KrakkenSmacken

I would support this idea with a couple of additional mechanics. One, when you board, you board. The boarding party gets onto the other ship and starts a fight. Crew move from one ship to the other, and battle on the actual deck of the ship that is boarded. So there should be two parts, what the ships are doing to each other, and what the boarding party is doing to the crew of the other ship. Small ships should be dragged, jostled against, pushed around and ran over and sunk, all while boarding is happening. It should take time for crew to transfer from one ship to the other, and they are vulnerable when this is happening. Slower travel would mean it happens faster and safer, while fast moving ships would jostle and push and would transfer crew slowly with high risk. Repelling boarders would involve pulling crew off other work to fight, so boarders for example could tie up the crew of the top deck guns, or one side of the guns only, while the rest of the ship continues to operate while the boarding fight happens. Jump ship should also be a thing. The entire crew empties from a sinking ship, with all the marbles thrown into the desperate fray to eliminate the other crew. Empty a cutter onto a victory, and it should be a short bloody fight that has little impact on the Victories performance. Swarm a victory with 5 cutters worth of crew, now you have a serious problem to deal with. In order for the above to work, the option for the captain should exist to run the boarding mini game like he runs normal ship operations, such as crew focus, repairs, etc, without stopping the ship. Of course all of this would take quite a bit of programming effort, but it would be I think more interesting than the current mini game.

Just an FYI on how exiting a battle instance works, they seem to stay open indefinitely. I was in an rush and logged out before exiting an instance I was in after hunting an NPC trader, fully expecting to login in the OW when I got back. Nope, 8 hours later, still in instance, still able to interact with the cargo loot/adjust window.

The right way to go is to assist in facilitating this behavior in the UI, with ease of transition between crafting and item purchase. If beside where your items show as short and turns red while crafting, was a price and button to just buy the materials from the port, players trying to capitalize on spending their hours on the small parts of a ship would have a more convenient outlet. Right now the best trade seems to be in the lowest item on the required list, (logs, hemp, gold, etc) because that is what people habitually head to and then build up. But if there was easy access to purchase already assembled parts at every level (Planks, Iron fittings, etc), then effectively people would be selling their hours.

I'm going to expand on the above, because there is far more possible with that kind of mechanic, and that "Idea" bullet point doesn't quite do the whole concept justice. Full disclosure, the core of the idea is already in use by games like Travian and Valor, both of which have an insanely compelling and team comradery quality to them. I would not want to port over the degree of compulsion they have built (24/7 game aware or you fall behind and die), but there are some good mechanics mixed in with the bad. So for our case take the base idea that ports have morale, and morale drops more with every successful attack, and raises with time and other items. Do not think of morale as a percentage, although my initial example seems to indicate that. Think of it as town hit points, and morale hits as damage, with a base value of 100, that gets adjusted up the more active and defended a town is. Here are some other in game possible modifiers to morale. Every outpost built adds +1 morale. Every warehouse expansion adds +.5 morale. Every 1k of ship BR in the dock adds 1 morale. With the above a single player fully dedicated could influence the towns morale by +6, with a fully expanded warehouse and 5 Victories in the dock. To reduce setting up morale mule accounts, after 10 days of inactivity, a players morale influence is reduced by 5% per day until 30 days when their influence is zero. A single login activity restores their influence in 24 hours time. Fortifications: Add 1 morale for every (5000 * fortifications) paid into a fund by any player with an outpost at the port (max 1 fortification per outpost). So adding +1 fortification to a town with 15 fortification would cost 80,000 and require that 16 players at least have outposts. Any damage done to morale has a chance to destroy a fortification = to (1 * fortification count) /remaining morale. [EDIT: EG. A town with 16 fortification and 16 morale would be 100% guaranteed to lose a fortification, while a town with 16 fortification and 160 morale would only have a 10% chance of losing a fortification if morale was dropped by 1)] Now with the above, my initial numbers would probably have to change. I would reduce the cool down on timers to 4 hours, and raise the damage that a single raid can do up to 30 (10 per tower destroyed in the defense) + 1 per ship remaining in the fight when the battle ends. I would add in the inverse value to morale on a failed attack. +10 for each tower still standing, +1 for each ship still remaining. In this way a single battle could swing morale +/- 55, but any contested battle would see a much lower change in values, including the possibility that a failed attack actually improves town morale. [EDIT: The above should probably be reversed mathematically to +1 for every ship that enters, -2 for every ship lost, and no morale boost for remaining towers, so that a single traitor ship starting a fight can't just give up +55 morale to a town] Meta game play would start to show up with this. Players seeing a port under siege would start to park fleet ships in dock to boost total morale. The natural restrictions caused by the size of the map and difficulty in moving fleets of ships around would make distant region defense a serious effort. (Get to threatened town, set up outpost, return to fleet. Cap/teleport fleet to new outpost). They would also have to divert resources to build outposts, upgrade fortifications, and maintain enough presence in the area to fight off days worth of attacks. To the OP's main point, smaller nations as their territory contracted would find it easier to move fleets into ports, focus outpost numbers and easier to concentrate resources to build new fortifications and increase morale in less area, making it increasingly expensive and difficult to take the ports of nations with reduced territory. For example a small team could replace the morale of fallen fortifications almost instantly after the fight, making it literally impossible for an enemy to take a town that was being reinforced by 55 dedicated players except by long drawn out attrition. Large nations would be naturally more stretched out as players would be financially limited to the number of outposts they could maintain and create in the efforts of expansion. Fronts would open up in areas other than the stale mate zones of reduced nations, forcing the withdrawal of nations to protect multiple fronts. Wealthy individual players would have an increasingly more expensive and hard time supporting outpost and fortification efforts in ports that are in dispute. This would cause internal tension within the factions as keeping the team focused and together becomes harder the more players are reliant on each other for success. Deciding to place outposts in neutral towns would cost more than gold as it would also make setting up future useful morale boosting outposts more expensive. That is my more complete suggestion.

