Naval Action – Alliances

By Atlas on August 23, 2016 in Daily News, Naval Combat

Game-Labs’ expansive naval combat sim, Naval Action, continues to navigate its way through Early Access with a fair amount of success. Just visiting the Steam page shows, as of this writing, reviews firmly in the “Very Positive” and “Mostly Positive” categories. In fact, it’s because of these ratings that Game-Labs recently introduced four new ships into the game.

These newest additions also come included with a large Alliance “testing” feature, perk changes, and a good amount of bug fixes and tweaks. Game-Labs also promises that if they continue to see such a positive response to the game’s development, they’ll work harder to get more ships into the game before its full 1.0 version release.

Patch 9.94

The biggest change in the most recent patch comes in the form of Alliances. However, before you get too excited or too dismayed, keep in mind that Alliances are currently being tested and monitored. Since Alliances serve as the first stepping stone to reworking the game’s Conquest system, it’s likely there will be a number of changes made to the current incarnation.

How it works:

Alliances are formed through player voting.
- For testing purposes, the rounds will be weekly, but will be longer in the future.
Voting rounds consist of picking an Enemy Nation and a Potential Allied Nation.
To be eligible to vote you must have an existing character in your chosen nation that is 15 days old, as well as having achieved the third lowest rank.
Friendly fire is no longer possible.
Pirates cannot sign Alliances.
- Outlaw class is in the works who will reject all authority.
Friendly smugglers are no longer attackable.
Alliance chats are now available.

Game-Labs’ own example of how the system will work:

Week one

France picked Sweden as a top ally choice (picking denmark as enemy)
Sweden picked France as a top ally choice (picking great britain as enemy)

Then during next maintenance alliance is signed for 2 weeks between France and Sweden. Once alliance is signed all votes are reset and credited back to the player for the next round of voting.

Week two

France is already allied with Sweden

France wants to ally with Great Britain
Because one of their ally members has listed Great britain as enemy this alliance cannot be signed and is not available for voting
To be able to ally with Great britain france must persuade Sweden to drop Great britain as enemy and replace it with someone else (for example Denmark)

As a result in 3 weeks (3 rounds of voting) 2 or 3 large blocks will be created. Over time the situations might change. Because of the forced enemy decision there will always be 2 large blocks at the minimum.

Be sure to check out the rest of patch 9.94’s changes and head on over to the forums to join in the discussion!