The Spud

The problem with port flipping is that all ports can be attacked every day. So in theory a nation can lose ALL his ports every single day. Three good suggestions would be. A - Announce port battles in advance, lets say 2 days in advance, so you don't get caught "off guard" and lose half your ports because half the clans are offline. Limit it maybe to 3 ports a day or make it depend on the number of ports the enemy has (devide by 10 or something). B - And my favourite, can't attack ports that are not next to a friendly port. So no more port capping across the map, taking a port in the middle of friendly territory. This is historicaly inaccurate, why would you take one port on an island that is surrounded by enemy ports, and your friendly port is 20 minutes of sailing away. Islands could have a "trade route" towards the next island. For example from Saint Ann to Portillo and from Port Morant to Tiburon. So you would need to take Tiburon before you could attack morant, and would need to take portillo before you could take Saint Ann (and the other way around). After Tiburon you could attak Jeremie and les cayes. Nippes after jeremie is conquered, and Saint Louis after les Cayes is taken. This might be a hard nut to implement. But this way there is always a "frontline" and a sort of "safe zone". This will make PB more rare as you can cap only a limited amount of ports, some ports will be more important to keep compared to others. C- You can't attack ports until you control the regional capital. Devide the map in sections, with the regional capitals being the center. Must take that port before any other ports can be taken. So if your regional capital is attacked and you lost two ports under that capital. You must first take the regional capital back, and then you can take back the smaller ports.

The port flipping needs to be slowed down, PB's need to be more valuable and time/resource consuming. So nations can't launch 20 attacks on one evening. Best Idea was to anounce them in advance, so people had enough time to gather the defences, instead of it being a blitzkrieg capping a dozen ports on one evening.

Well since pirates and nations essentialy play towards a different goal, there is no real need to balance the two out against eachother. We must take in account that the pirate faction will be smaller then it is now, for obvious reasons, so they won't be met as common as they are now and as such be seen as a possible problem and not a certain problem whenever you sail out with your ship. There will be no real reason for nations to go hunt the pirates down, as they will not be seen as a threat, they will be pesky camping out your trade routes looking for a good opportunity to make gold. They will be seen as something that has to be dealt with whenever they cross your path, there will be no holy crusade to destroy them. I would still keep the ranking comparable to those of the nations, but with gold needed to rank up. Prestige could be a ranking system per player, and a ranking system per clan. It could be you can purchase expensive "Prestige" coins or medals. As pirate captains will have probably bragged with gold rings and chains, something you can easily display when clicking on their ship. Like a little icon saying how much gold medals this captain purchased, thus showing off his wealth. This could be implemented amongst clans too, so clans can show off their wealth. Possibly creating some pirate clan wars, or clans fighting over their "hunting grounds". With the above we'll have to assume that the pirates will not contain the people who want to be involved in the whole nations war, as they will most likely choose a nation instead of the pirate faction. Accordingly we would have to assume that the whole pirate faction will not side with one nation against all the other nations, as their right hands. Unless that nation "hires" the pirates by giving them gold to camp out another nation, allot is possible in this system. It would give the people who realy play as pirates, and who are probably frustrated by the fact the pirates get so much bad talk, a much more piraty game.

I had my idea posted elsewhere on this forum: Instead of the XP used to rank pirates need to use gold (currency) to level up, so they would need to transfer in game currency to their "Treasure", this gold is forever locked in there and counts towards your rank. So you could click your money say transfer X to treasure, it deducts from your currency and you add the gold to your treasure, which counts towards your rank. So essentialy the more money you have the more people will want to sail with you, the more reputation you get. The port capping will be left only to nations, and the pirates can use freetowns to run as their HQ. This will essentialy make pirates concentrate on what they concentrated on historicaly, getting rich. Like nations have a constant goal (capping as many ports as possible) pirates should have an equal goal amongst them in the forms of whoever has the most money. Like a ranking system, some sort of way of showing of how good they are. So there is a constant drive to get more money and become wealthier. So the goals between nations and pirates are different, but they use the same OW to succeed in their efforts, so they will be influencing eachothers progress, they will not be influencing eachother up to the point the pirates will decide the outcome of a nations succes. When it comes to ships, in this situation its probably preferable they don't sail SoL above 3rd rates. The pirates would need to have some additional content, or some other features, like being able to raid ports, so its sufficiëntly attractive for pirates to play. I don't like taking away pirate features and giving nothing in return. Give them some pirate only ships like the pirate frig. The pirates could be very opportunistic, with the no cooldown TP between outposts, they can be fighting across the map wherever the biggest catches can be done. Give them the opportunity to be more sneaky, do more ambushes, give the pirates the optiont to demand a ransome to let the oponent go in return. More of these piraty things. This suggestions is probably full of loopholes and possible exploits, but I think the core of it would benefit both the real pirate players and the nations. As it doesn't nerf them up to the point there is no fun in playing pirates.

