Verhoeven

Well, instead of the game, I watched an episode of Hornblower again. :-)

Nah, these guys never sleep :-)

Guess there is a little server issue

With all due respect dear Admin. You asked your potential customers to come up with ideas and suggestions. Well they put the effort into it bringing tons of ideas. Be glad with any involvement! Maybe some do not fit in your strategy or the game you have in mind. That is fine. You have to be able to deal with some criticism here. You can not doubt the good intentions all forum members have. And so far I have not seen any forum member behave absurd or disrespectful. But to be honest, I find some of your responsess not very respectful, even some are probably meant in a sarcastic way.

The assumption that gamers need progress in the form of perks and ships in order to keep them attracted to the game is absolutely not a must. There are many games out there that maybe give you an increase in rank but the in game stuff remains the same for everyone. Company of heroes 1 is an excellent example. Everybody has the same stuff. The rest is skill and experience. The only real reason for rankings, is for automactching. So you won't have real newbies fighting level 16's IF they don't want to. Still you have smurfs, experience players with double accounts pretending to be newbies. But so what? I play COH and TW with my friends. If you wan the 1st rate in NTW, just make a game with lots of money to spend. In Company of Heroes 2 they changed lots of this. Equally inspired by commercial trends. You can buy (euros or dollars) more doctrines and you have all these weird achievements in order to get a tiger tank.... (what happens is that friends grind up levels and get the Tiger in no time, so what is the adde value?). There is no lobby anymore and you will end up in games you dont want to be in. The result: Well just go to their forums. It is a disaster. With numbers of active players dropping rapidly only 2 months after release. This is likely the end of the CoH series. Keep in mind. The stand alone, highly moddable (and new maps) COH1 survived 7 years with many thousands of players. Many going back to CoH1 (though they also killed the servers and brought out a buggy version of the old game to the steam servers, people still play COH1 a lot!). I am a succesful marketing strategy advisor by profession (been doing this for the last 25 years). I run a consultancy firm with 16 people. I give you a free of charge advice, you did not ask for. Forgive me the lecturing Superior strategy is all about claiming and occupying an Unique strategic position. A position that is and can not be claimed by competition. And a position from which you can offer clients a sustainable offer that fullfils their demands and wishes. In todays markets managers and entrepreneurs are fanatically trying to re-invent their business. As 'me-too' is the way most business are going, more and more they run out of options how to become succesful. If you look at truly succesful companies, you will see that most often they do not come from the direction you were thinking most companies are operating. They came with something new, something else. These companies are succesful because they change the game. Actually they changed the rules game, making the game theirs. My simple advise. Dont look at your competitors and say "well it was succesful for others, so we have to do it too". Don't try to be better ---- BE DIFFERENT. As you are a small company you may not have the resources and stamina to attack your succesful competitors. Think out of the box. Go for the niche, and after that the next market segment. It's like a beachhead strategy. Use a lesser defended, unguarded market segment with potential as a beachhead and secure it. From there you fight your way into the mainstream market. Now I am not saying you are going to fail. The argument that triggered my advice is building a bussiness case based on what competition does. Why could a Turkish couple (man & wive) become highly succesful with Mount & Blade selling millions of copies? Because it was so completely different! And... they almost went open source. The amount of mods is enourmous and they truly listen to their communities. Just google Taleworlds. Google will probably already autosuggest forums.talewords.com on the first letters "tale". Then they made a very clever choice to work with Paradox. One of the better niche market game publishers. A Dutch modder made M&B Napoleonic Wars selling 150.000 copies as a dlc for $10,-....

Well in real life (!) anybody who lacked appropriate rank was not given a ship.... but in online games you can pretend you are an airoplane pilot, even without a real life PPL certification The thing is that this set up dictates that you have to spend time (and money?) in the game before you can play certain ships. So no freedom in that. In multiplayer (stand alone battle) it does make setting up your own games with the conditions you want impossible. For me grinding says nothing about skill. And there are grinding games where I just bought the stuff instead of the time spending on it. So what happens after we all grinded our way to the first rates and what ever there is to make you feel something? super first rates? ironclads? For the open world it's fine, but will it be possible to set up the battle of your liking with your friends only? If that is the case, it will be just grinding for a week or two (or just use the credit card?) and than just host my own battles.... Final question: Will it be possible to host your own game? Or use a dedicated server to host the game?... I fear it will run on centralized servers with preset conditions and that keep track of everything. Anyway. Some will like the current direction but I am sure many of the AoS buffs won't. This is not going to be my type of game. S! PS: I have played TW campaigns ofcourse. Hardly finished them. It is personal. I think you can't judge me if I say I only love the battles in TW and not the campaign. And online you will be playing battles.... now and than I still fire up a TW game. Just a game against ai for 30 minutes or so.

