Bach

When Patton rolled Sicily command told him to go only this far. He didn't meet any resistance that could stop him so he kept right on going and took control of the whole damn place. History remembers him.The allies also had a general they sent to invade Italy. He was very defensive in nature and spent a lot of time building a defensive beach head. Two recon guys in a jeep drove all the way to ROME reporting no resistance. He ignored it and dug in at the beach while the Germans were able to come in and fortify the road to Rome. Eisenhower fired the guy. History doesn't remember him. Alway always make the other guy fight for his own land.

@ Poe That huge force wasted on empty French ports that would have been just as empty on any given day? Seriously? Sounds like Invictus is a bit of a handicap. @ Brucy I don't know. I kind of have to go with Poe on this. You would have known from the moment Slamz bought the flag that you only needed minimal forces to hold Aves and you already had the ships there in the port. So any screen by British would be wasted. You could have hit Fred's with the high BR fleet and probably hit one Haitian port with a minimal probing group that could have been the main force screen for Fred's and then went on to its port. When the B team back at Aves was done with the French mock strike they could pushed for yet a second Haiti port. You could have ended the night Brits pushed back and pirates with foothold in Haiti. Probably would have been very demoralizing to your opponents.

Doesn't matter to me how you apply it. As long as the end result deters stock piling of rate ships.If a player owns x20 3rd rates stock piles all across the carribean but only operational sails one at a time how would his daily cost at sea be different from a player that only owned x1 3rd rate and sailed it daily? The issue I'm looking to curb isn't rate ships being sailed but rate ships being stockpiled.

I like the idea of pirates not being a nation that can be chosen. They should have to murder their way into it and then live of the frontiers of society raiding and such. There is absolutely no need for them to be nations or even build/sail ships larger than a pirate frigate. They don't need to be a nation and removing them as such would help the competitive populations of the nations that should be land grabbing.

@POE The Bahamas could by liberated in 5 moves with the resources at hand. Holding it would be a different story but certainly easier knowing what the pirates know of the game now. If the PVE pirates are pissing you off enough come on down SE as pissed off Pirates and help the French regain the SE and push said PVE pirates back into the game. We'll take the south up to the French Capitol, you keep the North from Roseau to Saint Lious plus the St. Joe iron and hemp for ship building. Then we go make some noise elsewhere. @Brucy You have the power to either make or break the pirate nation on PVP2. You might hold the Antilles as a fixed fortification but anything you teleport out to take will just get sucked up the next day after you leave. You want progress you have to live on the war front. If you do that we'll take the Antilles back and you will just be bouncing back and forth. It could be fun. It could be frustrating. You will never build a coalition untill you have the leadership to tell the weak minded or short sighted on your own team when to shut up or else.

Looking at what data was actually available or known at the time I would probably agree with this assessment.The port battle start shows a clear Pirate BR advantage not to mention the five towers. Meaning the British would have had to destroy 2.3 ships for each they lost plus the x5 towers. With those odds stacked they would have had to play overly agressive in the PB. Logically it was likely a loss as soon as it started. Meaning you can't really count the PB losses as meaning that much as the BR effect would have forced the Brits into more suicidal all or nothing tactic. Though still a solid defense it shows more for the pirates ability to muster a high BR than to actually kill ships in an equal fight. So basically you can't count the Aves PB 25 ship losses as if they had been equal footing ship losses. The sea battle is more a fair telling. There we see 8 losses to 8 losses. That's pretty equal. As to adding the French ships to the loss count that doesn't really wash either as that attack was a suicidal diversion by plan. Not joking and not covering up a bad loss with spin. I was against the diversion from the beginning as we knew the pirates to be divided into North and South groups and other than possibly diverting screeners it wouldn't effect the Aves PB. But that was the call and that whole group was expended as soon as it set sea by plan. So again, you can count the 25 under BR French suicide attack as a 25 ship loss as if equal footing. So in the end it appears the Pirates and SOB were fairly evenly matched. Defensive and terrain bonuses going to the pirates they held the day and should be commended as such. But no landslide win here.

This may seem trivial. But in going with the sailing ship genre calling ourselves CLANS just sounds wrong. You should change it to FLEETS or SQUADRONS.

Dude, normally I'm on your side. But the only reason you have a "safe" area is because you came in when you had numbers and tech advantages over a much smaller group of players. This allowed you to take it with minimal contest. What makes it safe is only distance and no serious efforts by the other game super powers to remove you. One British squadron coming over and getting repelled isn't the same thing as a concerted effort by the entire British nation. Those guys take three ports a night. It took almost everything you have just to stop SOB. In the end you haven't solved the Zerg issue. All you did was isolate yourself from it. You could be sailing cutters right now and have accomplished just as much. If and when it happens you have to match them port for port just like you did with just SOB. At that point in time your going to need some allies.

