I have to go to bed. I have to be at work in 3  1/2 hours. I would like to share my personal opinion on the going ons from tonight. And it's totally cool if you don't agree with it. I'm not gonna get upset. Just my personal opinion, I'm not trying to create a problem with anyone. Keep in mind, I was not in the same voice channel when this raiding deal was decided on, so if I'm totally wrong here, I apologize.

So these peace treaties were turned down by Ghost and as I heard it was something because fish or someone talking shit which caused Ghost to back out. At some point tonight it was decided to raid their base. But we don't have the ships for it so we spent time to build a level 1 brig. Right off the get go it was disorganized with our allies going in separately and us having to stop and swap ai from ship to ship. Once we finally got up there we went for their allies base instead. Once we got there it was heavily fortified and defended. Their allies show up and we immediately turn to fight. It was a chasing battle with them just luring us away and separating us. More and more of their allies started showing us completely out numbering and out classing us. We lost the brig and retreated.

Alright so that out of the way I'd like to propose some suggestions.

We have far too little defenses. We have mortars and cannons on the top base that really aren't that effective. The mortars on the gates are effective but just out in the open. We need to change that. Let's take example from the base we tried assaulting. Fortify the shit out of our island. Not just our base, the whole island. We can build similar pillboxes out in the water so not to screw with spawns. I've tested it on my test server and it works. Next we need to lock up defensive supplies. Guns, ammo, armor, bows, arrows. Everything. Have a stockade just for defending. And have admins and select council members have access to the door. Too many times we go for weapons and they are gone. We also need to go hard on gathering AI and Gold. We now have the amount of people that can make this possible.

As for ships, we need to make some battle schooners just for fighting SOTD, gathering chests in the water and really focusing on maps. Forget maps that are more than two grids away, it's a waste of time. Next are ships for assaulting. We need to have a fleet of ships. Nothing too large but a decent fleet. For example, two to four brigs, three to five schooners and some fire sloops. We have the people for some of those and Noob Lord and myself will heavily focus on getting more recruits to man the rest of them. We need to focus on leveling ships up and crafting them out of higher tier parts.

Now for allies. We have none compared to our enemies. We need to venture out and seek out alliances. They won't come to us. This is a hard and complicated task. However it can be done. Hell even if we have to ally up with the fan club alliances. It's more than we have now.

We can make this happen. I believe we all have it in us. We just need to be a little more organized and focused. I know a lot of this is already on a lot of folks minds and we've talked about a lot of this before. We need to focus more on it. This is just my opinion and suggestions. To be honest, we are getting our asses kicked. We are constantly sitting at bare minimum while our enemies flourish. If we're not careful we'll end up getting wiped and then end up on a private server with less than half of our members.