Anolytic

The morale of a ship should not just matter inside of a boarding. It should be a trait that has effect on a ship's performance in battle, and it should be possible, though hard, to destroy a ship's morale and make it surrender without boarding it. As has been mentioned an endless number of times, ships did not usually sink historically. They struck their colors or were demasted and boarded. As an example, I was smuggling mid grade notes out of Gustavia yesterday in my Le Grosse Ventre when I was attacked by an Ingermanland. I promptly boarded him and killed almost all his crew and his morale. I was surprised that after attacking v brace when he had 12 morale left, he still had 4 morale, and attacking v brace again when he had 4 morale he still had 1 morale left and was able to disengage. Honestly I made several huge gaffes in this battle - allowing him to eventually demast me and flee the battle with only 70 crew left - and should have been easily able to capture him, but in my opinion a ship realistically should be severely reduced when its crew has only 1 morale left. And me stern-raking it 20 times after he had only 1 morale left should have realistically made his crew give up and the ship surrender.

I've had this same thing happen quite a few times. My barricades usually reduces the consequences, but it is still a bit frustrating.

I look forward to this. But it needs to be accompanied by a limit on how many flags can be bought by one nation against another nation in a day or within one defence timer. Or it will just let populous nations roll over less populous nations, take all their ports and the other nation can't take anything back for 7 days.

There is skill in choosing the right upgrades and using them correctly, as well as balancing their drawbacks. And I love my golden upgrades. Still, I cannot deny that you are probably right.

I like the white flag idea within short range of capital, but within the first 2 ranks you usually only loose a basic cutter if you get ganked anyway, so what's the problem. And if players leave after being ganked a couple of times they are too weak for this game anyway.

This may be a minor issue that comes up very rarely, but I still wish to address it: The "TAB-screen" - the list of ships on both sides in a battle that comes up when you hit TAB in an instanced battle - needs some improvement. It has been suggested more statistics are added here for more ships, which I have no definitive opinion on, however there are battles where one side has more than 29 ships in a fight, and thus not all players/ships and their names, status, kills/assists, are actually listed. It is of interest to be able to find out during a battle from the TAB-screen how many ships exactly are in a fight, with you or against you, their status (sunk or afloat), and their player names. This could be solved simply by adding the possibility to scroll in the TAB-screen. From what I have been able to test, scrolling the TAB-screen is not currently possible.

You know that if there is noone around in your area to defend, you can just capture the ports back? You only need one, maybe two players to do this. And a bit of gold. If it's about port holdings I mean.

What Ledinis said.

Nice! I noticed there was a patch.

This looks great. I look forward to testing these changes as they arrive.

1. I would consider adding even more ranks (but at lower levels), but renaming the two highest ranks and have Flag Captain be the highest rank, a rank/commission which also has to be paid for with gold every week to maintain it. Adding more ranks would counteract the problem that some ships fall between two chairs and are less used because once you have the crew to man it, you can also man bigger ships that you would rather select. 3. I don't need that much customisation of ships. You just end up with a game which less people can play because it is too resource hungry for no good reason. If a lot of ships look alike that is totally fine. Also this will be somewhat counteracted as developers keep adding new ships. Remember that this game is in alpha and only a few of the ship models that are going to be in this game have been added yet. I wouldn't mind the option to name my ship though. Even if just a name that could be seen in port and in the battle result screen.

I don't mind that we only have 1 repair in battles, but if this should change, there should be a long cooldown before being able to repair again. At least twice the 7 minutes cooldown for urgent repairs.

How is this feature arcade and not realism? If your ship is sinking it's inevitably dying. You should not be able to save yourself by clicking out of the battle, that would be the arcade thing. If you disengage and plug your leaks and pump out the water, then you can escape. Enemy ships half full with water escaping consequences just because they weren't tagged for 2 minutes, that's the stupid thing that used to bother me.

