Anolytic

Many of our captains were involved both inside and outside of today's epic battle for Castries. One of our new members, Karl Mar, went down, but not without a long and deliberate fight to stay afloat long enough for our forces to get buffer points, and then a decisive explosion worthy of commemoration like Ivar Huitfeldt.

Castries February 21st:

Activity in RDNN is growing. Yesterday at Port-au-Prince several of our captains fought in the brawl and outside in the screening. My own recording of the battle was corrupted unfortunately. This is the port battle from the Swedish commander's perspective:

No, it wasn't good in general. Very few ships sank and not that much shooting was done. The batle was won on points. It was never a very even battle, due to many attackers not managing to click into the battle and random smaller ships filling the spots.

It's uploaded on @rediiis Youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWonEt5fiDzQAGLGxOeQL2A However, seeing as it wasn't a particularly good or lasting battle it probably doesn't belong in this topic.

Unless they completely reform NN into a sort of article format accompanied with a layout change, I doubt that the plan is for replies to topics to be removed. I do not know for sure, but I imagine that OP creation will be limited to approved content creators, while replies will still be open to anyone. This will allow mods to crack down on off topic and derailing threads a lot more than now, since the creative content in the OP will be more in the focus, and at the same time it will focus the types of topics created in NN. It will hopefully root out OPs created simply to troll, flame, bait or incite conflict. The trolling and flaming going on in NN inevitably spills over into other forums and discussions. It creates higher tension in the community and locked positions, and respect goes out the window. It's also mostly the same few players flaming and trolling in NN, cheering each other on or riling each other up, often against players who are not active in the forum either because they were driven away or because they do not write English well enough to respond. NN right now is dominated by players playing for nations with primarily English speaking populations. Other nations' voices are drowned out. Players from other nations get flamed and provoked, without the opportunity to respond, or if they try to they get instantly flamed by many people, and often mocked for their English skills. People need to recognise that this game has a global community. In many western countries the online culture of throwing insults, flaming, lying and being generally obnoxious, is accepted as harmless banter and fun. But just like is often pointed out when discussing the issue of night flips, the globe is round and cultures differ around the world. Not all cultures have people as accustomed to being insulted, flamed, wrongly accused or trolled at. If you want a global community, a growing population and diversity of players, then the community needs to be kept respectful and civilised. Neither describes NN right now.

I think you're missing part of the point that the devs made. They've basically said that they will close NN, and *replace it with something better*. What they have described, having a new national news forum revolving around role-players, streamers, content creators and reports from in-game, rather than revolving around trolls and flaming like now, sounds perfect to me. What will get potential new players to want to join the game is not the mudslinging, trolling and racism that permeates the forum now and drives away both veterans and new players alike. What will rather get new players to want to engage in the game is content like this: Sea diaries, journals, sea vlogs, very committed roleplay diplomatic announcements and so on. Devs want to give this content more room, and the trolling removed.

My video from Morgan's Bluff should be playable now at least. New selection of music.

I'm working on uploading the video again with different music. Didn't know that Youtube would block my video for using audio directly from Youtube's own library...

My scepticism aside, I have some questions about these raids: Will the defending NPC ships that you can spawn to take control of have a standardised fitting? Or do you risk getting insta-killed because you spawned in a fir frigate with medium cannons next to a Pavel? And will spawning as the defender mean you might take over a ship that is already engaged and sailing around in the battle instance, or do defenders only spawn while the battle instance is loading? Any chance these raids will be 5th rate and below only, please (or different rates depending on ports)? Would make them more interesting in any case. I miss @Fellvred's "Small Battle Challenges". This could in a best case scenario work out to be somewhat similar to those fights. I imagine most of these raids will be arranged by the raiders with timezones and diversions and so on that they are mostly PvE, but probably with some random player defenders joining and being targeted instantly because their sailing is going to be extremely easily distinguishable from NPC defenders. Will defenders spawning in suffer losses, like crew loss or officer lives loss from being sunk in raid defence? Or will it be practically lossless for defenders? Will raid defenders have a guaranteed numbers advantage to "make up for" likely being mostly NPCs? I do imagine that these raids will often be a group of 10-15 organised players with teamspeak, tactics and organisation, against any number of random pubbies and noobs with no teamspeak, no coordination, and also no idea if the allied ship sailing next to them is a player or an AI. However I also see potential for this as a way to get random players and pubbie clans involved in RvR, and to spread the RvR contents around a bit in the population and not just to the "elite" RvR players. There is a chance that these raids, both offensively and defensively will appeal mostly to pubbie clans, and that the RvR players we have now will keep fighting the Port Battles and territory conquest we have now, with their/our "elite" fleets of the same 25 players every day. While pubbie clans will take care of the raiding against enemies until they get enough practice to join (or replace) the "elite" RvR fleets. I have expressed some scepticism of this feature, but I do also see some potential in the raids for getting more players involved and spreading the game's content around more. So more players have something to enjoy and not just the "PvP elite". With the currently suggested implementation of raids I do however think that it is important to give this more of an economical impact than a military RvR impact. That players who want to do port battles do not have to personally do raids all the time in between to get those conquest markers to enable them to create or join port battles.