Some ideas related to flags. Yes eventually money will be all but unlimited, but there are other options. Flags can only be purchased at a capital. (More time to prepare and tackle incoming fleets) Flag cost is based on distance to capital. The further out you are, the more it costs to conquer. Flag cost raised by number of ports held by nation. The bigger the reach, the more expensive the empire is to grow/maintain. Nations are allowed to capture one port every 6 hours max. Flags go on cool down with successful capture. If your in a country with too many people to get into captures, maybe you should jump to a less populated one. The above is waved on ports that have flipped in the last 24 hours. These are in dispute and can be re-taken without triggering the capture cool down. Ports have morale. Every capture event loss reduces moral by 25%. Morale replaces at 1% per hour. Attack cool down timers are set on ports 6 hours after capture win/loss. This would mean that the most aggressive nation would take 5 capture successes in a row over 30 hours to flip a port.

because "Ultimate disgrace" is such a fun game mechanic. I know I look forward to being ultimately disgraced over and over again.

How many of these threads are active in one form or another now? That's a pretty good indication "something" should be done. Otherwise the devs should just re-name every nation to a color rather than country, and let it be a "Risk" like free for all. As colors instead of nations there would only be emotional attachment to events and your guild friends. Whomever could then call themselves "Pirates of color X" and play like pirates or whatever. There is a very good reason (population and popularity) that US,GB and pirates are the largest populations on all servers.

I would almost be willing to suggest that people with an orange "leninade" avatar image be required to pay double for the base game. Both make the same amount of sense.

Some of my input. If you take away crafting, you need to replace it, so change it to repair and refitting. With the same type of BP requirement in parallel to crafting, the ability to replace lost Dura for 2/5 of the ships basic cost (2X what it originally cost) with a cap of 3 Dura so you have to do this more often. Risk when doing so of degrading the quality of the ship in line with the level of the repair level of the person preforming the repair/re-fit. Craft notes can be used to prevent degradation. Craft your own repair kits for cheaper. Raid flags captured from enemies with a short life time (1 hour). Run up captured false flag and ship to dock at port. Load up goods from the dock and haul away. If identified it's a chase/escape battle. Bonus XP for dealing LESS damage in a capture or goods stolen. "Dock" at any shallows or set cove areas for repair/ bury chest(warehouse). Very limited size (one row) per cove/area. Teleport with ship and no cargo to any cove with your booty stored on a lower cool down timer (1 - 2 Hr). That's enough for this round.

Going to add a bit more to this. Realistically most ships of that time were captured and prizes of war, after crew surrendered to overwhelming odds or had been beaten down. There were very very few fights to the death. 50% crew loss was catastrophic. Just look at how often Admiral Nelson wrote about prize money and it's impact on crew moral. The goal was not to sink, but to capture. So if they stripped Dura, then I would expect ships crew to force surrenders of their captains at somewhere between 20-50% moral without requiring boarding, and that moral would drop much faster than it does now when a ship is obviously out matched. But then this would basically be a different game at that point.

