maturin

Don't waste my time. We're talking about Caribbean pirates. The game is set in the 18th Century Caribbean, so I expected to see 18th Century Caribbean pirates. If we're going to welcome every dictionary definition of 'pirate' into the game, then I can't wait to see all the Somalian RPG-gunners and Napster employees sailing around Mortimer Town. At least the Brits will get to play as anthropomorphic English Muffins, out of fairness.

*ahem* The Barbary States practiced piracy as a tactic. There were pirates in service of the Barbary States. And the only reason they were called pirates, as opposed to privateers (or a navy), is that the European countries wanted to smear them. Pirate here is not an objective label, it's a value judgment. Transplant the Barbary pirate ships to the Caribbean, away from the countries that support and sustain them, and see how long they last. About as long as the Swedish or Danish colonies would last without support and expertise from the powerful mother countries in Europe. (That's the problem with pointing fingers at the nationals: they have all the resources of European empires to back them up. For gameplay's sake we build the ships in the Caribbean, but in IRL they could just pop over from the Baltic.)

I was a pirate before any of you young 'uns. One of the first dozen to ever sail GameLabs' Caribbean. I complain because the game never got the pirate faction I wanted to play for. Why the hell would I want to grind XP in service of an overpopulated zerg metropolis, just so I can look at a black flag?

With multiple Spanish and Swedish clans going pirate (plus the ones I haven't heard about), I'd imagine so.

Can't really offer any insights unless you take a video.

Yeah, just change the faction name to Ruritania or something imperial-sounding already. With a powdered wig on the flag.

Devs said that the Brits were #1 on Facebook. They may have been surpassed by pirates since then, but there is no evidence of that.

There shouldn't be nationally-exclusive paint schemes, just a few to choose from for each ship. Black and white, yellow ochre at the very least. Hopefully third party texture artists can help at some point.

I think admin just wrote off the idea.

I really hope that blueprints are included in crafting XP, otherwise I'm going to feel like a dunce for grinding them all.

Are you paying attention to the yards and closure angles? Do you have frequent desync or high ping? Because I haven't noticed any of this, really. It's usually just my vessel that's making rapid speed changes.

Very stealthy, persistent bug. No one has found its hideout yet.

Wouldn't work. The ability to buy a 'lockout' time for ports in your faction could work, though. The current owners of a port can set a timer and then also designate 4-6 hours when future owners of the port can't set a new one. Ew, that sentence.

You call that mud? Capturing replacement ports is a tactical necessity for France. If they defended battles instead of taking new ports, even a 50:50 win/loss ratio would quickly see them lose their fragile footholds in the region. Britain has plentiful forts and fleets compared to France, and you are blaming them for not playing to your strengths? More like throwing pink skittles, not mud.

Why? If you slow down conquest, the small nations don't have to try and fight off eight flags in one day, and don't get blitzkrieged out of existence. Instead, they can scrape together their fleet of 25 ships and put up a fight. You are certainly right that slower conquest won't solve the problems of unbalanced RvR: the big factions will still bully and beat up the small ones. But won't the losers get to have more fun along the way? The superpowers still get their fun, but hopefully the little guys don't quit in frustration. Slow conquest is also more correctable by occasional map resets.

The French still have time to leapfrog up past Yucatan and retake Louisiana! I don't wish ill on the U.S., but it's impossible not to root for a comeback story like that.

Wanting to crush the US nation seems to be rather common among flag-waving patriots nowadays.

Childish baiting from Vicious & Co in the past has included: Avatar combining letters 'SS' with eagle resembling that used by Nazis; Avatar depicting KKK member giving the Hitler salute; Confederate flag posted on forums as symbol for clan. But I'm sure that the letters SS were chosen totally at random, in utter innocence, with no alternate meaning intended nor conceived of. And if you believe that, I've got a wall I'd like you to pay for.

110-gun Ville de Paris spent the better part of a year in Americas, taking part in three major battles. That's just the one I could remember off the top of my head. The Caribbean and its sugar-producing islands were often the main concern in imperial warfare. Very far from a backwater. And these are ships. Crossing an ocean is not a big deal.

I was just raising a point of order, nothing more. Although if the crypto-trolls start to cause the US trouble in Florida, remember that Spain has an interest in SS' new holdings.

*Undefended Spanish ports.

I thought I pointed that out in my earlier post. The British routinely built ships according to French designs, and occasionally even hired French designers. That already includes two of the ships we have in-game. We're also likely to get a Danish SoL, of which that the British built an entire class of near copies. But aside from this, there was nothing preventing nations from using foreign designs and practices, as the technology was the same. The great Swedish designer Chapman simply roamed the continent collecting the best of what he saw, and other Scandinavian naval architects similarly spent time apprenticing throughout Europe. More importantly, few of the game's vessels are sufficiently unique to be restricted to one nation. There's almost nothing Russian about Mercury; it's just an armed brig. The ability to customize each ship considerably also goes to show that these aren't super special national snowflakes but variations on a vaguely-defined class. Every nation had ships incredibly similar to Cerberus, Trincomalee, Bellona, etc.

Yeah, free towns are supposed to the sorts of lawless frontier places like pirate ports were in reality. (Pirates never tried to stop anyone from docking at Nassau.) Alternately, it could be impossible to leave large warships docked at an outpost there without the player's presence. Someone will just steal it.

So Britain takes a dozen Spanish ports, keeps them permanently, teases about returning them, and helps out a Spanish clan a few times? Sounds like a great deal for Britain. Like squatting in someone's apartment and then making a deal with the landlord's janitor to pay three rotten cabbages in rent.

How expensive do 1st Rates have to be before we see historical proportions of SoLs? 400% as expensive? 500%? Does anyone care to guess, and can they possibly have an informed reason for making that guess? The price would have to rise with time and inflation. And you know that eventually a clan would put together 25 of them for a critical port battle (e.g., British vs. Rats at Jeremie). Do we really want to make the cost of building 1st Rates soar far above historical levels in a never-ending quest for historical distribution of SoL sizes?