the Zoners

[Rudo]

The thing is, people bitching about the Zoners having some kind of "military presence" forgets that while they might have the equivalent fleet of a house, it isn't all under one banner and it is dispersed across many freeports. Granted, the bulk of it will be at Gran Canaria, but nevertheless it exists. The way I see it, each Freeport is autonomous and runs itself, but obviously each Freeport would need to have a designated "leader".

If each Freeport encounters trouble that it cannot handle by itself, it would then request an assembly of all Freeport leaders on Gran Canaria (this is just how i'd see it overall), and they'd discuss how to handle the issue between themselves, since it may affect all Zoners. The Zoner Council as Mal created originally, pretty much works in this fashion. Otherwise, all Freeports stand and work alone for the most part. If an organisation declared war on a Freeport though, it would be reasonable to assume that all other Freeports would assist, because it could threaten them in the future if they did nothing. Just how I see it, and everyone is entitled to their opinions. I largely agree with what Richter said.

Also, I don't really get where people are thinking that the Golden Chrysanthemums are a military power. They're about on a par with the Blood Dragons, only they have considerably more funding from selling cardamine, which I don't think is unreasonable to consider. They also don't really use anything above the level of fighters/bombers (I think at present the official [GC] group owns a single gunboat, which isn't even active). Anyway, I won't go into that further here, but since others had kept mentioning it I thought i'd make a mention of it.

Perhaps you should all, as others have said, just wait and see what 4.85 brings (although I still think it should be called version 5 XD). All groups are evolving from their original ideas, such is the passage of time. To be honest, I would say no pirate groups should have anything bigger than a gunboat, and most pirate groups shouldn't even have access to even gunboats. On the same token, if we were to do that, Zoners shouldn't get any battleships or cruisers or gunboats, although I would make a couple of Zoner Juggernauts dockable bases and stick them outside Gran Canaria and other key Zoner locations maybe. Junkers shouldn't have battleships. They shouldn't even have cruisers. But how boring would it be, if nothing ever changed at all.

But times change. People get richer and more powerful. More space gets opened up for exploration and exploitation. The tech levels and manufacturing capabilities of groups increase. Just the way it goes.

The [GC] gunboat is indeed active, or at least was logged in tonight. I saw'rd the Lady wif my own eyes!

While I'm somewhat for the expansion of fleet assets, I'm in full agreement that factions that don't prioritize direct conflict shouldn't really get access to a lot of the bigger ships. I say this as the chap officially spearheading the Junker Congress. That said, people lobbied for caps and had decent roleplay. They got them because of this. Thing is, we rarely use them now that we have them. And in my humble opinion, they never get used for the right reasons.

But that's me, I'm solidly anti-cap as a rule.

I can't wait to push every Junker who wants a cap towards a salvage frigate come 4.85. Now THAT'S an artillery ship fit for a Junker.

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