Enraged Ewok

Been working my way through the academy since getting the game last week, and for the most part enjoying it immensely. A few thoughts below on the missions that have stood out most to me so far, both good and bad: Sink the Raiders Definitely the hardest one I've done up until I reached the one last night to build a BB/BC/CA and destroy two modern BBs, a BC, and their escorts. Feels just right in terms of difficulty to me, while still being very engaging gameplay-wise and having multiple ways to win. Speaking of engagement, my most recent attempt with 2 armored cruisers carrying 12" guns and 5" secondaries had me on the edge of my seat. By the end, with one enemy CA left and closing on the transports, I had only one 12" gun turret still in action between my two ships. Both had around 50% structure, but looked so roughly handled that they might not be worth repairing afterwards. Fortunately the final CA wasn't much better off, and the 5" secondaries did their deadly (and seemingly now too common) work of causing magazine detonations. Armed Convoy Attack I did this once with a BC and just barely failed due to time limit, and twice with CLs and won so hard and fast my head was spinning. Especially with CLs, I feel like this mission is far too easy. The first time I was expecting to get reamed by the pre-dreadnought and armored cruiser escorts, so I sent 1 division of 2 CLs at them as a distraction, and the other division of 2 at the convoy to sink it before all my CLs died. Much to my surprise, my CLs' 3" casemates scored multiple ammo detonations on the pre-dreadnoughts and had both sunk within 40 minutes on the clock without any torpedo hits. The accuracy of the CLs on the BBs/CAs was often 70-100%, without the gun tech bonuses, within 3km range, which seemed really silly when the pre-dreads had sub 2% accuracy at best at the same range Search and Destroy This one bored me. Build a fast battleship, run down and sink two retreating battleships. It felt like, short of cheesing the game to get stupid high speeds to close the distance, it mainly came down to whether I got a lucky hit on the faster of the two running battleships. When I finally did beat it, my destroyers actually caught up to and torpedoed the lead BB after I sank the first with gunfire but couldn't land any hits on the second Destroy a Fleet (Forgive me if I have the name wrong on this one, it's the one where you build BBs/BCs to fight the 2 modern BBs and their BC/CA/CL/DD escorts.) I've only tried a couple times so far on this one. First was with a closer ranged approach, which got my 2 ships chewed up and sunk very quickly. I tried a longer ranged approach afterwards and fared much better, with my main issues now being the screening ships closing and launching a lot of torpedoes. My main mechanics problem with this mission is basically the flip side of the Armed Convoy Attack mission. Despite radar and all these nice FCS upgrades, 6", 5", and 3" secondaries are nearly useless against the DDs/CLs in the screen, but the screen gets incredibly high gun accuracy against my ships and cause quite a bit of damage despite their tiny caliber. Accuracy and hit rate against the BBs and BCs seems fine for the most part DDs vs TBs I actually liked this one, and at least with regards to accuracy against each other, the DDs and TBs felt ok. Both had very poor accuracy against each other even at close range, and most of the sinkings were caused by torpedoes and in a couple cases lucky main battery hits from the opposing dreadnought. Gunnery did assist in that by occasionally causing flooding/engine damage that slowed them enough for torpedoes to hit. I believe I got incredibly lucky managing to win this on my first try. I did lose all 5 of my DDs while the AI had 6 TBs left, but my AI-designed battleship managed to sink the enemy BB and then after a long time my secondaries managed to sink enough of the remaining TBs to win.

It's likely a mix of me being somewhat rusty and the ship being oak/crew space with only the most basic mods, but my experience with the Belle vs an Endymion earlier was not good. 30%~ better turnrate was not nearly enough to overcome the Endy being better in nearly all other aspects. Fortunately the Belle only cost 200k, which is the only reason I'd recommend sailing it over a heavier 18pd frigate.

You are literally bitching about the equivalent of not getting rare loot drops when you didn't even participate in the raid, to use the most general MMO mechanics.

They added more servers due to an issue that wasn't actually there: people AFKing ingame and causing other players to wait an inordinate amount of time to log in. That was solved by AFK timers, not by adding more servers. The game was also fresh off Steam release at that time, with all the hype and population surge that comes with it. Look at every game launched since Naval Action on Steam. Massive initial population as all the lemmings move to the next "New" thing, followed by a steady or in same cases immediate drop weeks or months later as the next "New" thing comes out. The game was not magically more fun back then, and population drop due to ROE changes a massive stretch of logic at best. The current ROE we have is the best we have ever had, and most fun for me. I don't want the entire RN joining my frigate duel. With old ROE, ganking was worse, people still camped in battle screens, and people ran just as much as they do now. Nothing's changed except we know our odds of success outright instead of having to wait 5 minutes before deciding whether or not we can actually engage without getting dogpiled 49v1.

