Ports Are Over Rated

[Vllad]

On PVP2 the French are down to 2 ports on the east side of the map. One of which is their Capitol. We thought this would force us to vacate if we couldn't keep ourselves supplied in ships.

 

Actually just the opposite happened. With some creative thinking we have basically been able to keep ourselves over supplied through Free Cities and we found that we actually had no need for ports at all. Granted we are not a very big player base but if we can supply 30 to 40 players in ships and not use any of our ports to do it what does that say about the importance of ports to begin with?

 

It is possible this is a very good thing since it is likely one of the small teams is going to get over run.

 

However I am more concerned that while it is good that a small nation can keep itself alive without ports does this mean over all we have way too many resources in the game and other than dots on a map to conquer are ports really irrelevant?

 

The reinforcement bubbles are neat but people can get around those mechanics.

 

I think ports need to play additional roles. Maybe every port needs to create a rare product, maybe each port creates some rare upgrade that only it can do.

 

We need something that doesn't unbalance the map but at the same time makes ports more important then just some place to get a conquest flag.

 

On the positive side we French learned that with our ports gone we no longer had to do any of the Econ things. We now have others doing the Econ for us and we just get to PVP. It is possible the developers purposely did this. However eventually the players are going to figure out that the conquest really doesn't mean anything other than having pretty dots on a map if Nations can supply themselves without any ports at all.

[Arsilon]

I believe the devs have already stated elsewhere the current spread of resources is artificial at this point and that it will change significantly in the future (I wish there was an easier way to go back and find these posts).  This makes sense since they have much bigger dynamics that need to be flushed out before fine tuning the econ component and making people sail all  over the map doesn't help them do that (nor is the population large enough overall that you will get enough people focused on doing that for large nations -- we can do it for France on PvP2 only because we are so small).

[Slamz]

Yeah, I almost made this exact same post, but we do know some big conquest revamps are in the works so I figure I'll wait and see what comes next.

 

I think ideally the map should actually start with no ports. Players build and destroy ports, which, if done well, should mean that nations only drop what ports they actually have a use for. A small team might only need or want a few ports.

 

The current map has way too many ports, I think, and just creates a lot of needless distraction. Nations pac-man up the ports but then they literally have no use for them.