I was recording when this happened, but my recording was corrupted, and I also didn't have opportunity to F11 at the time. I will however try to describe the issue: I was in the port battle for Castries and I boarded someone who standing almost still. I was heading straight for him, and I slowed the momentum of my ship down to boarding speed by turning my sails against the wind and depowering. I also may have used lightly bumping into him in order to further get my speed down - I may have broken my own bowsprit in the collision. In any case I started pulling his ship in for boarding. My ship kept slowing down while I was pulling and went down to less than 1 knot, still slowing down rapidly towards zero speed. But when you're pulling someone into boarding, the ship automatically puts sails down. At the same exact moment that my sails hit 0%, the pulling was completed and boarding interface came up, my ship somehow started moving again. It was like I had a freaking steam engine on my boat. With absolutely 0% sails up it accelerated almost instantly up to 2,2 knots speed and was racing away from the ship I was boarding at a close hauled angle to the wind afair. After two rounds of boarding, my ship was so far away from the boarded ship that my boarding was interrupted. Only then, when my ship was out of boarding, did my ship stop "drifting" away at an insane 2,2 knots without any sails raised.

With tally board shown: The fortifications got 10 kills. We knew that they were trying to get a fight under the fortifications, but accepting the invitation to fight in A enabled us to block them from recapturing B behind us. We also had ships split off behind us that we waited to catch up to us and reinforce us in A. Most of the time we were fighting both outnumbered and under fire from the towers. Tactically there are several things to reevaluate, and in regards to our mortar brig we failed him. However all of our captains in the battle fought valiantly and conducted themselves excellently. We achieved what we came for, a fun brawl that we fought very well. Unfortunately for me I was distracted before the attack and forgot to give my officer any perks. It bugged me the entire battle, and likely caused my sinking just before the end.

I'm open to try different colour crosses, even though I think it's part of the challenge and also not that hard to find the crosses in fog or bad weather. However, I'm not sure I see the benefit of dense fog in the PvP event area during the PvP event at 4 am. Like now. If there are even two players there, how are we supposed to see each other?

#nofleets With devs testing the opportunity to use the hold space of fleet ships I am thinking that it could be an OK solution to allow players to take traders as fleets, and to escort them themselves with a warship, but that the opportunity to have warships in fleet should be removed. I never really tried using fleets. In the last week I have tried fleets three times. Once for transporting a ship (didn't really make a difference, did it @Christendom?), once for tactically increasing BR, and once for escort. I didn't feel any safer, and I didn't need them or get helped by them. So I'm definitely not going to make it a habit to bring AI fleets. I've been taking a peek in on the PvP2 server these last couple of weeks, and it seems everyone there brings an AI fleet when they go in OW.

I will surely test it out, and I hope that this will work out good, but I feel a bit like this is just going to be more PvE-to-PvP content like hostility generation is. I fear that OP ships needed for RvR will only be available in exchange for those PvE marks of conquest. And most raids are probably going to happen during the night when the attacker can be reasonably sure that not many will spawn to defend. Also as someone said, what is the reward/benefit to defenders for spawning into the battle?

Thanks! This was long overdue. The National News section has devolved into base trolling, racism and shouting matches. And it has spilled over a lot into other sections of the forum, to such an extent that many players I know do not want to post their suggestions or opinions about the direction of the game because of all the flaming and trolling that goes on from some members even outside the National News. I myself also stopped using this forum actively for a long time, because it was just a shitstorm and nothing serious. The forum has become highly unfriendly to players who use English as a second language, and to anyone who does not belong to the "club" of trolls and cheerleaders who think they alone own the game and wish to limit open discussion of mechanics solutions by bullying and flaming.

Despite the fog, I had not trouble locating the port and clicking the swords.

I have no idea about his other history, but he was in Denmark too for about two weeks. Even though he was a spy, we liked having him. He'd be welcomed back by me any time.

What happens when: You put your best ships in the national outpost at the front line of your nation. Then the nation votes and decides on another outpost location. Does your stuff and ships get magically moved to the new national outpost, or are they lost forever? I've been pondering something similar, only for clans. When you're in a clan, they normally have a couple of outposts that you are asked to maintain. So some of your outpost slots are used for the clan, leaving you with fewer to move around as you please. So, what if clans were able to buy 2 or 3 extra outpost slots for all their members, at a price of say 50 million per slot to avoid that people could easily do it with single member clans.

It has not been said from Danmark-Norge that we are "quitting the game". Just a statement of fact by players like myself, who still play this game, although less actively, that what I can see from my Steam friend list, in-game friend list and clan list is that the majority of the players who made up the RUS/RDNN RvR fleet are now playing other games instead of Naval Action and has done so for a couple of months. Some of them still come online to help out with a port battle from time to time, but this player attrition has been happening ever since the map wipe and the broken screening. It escalated before (protestant) Christmas when players expected announcement of a fix for the broken screening, and yet nothing happened. Regarding whining, RUS/RDNN can take no responsibility for what members of other clans express. So called "Night flips" are a part of the game, but they also expose a problem with the server balance and the game mechanics. I commend the US players for exposing this issue, as is our purpose as alpha testers. It is up to the devs to find a solution for it. This game is not our job, and if the devs do not focus on making it fun, then players will choose to spend their spare time on other games. When some of the top issues are fixed, players' tolerance for staying up late/waking up early to participate in the game will also increase, as long as it is kept sustainable.