Meerkat

i believe the 34 points is based on your company size. a solo has 30 points. looks like 3 person company is 34. so, you would need a decent size company to claim even the 53 point island. this was a stealth change from the ptr where a solo could claim even a large island if you could pay for the upkeep.

...pessimist... 80%

Launch Information As of right now, we are currently working on generating our release candidate. We expect that our entire network will be wiped and the patch made available on: Thursday, the 11th of April at 10 AM PDT For this relaunch, we'll be spooling up the following networks, completely fresh with no pre-existing data: Colonies: EU and NA Networks PVE: EU Network Empires: NA Network

Toggle Island Info, bottom button on your atlas. i think this is what you are looking for. i would like to see the original island names in the info too, and possible a font/size adjustment. it's pretty messy atm.

one additional note: crossing zones into a squadron is pretty devastating. i zoned into 2 gall, 2 brigs and a schooner. galls where 26 & 28 and ended up right in between them on zone in, the proceeded to make swiss cheese out of my brig. this is basically worst case scenario but nothing i could do about it.

agree, pathing is pretty messed up. seen several resting on the shoreline. also, too many to count. i have killed countless SoDs but there are swarms everywhere. instead of seeing 4, 5 solos like before in render distance you now see 3 squadrons totaling 15-18. seas a full of them!

claims as a concept are working ok. results may vary per isle but that is expected. get a bad landlord, move. the taxes are ruining peoples experience with what would otherwise be a decent system. people hike up the taxes to max and pay for their upkeep through taxes. completely defeats the whole point of upkeep. really really dumb that that was allowed to pass onto the ptr, that one doesn't even come close to passing the common sense test. (i think we have a troll in headquarters)

Think about it, you have the entire island farming for you not just the random person that wonders in your claim. Tax should have lowered significantly, 50% is a joke. 15% max is more than reasonable. AND, for the love of god, gold should not be taxible. People jack up the taxes and let map farmers pay for their upkeep. Completely defeats the point of have to work harder to have more claims. This is not that hard folks!

it'll be interesting to see all the island owners typing [][][][][][][][] in chat when the NA players get up and log in tomorrow. if nothing else, Atlas is an interesting social experiment!

Great news, this will make trade and big group events like kraken kills much easier for the small guys and solos.

pillars and foundations are the new "claim". 1. stake out your area 2. drop pillars/foundations to "claim" an area 3. build at your own pace and enjoy i think that's how most people will play it. this will only get annoying if people claim an area and never build on it. the PTR will shed some light on the details of this system but i could see problems with this on PvE if land owners can't destroy after the 12 hour window. pros and cons either way... CAN destroy after 12 hours: land owners can clean up pillar spam but can also "clean up" your legit base. CAN NOT destroy after 12 hours: pillar spam is allowed to stay as long as the player is active.

No way to claim ships atm. previously I claimed a raft after it was abandoned for weeks (to scuttle), but now I have a raft left in my docks with no way to remove it. Can not claim or demo it at all after weeks of sitting there. This worries me since it can easily be used to grief people, block ports or surround galleons and brigs.

Troll

thank you devs for the much needed thatch and metal tames! this rounds out the utility animals perfectly!

totally disagree, empires and colonies are frameworks that cater to different play styles, they both exist for a reason. the problem here is that the predators are following the prey. megas don't want to play on a low pop server cluster so they try to force their play style into a framework that has been specifically designed against their way of play. if you want to play on colonies as a mega, fine, but know that the playing field is not designed to suit you and accept it.

it doesn't sound like the megas are going to play on empires at all. which makes since, no one wants to play on a low-pop/no-pop framework. it will work fine for the RP folks, but that's probably it. but they have an incentive to self balance and keep a healthy story line going. company size is much less of an issue. i think of this in terms of the predator and prey relationship. the megas are going to follow the herds wherever they go. it's analogous to the African savannas, lions follow the antelope and pick off the wounded and helpless, easy prey. it would be great if the empires/colonies played out as intended but it sounds like it's not going to happen. 50 player max alliance would solve it. sure there could be coordination on discord with 250 people, you can't avoid that, but at least there would some amount of friendly fire and confusion. it would be messy with recruiting new people though. you would be quickly locked into what you had, you would be forced to kick people before recruiting new ones and you wouldn't necessarily know what all of your allies are doing in terms of recruiting. i do like the idea though, especially now that it looks like megas are just going to be playing on colonies.

That’s probably true, maybe more so in larger games especially. You need someone to distill down the useful information. I think if I where a dev I would stay away from forums like this if at all possible. I get the feeling that the atlas team is pretty small though. I see so many ideas that get floated here that only address “my” problem with no thought to how it will affect the greater population if implemented.

I’ve said this before... the biggest mistake a game company can make is NOT listening to their player base the second biggest mistake IS listening to their player base its the community managers and the devs jobs to see the reason through the noise Typically two types of people post on game forums... loud, entitled, narcissistic, people who like to complain about their problems and troll others and people that actually want to game to succeed and post reasonable, productive feedback. This fourm is heavy on the former.

Solo players can still find a group if you look. That’s what I did last weekend to get the kill. It is doable but probably not solo on your first kill.

Looks like I missed the window on this topic when still somewhat productive. It’s hit the depths of the swamp of humanity that all forum posts eventually descend into to die. Anyway, I do like the idea of splitting up pvp into two distinct play styles that are not exactly compatible. 2-50 “colonies” is going to be very popular. The new claim style is basically how people play on pvp as it stands now. Small to mid size companies can claim an entire island and defend it pretty easily and run off the random settlers. Now, at least, there is incentive for both parties to work together. Mega companies could always dominate mid size so it makes sense to split them up. the smaller server grid is pure speculation BUT if they did decide to do that it wouldn’t bother me at all, the “world” as it stands is mostly just repeated islands that work well when you have the population to fill them, and not so well when you have single digit population on each. There is no need to sail all 255 grids when you can get everything you need on 1/10 of that. Personally I think they will leave it 15x15 and try to make improvements to regrow the population . I am pretty happy with the new changes, here’s to hoping that things continue to move in that direction.

One of the reasons I’ve decided to play PvP this time. Everyone has the ability to check everyone else. If you make enemies you will have to answer for your actions and most likely you will be outnumbered.

I like personalized claims with a limit. Starting with 1 claim and earning 2-3 more as you advance. No claim spamming, you need to be strategic and place your limited claims in areas with different resources. Or something similar to the new system that encourages community but has real consequences for land owners behaving badly.

Instead of cannons freely placed on ceilings have them only snap to cannon mounts and only placable in certain areas of a ship.

Wait, is this real? Lol /facepalm

I am imagining a situation where people/companies claim more area than they can use, tax the hell out of it and use that to pay for the upkeep. I think I read that they plan to keep leader boards for land claims. All depends on how they tweak the numbers Destroying structures is obviously a big concern, I see this being used more to “move” people that build to close than the landlord rather than general maintenance and cleanup of foundation spam.