KrakkenSmacken

Not to mention, that as the top dog on the pile, odds are good that there will be two or possibly more hot spots as other nations attempt to knock them off. I can't image the gang up event that the pirates of PvP1 are going to suffer the moment this becomes the norm and they run a port reset to facilitate the change..

I think it would be more fun if handled in another way than simply logging people out. ANY AFK sailing > 10 min, and enemy admiralty posts a special mission in near ports. " That KrakkenSmacken was last seen 40 miles NWW of [some port] Heading NWW If you can kill capture that ship admiralty will give you a fat reward. " If your sitting and spinning, your food. If your on a long trip, you could get harassed on route.

Yup, that was it, many thanks. I don't even mind if you can't auto send captures back to port, but have to sail a weaker captured ship back. What really bothers me, especially as a pirate that operates deep in hostile territory, is that I may have to kludge the hell out of managing to keep playing that way. See even without TP, the work around currently is rather simple, if a bit of a pain. Build a ship yard in the port you wish to operate out of. Ship resources from your other holdings until piracy gives you enough supply. Smuggle the rest from local hostile ports. Build the ships you want in the area, and hunt. No hours and hours of endless sailing. The only real change it would make, is I would probably never really return to the capital, and it would cost a bit more to simply transport wealth in the form of sold ships/parts with the magical "delivery" system in place now. Ironic, but not having AI player controlled ships/fleets makes the game less realistic and not more, in that goods can be "delivered" without any risk whatsoever.

Yea I read that one, and it wouldn't bother me so much if I also had not read the post (I wish I could find it now, just spent half an hour looking for it), where Admin also said they thought that because AI ships are slower, that nobody would use the feature of setting orders and letting them loose on the OW, so they are not wasting time on it. Shame, because a fleet of 60% slower trade ships that you had to escort in the OW to keep safe, rather than the current attempt at fleet mechanics where the "fleet" is only one ship on the OW, would probably have been a fun thing to do. I could see you trying to scout ahead for hostiles, intercept enemy ships on the horizon, planning with a group trying to escort a large group of trader AI, that sort of thing. Seems like that would be fun. If I quit because a high percentage of the fun is hidden behind what I consider time wasting work of trying to manually sail ships from front line to front line, it won't be with stomping feet. It will be a sad sort of a sad sigh and I'll move on. Hopefully Crowfall is a bit further along by the time that happens. Then I'll go back to checking in once in a while to see how much interest there actually is in this kind of a game.

I prefer to think of it as a different kind of realism. Since the top "rank" we are described in the British class, is "Rear Admiral", I'll use that. Is it realistic that the Rear Admiral of a fleet personally drive every single ship in that fleet from home port to the action? Nope. Is it realistic that the Rear Admiral personally captains trading ships? Nope. Is it realistic that in order to be an effective Rear Admiral, he also has to understand and be part of the construction of his ships? Nope (Possibly at this rank???). So why is it any less realistic for a Rear Admiral to order ships to and from ports, and have others (AI) conduct business for him under orders? I prefer to think of all the outposts, (which would have had their own leadership), the fleets of ships, the resource extractions, the warehouses, and every other resource a player can control, to be assets under command, and we have the privilege of selection as to which asset we wish to enjoy, and what role we wish to take, at any given time. Rather than issuing paper orders to everything, and being stuck waiting for action reports, we simply get to role play multiple different captains under our command, going to wherever they happen to be. Hopefully, eventually, choosing which ones we order to do things, and which ones we choose to experience first hand. It's not much different than assigning how laborer hours are spent really, it's not like your actually building a ship. If you want to prefer to lock yourself into a single role/location, you always have the choice to role play that, even if it is less than ideal from a strategic point of view. It's the job of the developers to create an engaging strategy based around the players abilities and limitations. You can make strategy just as much a part of a game that allows TP or AI sending travel, as you can one that does not. Claiming a preference for strategy and "realism", when other strategies and realism are possible is an empty argument, especially since you had to resort to using the word fantasy. Unless you have found a way to stand on the deck of your ship from inside wherever it is you have your computer installed, and have cannonballs whizzing past you when you fight, all any game it is fantasy.

