Jozef

I know there are countless proposed solutions on this board to the current pvp imbalance that strongly favours the attacker and makes raiding bases far too easy. I'll add here mine as well just for the sake of it: 1) new resource: clay Clay is a common resource much like stone and can be found on most shores. It can be collected with a shovel. 2) new crafting station: kiln A kiln is a crafting station much like the forge, and it can turn clay and coal into bricks. (it can also be used to create glass or porcelain items in a future update) 3) new building tier: brick Brick walls require bricks and other standard materials to build, they are the most expensive building type. Matching metal doors require a high amount of alloys to manufacture. Brick tier offers the highest level of protection to defenders. A single grenade or cannon shot deals 5-10 damage to a brick wall. With 50.000HP (more than double the 24.000HP of a large stone wall), a large brick wall is the strongest wall in the game. It needs about 20 minutes to destroy if attacked by two standard brigs with cannons (each bring having 11 cannons, firing every 4 seconds, dealing on average 7.5 damage to the wall with a single shot would deal 49.500 damage to a 50k HP wall in exactly 20 minutes). 20 minutes may not seem like much, but it would be a clear improvement from the current 30 seconds to bring down a large stone wall. 4) cart-mounted weapons have half range and half damage compared to rigid-mounted weapons. Cannon carts would still be extremely useful in large battles and skirmishes and taking out small outposts, but would fall short when attacking large fortresses. An average team of pirates with 3 cannon carts could still penetrate the strongest inland fortresses in the game in under five hours if they are left unattended, well within the current siege window of 8 hours, large armies being even faster. 5) Land mounted weapons get a 20% range increase compared to ship mounted weapons. Combined with their common height advantage, cannon towers would then outrange ships, so a ship attacking a fortress would deal a few salvos, then move out of range to repair, then return for another few salvos until the tower is destroyed, leading to at least a minimal amount of challenge associated with destroying a base. 6) NPC operated weapons get to use their full range. Currently, NPCs will not target enemies beyond 30 tiles, even if their cannon would allow it, meaning they are easily outranged and destroyed by attackers. 7) Double the damage of puckles. Currently a high level, well armoured player can just run up to a puckle gun and take it out with about 2 grenades while taking minimal damage. Charging a machine gun head on should be suicide not a walk in the park, a doubled puckle damage would lead closer to that. 8 ) NPCs manning land-mounted weapons get their payments reduced by half. Manning a cannon on a ship rocking on the high seas is tough job, lounging on a castle wall, waiting for attackers to show up is a walk in the park in comparison. Land-mounted cannons therefore should cost less to man allowing a fort to be defended on all sides by at least a couple of cannons or puckles without costing a fortune. Notes: - besieging a brick fort will now require attackers to stock up resources or have supply lines. Taking down a large brick wall will require 6.666 cannonballs, costing a total of 67K metal, 19K flint, and 7K coal. They will weigh about 14K pounds, filling a galleon about half way. As a comparison a simple fort with 15 large stone walls currently costs 6K fiber, 18K stone, 6K thatch, 12k wood, 8K metal, 4K coal (using iron as an example), provided the defender does not shoot back. The new brick tier should be more costly, about doubling the metal and coal cost of the construction, and adding clay. Due to the steep metal costs of cannon balls, this would finally lead to a resource advantage on the defender's side, so manufacturing all those cannonballs would cost more effort than building the walls themselves. - Doors are always somewhat weaker than walls, so the new large metal gates would require about 20% less resources to overcome. A single galleon could still break a large metal gate in under 15 minutes.

And I don't blame them, they are clearly playing the game within the rules and have a very efficient strategy for success. I blame the game developers who made the game rules favour this kind of gameplay. That fact that it takes more resources to build a wall than to destroy it means if you are building any base, you are losing. Because you could have used that time and effort to easily grief someone and gain their hard-earned wealth instead. And as Mike says, for the players who are not interested in griefing, the only logical solution is to not play, hence why 90% of the playerbase left.

I agree with much of what is posted in this thread. Raiding bases is far too easy, and naval combat - supposedly the main focus of the game - gets surprisingly little attention. Also, I just noticed that most people in this forum seem to keep repeating the same criticisms in hopes of getting listened to: basically all the top threads here are calling for less offline griefing and more love for ship vs ship combat. Instead the next update is delivering cats and seahorses. Not only is this game in a bad state, its apparently heading in the wrong direction. (meanwhile I have been griefed again, 3rd time this week. Strongest defences breached in under a minute, tames killed, all assets looted, base destroyed, ships sank. And I was just finishing rebuilding the walls after the previous raid and making a new ship so I have at least one. Hence the base was practically empty after the previous wipe, the attackers had nothing to gain from this. No wonder 90% of the playerbase quit with such mechanics.)

