When i happened upon Naval Action, I was ecstatic, I love age of sail games and all of the fun from bringing a full broadside of guns to bear to going toe to toe on deck of boarding to hammering/getting hammered by a city port or fort, when i joined i loved all of it, the beauty, the semi realism, the semi true sailing, and all that. now that being said the pvp is a little over kill, its great and all but really annoying when people just camp outside the capital for new players just to get their pvp marks and getting those marks gives them an almost unbreakable edge over anyone without. so here are some suggestions that might make all happy and would be willing to actually discuss things in farther if warranted.
1. first off to the pvp thing, make it so if you are in the capital port (Charleston for US) that you get capital class ships to protect you (I.E. 3 - 1 st rates depending on strength of enemy). everywhere else, unless you are tagged by a capital ship you only get up to a 4th rate and it matches the strength of the attacking ship.
2. now adding to the historical aspect that would really put a fun twist to the game and give you a little more national pride. Players can only CRAFT ships of their country (US gets the Connie and other US based ships) and ai fleets will only spawn with their nations ships (spain wouldn't spawn with a connie) and by ships of their country i mean the country that originally built the ship.
- note give ALL nations a baseline ships for example:
7th rate - Cutter, sloops
6th rate - brig, schooner
5th rate - frigate
4th rate through 1st rate - ships of the line
now the 4th rate would have about 50 guns with a crew of about 400(max)
3rd rate would have around 74 guns or less with a crew around 650(max)
2nd rate would have around 80 - 90 guns with crew around 800(max)
1st rate would have about 100 guns with crew of around 1000(max)
from there you add in your l'oceans, essexs, and all the other ships/ ship types would be nation dependent.
3. PVP marks, #2 would factor heavily into this category, your pvp marks instead of giving game breaking upgrades instead, give out notes for ships of different nations but instead of making it 15 marks make it harder to get certain ships for example:
7th rate - 10 marks
6th rate - 15 - 20 marks
5th rate - 40 - 50 marks
4th - 50 - 75 marks
3rd - 75 - 100 marks
2nd - 100 - 125 marks
1st - 150 marks
but on the side note make it so these notes could not be used to craft one out White oak, teak, or live oak.
4. Both of those now would make this possible and give the ability to capture 4 - 1st rates again because you would have to try to capture other nations ships from AI but make the AI fleets to spawn in out of really crappy material so that capturing them isnt necessarily a big win.
Overall I feel this would help greatly in bringing your game population back up, adding new players because there isn't so much seal clubbing but you can get respectable pvp action outside of the capital harbours. it would also give a new feel to the game because Port battles would have to be won by the skill of the nation using their ships or stolen ships and you would have to plan around your nations strengths. now it would be easy to navigate around this feat simply by having multiple alts in different nations, but to counter it and make it a little more challenging and rare to see a quality 1st rate or 2nd rate (instead of 50 WO/LO or similar in a port battle) make them a little more difficult to craft something of that caliber
like i said this is observations that i have seen while playing and i feel that all the player base would enjoy these updates and would bring your population up greatly as well, and like i said if you would like to discuss this more, i would be happy to in teamspeak or discord or just through email, and anything i could do to help this i would