As I recall from my EQ days, the druid who could teleport and take people from place to place, was a VERY popular and financially successful character. In a game that had huge grind built into its core design, they still understood that giving people a way to bypass and manage travel was a critical mechanic. Besides, trying to compare a game like this, where everyone is a captain,of their own ship, ship class limited only by level, to a very role specific MMO design, is quite simply comparing apples to rocks. A real comparison would be that a character had to be a deck hand, then midshipman, then lieutenant, then.... Maybe a couple of months of being a peg boy would cure you of thinking that more realism and less game should be built into the game. That said, I wish they would do the same about a TP vs No TP server. Then all this bickering could end and we would see just which model actually works for a game. Oh, and I happen to think the current handling of death to nearest port is just fine.

Good point. Troops make sense to restrict to your national ports, so do officers and other human components that would potentially have a preference for who they fight for. Also on the potential list of restricted goods for free ports could also be cannons, upgrades (some types), ammunition (which we don't have but could), specific classes of repair kits, etc. I really think the repair kits could and should be broken down more than is currently done. We already have the "Class X repair kit" as prizes, so why even have the current mechanic? I don't quite get the need to two systems. Perhaps it's a place holder. For example a sail kit would be available at free ports, but a Heavy Carriage kit, or cannon repair kit would not. I know that one set of cannons currently represent a full deck damage healed automatically, but it could be tweaked so that for every canon destroyed I would simply also assign the % of cannons that represented, and assume that a cannon repair kit or carriage repair kit a fixed percentage of the damage, only available to be used in OW. Ammunition could be tracked simply as one kit per 25% ammunition "damage", and "repairable" during a fight. Damage done at a rate of .10% per broadside loading. (That's 1000 broadsides for a fully stocked ammunition for the mathematically challenged among you. ) With all of the above, capture of a ship, and stripping any of it's repair kits would become the thing to do while in hostile waters, not require you to travel home to fix, but to constantly be on the hunt for those types of supplies. Sounds like that may be fun.

Another option would be for the ports to simply stop producing their daily production, and be easier to generate hostility against, given the proposed hostility mechanics. They could even have a susceptibility rate that if spied out would show just how fast and easy hostility could be raised. Buildings could lower this rate, and starvation raise it.

This assumes that there are no AI fulfilling the role. If AI were able to run real supplies, maintaining a nation might include posting product for sale where it is not consumed, and letting the AI move the goods, and take the profit. Since capitals consume just about everything, you could not rely on that, and if the AI were coded to avoid using free ports, you would still have to get the supplies somewhere in your national ports. This would also give incentive to smugglers to disrupt a nations AI traders by clearing out stock in the known supply ports, and forcing players to directly deliver these goods.

I actually think I recognized the pattern from the Star Citizen forums, and if it is the same person, he proudly proclaimed that English was in fact his first language, as shocking at that may seem. If it is the same guy, he could be a dedicated kick start/early access troll.