Mmm...so I understand that it will not be possible to set up a game yourself with the settings you like? Like the ships available or crews available? You can only obtain certain ships after 'grinding'.... That is dissapointing indeed. Even in Total War multiplayer you can set up the game you want with the units you like (based on money, but host decides the amount). In CoH you can set up the games you like. Conditions depending on the host of the game. Actually in most RTS games you can set up the game you like. Rankings are only for automatching and to get an idea who you are going to fight. Personally, if this is going to be a 'grinding' game, where the player who puts most time into it gets the crews and ships, than this is sadly not the game for me. It will be another World of Warships, but in a different era. Shame, I was under the impression, based on previous information here, that we would have the freedom of creating our own games. My hopes that this could be the one, 12 years after AoSII, just faded away. Best regards and good luck with the development. S! Verhoeven

I hardly played the campaign of TW either. Just the battles. If you don´t play the campaign and just do the battles. it´s 100% battles. Both CoH and C&C have a campaign too (which are for sure 100% battles only). After you have finished them most will not replay it, and go for custom battles or multiplayer. Anyway, it´s not quite relevant if you get the context of my point.

There are tons of players who go just for the battle. Succesful RTS games like Company of Heroes, Total War (!!!!) or even Command & Conquer are just about the battle (and all have pretty good single player modes). Sure you can add all sorts of ranking and achievement systems to it. Most of its players just like to do a game. The winning or losing brings enough incentive. Actually you can't really compare MMO/character building with the typical RTS game. The WoT or even WoWarplanes games are (too) quick though. For me so quick that most of the incentive is grinding levels and planes/tanks. For me a match of 30 to 60 minutes is enough incentive to go for the win, and absolutely avoid losing. I still have memories of specific battles in AoSII from 12 years ago (!). Last Sunday, I played another Line Battle in Mount & Blade Napoleonic Wars. 250 players (the root of the game is more than 5 years old). Winning is all about the honour, losing about the disgrace. The rest is just plain fun. I am sure that over 5 years people still play Mount & Blade. If you go online you see at least 10 games with 30+ people (at any time). The top one will mostly have 150+. All hosted by players or dedicated servers. Some open, some passworded. All with admins and different settings. Some modes are Team deathmatch, Battle (you have only 1 live), Siege or even Duel. There are tons of mods, from Romans and Vikings to Brit vs Zulus, WW2, Zombies & Star Wars. The longlivity of this game lies in its simplicity, it's open community and its modding potential. And yes you can also do the single player open world. There are even multiplayer open worlds (with a bit of trading and crafting). With over 1500 hours in M & B I consider myself an excellent player. The last year I really specialized in arty (which is really hard to master). After a game (3 rounds of max 18 minutes) on a human vs bots server (mostly around 80 humans vs 160 bots commanded by 5 humans) I had a score of 506 kills vs 6 deaths of my own... I decided to stop. After months I started playing again last week. You never lose the skills. Newbies still get tricked by feint attacks, though my arty accuracy needed a bit of practise again. Still a bullit or a bajonet of a newbie is as deadly as by an expert. That never changes. I have played the open world mods too. Great fun as it is all based on the same battle engine as in the stand alone multiplayer. I excel in those worlds based on experience and skill. Not perks, sure the weapon advantage can be a challenge, but an experienced player knows how to deal with it. The only downside is... time. After a while most of these mods decline as players have seen and done it, going back to the core of the game or going to other mods. Doing battles for 1 or 2 hours and log off. S! Verhoeven

I did not like the game. The interface however could be fully customized. The guy who used this set up was probably intoxicated by the music he was playing. I always used a minum of information. The little thumbs you see on the left and bottom left are all the magic spells that came with that game. You could pin them on your screen. Still, a customizable screen interface would be great for Naval action.

