Portal:Handbook/Politics/Selected article/4

War is very fun and very dangerous, and knowing what to do is extremely important, both as an attacker and as a defender. Warring is not just something that one or two people do in a flag, it is a comprehensive flagwide effort to sink your opponent's boats, and to protect your own. Tactics to accomplish this are far reaching, and some push the boundaries of the Terms of Service, so adherence to either a War Convention, Common Sense, or both is highly advised.

Gathering Intelligence Part One: Keeping Tabs on the Enemy
Every officer in a flag at war is responsible for gathering intelligence. Use the /fwho command on the enemy flag to determine who is online. Run down the side tab, clicking on each pirate online, and determine their location. For any that are on boats, click on the boat and determine whether the boat is in the war flag, or they're jobbing for another flag. This is how you take inventory of all the enemy boats at sea. These boats may be potential targets, and they also might be potential hunters, out to sink boats of your own flag, so it's important that every officer in the flag be appraised of their location and staffing levels, repeatedly. Someone in the flag should update the rest of the flag on the boats of the enemy often, as frequently as every five minutes, for use in both offense and defense. This isn't as hard as it sounds - someone can do it while playing parlor games if they have a second account open.

Gathering Intelligence Part Two: Protecting Yourself from Attackers
If you are running a boat, be it a pillage, a trade run, memorizing routes, or any other activity, you must be aware of the potential attackers before they nab you. That means first and foremost monitoring the flag officer channel for updates on enemy positions, but also means protecting yourself. If an enemy boat is called out over the while you're at sea, do a "blank" /who command. This will bring up a tab indicating all the boats at sea in your archipelago, who their navver is, and how many players are aboard. If the enemy boat is in that list, chances are high they're hunting you. At this point you can run to port, abandon your boat at a league point, get more jobbers from your flag onto your boat to help you defend it (should they find you and attack) or just trust in your skills to either evade or sink them. It will behoove you to do a /vwho on their boat, look through their jobber's statistics, and evaluate whether they're within the same general might rating as your boat. You can also get an idea whether the match is even, or in one side's favor. Don't forget that people can jump onto or off of a boat right before an engage.

Gathering Intelligence Part Three: Initiating The Hunt
If you see a potential target flash by on the flag officer chat channel, and you'd like to set out and try to sink them, /vwho that boat directly. Go aboard a nearby boat, and do a blank /who to determine whether they're in the same arch as you. If they are, ferry about the archipelago and start buying drinks for old salts. You should know what port they were last seen in from the /who command. If you can establish their destination from an Old Salt, then you can infer which route they might be on. Crew up a boat and head out for the kill!

There are many other creative means by which your flag can help you track down the location of the boat. You could /pay someone on the target boat a bribe to tell you their location. You could have your flagmates monitor the archipelago by deporting boats at every island and watching for the target to sail past. You could see if the target boat has a hiring notice posted on the notice board, and actually take a job aboard their boat.

Be careful with the use of alt accounts in any aspect of war, because the criteria for suspensions and bans during war are nebulous and difficult to pin down.