Captureable ports in the safe-zones - Fake Feature

[Anolytic]

The huge reinforcement zones brought a lot of changes to the game. Some good, some bad. But some changes have to be made to adapt to the new system.

First. Please make all captureable ports inside the high-sec areas into uncaptureable ports that no clan can hold. As of now, several nations have "captureable" ports that are within their reinforcement zones. This brings both great unbalance to the game, and it creates a fake feature. 

Second, change it so that hostility missions under no circumstances can spawn within the reinforcement zones. 

Why are captureable ports within reinforcement zones problematic, you ask?

First off, for the clans that hold them, they are completely safe, high-income ports that give a huge advantages to the clans and the nations that have them, and that are virtually impossible to loose, except if the clan purposely abandons them. Take Road Town for instance, which is held by my clan and which is within the current reinforcement zone of Danmark-Norge. It is a regional capital with decent income, and virtually impossible for an enemy nation to assault because of the reinforcement zone. It, and ports like it, is a perversion of the RvR-system, of the clan-focus that puts clans into competition with each other, of clan economies and of the game economy. And calling it a captureable port is a fake feature. 

Every captureable port on the map can be grinded by PvE (hostility missions), or by PvP (provided there are players there), except for ports within the reinforcement zones. 

Imagine that as an attacker you want to grind Oranjestad, one of the most profitable ports on the  map. First off, I do not think it is possible, even if you try, to spawn a hostility mission for Oranjestad that is outside the reinforcement zone of Sweden. So you go there to grind it. And on the way to the hostility mission you see some players. But you cannot attack them, because of the reinforcement zones. Grinding by PvP is out.

So you resign to do PvE. You do a mission. Once this mission pops up with 20+% hosility, enemies start to congregate. They can sail safely around you, in any number and any ships, until they feel confident enough to engage you,  because you cannot tag them due to the reinforcement zones. You do another mission. Someone jumps into it, you kill the AI and you kill the mission intruders, but you loose a couple of ships. The enemy are now gathering outside for you when you come out, force weakened from losses and used repairs, but still numerous enough that the enemy do not dare to engage. When you respawn in open world they are sitting all around you. You know there are more defenders coming, so you want to tag the ones already there into a battle, because you can kill these ones before they get reinforcements, only you can't tag them, because of the AI reinforcements they will get. 

The inevitable conclusion is that even with a big fleet for grinding, attacking any port within the reinforcement zones is impossible.

And say you managed to grind a port. Maybe you snuck in and grinded it at night - another gripe I have with the game right now btw, why even double down on hostility grinding for PB creation when people can now just choose to grind at night (EU server) when there are no possibilities to counter-grind them or trying to jump their missions? But at least somehow, for the purposes of this thought experiment, you grinded the port within the safe-zone. Going to the PB is now the issue. Bringing a screening fleet to help your PB fleet get there, is useless. The attackers screening fleet cannot tag anything, because they will be instantly killed by AI reinforcements. And the defenders can bring whatever screening they like, with no fear, and no real need for organisation. Because if anyone messes up, AI reinforcements will save them.

So I repeat my plea. If you are going to keep the reinforcement zones as they are, turn all ports that are within the reinforcement zones into uncaptureable ports. It makes no sense to have as captureable ports that aren't actually realistically captureable. It only means that after each map reset there will be a race between clans, to capture these valuable ports that cannot be lost. And any clan that is created or joins the nation later, will be at a disadvantage compared to the other clans.

[Kloothommel]

This. 

[CaptVonGunn]

not impossible just really really hard....

[Anolytic]

5 hours ago, rediii said:

zones are too big.

Yes they are. 

And they are also very unbalanced. For some nations they cover a large number of "captureable" ports, for other nations they only cover empty sea. The current safe-zones make the difficulty descriptions that devs have assigned to each nation, beyond inaccurate. 

5 hours ago, rediii said:

so yea make every port uncaptureable within the safezone.

And it is not like historical accuracy should be a deterrent to this. With the last map update, devs did away completely with historical national territories anyway. 

5 hours ago, rediii said:

Btw. philippsburg and oranje are no high value ports because they are within the safezone. They were high value ports before safezone got implemented

Yes. That was my point. Same with Road Town, although with the redistribution of production resources Road Town got slightly more valuable than before the update.

5 hours ago, rediii said:

But please implement a reason to leave the safezone. stupid high taxes or something else. Or atleast make costs of port lower... it's stupid atm.

Agreed. Taxes in uncaptureable ports should be 20% or 25%. Another measure to get players willing to leave safe-zones is what I propose here: 

 

[Limpear]

In France Roseau/Rosaly/Kingstown in safe zone - I gues more than 140k distance!!! I think it is fundamentally wrong to make such large zones(not only in France). People do not need to trade or they trade safely and pvp only on pb.  The number of people again inexorably decreases -  time to introduce some changes (and do not forget to fix Wasa because it is 3rd rate imho)

Edited September 27, 2017 by Limpear

[CaptVonGunn]

The Zone should be limited to say 25-30km circle around each capital....  Sure some would have more Ocean then others.. but it would at least be a Standard rather than the current one base don the completely arbitrary Zones we have now