Sorry if I got the wrong impression about your amount of play. Your first sentence, "After 1 month i just sign in what happening on forum, whats the next step in development. I see, nothing changed." sounded like you had joined a month ago, stopped playing, and then jumped back in, looked at one or two posts for some very specific features YOU happen to want, didn't see them, and then proceeded to bitch, moan and stamp your feet like an angry Child. The fact is I took a two month hiatus from the game, and was astonished to see soooo many things different when I came back. Land in battles, TP rules changed, smuggling, about 5 new ships including mortar mechanics. Just before I left there was the production buildings added, crew management in battle, and a bunch of other things I can't even remember now, so I think your way way way off base to say they haven't been making progress. These aren't spell casters able to summon code from their imaginations alone, writing good software is HARD, and takes TIME, to do it. I think with how ambitious this project is, and how small the development team is, they have done one hell of a job putting the core in, while trying to flesh out open world ideas and problems. To your comment "But all of that 3 games developers just care about how to satisfy the players, they communicate with them, they try to keep them in game with thier patches, and they answer the players questions." As either ignorant, as in you haven't looked and participated enough to see, or blinded by unrealistic expectations and your own self importance. I see Admin, the lead of the developers, who has over 1700 hours in game to show for how well he knows the players experience, posting in most active threads on this forum, and responding to reasonable comments and questions at least once a day. If your last couple of posts are any indications, I would not consider your comments reasonable. They are difficult to read, grammatically horrific, walls of text that lack any meaningful punctuation. Seem to offer no suggestions, and come across as just juvenile and illiterate rants, especially when you claim to speak for "most players" when talking about what is currently pissing you off. Now if English is your second language, the grammar and punctuation is excusable, but I would suggest you slow down and put together a couple of concise points and ideas for solutions, rather than the all encompassing spew you currently seem to use. I think with how ambitious this project is, and how small the development team is, they have done one hell of a job putting the core in, while trying to flesh out open world ideas and problems. The play is not there currently to hit mainstream, but early access sales seem to indicate that many people purchased, and never even tried the game, instead opting to wait for it to be more fleshed out. With 300 hours in, I already have had my moneys worth of fun, considering it's was less than a mid range dinner out with the wife. I also think your assumption that successful early access games all have a rising population needs one hell of a sample size to prove your case. I can't imagine any early access game that people install to just check out, that has continuous growth through the entire early access phase. ED comes to mind, and I know many people who enthusiastically started in that game, and ran out of interesting things to do in much fewer hours than this game. So please show me one game in early access that has had continuous player participation growth over the course of 6 or so months, cause I would love to play a game that good.

With that level of self importance, not to mention impatience, I'm not surprised your unsatisfied with early access. I would suggest you only ever buy finished products from now on, because you obviously have no clue the herculean task that is game development, nor the patience to be what is essentially a tester providing reasonable and coherent feed back to what seems to me to be an extremely fast developing game. Don't let the door....

Why do you ask such a thing? They will bring up the "pirates can attack each other to avoid combat" and the "Green on green turns you pirate without asset loss". Those are not nearly as powerful as they make out, but trying to address the real culture issues of, "I want to be Jack Sparrow, Yar!" and "Lets join the winning team because winning is fun" is harder than simply blaming, finger pointing and making rather childish comments about capital punishment for wanting to play a game. But what can you expect from someone who's angry that they are losing, when the game is supposed to be about winning and losing to begin with? EDIT: BTW, I would be fine if pirates were incorporated into other nations as a mechanic and play style available to any nation. I enjoy attacking trader ships, both AI and player, so as long as I can disrupt somebody I'm happy.

Woah... I did not realize that thread started in 2014, I just saw the chatter from someone waking up the thread today and jumped to page one to see what the original post was. I honestly thought it was a recent idea, but wondered how the hell they would maintain persistence and exploration/establishment of ports at the same time. The only thing I could think of was that instead of conquest, if a port was flipped too many times it would simply kill it and re-open a spot in a limited number of port positions. My guess however is that things have changed too much for that kind of game play to be an option.

Its easier to stop a rolling Cheese before it gets half way down the hill.

Yea, much shorter with PvP than PvE, so even buried deep, an enemy fleet that is left alone by players will take along time build up hostility. I think that may be a strategic mistake on the part of the developers, that choosing to ignore player fleets in your waters to prevent the climbing of hostility is a potential strategy. Ignored fleets should devastate the target, not be less effective. I think the Devs should consider a mechanic that seen PvE hostility start off less effective, but escalates to being more effective if left alone. Perhaps after a certain level of hostility is reached (>40%) , PvE becomes equally effective as PvP, so that fleets simply can't be ignored after a certain point. You shouldn't be able to stop an invasion by ignoring it.

I don't think it's the off hours he is worried about, its the fact that players will be able to stage fleets in Free Ports to conduct invasions. I wouldn't even worry about this though if I was him, as the entire port structure is also set to change anyway. From the link: Except for starting areas, every port will have to be founded by players or player guilds. We will seed the world with some native villages that players can capture to speed up the shore development, but most of the map will be uninhabited. Explorers will be able to name coastal towns that will appear on map after Royal Courts, or Admiralty approvals. The world creators will name key landmarks – but explorers could chart and provide naming for smaller islands.