Had been thinking about this too...declare a part of the map an "arena"... put some ports up between the current "alliances" UK,Dutch, Swedes, US VS Spain, pirate, dane and french. First team to cap all ports gets a point. Would probably be allot of fun and massive concentrated PvP'ing.

I am a fan, but an expert I am not, it is indeed Keith and Mick who wrote Paint it Black, so you are right good sir. Non the less, filing a lawsuit is the plan... I asked Paul if he would accept High Grade Notes as a payment, but he didn't know what I was on about...

I have been emailing with Paul McCartney about this, and we might be filing a multi million dollar law suit against the pirate faction, under the ruling of it being used as "War propaganda". So you guys better save up that gold instead of buying santi's. Will Smith said he would be totaly OK with you guys using "Men in Black"... so there's that...

The sadest part about this is I can't listen to "Paint it Black" anymore without feeling a bit of a betrayer to my nation for playing the pirates anthem, and its a darn good song. Now before we go on any further about who is betraying who, I would like the pirates to choose another anthem, and get my problem sorted. Would you guys agree on using "Will Smith - Men in Black" as your theme from now on? I don't like that song anyways. Thanks in advance.

There is something about people going out of their way to boast about whatever they've done that kinda makes me angry...

I look forward, as a brit, to the day they introduce the "Wars" where you need to announce port attacks in advance. So two nations can pitch all they have against eachother in a well prepared offence/defence. No more of this opportunistic, "well clan X is stuck there" lets cap a port or two while we can. Ports are flipped way to fast, if one nation is having an off day with the better parts of some clans not online, they can lose a huge amount of ports in one day.

It is being said before that OR we make pirates a full nation, where they can't attack eachother, exactly the same as nations, OR we try to add a touch of history and make pirates real pirates. The only way I think we could ever achieve this is by making the end goal for pirates different from these of nations. That is why i sugested the gold as a historicaly correct method of motivating pirates to do PvP. If you guys all agree on a "code" where its not done to attack a fellow pirate (something I might assume of being more or less done back in the days) there's nobody to stop you from dong that. You could raid and PvP all you like and whoever you like. Like said above, who is to stop you from interfering with a nations tactics. It would be the real free for all pirates. It would be preferable to compensate the loss of features with something in equal measure.

Reading it again makes it sound allot like I want to endlessly nerf the pirates. I just want to shift the attention for pirates from owning ports to owning gold, as it would have been in the days. So they essentialy play their own game inside the game. They could still sail whatever they want, they just can't do PB's. We should give them something of equal value in return, something the nations don't have and might envy, like nice ships or special missions. In a way they will influence the nations gameplay, but they will never be able to destablize it, they would have no reason to do so.

The pirate faction is a hard nut to crack, and these complicated mechanics (although nice idea and well explained) will be the cause for exploits and griefing. The pirates can not share the same motif as a nation, they shouldn't be on the hunt to cap as many ports as they can. My sugestion: Make the pirate faction purely gold driven, no battle experience needed to rank up, just how much money you make in your "carreer". To prevent abuse (huge gold transactions from one pirate to the other) you need to transfer gold to your treasure, the treasure gold can not be used and can not be put back to useable gold, the treasure gold is the only gold that counts towards you "rank". On top of the usual rank, we could also give the top X amount of players a bonus of some kind. A redeemable SoL or something worth the effort of being the wealthiest pirate in the carribean, a little medal or something next to your name. This would have as a benefit to the nations that they are totaly uninvolved in the whole port capping business. We could have some fixed pirate ports across the map, uncapable, maybe on small islands. So they are not focussed on any region or nation. So the pirates would have no interest in who is owning what port, only how much money can be made from their traders and ships. They can attack eachother, to steal their stolen cargo. Clans could work together to put a player in the top X amount of players. Maybe give them some more pirate only ships, like the pirate frigate. We could or could not let them craft stuff, make trading only possible in free towns and pirate ports. It would make a nice bit of competition amongst pirates... The fact they are not involved in the national diplomacy, might open up the option for a nation to make a pirate a privateer for an amount of time.

