At the moment Nations rules stop you from claiming natural straits with peaceful towns, but not with unpeaceful towns
The rule should be extended to include unpeaceful towns
- The unpeaceful town could be owned by someone inactive or only logs in the deposit money. That means they'll never login which deprives you of the chance to blow up the walls, assuming they don't immediately surrender
- Even if you blow up the wall, they can reblock it in a few minutes which makes the entire siege pointless
- The effects of this are comparable to hypothetically blocking Bab Al Mandab or Gibraltar which are rightfully siege regions to prevent this. For example the entire Baltics are cut off from the ocean because of a single unpeaceful town, they have to take a extremely long detour around tiny canals and the Russian Arctic to get around this, which makes both navally attacking and bulk trading with these towns very difficult
- However after this rule is implemented unnecessary canals should be reverted by staff, for example the giant canal Konigsberg is building through Scandinavia to bypass the Baltic sea wall.