You are right about Rust, but there offline raiding is both clearly marketed as being an integral part of the game, and still you can make comparably safe bases that take an actual effort to raid. Add to that the small, controlled servers and regular wipes and you have a great survival game which is about building safe bases, and trying to raid other people's constructions. It works. Atlas however is marketed as a fun, massive pirate game with naval battles but in reality its just offline raiding and just four ship types. There seems to be no incentive to take part in naval battles whatsoever. If you play it like Rust you can do quite well, but you will miss out on most game mechanics from taming through shipbuilding to naval combat. If you play it like its intended then you will spend your time building a fleet and then trying to find other ships to fight in vain, and lose your fleet when you log off. It just doesn't work.

There is exactly zero incentive to PVP in atlas. Why hassle with trying to attack an enemy fleet in an epic sea battle, or siege a well equipped fort with heroic defenders when you can simply wait for your enemies to log off, then kill them without resistance and destroy everything they ever created in the game in minutes. Once your enemy logs off, they are defenseless, sleeping, and therefore can be killed with a single hit and looted of all possessions without any skill or difficulty involved. There are no safe places to log off either. The strongest walls anyone can build in the game can be destroyed with a few salvos from a ship, so in about 10 seconds. Even walls that are built far away from shores can be destroyed by a single cannon cart in about two minutes. Also, a simple cannon has longer range than any defensive armament of a base, so you can safely park your ship or cannon cart outside any base, and shoot it without any chance of retaliation. Any ship you may build will also go down in a matter of seconds if found unmanned, even if you spent a week building it. Suppose you are really vested into not dying when you log off, and decide to spend an enormous amount of time and effort building on a remote mountain top that is both away from ships, and cannot be reached by cannon carts. Well, then then any attacker can still destroy the strongest wall you can build in the game with about 30 grenades, in about 2 minutes. To put this into context, grenades are relatively cheap to make and the average player can carry about a hundred. Interestingly, not only is it incredibly fast and easy to kill people offline and destroy entire bases, its rather expensive to build them. Atlas has the odd logic of making it cheaper to attack a fort than to defend one, even not counting the range advantage of attackers that makes all the defensive armaments useless anyway. At the moment not even mega companies seem to keep a large enough player force to defend themselves 24/7, so just build yourself a cheepo ship, get a horse with a cart, pack in a few grenades and sail around to find any building or ship left unattended for two minutes. Destroy it, loot it then move on. Its what everybody seems to be doing as its the most efficient strategy with the current game mechanics. A single player in underpants can currently beat any mega. I had this stupid idea a month ago to start the game, team up with some friends, build an awesome pirate base and fleet and then look for other fleets to battle. After a month, the four other guys left, as if we built something, it would always be destroyed while we were offline. We never witnessed an actual battle. We did see ships sometimes, but if they found us online, they would just sail away without attacking, and avoided us if we tried chasing them. The few allies we met have the exact same experience (most of them left after getting wiped repeatedly). I have only witnessed actual ship vs ship combat on videos. And to be fair, cruising around we found countless fleets moored on shore with their owners logged off, and also countless bases built by fellow players. We made the policy of not attacking anything if there are no players on it, as it did not seem much fun griefing others. But for most people this is the game: find an unattended ship or base, destroy it, then loot it. If you find other players, then just avoid them. Offline griefing is by far the most efficient strategy in this game, and this makes it a very unrewarding experience in my opinion. Its not the fault of the players, its a mistake of the game developers that made offline raiding the easiest and most rewarding activity in Atlas. A very poor game design choice if I may say so.

Can this be disabled for PvP too please? With this change any company that has built on claimed land can potentially lose all they have ever built if they lose control of their claim flag. Offline raids are bad enough already, but at least currently it still takes some effort to wipe every single structure off an island. This nuke does not even require to demolish large buildings or even attack most outposts. You just need to capture the claim flag area - which is often itself not even defended, hold it for a few days, and anything that anyone has ever built on the island can be instanuked. This includes safe caches on mountaintops, secret stashes below the water line, all harbours, pens, stables, houses, farms, forts, turrets, buildings, paths, really everything. It has an enormous griefing potential and will be used in 9 out of 10 cases to wreck months of work instead of combating pillar spam. Any reasonable company will now relocate to lawless as with this change constant war is still safer than the risk of getting nuked - this single, small change is that bad. I agree that overcoming pillar spam is important, but this change is a typical case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. By combating pillar spam, all structures have just been made irrelevant in claimed areas on PvP servers as no matter what defences you build, if the enemy gets to control the claim flag, they can wipe everything you ever achieved in the game without a single gunshot. Also, 12K gold is about a week's worth of upkeep for a 5 man company. It takes very little effort to obtain. A solo player farming common treasure maps makes about 1k gold an hour, and it just goes up from there. The money cost is far too low compared to the immense power it holds, as its by far the single strongest attack in the game. Renting a dragon costs 20k and its damage is negligible compared to this nuke. I registered on this forum to make this single post, I am hoping it gets read by the relevant people even though I understand the chance for this is rather low.