The nations need to be balanced. The pirates don't and that is part of what makes them Piratey. If you want to paint dots your doing it wrong. Join a low pop nation and balance out the national conquest aspect of the game and the map wars will really start to sing. I know you may not agree but the BEST thing the Devs could do for the Conquest aspect of the game is remove the pirates ability to compete in it as a nation. The pirates should be unique and doing piratey things. If the nation builders in the pirates had all joined Spain, for example, we would be having a much healthier conquest game at the moment. Capturing the Bahamas would be a waste of time so no one would bother and the pirates would be living and raiding in the middle of three fluctuating war fronts. It would be huge chaotic fun to be a pirate.

I'm not sure the data would mean much.The game essentially has different mind sets amoung the players. Capture ports to "win". This is kind of a POTBS hold over as owning ports in NA doesn't actually "win" anything but it does become resource denial so they are still strategic to controlling a region. Pvp fighting in more realistic no magic sailing ships. Not everyone is doing this but some are. PVE grinding. Most are probably doing this in a quest to get max level. Which again is a POTBS mindset. There is no advantage for a level 7 captain sailing a snow over a level 3. Once you have the level to sail your ship of choice further levels are not much help. It's just that 80% of the game seem to be choosing to compete at the first rate level. Exploring. There are inevitably some out there just exploring the map. So the data would likely only show instances of pvp mindset and then only when two like minded groups happened to bump into one another. For instance, the Spanish could be the most bloodthirsty and capable pvp players. But since they are sandwiched between two conquest minded PB groups grinding out huge BR 3rd rate captain that just port battle there wouldn't be any data showing the Spanish true nature.

Two different pirate groups Arbour. Poe is on the Bahamas front line daily. He isn't part of the PVE guys in the South. If we ever go up there we're going to need to figure out how to beat the same problems he is facing.

Is it just the deep water boats or the shallow as well that you are finding difficulty constructing on the front?

Crying? My comment was "this is probably my all time favorite pvp game". If you think I'm somehow having troubles you may clearly be the delusional one. I log in every night and pvp for hours till I log off. This game and our current situation is awesome. About the only way you could screw up my game play is to suddenly disappear. Then I might be crying. You keep pointing back to the map. We get that you own a bunch of ports. That's not actually effecting us or stopping our game play. We don't PVE, we don't mission run and we barely do Econ. The only thing we need is your ships on the ocean and that's working out just fine. We've even had to stop capturing pirate ships because we just don't have the dock space. We barely build anything. Other than for a PB's I haven't even been to a French port in a week.

WTH Vllad? You said you weren't going to sugar coat it.

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After rereading my own post it's sounding a bit harsher than meant it. Goon Swarm was a positive thing for EVE as a game. Even though I fought them it doesn't make them real life bad guys. That kind of power projecting mega Corp gets the rest of the game going and generates memorable and often epic battles. I am a bit of a sailing ship era nastalgia buff and the only thing I dislike about it there is the twisting of the pirate role into a conquesting national. If there ever is a map reset it would be awesome if you guys all went Spanish and created the Goon Armada. I think it would play better in the NA world.

It could very well be. I wouldn't mind giving it a go in the Bahamas. Be good to compare strategies and see if either finds a chink in their armor.

Your goals are the goals of a conquesting nation. The biggest ships you can get to capture the most land to "win" an MMO. I'm not saying that is a bad thing and I agree you are doing it well for your stated goal. But it's not very piratey. You've become a nation flying a black flag. There is nothing wrong with that but you can't expect everyone that thinks of pirates to be thinking the same way. I fought goon swarm for years. I was around when they lost their first dreadnaught. The used to swarm us in cheap cruisers. We would kill off waves of them but they would keep coming. Numbers was always there thing. Individual they were some of the worst combat pilots in EVE. But they had a good horde/Zerg mentality that didn't require combat skills as much as Econ and PVE skills. So hearing this from you the Eastern pirate style if play makes a lot more sense to me now. Again, nothing wrong with that. It's a conquest style of play proven to work. Since NA has ship dura and capturable NPC ships it should work even better than EVE since you don't need to resort to swarms of cruisers and you can go right to swarms of 3rd rates. Yes, it'll work here. But it's still not very piratey. You'll essentiall be the Spanish Armada with Lord Nelson quality ships and just happen to be sailing around flying a pirate flag as you conquer fortress after fortress of mostly empty battles. Very goonish. Not very piratey.

I'll only say this one time as I really did appreciate the SOB foray into the East as so should the pirates. It was a great battle if large ships. That said, there would have been a world of difference in that day had the native French been planning the strategy vs. the British. To be fair I think they wanted the big ship fights. Had their been a more concern for actually winning the day the British could have simply slipped into the South, where they already had ports and less telegraphed sneak attack could have possibly liberated the entire South in one day. Then the remaining North fight would have been Brit, French, Dutch, Dane all focused on one front. CF and OMG are both very good. But that route would have seriously challenged even what you have built up there. So it is true the French are no great threat and realistically won't be for quite some time. But you shouldn't underestimate our ability to use knowledge of the terrain and situations there to be at least a thorn in the side.

