For long we have received ideas and suggestions to incorporate somehow warfare into port control.
It is a fact that we do not want to change Influence and how it works. Generally speaking, we hate nerfing anything and we steadily believe that solutions are easier found in new concepts rather than old ones.
One concept we could add is Port Traits,
Traits such as:
1)Loyalty
2)Corruption
3)Happiness
4)Population Growth
can be elements of a bigger expansion for the game, called Ports Expansion which could include other ideas such as Port buildings ideas we discussed earlier.
All traits will be affected by players through fleet actions, market actions, port buildings and port control.
We should avoid using any specific voodoo cards at first (although we can always think of some later).
We should avoid any direct change through gold spending (there is influence for direct change and we will have port buildings as indirect gc sinker).
All these three traits will be in direct relation to each other; if one collapses the other two will be damaged as well. In how they will recover though, it will be different.
For example, Loyalty could mainly be affected by Port Control and how many days a nation has held the port. The particurlar trait must be country specific too. Which means that each nation will now hold a loyalty level with each port. Starting at 0 if you never held the port and maxing at 100% if you have held the port for a whole year in a row. This will be easy to define too: Loyalty rises by 0.2739% per day for the nation that holds the port and drops by the same amount for all the rest nations. This will be the basic growth.
More ways to affect this can be added. Perhaps, sending your fleets to hunt down enemies of your country (fleet action) for a prolonged time, could speed it up. The more ships a country could put to this chore, the higher the loyalty would rise. In the same time, other nations that would want to contest the port, would be able to counter this. This could end up in real battles when more than 1 sides collide or simulation battles where simply the strength of each ship entering the war would matter (better scenario for us as it would be an entirely new concept which would make it worthwhile for big players to have big war fleets).
Moving on, Corruption will be created for anything bad that happens to the port. From the simple cast of a single Black death or even worse, for declining trade incomes, corruption will find way to rise. The more it rises, the less taxes the country will rake in from the specific port while it could combo with ship forthcoming taxes in shipwright.
Happiness could be a way to contain corruption, but certainly not the only one. Happiness would too be affected by corruption though. However, it would be perhaps easier to make your people happy than to combat corruption. Certainly, we will take in mind various parties hold by other players in the port (so, perhaps it would be a bad idea to constantly hold your major parties to hostile ports) but more direct ways can be added. Such as donating resources to the port? We will see.
Finally, all these traits will play a role for population growth which will also have an innate rating. Expect it to be negative when population of a port grows after a billion and positive in the lower populations to extra positive in very small populations. There are some other ideas about this already.
There... food for thought for a feature that could add many interesting factors in the game for all.