I think that the idea of flags in OW has been discussed before and more or less dismissed due to the system resources it would require.

"We"? So basically you want everyone else to fight the pirates. You would have to pay me a lot more than 2 cents.

They have said more than that.

According to Steam I've spent 3 times as many hours as that in game Anyway, you've tested the game a lot, it's okay to take a break and wait for something closer to the final product. I only hope when you come back, you come back to our clan again. Just keep in mind, it is a game in alpha and our purpose with playing it at this stage is to test it, so that it goes through some changes that you do not like is only natural. I don't like all of the changes either, but the only thing that really makes this game harder to enjoy is the low number of players in my nation-which has persisted through all of this alpha and is being amplified by players tiring and leaving for the past few months-and that the conquest system has not been improved at all (while other changes have made numbers more important), which I believe is a major reason for the player loss. 1. There still are BR limits of a sort. A basic cutter couldn't tag my Ingermanland into battle the other day. I see your point, but the BR limit system had its problems as well. In the meantime it has been scaled back. 2. "Zerging" is a valid, and even necessary tactic with the current mechanics. Especially when with equal numbers we were better every time. Danes shouldn't be angry with the Swedes about this, but it does highlight-for the umpteenth time-issues with the conquest system. And yes, the only way to effectively deal with towers is by boarding. 4. The range might be slightly too short now, but I really like the idea behind the new damage system, and I cannot express that often enough.

I'm not sure about everything, but on the whole you're onto something. I want to keep the big open world though. And in Denmark-Norway we've never had to travel far to PVP. Despite this, or maybe because of this, we have been struggling with player number losses a lot longer and a lot worse than most if not all other nation.

If it was implemented that you could get labour hours from combat, then it should definitely not be Rear Admiral exclusive, but something all players got. And it should be fairly equal for all ranks, not like XP where you get more for killing bigger ships. Maybe labour hours rewarded for the time spent in battle... However any system that would send people into PVE-grinding to get labour hours would be very bad for the game. I could vision though, a system which rewarded players with a minor amount of labour hours for actually playing. Tying it to combat however, I am very sceptical of.

Although Chimera is right, this seems like a bug. If you enabled the smuggler flag you should be able to sail into port, and you don't need an outpost. Personally as a Dane I've made a habit of smuggling into Gustavia and put up contracts for mid grade notes, and I have no problems whatsoever entering port or retrieving my contracts. Did you F11 this, and are you sure your smuggler flag was actually enabled?

I've developed, out of necessity, a habit of clicking the arrow in the chat tab every few minutes to check for new incoming conversations. A bell notification sound as suggested would be immensely appreciated.

You can use the scroll wheel to get the exact amount, but that means scrolling for five minutes if you didn't slide with precision. You should be able to input an amount just like when you trade with a player.

I very seldom do a mission right after I picked it up. I pick up missions whenever I am there from ports that most frequently spawn them in favourable locations, but usually I don't go out to do the missions until a few days later, whenever I need to stock up on money for flags or mid grade notes.

I like your ideas. Especially the one about a ship showing who built it, except something would have to be done about a frigate turning into 5 1-dura frigates if the owner got capped 4 times. But these changes also sound like a lot of work for minimal actual improvement to the game. I wouldn't prioritise this a lot.

Don't be so negative. Maybe crew loss needs retweaking. I was in a few battles today and didn't notice high crew loss except for when I was bowraked by a Swede rennomee for 90 minutes, so I'm not sure if you're right. But if you are I'm sure the devs will figure it out from our testing and giving reasoned responses and tweak it to proper levels. About boarding AI is not human, and boarding is supposed to be a bit of a challenge. Beside human players will often switch to defence in the last possible moment. Not because they were able to react to you, but because they anticipated you would chose attack. You have to counteranticipate their anticipated choices. It's what's fun and challenging about player boarding. With AI boarding there are plenty of ways to make it easier for yourself by blocking last second defence selection.