I disagree that this is a question of ship or crew size, or a question of level. Even a basic cutter can go trader hunting, or make itself useful in a team battle. I think it's a question of player confidence and skill, which will be different from player to player. My advice is to tag lone enemy AI traders (but not Le Gros Ventres)/take lowest rank missions, learn how and when to use the various ammunition types, learn to demast by shooting those predictable and barely maneuvering AI traders, learn how your ship handles on different points of sail, and most importantly, learn how your most likely targets handle on various points of sail. Learn how boarding mechanics work, and learn to watch your speed and control your sails to decelerate and board an enemy, and to keep your speed up to prevent a larger ship from boarding you. Don't let failure get you down, as at this point your ship and crew are free. Once you've leveled up once, you'll have the crew for a Pickle, which is about the most flexible small ship as far as sailing capabilities go and also offers the most crew protection out of all the 7th rates thanks to the high bulwarks. You can use it to hunt player trade ships, or take on similarly sized player warships, or fight against AI. Just remember that losing crew over those starting 40 will cost gold to replace, but an officer with doctor perk (costs 1 point) can reduce that expense hugely. If you joined a clan and happen to find yourself fighting players or AI in larger ships (3 masted vessels), do your best to keep yourself on the back end of the ship and away from their broadside's arc of fire. A single broadside from them can devastate you, but you can do a lot of damage putting round shot through the vulnerable back side of the ship. Firing at a larger ships sides is in most cases going to be a waste of shot, powder, and your ship and crew. Leveling up a couple more times will give you access to the Brigs, Snow, Rattlesnake, Mercury, and Niagara, which are all more powerful in terms of broadsides but less flexible in some degrees in their sailing than the smaller ships. Well played, most of these ships can handle a single larger 5th rate in a 2v1, dependent on player skill. Niagara, thanks to it's 9pd guns, can do even better. Just beware of larger ships firing grape at your open decks if you come close alongside, as this will maul your crew and likely lose you the battle. Rattlesnake is also beloved by group PVP thanks to its chase armament and exceptional speed. As a comparison, it took me about a week and a half to get to my first 5th rate, a Cerberus. I doubt it would take that long now (heavily dependent on daily playtime of course) to get to the same level, as leveling is easier now than it was then. Making money is also easier now, as you can sell your labor hours to other players and also sell all the loot from captured AI traders. The trader interface on the map (press M in OW) will show you a list of ports that produce and consume every commodity, and are ordered by distance from you. Hope this helps. Good luck and good hunting Captain.

I agree with a lot of the changes you've suggested to crafting in general, but I do disagree on a few points regarding rare reward/event ships and blueprints. Firstly, those blueprints will very likely be accessible through events on all servers, post-rework. And given all the event ideas I've seen over the months, I doubt it would be hard to create more events accessible to different playstyles (trading, PVE combat, etc.). Second, nothing is stopping players on PVP2 from putting together their own tournament, as the PVP1 tournament was originally a player creation. It was later sponsored by the devs in the form of rewards. I saw several people trying to put together non-clan teams for this, but this was made impossible due to game limitations not allowing cross-nation teams, not that people not in a clan were barred from participating. I hope that that hurdle can be overcome for the next tournament, but who knows. Regarding the blueprint rewards, the trick is keeping them rare. The more avenues to obtaining the blueprint, the more people will eventually end up with them unless they are further diluted across the events. Personally, I'd rather just the ships be given away in this case and not have a blueprint at all for them, though I feel like many in this forum would take issue with that as well. I feel that that would allow an increase in possible prizes across events, player tournaments, etc. without opening the floodgate so that every nincompoop at Flag rank has one. And with the return of events, he can get the blueprint. All he has to do is put in the time to do it, much like my friends grinding maps over and over again in Warframe and screaming bloody murder when they don't get the drop they want. Assuming the reworked event is successful, it could pave the way for more varieties of events to fit different players (traders, PVErs, PVPers), so that even the trader that wants nothing to do with PVP doesn't have be "forced" into a playstyle he does not enjoy to get his reward. I disagree entirely that event rewards in the form of blueprints and limited ships are false features. The content is there, the player just has to put in the time to get it. What you did was claim that Russian clans were being favored by Russian devs, while ignoring everyone else that had also received rewards from the tournament and events. That was entirely out of line.

