B20 Update: Naval Supremacy

🔶 What's new in B20:

◈ Guild Benefits 
◈ Major rework of Tension
◈ Reworked Reputation
◈ New ships
◈ New Specialist system
◈ Improved economy and smuggling
◈ Numerous interface fixes

🔶 Guild System

Guild Privileges

A new guild privilege system has been added to the game.

◈ Privileges grant bonuses to all guild members. They improve guild development, ship and cannon crafting, resource gathering, and unlock new possibilities, including consumable items and a 5-character guild tag.
◈ In addition, the maximum fleet size is now limited to 30 members.

Influence Points

The influence point economy has been reworked.

◈ The amount of influence points earned for completing guild missions has been increased, but the cost of certain actions paid in influence points has also gone up.
◈ When supplying a city, 1 influence point now grants 15,000 supply rating.
◈ Influence points are now purchased for 200 guild chests instead of battle marks.
◈ The exchange is available only to players with the right to manage the guild treasury.

Guild Missions and Season Results

◈ The military mission "Sortie" now counts regardless of where the battle takes place.
◈ A new mission, "Active Defense," has been added for trading guilds — details in game.
◈ At the end of the season, a bonus to influence points is awarded to all guilds of the military factions: +30% to all guilds of the winning faction and +15% to guilds of the faction that finished second, based on the number of points earned during the season.

🔶 Open Sea and PvP

Reputation

The reputation system has received several important changes:

◈ Reputation is no longer reduced for sinking allies from your squadron, your own guild, or trusted guilds.
◈ The additional cumulative reputation penalty has been reduced from −7 to −3.
◈ For neutral players, the base penalty for sinking nation and trader ships is −3, and it increases by −1 for each subsequent kill of this kind.
◈ For military players and traders, the base penalty for destroying neutral targets has been increased from −1 to −3.
◈ Pirates now receive negative reputation only with the military faction whose ship was sunk; reputation no longer increases with other factions.
◈ The additional reputation penalty for loading cargo from a sunken ship's hold has been removed.
◈ The maximum cumulative penalty is now capped at −20.
◈ Cases of incorrect display of reputation changes have been fixed.

Aggressor Status

◈ Duration increased from 2 to 5 minutes.
◈ The status is no longer removed upon entering a port.
◈ Fixed errors in status display after death and respawn.

Tension

Tension now works under new rules:

◈ The tension-raising mode has been moved to a separate game layer: players participating in it see only each other and non-player ships (NPS). Tension can now only be accumulated during the attack window, which has been shortened from 2 hours to 1 hour.
◈ Players from the faction that owns the port cannot interfere with the attacking sides raising tension — they do not participate in the mode.
◈ Port owners can no longer reduce tension by destroying pirate NPS. However, tension caused by resource shortages is still reduced by 1 for each pirate NPS sunk.
◈ Pirates no longer raise tension by destroying trade NPS.
◈ Tension gained for destroying a patrol has been increased from 3 to 5 for the pirate faction.
◈ After the capture window ends, all tension accumulated during it is reset.
◈ Tension gained for sinking a player has been reduced from 3 to 2.
◈ Removes twice as much tension points for players on Hurakan.

Separately, we've made changes to how patrols work:

◈ The number of patrols has been increased.
◈ Patrol respawn time has been reduced.
◈ Outside the attack window, patrols can be attacked by all players except the port-owning faction. During the attack window, patrols appear semi-transparent and are unavailable to players who are not participating in raising tension.

🔶 Arena and Port Battles

◈ Allies no longer apply combat status to each other in the Arena and in the Hunt.
◈ The ability to interfere with target delivery by ramming an ally has been eliminated.
◈ The Captain's Seal now affects the size of rewards from port battles, as well as experience from PvP, boarding, fishing, and whaling.

🔶 Wind Rose

We are continuing work on the wind rose. During final testing, issues were identified that require additional refinement.

Wind rose changes will be added in one of the upcoming patches.

🔶 Ships and Balance

New Ships

New ships have been added and will be available in the Imperial Chest:

◈ Transport frigate, rank II — Bonhomme Richard;
◈ Heavy ship of the line, rank III — San Juan Nepomuceno;
◈ Fast junk, rank IV — Qīng Lóng;
◈ Heavy atakebune, rank V — Tiě Lóng.

The following are also now available at the Shipyard for battle marks:

◈ Southampton;
◈ Iberia;
◈ Three Hierarchs;
◈ Montanes.

