if those few friends of yours are truly loyal to each other, i suggest you form your own SQ and join back up. If your main fleet isnt growing and getting inactive, you can withdraw the SQ without losing touch with your buddies, the loyal ones.

It is also easier to join up with other SQ in similar situations. Possibly share leadership which is not uncommon, even for some of the current harbor owners. And if things go sour, withdrawing the SQ will still keep you guys together so you dont have to re-tag individually (only suffer a penalty).

also I dont think HA or not being able to play them is a problem for mid level players to leave. To be honest, a BB4 player in HA will not even be able to compete in the Harbor tile, which is the main attraction. The ocean tiles play the similar to fleet vs all rooms anyway.

to pay mercs.

if you half read all of the previous comments you will realize that this is pointing the suggestion in the opposite direction.

credits to mercs gives even more reason for half the members in every fleet to ditch and become mercs.

and as a small fleet hiring mercs, they would hire only the super veterans, not the BB3 who would otherwise not see HA play.

and lets say super vet players dont make up a huge portion of the merc population. It would be more profitable to recruit a player than hire him as a merc... oh wait. he would like that cuz he wouldnt get paid.

and still bigger fleets will have more money to hire more/better mercs than small fleets anyway.. and we are back to square one.

Money doesnt buy skill

I disagree on some points. Most of the highest level players could care less about the credits. I'd imagine that they have hordes of them and points as well, unspent. It would do them little good to leave a successful fleet that they have time/energy invested in just to gain more useless credits.

Second, a smaller fleet could properly plan to beat a larger fleet with mercs. There are a lot of smaller fleets with a core of high level players. They simply need to "rent" an army for the day. A cap on the number of players that can do HA would prevent abuse and would limit the larger fleet from being invinsible by merc.

Finally, there are quite a few good natured people in NF that just want to do battle. I'd bet there are friends of fleets that would do it for litterally nothing, just as a favor or for fun.... which is what it is all about.

Like I said, I've seen this system work.

If you get mercs and take a harbor as a tiny fleet then how will you make money to hold your harbor

CV players have a lots of credits. BB and SS players much less.

Mercs, due to past history with a fleet on AZ, I understand, are also kinda ill-regarded in NF.

I however saw some kind of unofficial mercing. 2 friends, highly skilled were getting paid in credits/week for being in a fleet. So mainly this suggestion would make it a bit pointless.

As far as lower level players goes, they wouldn't dig in. A bb3 in HA is worthless, pretty much. Someone with 2-3 BB6, even if a total retard can play canonfodder at least.

But mainly, HA are determined by 3-4 key players that sunk most of the stuff.

So won't this then spur more people to drive CVs? If mercing is already happening, then why not sanction and regulate it? So a smaller fleet would only need to hire a couple key mercs. Thats pretty much the same in the other game I played. A key player was taking out like 8-10 others....

You obviously over-estimate the ammount of unattached key players there is.