Disable contracts partially - use rare ressources to promote pvp

[Navalus Magnus]

There's a war waging about rare ressources needed to craft upgrades like the Cartagena Caulking Refit!

Sadly it's fought just by the means of placing buy-contracts for tremendous amounts of in-game money, instead of fleets battling each other to gain supremacy over certain ports.

The problems which lead to this are (imo):

1. For the majority there is no accessibility to rare ressources - even if their nation owns the port where one could buy the ressource (e.g. Cartagena Tar). The reason for that is simple: The prices set by contracts are far too high for the occasional player! This is known to all players (of nations which once owned the ports in question). Therefore the motivation to get a pb fleet together to attack such port is lower than it could be.

2. In case of Cartagena de Indias: Even if a nation had succeded in calling their banners, raising the hostility to 100% and getting the pb fleet into the battle they would most certainly face a well prepared swedish fleet. For many players it might seem, that (in this case) the swedes haven't lost a (defensive) pb in ages. That is also a motivation killer. To put it into general terms: A rather small group of players is able to fight off any attempt of thier enemies to take a port off of them.

 

Imo these problems could be solved by:

1. Disable the option of placing contracts for rare ressources like Cartagena Tar, and instead let theses ressources be sold by the port in question at a certain amount per day, split up in smaller amounts appearing randomly in the shop in the course of day. This way every player of the nation owning the port could get his share if he / she happens to have the luck to be at the port at the right (but unknown) time.

2. Change the hostility grinding for pb and bring in something more spontanous like the old flag system, in an enhanced version (reducing exploits like the flag blocking to a minimum).

- There are already good ideas mentioned in the thread to that specific topic. -

That would make it possible for every nation to surprise opponents. Therefore potentially stronger enemys could be beaten because they wouldn't be able to organise a well prepared pb fleet every time they were attacked. This way the ownership of important ports would be much more contested and likely to change more often allowing more players to get rare ressources like Cartagena Tar for a reasonable price and besides promoting wanted pvp for everyone - surprised port owners won't be able to get their best players together every time, so everyone online and available is needed for defence!

Edited December 2, 2017 by Navalus Magnus

[Hawkwood]

I still think RvR is not working as it should. When a Realm attacks another Realm, there must be:

1. A reason (diplomatic incidents, valuable ports/regions, notes from Europe...)

2. A goal (can be defined by the game, when players define them, they are just sometimes, well, not motivating enough...)

3. An end(self explanatory, when a goal is known and accomplished, the war ends)

And in this game we don`t have any of these instruments, it may be a reason(not the only one), why Conquest became boring and meaningless.

[Navalus Magnus]

If set in the mentioned way we e.g would have:

1. A reason (need of rare ressources to be more competetive (in pbs)).

2. A goal (getting the rare ressources / port in which they can be bought).

3. A temporary end (when port is conquered).