Map domination

[van Veen]

While I genuinely like the idea of spawning rare woods randomly across the map, I think there is one problem which needs to be addressed somehow. It's the map domination factor. 

The more ports one clan (and his friendly clans) owns, the higher the chance of having exclusive access to rare woods. So, a dominant group becomes even more dominant in terms of better ship builds and higher income. This is a slow process, but I am sure that this eventually leads to one group roflstomping the whole map. If not addressed properly, this leaves players of other nations frustrated which is not good for player retention and not attractive for new players. 

In my point of view, there should be a victory condition that finishes the game and then resets the map when one nation controls more than XX% of the map. 

Additionally, some sort of counter mechanisms that slow down map domination should be implemented, e.g.  

• port maintenance costs rising exponentially with number of ports owned, 
• ports not taken care of (those with <0 tax income maybe?) become neutral after a while,
• better spread knowledge of rare wood ports, so everyone knows where the sweet stuff is,
• ...

Looking forward to your ideas and comments. 

[Georg Fromm]

I can not say that it does not come with the special woods, as you suspect. However, what bothers me about this proposal and also other proposals for the new economic model, is that nobody can actually say what is really going to happen. Should not we wait for the actual development before making suggestions for improvement or change?

 

[Archaos]

Last time we had the rare woods, this was expected to be a problem, but it never really happened. Maybe due to alts and easier access to the woods but I think we should see how this plays out first as there appear to be many rare spawns as well as some producing ports for rare resources.

[van Veen]

Does anyone know how many ports have resources, how they are distributed and how they respawn?

[StuntPotato]

I really like OPs idea of increased cost for port maintenance. Maybe an alternative could be that part of the port maintenance has to be paid With resources drawn from the clan warehouse in the port. This might open up the game for traders to sell the wares needed in those ports and opportunities for the opposition to jump those traders, denying the goods.