Idea for raids: ruining the port's trade-goods economy.

[Slamz]

I think part of why the "raid" idea keeps falling flat is just because, well, what's the point? What does a raid do that makes it worth the trouble?

I think the answer could be in the new trade goods economy. That is a massive money maker and seems like it could be an interesting raid idea. The Dutch are making millions trading between their capital and the British capital! What if you could raid the Dutch capital and in doing so:

1) Disable all trade good production for 5 days
2) Disable all trade good consumption and buying for 5 days

Used to be the capital would buy widgets for 250,000 each but since you raided it, it will not buy widgets at all.

It does not impact resource production or trading because we don't want to shut down basic ship construction, which the game needs to survive, but we COULD shut down trade goods which would actually be painful.

And "disabled for 5 days" is highly negotiable.... it could simply create a "-100%" modifier to the sell-to-NPC prices for that port which then returns to normal at a rate of 10% per day. So right after the raid the port will pay literally "1" for widgets but then goes up to 25,000 on the next day (10% of normal). You probably paid 125,000 to purchase widgets so it will take 5 days to reach the break-even point and 10 days to return to normal. This would make it valuable to just raid all up and down someone's main trade routes, ruining their best, easiest, most traveled money making lanes.

 

What, exactly, a "raid" consists of mechanically I would prefer to leave to other threads.

This is just an idea on what effect a "raid" might actually cause that could be interesting and worth doing.

 

Thinking of "exploits": You could dodge the effects of severe raids by creating alts in other nations but I think the idea is still sound because ultimately raiding is going to disrupt the normal flow of traffic. Brits raid my French ports so I make a British alt and just trade over there for money. But then the Pirates raid the Brit ports. Now what? Create a Spanish alt, I guess? No matter what I do, the raids are going to push me around and scatter traders in confusion which is really the whole point. It stops the status quo from being so....quo.

[Norfolk nChance]

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[Slamz]

This in my opinion is a much better and simpler system. Read the last post by me for the final idea. The coding is not a mountain either and will give everybody a stake in each and every port battle.

Forget Night Flipping, this blows it sky high….

 

Norfolk.

[maturin]

Good idea

[Remus]

It's mostly capitals and free towns which seed trade goods - raiding free towns?? I cannot really say I am much sold on the idea of raiding capitals. For small nations this is pretty much all they have.

What about shipbuilding woods?

[Slamz]

18 minutes ago, Norfolk nChance said:

Read the last post by me for the final idea.

I don't like that as much actually. As I was writing up this raid idea I realized one obvious flaw would be that for it to really matter, it needs to last a fair amount of time. With even a smaller team having 20 ports to trade between, raids/blockades that impact a port for 2-3 days is not going to really hurt them unless you're raiding/blockading like 2-3 per day, ever day, forever.

The raid dropping trade good prices to 0% and then +10% recovery per day, though, means you could hurt a region pretty badly by doing 1 raid per day or even 1 every other day. It's a longer lasting and therefore more disruptive burden. You still can't exactly ruin Britain (which just has too many ports) but you could certainly shut down particular locales.

Your idea does make me think of how raids could work though (this despite saying I didn't want to talk about how raids are created....)

Make contention be both port based and county based.

County contention is the sum of all port contention within that county and basically just works like today. 100% contention = port battle scheduled.

If you focus your contention on an individual port, though, then getting any port to 50% puts it in "raid" status and has the effects described above.

So conducting a raid is really about going to a port and sinking everything near it, just like port battles, but lower requirements and can be done at the same time as a county flip attempt. Or maybe you don't even intent to attempt the flip and you just build up contention all over the place to cause these "raid" conditions to occur.

 

But also, I think it's important that this impacts only trade goods (and maybe NPC ship selling). We have to think about a player on a low pop nation basically logging in to "dead gaem" because all his ports are raided/blockaded and he can't really even conduct normal business.

By limiting it to trade goods, we pull the rug out from under the big money maker but there are other ways to make money and the player to player economy is still functional. (Actually he can still trade too, but he'll have to smuggle flag and go further out and take chances!)

Raids should be felt without being crippling to a team.

[Slamz]

5 minutes ago, Remus said:

It's mostly capitals and free towns which seed trade goods - raiding free towns?? I cannot really say I am much sold on the idea of raiding capitals. For small nations this is pretty much all they have.

What about shipbuilding woods?

Stopping production of regional woods might be interesting. We wouldn't want anything that halts fir and oak production, for example, though. People always need a way to make ships.

But raiding free towns should actually be legit. The only people using the Free Towns for trading in French territory are, mostly, French, so raiding "our" free towns would hurt us more than anyone else (might hurt the Swedes too, because they like to sneak in there... but mostly us).

And I dunno about "mostly capitals and free towns". Last night, for example, I made most of my money trading back and forth between two French towns almost right next to each other. It wasn't the 100% profit (or more) I could have made by moving it to a capital but it was still about 40-50% profit hauling trade goods from one French town (which had the lowest price in the region) to the town right next door (which had the highest price for quite some distance). In this case, raiding either of those towns would have wrecked my easy money making last night (...and probably tonight, if nobody else is stripping the place!)

 

[Norfolk nChance]

I need to think before replying back... something is there... [Slamz]

[CaptVonGunn]

Raids should still need hostility. But seperately tracked from PB. Just a toggle before entering combat on what it is for. Then when it is done your side gets to Raid any one port in that region. 

You win you get control of the port for a full day . during that time everyone that was in evolved in the raid AND provided at least "X" hostility gets to raid the port for "X" items of resources the town had in it or produces. This amounts coming from all sources including warehouses and resource buildings. TPs and access to your buildings and warehouses would end as soon as raid starts.

Then for 3 days after the raid is over. It produces Nothing while the port recovers. Losing a port to a raid should hurt. Heck I think any ships on the market should be fair game also but I know that will never happen

Edited June 9, 2017 by CaptVonGunn