by Haron » Thu Nov 03, 2016 7:54 pm
To get more action, there are several issues that should be addressed.
A) Guilds or Nations? For whom do you fight? People have different view on where their loyalties lie. Mine is always to my guild, I just have a temporary nationality. To others it's the opposite. Some, like the SSTG, have decided guild and nation should be one and the same.
B) Why fight for port control? For ordinary trade, party cards beat Duke bonus. DaVinci is happy in a nation without ports. Sure, if you're a gold trader, you need ONE port. Then, there's the NPC tax. Sounds nice with lots of ports, right? But most nations would be better off focusing their resources on fewer ports, as TI cards would make the total population higher that way. Oh, and if your nation loses its port to another nation? Just change nationality.
C) Why do civil wars? Danik and LT caused fun and action some time back - at a great cost. Today, only Spain has a decent treasury. Stealing treasuries is off. And with the royal stipends, why not just take those and be happy? No need to fight for vote control. And should you get vote control, the "big guys" in the nation can just change nationality (like the Midway players did).
D) Raids. I can take an inexperienced player with SoLs and make a profit. Or someone being careless. However, profiting from raids is hard. And getting the necessary voodoo takes time, so conducting raids often is tricky. One reason for this is that there is really very little reason to use the Big Ships. So there are few out there. Just lighting up a big trader and plundering his trade fleets is more profitable. And even that gives little profit, since traders have "just enough" gold in their treasury, since it's so safe and easy to use banks, where gold is safe and easily accessed. Oh, and when you count in retaliation, any raid is risky.
War is costly and risky. Just trading peacefully is by far the most profitable path. If more conflict is desired (it should be), then people need an incentive to fight. Like BIG fights. I think something along the lines of "external political events" is a good way to achieve this. Give nation leaders "quests" to gain another port, for instance.