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tl;dr: Putting a port into 100% contention causes problems for that team regardless of how the port battle turns out. Random thought of the day: If you build 100% contention on a port, this is a "raid" and lasts 48 hours. While in a raid state, the county generates no trade goods, will not buy trade goods (or only pays "1" for them) and player buildings produce labor hours at 50% rate. I was just thinking that while contention often generates PvP, a smart team that was confident in their port battle fleet could simply ignore contention grinds. Let the contention happen, show up for the port battle, done. Costs them less time, less risk, no counter-grind and they win. I think this is such a huge risk that when people realize what I have just said, nobody will grind ports anymore unless they were really sure they could win the port battle. It would be a tremendous waste of time to grind contention, get no PvP out of it and not be able to win the port battle. You accomplished literally nothing in that case. So let 100% contention mean something: It means the county is screwed up for 48 hours. Better go out there and fight those contention grinders!

tl;dr: You do boarding by pulling up, meeting the usual qualifications and doing a "Send Boarding Party". Boarding combat occurs in the background without interrupting the naval sailing game. There is no boarding screen and no boarding mini-game. It's RNG + modifiers. I was recalling an old Star Trek type game I played a long time ago. You could board enemy ships by beaming crew to them under the right conditions and the crew fight was just sort of a background thing that went on automatically while you kept fighting ship to ship. Your boarding party and their crew slowly killed each other off til someone won. I think that could actually be pretty reasonable here. Here's how I imagine it working: "Grapple" becomes "Send Boarding Party". Based on your preparation level and available crew in boarding, you can send over a boarding party. (Ideally I think it's a 2-step process: "Send Boarding Party -> [25%] [50%] [75%] [100%]" where the level you select represents what percentage of people currently in boarding you want to send over.) You can do this once every 15 seconds at most (Maybe there's also a "Recall Boarding Party"...) It's entirely possible for both ships to send boarding parties over to each other at the same time. Boarding combat resolves itself slowly over time in the background with no further interaction by the player. My ship has 300 crew and you just sent 100 boarders over. They are fighting each other in the background based on applicable modifiers (captain skill books, ship mods, deck height, etc). As defender, putting people into Boarding helps me fight off the boarders at the obvious cost of having less people in other systems. If the attacker wins, then it's just like winning a boarding combat today: the owner of the ship is booted and the ship goes neutral (we'll have to decide what happens to the remainder of the boarding party... easiest thing might be to just make them magically reappear on the source vessel. We'll assume they have transporters rowboats.) Grapple might actually still exist but it's more like a drag force between the ships. A more powerful ship can just power out of it but it might be enough to stick a lighter ship to you. Basically the idea is I can pull along side you, send a bunch of dudes over to attack your ship in boarding combat and then sail off and continue fighting. If necessary I may need to come back and send more boarders or recall the ones I sent but we aren't lashed together playing a minigame. I would also suggest that any damage against the ship is as likely to kill boarders as local crew. If I have 100 boarders to your 200 crew and then I rake and kill 60 people, I probably killed 20 of my own guys and 40 of yours. This also makes boarding kind of risky unless you REALLY outnumber the other guy. If I have 300 crew and you have 200 and I send over 200 boarders and, at the same time, you send over 150 boarders, we're probably both going to die. Your 150 boarders kill my remaining 100 crew and my 200 boarders kill your remaining 50 crew. Both captains are killed, both ships go neutral. You will never want to send so many boarders to another ship that it leave your own ship overly vulnerable to a counter-attack at the same time.

tl;dr: The major deciding factor on your reward for winning a port battle is based on how much contention you generated in the process of flipping it. Everyone loves Conquest Marks. Getting everyone to participate in the contention grind is the hard part. What if your reward (currently Conquest Marks) was based on the effort you personally put into the flip? Attended winning port battle: 1 mark. Every 250 contention points you personally generated within 24 hours of the port battle: +1 mark. So do-nothings who show up can still collect a reward but they will never get more than 1 mark per day. Ideally I'd give them less than this, like 1 mark every 2 days. People who actually did the work to create the flip get the real payout. Maybe they get this even if they didn't attend the battle. You put 1000 points on the port but couldn't make the battle? If your team wins you still get 4 marks per day. (Prices can go up to reflect the greater average income most people will be getting.)

tl;dr: Grinding contention should be the #1 best way to PvE in this game. I think one remaining problem is how people still avoid risky behavior. You want money. You want random drops. You want ship XP. What do you do? If you're like most people, you grind 1st rate missions outside your nation's capital, inside the protected waters or else in the middle of nowhere, where nasty enemies don't know to look for you. Grinding contention would be similar or better rewards in many places but you don't do that because it's risky. Maybe we should up the rewards for this risky behavior? 3x rewards for grinding in contended areas: Encourages port battle generation. Encourages new players to participate in the RvR scene. Generates more PvP along border regions as both teams want that sweet grinding spot. Still allows for missions if you must live in safety but they are worth a lot less, relatively, than grinding. Even "bad" grind areas that are thin on traffic are probably worthwhile now. Shows people where the action is at, just by looking at the map. Even if you are grinding + counter-grinding an area in cooperation with another nation, any group of privateers can look at the map and see what's going on and know "there are players there". War. War everywhere. Also thinking there could be a pop-up reward for making a port hit 100 or 0, based on the work you, personally, did to get it there.