Conquest - Port capture

[beagleplease]

It seems to me that currently the port capture mechanics are a bit broken.

The amount of ports switching hands seems a little bit silly to be honest(on pvp1 EU Sweden basically lost all its ports in one night, then a couple nights later caps most of them back).

One of the issues is with the ability to grab an attack flag and attack without warning or ability from the defending nation to react in time.

 

I like that an assault fleet forms and the defenders have the possibility of intercepting, this mechanic encourages open sea battles and is imo a good idea.

However the current implementation is not really working.  The main reason for this being that the port gets attacked instantly with little warning so no defending fleet can be organized in time.

We also have a problem with undefended ports also caused by this very same mechanic.  Even if a defending fleet is marshaled in time, if the enemy has greater numbers then you will find you're defending fleet

"screened" while the attackers take an undefended port.  It would be one thing if the screeners were fighting but mainly it's grief tagging.

 

The whole thing just favors the "zerg" far too heavily in a game where population is incredibly unbalanced.

 

My suggestion is this: 

 

Change the way assault flags work.  Lets have a system where you grab the assault flag just like it works right now.  Just like right now you sail to the port.

Here's where we make the change, rather than a 2 minute timer to assault the port, we have a much longer timer where the assault ship has to be protected.

I'm not sure how long this timer should be, perhaps 10-15 minutes?  Once the flag is planted, the port goes into a contested state.  Both nations ships can now enter the port.

The battle is set for the day after at the time the flag was planted or maybe even 2 days after.  This means that the defending nation has time to mount a proper defense and if several ports are hit at once

it gives the nation time to plan how to approach defending them.  While at the same time we also maintain the good parts of the assault flag mechanic.

[Martin Tyler]

I agree that they change hands far too readily. On this subject I think it would also be beneficial to see a set of 'starting' ports that cannot be captured by a nation. I.e. Sweden starts with a minimum of say 10 ports, which cannot be captured and will always be Swedish.

 

This would prevent the overnight ganking of a nation like we saw with the Danish vs the Swedish and ensure that nations always have a 'foothold' in the game.

 

PS. The retaking of the Swedish ports was part of a treaty, they were 'allowed' by the danes to retake them undefended in quick succession.

[Heibges]

I think the solution is more they need to put in mechanics to favor voluntary rebalancing of the population,

 

Say when the US took New Orleans it would have taken France 6 hours of real time to sail up there to defend it, after we had fought 2 other portbattles and expended our teleports.