The post being used as "evidence" was taken out of context at a much earlier stage in development, and the reviewer was using that post to insinuate that these would be mystical pay2win premium ships. And then the reviewer turns his comment section into an echo-chamber hating on the devs instead of informing players about the game, removing any comments that offer a counterpoint. That's out of line, and I have no issues with admin or other staff calling them on their bullshit. The customer is not always right, and when they deliberately misrepresent things like this it hurts the rest of us by driving away players who might have tried and liked the game.

Personal opinion from someone who's played a lot of betas over the years. Often times (and I personally believe it holds true for NA as well), early development is not a good place to say "we will never introduce premium ships/skins/insert microtransaction item here." The reason for this is that microtransactions are a business model just as much as an avenue to game content. At this point, Naval Action's business model is purely "buy once - play forever." No subscriptions, none of that recurring income that F2P/P2P games use to fund their own continued development. The devs' attitude here reminds me a lot of the devs of Eugen Systems, who long ago said there would never be paid DLC, which in this comparison are one and the same for possible premium ships in Naval Action. However, two years after release of Wargame Red Dragon (third game in the Wargame franchise), the devs asked on the forums if players would be interested in paying for DLC. All DLC, new factions, units, etc. had been free in both Red Dragon's predecessor, and Red Dragon at that point. For the most part, the community was happy to pay for new content at that point to help fund continued development and updates to the game. That may happen with Naval Action as well, but it's far to early to tell seeing as the game isn't even released yet.

Events were available on multiple saturdays with date and time known well in advance. After being pulled for rework, one of the changes promised in the rework was that events will be at random locations and times so that people in different time zones and in game locations have an easier time participating. There will be more chances in the future to get event ships. At the end of the day, unless you had a life threatening emergency, it was a choice to do something offline instead of spending an hour or two in the game. You had the opportunity, but chose to spend your time on something else.

Quite a big difference between being hit on the hull by another ship at relatively low speed, vs wind pressing on canvas far from a ship's center of gravity. Too much canvas, and yes your gunports will go under and you will founder. Remember the Vasa?

Except that you could find notes hinting at the position of enemy ships by AI, these notes were often posted to chat by the community and in some cases even recorded on the forum, DAYS in advance of the event. You literally didn't even have to hunt for notes, with how many people were posting them to chat. Event time slot was an issue yes, but when it was removed for rework one of the things said by admin was that event times would be made random so that different timezones and areas on the map get (easier) opportunities to get the prize. You had, and will have in the future, full access to this interesting stuff with the caveat of *GASP* you actually play the game. The biggest issue I saw with the event was that players sailed out expecting for all participants to get a participation award, and then whining when the early bird got the worm. For the record, I participated in several events. I got nothing. I still had fun going after enemy ships that I suspected to have cargo. You payed for an early access title. You paid for the privilege to help with development, with the understanding that things will change drastically during development, that wipes will happen, and with the understanding that some ships would be premium/event ships. From your final comment, it appears that this is not the kind of game you enjoy. So I ask, if you don't enjoy playing the game, why are you here?

Personally, if we're already removing most ships in player docks, I'd rather go full hog and do the full asset wipe. Avoid all this bickering and whining about compensation for an action that SHOULD be implicitly understood to be part of early access development.

From the perspective of a crafter who built primarily for himself and gratis for clanmates, and a primarily PVP sailor, I like the proposed changes. Now instead of having X yellow ships whose only differences are the upgrades installed on them, I have much more room for customization that isn't dependent on RNG. Both good for me and good for the recipients of my crafted ships, since now I'm not eating loss after loss when the requested exceptional 3/5 LO + speed build comes out once or more as 2/4 stiffness and the recipients don't have to wait weeks or more for me to slowly and painfully do my econ. As long as people keep losing ships, ships will need to be built

Not in the slightest. Number of upgrade slots didn't change, stats of the built-in upgrades/trims didn't change. Those are still gold, even though the ship banner changed to purple. What on earth is there to be frustrated over? A color change in the UI? It's not like the ship became worse or anything.

Will bridle ports ever be able to function as chasers with their real fields of fire, 45*~ to the right or left of the ship's bow? Or is the area control perk considered to have fixed this mechanics wise?