Sound alarm

[Admiral Nelson]

Or better yet, desktop notifications telling you someone is about to cast on you...

[Captain Jack]

(ATTENTION: NO EDITING TOOK PLACE - LONG POST AHEAD)

This conversation lasted a day and no more replies have been fed here. Still, this is a topic I wanted to comment; it is now 15 days later which I find a reasonable time for me to give our point of view.

First of all, in our book, Piracy can pay more than Trading. A lot more in fact and a lot faster. Trading needs significant investment and time in order to pay off. However, trading is much easier and the risks are.. lower. In the long term, you can make more with trading, given that you solve many other non-trading issues; mainly how to avoid getting attacked frequently.

This last part has been the epitome of many great players in the game. There are many different strategies employed in how to avoid getting attacked much. This is reasonable because this is how trading is profitable. If you have a pirate knocking at your door every day, you can't profit.

Now, on the essence of the discussion. We need to ensure that tactics used are promoting the gameplay in the way we want.

First, how much it costs to employ this tactic?
-It will cost about 6 FoJ at least. A cost of at 48 turns only for the FoJ (you will need turns for moving fleets, spy networking, attacking later).

From this piece of info alone, it become obvious that this is a strategy to be mostly used against large shipmasters. It has no sense to target any small player with this.

Now, if the opponent has about 500 ships (which is our new example level when discussing/designing game features), we are speaking of 100 fleets. If we suppose that no travel is needed,then one would need an extra 400 turns to attack it. So, we can safely say that 1 player with enough attacking fleets (and/or Flying Dutchmans) can go through the attack by storing 400 turns and buying an extra 200.

However, this player cannot be a small pirate but probably a well prepared pirate with at least 2 battle fleets.
Checking up the attacker, we will see a well prepared pirate with 2 worthy battle fleets, experienced, with a voodoo inventory and a plan. Now, why I check him up? Because I want to ask you how many other ways there are to attack a big trader nowadays?


If we investigate even further and we check up the victim here. The big trader we will see the following:
-Big Traders are mostly based in big active guilds. Such guilds are very active in helping against incoming attacks in many ways. One of them, is to removing curses on time.
-The discussion here is about losing the guild benefit to remove a FoJ in time but they can still help in other ways (ie Call the Kraken,Leviathan,Expensive Tools, Chains of Justice,Time Spiral).
-The guild members can still cast curses like Generosity to ensure that no ship falls on attacker hands.
-Some of them run on mindbars when they detect a probable threat. They have a bounty they can use virtually at anytime to nullify a pestering foe. Bounties after all should be more than enough to get rid of pestering foes; If a big trader has a daily income of 10M then surely, throwing a week's profit in bounties (70M) should be enough to keep a pestering foe at bay for a long time.
-They can use heavily escorted fleets in a way that they will not be defeated by small war fleets.
-They can run at a large hand which will ensure that no ship is lost in 1st wave.
-Then the guild can still be helpful to prevent the second wave.

So the picture becomes clearer now. After all, how much does it cost to endure on wave of attacks on 100 fleets? The maximum is 25 000 000
The actual is a lot less. Running at a hand of 18M should be more than enough to endure the wave. Perhaps 2 waves too or even three with the help of your friends. (This is where a new plunder formula makes sense although we might still need a tweak/limit on Booty Master).

Surely the cost is not small but if it is spontaneous it should be a day's or two profit.

Even if we go to the worst case scenario where you would lose all your tails, then we would talk about 100 ships. If these were howkers, the cost would be 100 credits(using ships market price) or 2M using shipwright price) and if these were LMMs, the cost would be 300 credits or 40M.

Surely the traders, especially large shipmasters, have every right to complain about it. Do not take this matter lightly.

It is not a matter of this tactic though. This tactic is not the problem.

The problem lies to the possible losses during a fight which at cases can be monumental. This is the real issue. We have attempted two times in the near past to give a solution here with no success. We will give another proposal today that will hopefully solve it better for all.