Would be more fun with a varried composition of fleet. Take a fixed composition of ships 1 x 1st rate 2 x 2nd rate 3 x 3rd rate 4 x 4th rate 5 x 5th rate 15 ships in total. So you know these will be allowed in the PB. The other 10 spots could be free (whatever you bring) or random ( example: 2 x 3rd rate, 6 x 5th rate, 1 x 1st rate , 1 x 4th rate). This would be totaly dull right now, but if they implement the fact you need to announce port battles in advance, you will have time to get the ships you need. Additionaly I would find it cool if PB could have a commander. Someone not participating in the battle but who has an overview of the battle, and can group ships up to give them combined targets. So you could see you are added to the "Yellow Squad", and the target could be a tower or an enemy ship. To make it a bit more coordinated without the use of teamspeak. So clans will be less opposed to letting pubbies in as they can be informed of the used tactic.

FYI, I have recently watched Blacksails S03 episode 2 (I think) where Flint gets caught in that storm. So I might be a bit too enthousiastic and unrealistic with the whole storm thing.

I never played Sea Trials, so don't know how they looked or how it changed the game mechanics. I would love to see these, bound to the OW weather when engaging the battle. In terms of duration of the storm and the longer time the battle will take. You could just make the storm ease out after +-30 - 40 minutes, and turn it into somewhat calmer weather we have now. Maybe also giving a chance of sail damage when sailing above a set percentage of sails (60%?), so people could try to escape at 100% sails but risk sail damage (percentage los) or even a demast? Some nice intesified wood cracking noises to warn the captain of the strain on the masts. Some nice close brawling, hoping you don't collide with your opponent. (Would even love some hard blowing storm noises to add to that). Or just put in Storm battles at the x1 XP rate instead of the 0.5XP rate? Would love to see this!

I highly doubt there will ever be a superpower on a well populated server. PVP1 has about 1500 players online on average. Its a multi language, multi timezone, multi nationality server. Right now a nation can cap lets say 8 - 10 ports if they are having a realy realy good night, and multiple clans work together and there is absolutely nothing going wrong. That is a large amount of ports, and most of these will have to be uncontested to pull this off. The devs intention is to slow down the rate at which ports are being captured, thus the rate at which a nation expands and another nations gets smaller. This gives allot of room to talk about cease fires, alliances, surrender conditions etc. They won't be able to completely wipe half a nation in two days, like they can do now. On PvP1 they have reduced some nations until they had as good as no more ports left (like the spanish), but they just left them and gave them time to regain their strenght. They could have camped their capital for a week, until finaly all players just ragequit - uninstall the game and the spanish are basicaly dead. In contrary to the real world, we want wars to last as long as they can, preferably forever.... :-)

I don't think the devs will implement a feature that will limit you from playing the game for some days, if you need to play another game for a couple of days, the chances are very high that you won't return to the game. The only games that limit progress by timers are these free2play games where they just want you to do microtransactions to speed things up. Labour hours are to be regenerated, because they would unbalance the game otherwise, and they don't prevent you from playing the game. Only viable system I could agree on is taking on rations for your trip, and having to dock up after X amount of days at sea, so your crew doesn't starve to death.

I think if you combine all the proposed changes (diplomacy, wars, PB, etc...) the crew thingy will be less of an issue. The PvP will be more coordinated, port battles are announced a couple of days in advance. So you don't need to sail out to sit in front of a port for two hours just in case the enemy decides to attack that port. If they implement the "Wars" and give point for every PvP fight done, there will be allot less random "just for fun" battles. People will team up to do PvP, so they stand a bigger chance to win a battle. I think the amount of battles you will fight will be less, but they will be bigger and more fun.

I don't think this will ever happen, we haven't got any nation conquering the whole map now, and I don't expect this to happen even after this is implemented. A couple of months ago people were complaining about how the pirates would rule PvP1, but if you look at the pirates now they have lost allot of ports because of the combined effort of multiple nations. They will simply not allow someone to cap the whole map.