More "hardcore" = less players, especially since it took me over 40 hours to get my first self built snow. If I lost 10 hours of work in a single bad moment, especially from being ganked or some other place holder game mechanic, I would be gone from this game forever, and that's just a cheap ass snow. I am a very patient person willing to throw hour and hours at a game I think I can make progress in, that would push me over the edge on a game that already has a significant amount of grind. Top that off with the more realistic human response, run at first sight of trouble every single time, or move in packs large enough to not ever be threatened, and you have an escalation the the very things that are getting a huge amount of complaints from players already. I personally would like to have a way to get durability restored via a crafter with the appropriate BP and 2/5 of the required supplies per durability. That way "my" ship would feel way more like "my" ship. Named, and repaired for as long as I play.

You could just put new flags on a cool down timer nationally after any successful port capture. Nation takes a port, the entire nation has to wait 12 hours to take another port. Call it fortification time or something. Then it's not subject to griefing by flag purchase, only "they took the wrong damb port" inter nation politics, which for a overly large populated nation should be one of the problems they have to deal with anyway.

The process could also be automated a bit. Have a port tax that is automatically used to purchase upgrade materials. Set this port tax to be based on total ports held by a nation, as in the more ports held, the more you pay, and you end up with a national perpetual comeback mechanic that adds an expense to being part of a huge nation with all the advantages of multiple ports.

Give us teleport to any of those un-capturable ports with ships (could be the same ports as current Neutral ports) (same cooldown as current teleport), a raid event instead of port battle with unique mechanics [fight though defender ships (if any) to reach a dock, start loot timer, grab stuff (player warehouses and dock stock) every X seconds like the boarding turns, survive and run away after looting as much as possible for example] and watch us roam the seas looking for easy targets and stealing your stuff instead of conquest. Yar!!!

Maybe what is needed to facilitate this is for there to be different strengths of wind. Then the heavy ships would get locked in irons easier or even end up fully becalmed, and be much harder and more strategic to manage in light wind. There should be times when the largest ship is the WORST thing you could bring to a fight.

Yea, the game is in serious need of perpetual comeback mechanics of increasing strength the more behind/ahead a nation is. Maintaining a large empire should be expensive in time, resources and co-ordination.

Well for the record I sort of started that way myself, as the "ITS HARD" warning made me think I should know the basics before going pirate. I started US, made it a level, then destroyed the account and made a new pirate with that characters XP. Since that is now possible, it would be simple enough to implement that to make a Pirate you had to at least be level 2, and abandon all your worldly items in the process. No real need to force a random Murder or be stuck starting close to your current capital.

Your doing it wrong. I have a Pirate on US2 and a US merchant on US1 (that I never play). I don't know why you think that is a limitation. In fact it's so good, the XP you earn on one will be added to the XP on the other, so playing on two servers actually progresses you on two servers. Hella good deal if you ask me.

I really don't see any advantage to this method of selecting to be a pirate. Murdering team mates, or national AI is easy. One of the things we should lack is missions. Having a pirate "admiralty" equivalent that lets you mission farm for XP and Gold is silly. To compensate for that, bonus XP for ship capture should be given. As for nation building, well we don't need it. If we could fly the colors of a captured ship and dock at that nations port until the ship was marked as "reported" for example, then we would be able to parasite and have a good reason to. If we could additionally raid a port to switch it to neutral, have little or no "Flag" costs, and attack ports without warning, and instead of being banned from neutral ports be the ports we are allowed to use but not defend, then Pirates doing pirate things such as they are would be the mechanism by which large nations could be forced to keep on their toes. Getting top of the line ships would not be by crafting, but rather by stealing them from the shipyards of the ports we raid. A constant scourge that you never know where and when they are going to show up. Certainly not the same nation mechanics currently set up.

A lock out, selected pull in, system that applied only to your side of the fight sounds like it should be tried. Instance creator/target gets a list of ships that want to enter on his side, somewhere around the same screen location as call for re-reinforcements, and can select accept/deny within 30 seconds of request. Members already in his group are automatically joined. Allow for a setting toggle to automatically accept/deny/ask by default. You get no say on the other sides forces, so only those on the same team have the ability to lock out to prevent involuntary isolation of weaker players.

I we are stuck to raiding, then we need to be able to try to impersonate as honest traders (fly the flags) and dock where we please. No magic (Hey this guy is a pirate) in the selection window. You see the flag, and unless you recognize the ship (ships should have names distinct from the player), or get close enough to observe the captain (player name), then the pirate gets into the port and can do some business. Now I realize that with durability there could be a maximum of 15 ships captured(copied) from a single 5 durability hull, so that reporting a ship (name) as captured would involve some risk if you had durability left. It would still be a more interesting way for us pirates to try to sneak around being all pirate like and stuff if we could impersonate any nation.