Yup, as a matter of fact I do. It's part of having surprise or feint attacks be possible in a game that will require build up to generate enough hostility to trigger a PB. In real life terms, fleets did not have to stage anywhere near their target of attack, they had 6 MONTHS of food supplies, and could roam where they pleased. Nobody was around to announce a fleet to a target port through national "chat", and if you saw a fleet on the water, it was already too late to send a warning to the intended target town, and it would be hit while it was completely defenseless, because you had to send your own bloody boat to deliver the message. So if you somehow manage to solve the unrealistic and unfair advantage that "magical" internet communication gives a team, maybe, just maybe, I would see it your way. But with that being an insoluble issue due to third party out of channel communications, and with captain TP to any port they have a ship, which I also support, even with a fully staged fleet in a free port, there will be the ability for the defensive team to stage a counter attack. And if you had read what Admin said above, it will probably take real PvP at that location to drive hostility up enough to trigger a PB, meaning the presence of defensive ships. So no, it's open water, there are no boarders, this game appears to be sandbox play first, conquest second, not the other way around, and your never supposed to be totally safe ANYWHERE. If you want safe, PvE is on your list of available servers.

Actually I just read how they handled it on the Euro Merge, and that mechanic would be fine. Everything gets itemized, and you have to expand them again once you move. It even lets you switch nations. Highlights Assets are transferred to account - not as players. If you wanted to change the name or nation - its a good chance to do it. All merged assets will be given to as redeemables If the option existed to voluntarily start this process, and then just drop the "player" account onto any server you like, and switch nations, that would do it. The one exploit I can see is if they also let you change name during a switch. You might be able to hide cheating activity by switching to a different name/nation in the process. It would may take bit more forensics to track a exploit report to the originating account if it's been removed from the server, but then again they may already have all that logged, so it may be a non-issue. Nation flipping/spying could be mitigated by requiring a 1 month cool down before you could switch again.

Because speculation about limits is what I do? I've pushed the edges of almost every game I have ever played to look for corner case exploits. I enjoy theoretical scenarios and trying to break systems. Better me posting my musings on the forum so people can evaluate and preemptively work around possible problems than keeping it to myself I figure. Besides, Admin said "ports that don't see active pvp around them will never get captured/lost." With port TP and "Top 10 ports with the highest hostility level will be indicated on the map " there is probably zero chance that a lone raider will be able to push hostility up unmolested by a more superior defensive force. A smallish elite group that could fight a couple of first wave "lets go see why our ports hostility is so high" groups maybe, but solo I don't think that's possible without cross nation collusion. (I.E. players on two different teams do the equivalent of "damage farming" for hostility)

Two things come immediately to mind. Port reports. What they have in stock, orders wanted, etc. Ports sell their own, other ports buy reports from other ports. Find fresh ones as hints on where to go for good deals/trades. Blueprint parts. Gather X number of BP pieces to create a full BP. Each port produces a few different pieces at random.

Taking your Tonka truck and going home as an optimal move is not a good way to design a game. If not playing is the most viable strategy, better to just let them teleport home out of the battle screen so they can keep playing.

As long as it's meaningful choice with agency, then it's good game play. If the best choice is always, or almost always the same, it's not. Even Chess after thousands of years has more than just the queens gambit as a viable opening.

There goes my lone raider option. That's a good solution. That way nations on opposite time zones will simply [never/not very often] create the scenarios that will see them battle each other. Will consideration be given of national time zones in parceling out initial territory and capital locations on a map wipe to place them in somewhat similar regions, or are these set in stone based on historical holdings?

I think the balance point will be somewhere around a stale mate between to opposite timezone nations. While one team is awake they try to build hostility. While the other is awake, they try to tear it down, or build hostility in a different area. Eventually the scale will tip to a battle, but this will be rare enough that it's possible those hooky players will make the effort to show up for the defense. I think the real fighting will be done with groups in the same time zone Or Teams will start to recruit and clan together for each time zone, so there is full coverage. I have high hopes that with some of the recent changes, and with a more meaningful conquest game, that populations will go up enough that at least 3 teams will be able to field forces 24/7.