Having now read all the proposed topics by the devs, I am kinda excited to see them all come together as a whole, and the crew thingy might be less important or "annoying". I especialy like the indicating a PB two days in advance and the raiding that can be done etc, it will make the PvP and Port Battle game allot slower and allot more concentrated. Two days of preparing ships, and exchanging Upgrades. Two days of coordinated raiding parties, no more random raiding as losses will count towards losing/winning the war. No more sitting outside of a port for two hours just because the timer is open, no more rushing to TP ships across the map. The amount of PvP battles will probably be slightly less, but they quality will be better I think. Players will group up, and grouped up players will be much more confident to take out their exceptional ships. No more PvP for the heck of having some fun, every battle will count. I like that. Just allot more tactics. In the bigger picture I think all will work very well together, and I don't think it will leave out the casual players as there is a role in this for everybody. I like all of it, when can we have it?

Well there will always be one type of ship dominating the seas, its the type of ship that will be the most cost effective, meaning the one that gives you the best bang for your buck. That was all just a thought i had, nothing realy refined so far. I just couldn't imagine that for example the british navy would have to tell a rear admiral he can't get a crew for his first rate, because they just divided the last 1000 crew amongst some midshipmen in cutters. I even heard in a documentary they had private people specificaly recruit seaman, and that if they failed to fullfill the contract with just a few men, they would just press homeless people or poor people into recruitment. I can't imagine a nation running out of crew, in every world war when there was about to be a shortage of men they would mobilise the nation to fill the spots. I could agree on a ship taking on rations, a number could say, enough rations for 10 days at sea with full rations, you could lower the rations to 3/4, 1/2 or 1/4 rations if you are stuck at sea for a long time, which could give some penalties. So every ship would require a set amount of gold to be at sea. A santi would need to take a massive amount of rations on for its full crew. If you have no rations left, your ship could be reduced in crew (death by famine) to a bare minimum amount (60%).

I get this will benefit the smaller nations, but it is a bit too extreme. There are still some things unclear, so I would greatly appreciate it if the devs could give an estimation as to what crew would actualy cost? Or would crew be totaly generated over time just like labour hours and not like purchaseable from a "shop" or something? If the goal is to make crew valuable, more valuable then a ship, why on earth would someone risk say 300k crew sailing a one dura consti, instead of buying an NPC 4 dura one for half that money? If your combined crew in your ship and in your outpost can't be more than the maximum crew your rank can have, if you can fully crew a santi, and you sink it you are out of ship and out of crew. If you happen to run out of luck and the port you strand at has no crew left, you are basicaly stuck there? I would much rather see a system that gives you a sailing officer, a gunnery officer and a boarding officer. And these guys gather experience after every battle, accordingly they give you bonusses. Like reload time, rigging speed and boarding bonus. You could see their health bar in your HUD, demasting could wound your rigging officer, exploding cannons your gunnery officer and boarding can cost you your boarding officer. The lower the ship armour the bigger the chance of getting the officer severly wounded that he can no longer opperate and a random chance of getting him killed. Not having an officer crewed could give a penalty. You could make it so you need to purchase them from academy's. So they are not available at every port. And you can choose if you want an officer that improves for example reload or accuracy. etc... Higher educated ones could cost huge amounts, and people could also "sell" their well trained officers. Obviously we would have to nerf or remove the upgrades this way, at least the non perma ones.

Well, this topic kinda destroyed itself if you ask me. It wanted to make a point, and in the end it just disproved itself.

In my opinion some people probably expect too much, I have read reviews today on Steam, negative ones, all from people who had 600 hours to 1000 hours in this game. About a year ago I made a calculus of all the playtime of all my steamgames (I think I have 60 - 70 games) in an account I have for about 8 - 9 years and that was about 2000 hours of playtime. If you have played so many hours in this game, I can honestly not believe you when you say you don't like the game. You can't eat a truck of oreo's and say you don't like oreo's. You liked oreo's alot but you ate so much of them that now you don't find them special anymore, and you started to hate them. I have never in the past years played a game for so many hours in such a short time like this game. I wasn't even in the sea trails part of the game,I didn't even know this game was being worked on, I didn't even knew I liked age of sail ships. I saw the game on the top sales list on steam, I looked at it, I liked the graphics, watched some you tube vids, and decided to buy it. I am a gamer since i got a NES when I was a little kid, and I haven't stopped gaming since. And I can honestly say allready, this is the game I will definetly remember and talk about when 10 or 20 years from now. We have some fine tuning and some more content to add, and this ship will sail fine...