Yakarue

I'm not against the idea of adjusting company mechanics but nothing you said here is accurate. Megas aren't content gating smaller companies. Megas don't have magical exploits to level cap faster than others. This game was designed around the concept of large companies existing (in addition to smaller ones). Every issue you listed here has nothing to do with megas existing and everything to do with poor game design and an incredibly high knowledge barrier for entry. Also, the whole concept of a "mega" is completely relative. In season 1, megas had a thousand members. In season 9 now, people call companies with 30 players a mega. Because if you're in a small 3 man company, 30 players is an overwhelming force to deal with. So anyone who complains about "megas" at this stage in the game is naive. Or simply bad and unwilling to learn. Or all three. No one is preventing people from farming the maw; even when we had 10+ boats in the maw earlier in the season we would still see small, never-before-seen companies doing their own thing in there. If you're expecting to do content at any time of day with zero resistance, it sounds like you should check out the PvE server. The whole concept of a survival PvP game is that when you go out into the wild, you're risking your stuff. The only company getting content gated this season is Molon Labe.

Hey there, my name is Yakarue and I like to build harbors. I’m pretty okay at it and sometimes I like to go overboard. In S4 we held off quite a few attempts to get into our harbor and in S5 people stopped trying. But today I’d like to talk about the current state of harbors in Atlas. I think it should be challenging to construct an impenetrable harbor and I believe a well-constructed harbor should be incredibly difficult to breach. As it stands, it requires too much snap count and global tame limit to make a thoroughly defended harbor and the changes to land artillery damage to boats heavily exacerbates this. The harbors themselves (the overall size, depth, opening) are not conducive to making efficient harbors. Tons of island layouts have a great harbor shape and opening but the harbor itself is too shallow to fit any boats into it. Far too many islands have zero harbor at all. Some islands have massive harbors where 80% of it isn’t within the claim zone so it doesn’t get peace time protection (like my harbor this season where I've spent over 80 hours securing it because of this). There are only a small handful of islands that are of usable size, have a manageable mouth, and are deep enough for boats to get in and park. The severe lack of natural harbors in this game results in gross amounts of snap count abuse, which kills game performance and enjoyment. On new islands I’d like to see smaller harbor mouths with deep, large harbors behind them. On existing islands, I would like to see the team make sure each large harbor is deep enough for boats to fit in them. And the black rocks that we can now build pillars through should be fully removed from the game or reworked so that players can’t swim through them. They should just act as the floor. Submarines. The amount of work needed to prevent your harbor from being griefed with a submarine is incredibly unreasonable. The source of the problem is that Submarines are classified as Ships. So if you have your harbor defenses set to fire on Ships Only (which you should) a Submarine can sail past them and bait those defenses into firing. But since cannonballs have very low penetration into the water, they can just sit at a depth where the defenses will fire at it but won’t hit it, effectively draining and wasting the defense’s ammo. This can be done in peacetime as well. To defend against this, competent harbor builders go to ridiculous lengths to keep submarines out of their harbor—harbor walls going all the way down to the ocean’s floor and elaborate, slightly submerged gate systems with cannons above them that force submarines close enough to the surface to be hit. It results in a massive amount of maintenance work and snap count usage. A very simple fix to this would be to reclassify Submarines so they aren’t considered ships and/or add an additional option to the pinwheel for targeting. Harbor structures. Pretty disappointed we didn’t get a gate large enough to fit galleons through with the last patch/wipe. Not only would a structure like this save on snap count but it would just be a massive QOL change as well. It’s also another partial solution to the issue with sub griefing. I would also like to see a harbor specific defensive emplacement. Something with greater water penetration and significantly increased damage to boats and limit the number of these someone can place per island. Artillery damage to boats has been in a really bad spot for a long time now. Galleons with 350% or more resist + armored up with ceilings could stay alive nearly indefinitely despite being pounded by mortars and other harbor defenses. Last season I made a cannon wall with 420 large cannons. In part as a joke but in large part because that’s what I needed to build to keep the harbor secure. And even then it took over 2 minutes to sink a sub 300% resist galleon. Give us harbor gates for galleons and better artillery options specific to harbors. Armored docks. Last season they were in an awful place because of how easy they were to acquire. It made building a harbor borderline pointless. This season they seem to be in a slightly better place due to how constrained resources are. But by the end of the season we’re still going to see harbors full of them and I don’t think that’s healthy for the game. Islands should limit how many of these can be placed for force companies to choose which boats are their flagships and deserve extra protection. Armored Dock spam on owned islands is awful for game health. Land artillery damage reduction with the last patch/wipe. This change baffles me. I don’t know where the direction came from or what the purpose was. For the last several seasons (ever since boat resistance was introduced), land-based artillery has tickled boats. This includes Mortars, Medium Cannons, and Large Cannons. Currently a Medium Cannon does 74 damage to a 300% resist plank. A common galleon plank has 12K health. You would need 162 cannons to hit precisely that one plank to take it out. Large Cannons and Mortars are in a similar state. I drove my 0% resist sloop past a small cannon wall where it ate fire from around 10 large cannons. The only thing to die was the bed. One plank was down half HP. A SLOOP. This change needs to be outright reversed and then land artillery needs a buff beyond where it has been sitting for the last several seasons. These are a few things that have been on my mind over the last season and especially this season with the change in damage to boats from land cannons. What do you think about the state of harbors?

We are running into this issue as well.