The only French in the North are newer players. Which explains the Pickles. It is the newbie French zone by design. You just happened to take it for some reason. It should provide a good test for the Alpha to see what it does. If new French accounts wain or players join France for a day or two and then reroll it will mean the Devs need to look into the mechanics of those ports. You may thrive on this crap but probably no more than we do. We take about 20 ships a day. Most of them are NPC hunter pirates. But we also have our share of long battles with squadrons. It's been loads of fun all around and when the masts if a pirate constitution go down, as happened twice yesterday, I have to pull the head phones off from the wolf pack cheers on our end. Truth be told you should consider switching flags with us. We're far better pirates than you are. While your a far better Nation than we are.

Some of us had kicked around the flag cost idea as well. It also has potential. One if the things discussed was having a discount on flags for attacking a nations original port that had been captured. It would promote nationalism and at the same time making it easier for a nation losing its ports to fight back. Coming from both POTBS and EVE, I still like some kind of Rate ship tax to deter stockpiling. The effects of stock piling in a game that lets you teleport around fronts just makes zergs that much more capable. Ideally you want the Zerg to over stretch itself. Ala Santa Anna in Texas or Napoleon in Russia. But if the Zerg can stockpile its best ships on each front and teleport around fronts instead of having to march then a Zerg never thins out. It's as powerful in the front as the back every three hours. the Zerg never has to leave a contingent to guard the flanks as they don't really have any flanks. Sure they can only teleport every three hours but even this is enough to erase all gains a smaller nation may make attacking a supposed flank in one day. Now if a super power nation had a limited supply of stockpiling ships then things get more reasonable. The Zerg nation has to choose its fronts more wisely. They have to consider rear guards and which spots will be important enough to warrant a reserve docked rate ship near it and which to risk. Adds more dimensions to the strategy of the game when there is a reasonable limit to stockpiling and teleporting.

That's why I prefer a flat usage tax based on the level of usage. So you have a tax rate attached to your captain that only comes into play when you buy something. So if you go on vacation or stop playing for awhile nothing on your account changes at all and you come back right were you left it. The tax only comes into play when you play.Say you have x6 4th rates = no tax add one 3rd rate and maybe 3% tax. Add x10 3rd rates 30% So it gets expensive to stock pile rate ships all over the place but just having a few is no big deal. Similar with ports. A nation is allows "X" number of ports. When it gets to X+1 = 1% tax nation wide on things bought. When they own X+100 ports = 100% tax so they pay double. Problem though is nations would need a away to shed colonies they wen't crazy and over zerged. I'm not sure how that might be done.

Not necessarily true. Not ever settlement produced wealth and not all settlement were actually guarded for that reason. If the British had built a defensive port and stationed a garrison at every single settlement in the Caribbean it would have cost far more than some fishing villages may have ever brought in. If there is no strategic value you don't just go around spending the money to build forts station a thousand men and feed them all.

I like the flexibility of this game. I think we have designed a "behind enemy lines" logistics system that would last indefinetly even without ports. That said, it's not the only aspect of the game I would like to try out or the only place in it I would like to play. I think we've learned leaps and bounds in the SE. But how long can you really go just dining NPC hunting pirates. Not hat it isn't fun and kudos to FC, SIN and OSB for providing the opposition. I'd like to kick it up a notch and try out a more war oriented front. Not that the SE isn't a war. The OS pvp has been epic at times. But the conquest aspects are rather one sided so there isn't much to learn beyond how to arrange uncontested pbs. The last battle of Padernas we rearranged our tactics from what learned in the first one and ended up totally routing the attackers. I would love to see how some of this stuff works vs. a variety of opponents. I would also like to see what we can do with larger ships. So my comments on this whole thing: I'm having a great time and this may be my all time favorite pvp game. I have no problem continuing the guerrilla warfare campaign and I agree we'll probably be great at. I'm not sure we'll be doing the newbie French any great service in the process though as we all go at it hard core. I would like to experience some of the other aspects, tactics and strategies of the game as that was the purpose of the alpha. All the port Zerging and such has me a bit mistified as this is an alpha. Not much point in winning the alpha by taking all the ports you can. I'm not sure that we don't have a responsibility of sorts to other players not to make starting areas unplayable for them. I'm not sure what that responsibility may or may not be but something about what we're collectively doing seems like it might not be right.

I think you under estimate us power players. To have a squadron of third rates on a front all need be done is to sail the squadron over in brigs one time. Set up an outpost, captured x6 third rates from NPCs and teleport home. It's literally one day playing effort and about 60k. Most of the 60k is made back while capturing the free 3rd rates and now you have both shallow and deep water power projection there whenever you want it. Since there is no upkeep cost on the outpost or ships the entire operation is pretty much free other than time input.If a ration system comes out that applies cost to all ships owned then that is essentially the same thing as a tax and I don't really care which way you do it. However there is still the matter for taxing due to over capturing if ports. Taxing for owning more ports than X may even add a new dimension where Nuetral ports stay around longer or maybe a Lord Protector decides to let a captured Nuetral port return to neutrality to stop having to garrison it. If the feed the crew system comes in then it is still essentially a tax. No one is stopped from sailing rate ships in moderation. All it deters is players from stock piling rate ships ala POTBS style.