For the sandbox it should exactly be like you said. Player hosts decides on the settings. So map, goals, time, shiptypes, crew rating, weather, time of day, number of players. Maybe even ship allocation, though that will be a lot of hassle. Players or fleets should be able to choose their ship in the game lobby. Maybe only be able to choose certain type of ships according to the settings, country, era, maximum ship types per side, etc. By the way. The Dutch Carribean. Easy to find. Just follow all the islands, its at the end of the string :-). Curacao...excellent!. I go there once/twice a year, and than hop over to lovely Bonaire which is next to it. Visiting my parents who live there. It is my second home.

S! Adair. Another great (true) story of a small vessel fighting a much larger vessel is ofcourse Cochranes Speedy (a 14 gun Brig with only a crew of 50) against the Spanish frigate Gamo (with more than 300 men). Cochrane used a cunning list (using a false flag and raising the British flag at the very last moment) to gain precioius time to position himself. He evaded several broadsides and eventually came that close that the Spaniards guns could not aim that low. Cochrane than repulsed several Spanish boarding attempts before sending his entire crew to capture the enemy ship. Cochrane eventually become too overconfident and made a huge mistake when he tought to see 3 Spanish Gallions on the horizon. They appeared to be three French ships of the line. After a chase of 3 hours. When he concluded he could not outrun them, he actually tried to outmanouevre them. Thus bringing his ship even closer to the enemies. At last with his mast and rigging heavily damaged he struck the colours and surrendered. Still it remains a accomplishement with no equal that he and the Speedy managed to survive that chase. I really love Thomas Cochrane!

S! I agree that a frigate master is more impulsive and should make quicker/faster decisions. I would not name it a reflex though. :-). When a captain acts on reflexes he would also be ultimate prey, and predictable. :-) I love to compare the frigate as a predator. It does not have the stamina for long lasting battles, but don't give it opportunities or it catch you and will finish you off. (the Japanese underestimated the danger of destroyers and frigates many times in WW2). Also when the prey is not weak enough or too strong, it can avoid the action and fight another day. Still a frigate is a big ship. And as his ship is more manouvrable a frigate man should be able to make fast decisions, or his opponent will do it. It's more like quick chess. But the pace should still be much slower than you actually want it to be. Imagine how sluggish a 1st rate would be. That is not a problem as a 1st rate would rarely fight a 1 vs 1 battle. It would have its spot in the line, or have a frigate to cover its flanks.

I think things like the randomness of wind chance would a nice factor. Though it should happen conservatively. Weather direction usually does not change 3 times in half an hour. It would be nice to see preludes of weather change. Or a message. If it is just a matter of seconds to see the wind change 180 degrees it would be rather silly. Instead of wind direction I would rather see changes in wind strength. That could change pretty rapidly, and greatly influence the outcome of any battle.

S! Adair. Good read. I think crew rating is very important indeed. It should be such that it makes a difference, but still gives a skilled captain chances. In other words, even a skilled captain can make a victory with a lesser crew. If his tactics and decisions are superior he could do it. And a captain with the finest crew should get in trouble if he makes an awful mistake. Though a ship with high level crews should be able to deal better with these mistakes than a ship with a lesser crew. In the stand alone battles of the game this could all be set in the game options by the game host. So you should have the option to have a 1 (4th rate A crew) vs 2 (3rd rate C crew) game. In the open world getting a better crew should be based on time and battle experience. Another thing is morale. In battle a ship that is surrounded by enemies or cut off from the main body of its fleet should take a morale effect. A highly experienced crew would better withstand setbacks than a lesser experienced crew. Maybe it is possible to build in the configuration of your crew. So x amount of gunners, x amount of officers, x amount of marines etc. Killing a captain could seriously infuence morale. If all senior officers are killed you can expect a ship to be out of command. A ship with a highly experienced captain the morale of the crew should automatically increase. In the open world. Let's say a ship has been out of port for months, or even weeks. Or locked up for months in a blockaded port. Would this influence morale? Ofcourse. It would be an idea to build in a system where morale declines over time, and can be restored over time (in port, in a fleet, etc). Leadership, morale and experience/skill are inextricable. And a must in the game. Verhoeven