Warship/Pirating Change

[misty snow]

I have a few ideas for changing warships and pirating. I feel like ports could use a slight buff because factories now hold a fairly stronger position early and mid game.

WARSHIPS

Clicking on a boat shows a SAM-like visuals to warships. Using the gif provided, you can see white is the patrol range and the color is the combat range

Green = Ally/Self
Yellow = Neutral
Orange = Hostile/Embargoed (If allied while embargoing, green will take priority)
Red = Shows only in the overlap between a green combat range and yellow/orange combat ranges similar to a Venn diagram

Two boats sharing a combat range (self or allied) will now move to support others in combat. Prioritizes any warships from hostile/embargoed players, otherwise random if multiple are engaged at once.

It would also be nice to have the ability added for someone to drag their mouse to select multiple warships at once, and if someone is playing on mobile and they press their finger in the water and hold it, it will create an ever-expanding circle that will select any warships in its range once the finger is lifted. The sensitivity for this (rate at which the circle is expanded) should be customizable in mobile players settings to their preference.

PIRATING

When a trade ship is pirated, as the pirated ship arrives to your port it will instantly be sent back out as one of your trade ships making it so you now not only claim the money from the pirated ship but now get a trade ship that will not impact the cycle at which that port already sends out another trade ship.

Neutral players will not have their ships pirated unless embargoed as pirating a ship is necessarily taking money from another player and acts as a conflict of interests. It would also be a huge quality of life improvement to also add an embargo key bind and trade requests similar to alliance requests for players who have you embargoed.

This better defines pirating as a more hostile and therefore risky yet more rewarding playstyle.

Things I didn't mention because character limits:

When pressing 7, the warship keybind, it will show you all boats range as well as highlighting the port in which your boat will deploy from.

If you're embargoed by another player you should receive a notification for that and have the yellow flash around your screen similar to how when a tribe attacks you.

Your boats only naturally attack hostile or embargoed boats, not neutral ones.

Ports can potentially also dish out a train when a pirated ship arrives, representing the stolen goods. However including this while it deploys a trade ship of its own and getting the gold from stealing the ship as is, this train would have to be short-lived. I think this also defines a ports relationship and job within a train tracks network, but I'm not really sure if this would be too overpowered and should likely only be considered if the rest of these changes wouldn't work or be enough to balance out the relationship between ports and factories if they were to be implemented.

When holding space trade ships will appear as:

• Green (allied/teammate, not capturable at all)
• Yellow (neutral, capturable if embargo is applied)
• Red (capture on sight)

[sage flume]

I like it, though I think for clarity embargoing should trump being allied

If someone is allied and refusing to trade then they aren't a good ally to have. some more indication with out having to look for their name or the price of trains would give a more clear and direct indicator you have been embargoed and water isn't fish safe.

Dunno why I said fish safe as they're trade ships not fishing ships but you get the idea as you can transport while allied

I would also argue that Ally and self should be clearly separate with maybe blue or purple being your own warships

[misty snow]

I'm not sure how coding works so I wasn't sure if it'd be asking too much to have it be a gradient or maybe its own color entirely (light purple perhaps). I do agree with your own ships being a different color but maybe I think it should just be a light green vs more mellow green because every other color I tested against the water didn't contrast very well, including purple, or it could just be entirely white. I think purple might be fine for allied embargoed though because it's not terrible against the water, it just doesn't contrast as well but since it's a more rare occurrence it may be fine.

I did like the idea of trade requests, the yelllow flashing for an embargo, and a notification for it in the alert box as well hopefully to help. I do agree entirely.