asking for more hours is basically asking for high end crafting to be turned into a solo activity, when the whole point of hours is that doing things alone isn't the most efficient way.

That actually makes perfect sense.

Opening and closing gunports I guess would come down to the same issue as having the guns animated when running in and out, as far as I understand it it eats into system resources in a way that isn't practical right now. I suppose if all you can do is run the guns in and close the ports the game can still handle all the guns as a single entity, so maybe it's more possible than having the individual guns recoil when fired.

Well, like I suggested, if your crew became an actual count of personnel under your control it would create a variable "cooldown" for huge ships, and also enable the devs to introduce a whole bunch of systems pertaining to rescue operations or crew capture/ransom to let people manage how catastrophic their crew losses are. And sure, that might offend people who think playing the game an inordinate amount should afford them special treatment, but hey, there should simply never be a point where you have so much money that you can just buy your way past all limitations. If you can break system by grinding enough the broken state will simply be the competitive baseline. That's what we're seeing with 3rd rate zergs right now, and once a couple clans have pushed enough of their members to the point where they can build a 1st rate every day you're going to see those stockpiled and unleashed in zergs too. It's simply inevitable that people will adopt those kinds of tactics if the only thing preventing them is not having that much time for the game.

It's like the problem with health potions in MMORPGs. It doesn't matter how expensive you make health potions, if you allow people to drink one after the other with no restrictions the most powerful players will always be the ones who have stockpiled so many health potions that they can just heal themselves infinitely. That starts to instantly break the game because now anyone who wants to be competitive needs enough health potions to just always chug one when they take damage, and consequently everyone has to do the grind to stockpile them. If you try to make people use the potions more judiciously by making them more expensive all you're really doing is creating a huge barrier to entry for competitive play, because someone, somewhere is still going to grind out enough of them to just keep slamming them down and be invincible. People who don't have the time to grind for the potions then simply can't compete and leave the game. The only solution is to add a limitation that is independent of cost, like a cooldown or carry limit. Not every problem can be solved by just adding more cost to things. Some stuff just needs independent limitations. For example, make a player's crew into an actual number of people on your payroll that cannot be instantly replenished when a whole mess of them die or are captured. Instead they recover over time, maybe 1 guy every minute. At that point you can't just throw away a 3rd rate, because it doesn't matter how many more durability points or extra third rates you have stashed. If everyone on board died you can't crew another one for several hours. Using smaller ships immediately constitutes a significant reduction in your risk, even if you are the richest player on the server. Also, having smaller ships that can pick up lifeboats and escape from the fight will suddenly play a huge role in whether or not you can sustain an assault or if your loss of life instantly becomes so catastrophic that you're reduced to using 7th rates. If you just try to slam more cost on everything to balance it out all you're doing is making sure fewer and fewer people have the time required to break it, and everyone who doesn't simply won't be competitive.

This seems like just another one of these ideas that tries to penalize the entire possible playerbase for problems that just the clanwar crowd creates. Penalties that need to exist because of a specific sub group of players should be designed in such a way that they only affect that specific sub group of players. Trying to build all the fundamentals of the game around the tiny number of people who have time for 4am harbor sieges is extremely short sighted. There is nothing wrong with building systems into the game that make sure those players have the appropriate penalties and controls to have an engaging experience, but stop trying to slap absolutely everyone with them like the game shouldn't even try to appeal to anyone else.

Personally I think the information should not be as perfect as it is right now to give more of a psychological element to the game, but you should have some idea of how badly damaged an enemy is. Personally I think the armor indicator is less of a problem than the crew indicator though. Being able to take one quick glance at a ship and know exactly how many people it has on board seems silly.

Don't think much of this system. This is a game about captains who serve great European powers that give them orders, not people who vote with cannonballs.

I'm not a fan of fracturing the game into individual game modes, there are plenty of ways of making the open world portion of the game fully accessible to the type of player that would enjoy sea trials.

I thought Port Morant already had a wall made of shallows and sadness.

The accuracy of a cannon comes down to it's barrel to ball tolerance. The tighter the fit the less the ball moves side to side on its way down the barrel, and the less it moves side to side the less likely it has to fly out at an angle rather than straight where the gun is pointed. Machining the bore is superior because it produces tighter tolerances, and it also allows for some weight to be saved on the barrels, since the thickness didn't have to be as uniform to avoid head fractures during casting. That's the reason why pretty much all cast machine parts today are cast first and then milled down to their final shape. More refined tolerances and it makes the part a lot stronger if the casting can cool at a uniform thickness to avoid heat fractures and is then brought down to it's final shape where not all parts are the same thickness.