Balance

◈ The speed of La Royale and Adventure when rowing against the wind is now 8.5 knots.
◈ Ship sterns no longer have protection, however the 20% bonus for stern hits has been removed. The calculation of the aimed shot bonus has been changed. The bonus is now applied to penetration rather than to damage.
◈ Fixed the damage calculation for Imperial Forts, which previously did not account for ship protection.
◈ Fixed the "White Double Powder" consumable: the +10 range bonus is now applied correctly, including when used together with the "Reinforced Ports" upgrade.
◈ The "Emergency Powder Charge" upgrade has been reworked: the base damage bonus has been increased from 5% to 10%, and the maximum bonus (+25%) is now reached at 33% ship durability.
◈ The central circle can now be entered starting from level 15.

Handling and Physics

◈ Improved behavior of NPS and captured ships: they now collide with players less often.
◈Improved ship collisions and reduced the harshness of rebounds.
◈ The sail-raising sequence has been reworked and now better matches the historically accurate order.

🔶 Points of Interest

◈ New points of interest have been added (see the "World Exploration" tab in the Logbook for details).
◈ Rewards have been added for completing collections in categories and subcategories of points of interest.

🔶 Economy

◈ Smuggling and cargo transport missions have been reworked, and errors in wage accrual have been fixed.
◈ The bonus for completing smuggling missions has been increased by 30%, and route lengths have been increased.
◈ Missions leading to pirate cities that cannot be safely completed under a peace flag have been removed from regular ports. In pirate cities, such missions can now appear with a low chance and grant a doubled reward — x2 gold, experience, and scrolls.
◈ Fixed errors in the accrual of prosperity and wages.

🔶 Specialists

The special crew system has been substantially improved.

◈ Special crew has been renamed to Specialists.
◈ When dismissing a specialist whose timer has not yet begun to run down, you now receive 1 scroll. If the specialist's timer has already started running down, they cannot be dismissed.
◈ After you obtain a specialist for the first time, they become unlocked: even after fully using them up, you retain access to them and can obtain them again later through a search.
◈ Unlocked specialists can be searched for using scrolls.
◈ A search takes 20 hours; only one search can be active per account at a time.
◈ The "Adventurers" category is not available for search.

🔶 Interface and Convenience

In this update, considerable attention has been given to interface quality.

New features:

◈ Presets now save specialists, designs, and other elements. It is also now possible to rename presets.
◈ Added a confirmation prompt for building high-rank ships.
◈ Added the ability to mass-remove ammunition, cargo, crew, cannons, and designs from all ships via a separate confirmation window.
◈ Steam news is now displayed directly in the game's main menu.

Improvements:

◈ Before sending text to any in-game chat, you can now edit any part of it simply by clicking on it with the mouse cursor.
◈ Fixed various interface display issues.
◈ Improved various interface and design elements: window headers, the friends window, the auction window, cannon class icons, tooltips, the special crew (Specialists) interface, the "presets" window, faction rankings, the caravan window, and world map filters.

🔶 Sound and Graphics

We continue to improve the game's visual and audio components.

◈ New musical compositions have been added.
◈ Fishing, ambient, and combat sounds have been updated.
◈ Fishing has received new visual effects.
◈ Some models, icons, and visual effects have been updated.
◈ Water graphics have been improved: detailed waves and lighting effects have been added.
◈ The sail-opening order has been refined depending on speed.

🔶 Event: WoSB Birthday

Along with Update B20, a festive event arrives in the game! From July 12 to July 25, the Archipelago celebrates another year of its history.

Captains can look forward to a festive event with daily missions, treasure maps, a special currency, and rewards from the Overseas Merchant.

Details will be published closer to the start of the event. Stay tuned!

🔶 Miscellaneous

Bug fixes and various game improvements:

◈ Fixed the issuing of cannons after interacting with pirate squadrons. Transported armament is now correctly issued regardless of the outcome of the encounter — sinking, boarding, or bribery.
◈ Improved client stability and fixed a number of technical errors.
◈ When respawning and departing from a lighthouse, a ship will be temporarily immune to attack after entering the sea.
◈ Tournament refinements: life losses on Thursday and Friday have been removed; in higher leagues, a battle will award more points.
◈ New missions have been added for the Military and Trade academies.
◈ Fixed tutorial bugs.
◈Added Turkish localization.
◈ Improved readability of CJK languages in the interface.