I want to tell those who read this that this is a really long suggestion before I gave examples on how this could work out and such. I don’t expect this to be implemented as it is because this is something that greatly influences a server, it’s islands, ship spawns etc.
I’m suggesting this so that other suggestors can one way or another improve this or take one or two ideas from it while they read this. ( This is the suggestion I sent when I applied to get suggestor role. I will edit parts which are about it. )
This suggestion also has lots of assumptions about the systems that are going to be released in full release. They might not be correct.
Faction/Guild Influence System
I want to suggest two things that could be an expansion to the empires update and could really really increase amount of fun you can get by playing in a guild or a certain faction like the assassin syndicate. Let me start off with with my suggestion:
( TITLE ) Faction / Guild influence over a sea, island supplies and political decisions.
First off, let me make two things clear: 1 - ) This in NO way involves PvP, I think there is already lots of features coming to PvP with all those naval battles and stuff.
Second note, The things I’m talking about will be about the BRONZE SEA for now, but it can also be appliable to the nimbus sea or any other seas in the future updates.
( SUB TITLE ) Faction and Guild Influence
Basically, factions and guild will be able to increase their influence in a sea by doing the things that are already specified in the navy influence page in wiki ( Sinking ships, rescuing ppl who are on the sea, doing good deeds, bounty hunting npcs )
Influence can rise both ways, either with FEAR or RESPECT. If you kill too many navy npcs, your guild or faction’s influence will increase, and navy’s will decrease BUT factions and navy will send in more reinforcements ( NOT IN THE WAY NOTORIETY WORKS ) to that sea and fight your evil deeds. And there will be people from islands who will unite and fight against your guild/faction; for example a group of volunteers from palo town will try to hunt you down, but they are all low leveled and you will be able to defeat them all, but if you defeat them all, your image will get more and more worse as Juraserva will be delighted to inform the entirety of war seas about your evil doings. ( peak journalism )
Having high influence in both ways will enable you to get more followers ( this is just based on assumptions for now, I’m talking about the fleet system in this part. ). Having a good renown and high influence will lead to your fleet’s durability getting less lowered, like good ppl wont attack you and bad factions wont attack your fleet because they know that your faction / guild will retaliate in a way that they don’t want you to.
If you have high good influence, factions and towns will send you gifts in the form of galleons, supplies ( the supplies I’m talking about are the ship supplies or fleet supplies, they will basically send us wood i guess. ) or unique food items ( like shell island could send us giant bananas since those are really really common in shell island, the same goes for cirrus island as well, they could send us sky apples. )
-(This part is similar to the upcoming feature that enables npcs to send you gifts and such stuff. I didn’t know about it before writing this suggestion.)-
Like the story where navy bombards the entirety of an island, you will be able to do that kind of evil things if you have high influence but its the evil influence, if an island tries to raise their forces against your faction, you will be able to destroy them ( not islands that are in the storyline though, or that woul be kinda stupid. It’s kinda similar to how Vetex is able to destroy ravenna and similar islands with his magic alone. )
Each faction will start with an influence that’s based on the amount of islands they own, for example: bronze sea will have grand navy and ravenna realm at the same level of influence and there will be some kind of a non-agression pact. By nature, grand navy will always have high influence in a sea unless a faction ( npc based factions ) are in war with them in a certain story event. Like, if Ravenna is in war with navy, navy will have less influence in bronze sea.
There will also be an influence leaderboard which shows you how much each guild / factions influence there is in a certain server.
And there will be more political decisions, like you can apply a blockade on the grand navy but grand navy will simply request fleets from lets say nimbus sea and there will be lots of majors or one or two rear admirals being deployed into the bronze sea. Those fleets will one by one rescue islands from your influence and hunt down your fleet’s ships and outposts. ( performance muncher, i don’t expect this to be implemented tbh lol )
There will be non aggression pacts and stuff of that sort, like.. the red corner in Whitesummit is not destroyed because they are either at the same strength as the navy in that sea or there are some sort of non-aggression pacts. ( I don’t know the exact lore of whitesummit )
This could be the same for our fleets as well: Grand navy won’t attack us and our guild/faction fleet won’t attack grand navy as well.
We can stop other factions, for example in the nimbus sea: there will be ships from viking seas. We can politically tell those viking factions to not come into that sea and lower the amount of ships they bring into those seas.
There can also be a concept that goes in the same way sea influence works: Order and Chaos
If too many bad deeds are happening in a sea, it could have a high level of chaos and we will be able to see much more stealing and killing ( npc wise ) in towns. Like pirates will raid towns because chaos is too high.
In the Order version however stealing and killings would be extremely lower and grand navy or good aligned factions could send in patrol ships and replace the guards in a certain island with their faction npcs ( they would have higher levels, probably ). This could also mean that the NPCs in navy’s stronghold in that sea to be higher levelled. Like imagine silverhold but all marines are now vice captains.
By the way, bounty and fame of a person doesn’t really influence this, what influences their good sea influence or bad sea influence is their actions: For example, an assassin cardinal could just join a server and only hunt bad npcs with high bounties. It would increase assassin syndicate’s good sea influence in that sea. ( Might sound stupid when we are talking about assassin syndicate. )
I’m partially suggesting this last part because I think that even though knights proxy require fame in order to join them, they are evil. and even though brotherhood of balance requires fame in order to join them, they are somehow good ( those are purely my assumptions, I’m making those based on the factions video that was sent to the arcane odyssey official youtube account. )
In that way, brotherhood of balance can still have bounty but they would have good influence for example, because of the good deeds they do in a server.
Some other tools can also be added to this proposal, for example: Flares that you can use if you face really strong enemies and require help from your fleet / faction.
This could be really helpful since there are literally lvl 260 npcs that have around 5k health, killing them is an absolute hassle. So you could request reinforcements via a flare and summon some faction/guild soldiers to make this thing easier, I assume. ( Another performance muncher. I know that there is already an upcoming tool named flare. I wrote this before seeing that. )
That’s all, thank you for reading it if you did read it.
I don’t expect this to be implemented in any way close to my explanation of how it could be, but developers and other suggestors could get some kind of inspiration from my suggestion..