maturin

False dichotomy, 9 times out of 10.

No captain should be forced to strike colors. However, after enough casualties the crew should suffer a catastrophic moral failure and desert the guns, saving themselves by hiding below the waterline. This would leave players no choice but to run away. And in turn, this would encourage people to fight aggressively and spread out the damage between both hull and rig so that disabled foes can be run down and boarded.

CubanMafia, what is the big ship in your avatar?

Учитесь, господа. Если все остальное ровно, тогда более длинный корпбль--быстрее. В серьезный шторм куттер не сможет свободно ходить под парусом. Ему придеться держиться на месте как мощная Виктория подойдет. Так как она сможет догнать легкий фрегат в подходящих условиях.

Sailing under courses alone was unheard of after the first few decades of the 18th century. Both fleets would always have their topsails set, and the leeward fleet would not be particularly interested in heeling, as it just makes things difficult. If you are availing yourself of the leeward range advantage, you are probably too far away to hit much of anything anyhow. If you want to reduce heel, you can simply shiver the topsails by rotating the yards. This will cause you to decelerate after a moment, but the effect on heeling will be instant. (In the game, heel is still incorrectly tied to speed, which handicaps players.)

So 10 kts of wind causes 19% disparity and 10 degrees of heel can cause over 30% disparity. Elevation wins out, and the leeward vessel would outrange its opponent in this case. If the windward vessel could only elevate its guns to 0 degrees, the difference would be enormous.

I have a hard time believing that 10 kts of wind is going to balance out 10 or more degrees of barrel elevation. You should do the math and then suggest this.

Huh, Crossbones entirely went under my radar. I have to ask, though... do they ever, err, sail anywhere on that show? If I were to mute the sound for some of the trailers, I would guess that it is just some gritty reboot of The King and I, with a male love interest.

The gunboat was my favorite vessel in PotBS, lol.

If they implemented realistic ramming damage, every battle would end like that. As soon as someone sees that they are being beaten, they will decide to send both ships to the bottom.

It's rivers and harbors that will make the real difference. Most estuaries and Maine-like coastline will be chock full of places where large vessels can't get to. Ideally, coastal areas will be full of ledges and shoals. So while larger warships can pass through, they will be forced to navigate to avoid running aground. That will slow them down while the little sloop glides over all.

In action there would be a certain number of hands dedicated to trimming the sails, while the vast majority occupied themselves entirely with gunnery. If a mast actually came down, or if the ship needed to tack in sub-optimum conditions, hands would probably be called from the guns.

That video is a perfect example of why ramming should injure the rammer more than the rammee. Your opponent decided that he was losing, and that it was worth sacrificing some hitpoints to try and rake you. So let him suffer serious speed-aggravated leaks to the bow if he makes that decision.

I'll be pissed off if there isn't. However, most of the world's coasts are within cannon shot of 20ft deep water, where any sailing ship can go.

The whole point of Constitution is that she can outfight anything she can't outrun. You'd be best of hunting her down in two medium frigates. And nothing is effective against ships of the line except others of their class.

Recently I've been really into Sam Simulator, the 'accurate to the switch' reproduction of Soviet-era missile systems. For most of the systems, there ARE no graphics, just photos of enormous arrays of switches. And you spend all your time squinting at blurry little blips on the radar screen. But when you finally start shooting down the capitalist pig warplanes you feel so damn SMART. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/04/06/1289863/-Game-Review-SAM-Simulator Also, ArmA 3, because it keeps getting better and better.

When you're aiming an entire gundeck, the shots will land all over the place anyways. There's not too much leading necessary because none of the ships move faster than a human sprint and are enormous targets. But if you were employing aimed fire against a certain mast, you should take movement into account. Definitely. Maybe you will hit the stern instead of the middle, though, and have a few shots land in the water astern.

I'm of the opinion that micromanagement of steering in general isn't a good feature to look into. Because simply put, the game's helm is a car's steering wheel, and the ships are on auto-pilot. They steer absolutely, unerringly straight, with only very slow deviations when using manual skipper. It has nothing to do with the actual business of steering any kind of sailing vessel, because that's out of the game's scope, in simulation territory. If you take a step away from arcade, it looks even odder to have rudder angle modeled, but with the ship sailing perfectly straight over a smooth surface with absolute steady wind speed and thrust. Rudder angle might be useful, because we can still pretend that we are giving orders to the helmsman. I'll leave it to the devs to decide. Edit: I don't have permission to view that image. The forum keeps having this problem.

Just present the plans of the ship as it should look in the game.

When is it useful in game terms? Probably not often, just when you want to set up a continual gradual turn and pay attention to other things instead of un-ergonomically going tap-tap-tap at the A and D keys. If the game's ships did not accelerate so damnedly fast, there would be more cases where a gentle, high speed turn could be advantageous. In real life, there are plenty of times when you would want to turn but keep your speed up. Most often because of leeway. A tight turn that bleeds off speed will also have you drifting sideways. And the key to upwind sailing is to build up speed with the wind free, and then employ it on a closehauled course. So you would never want to jam the helm over and shove your bow up against the wind as fast as possible. That would result in a slower closehauled speed overall. (You probably know this already, but if you luff up to a closehauled course at 8 knots, the boat will decelerate and settle onto a steady 6.5 knots. But if you steer the same course while accelerating from 5 knots, the boat will only reach a steady 6 knots. Numbers made up, obviously.)

И убирая розовый свет, делать раскраску по-POTBS-ому можно?

Cutter is dead sexy, guys. http://imgur.com/a/sKPAm#0 And this is my favorite action pic so far:

I think that this feature will be most valuable as a response to damage. In battle, fighting both sides of the ship is the most difficult and organizationally complex task that a crew has. So it stands to reason that once you start taking serious fire, this effort will fall apart quickest. In the current build, we lose a lot of guns. We should be able to command the crew to concentrate on one side or the other, which would counteract that gun-loss. In that case it would be in the attacker's best interest to sneak around and engage the other broadside, causing confusion as the crews try to get reorganized. Edit: Low crew levels is also the main difference between naval and merchant vessels. An Indiamen may not have enough trained men to load both broadsides simultaneously. The little pirate sloop with 150 men packed in it will take advantage of that.

Yeah, full speed ramming should cause major (perhaps non-repairable) leaks. Perhaps the flooding should disproportionately affect the rammer, to discourage trolling. I second the bowsprit (and possibly foremast) loss. If the bowsprit could be used to rip lower sails and entangle shrouds for boarding purposes, that would be totally rad. We can pretend that the the light ship will impact the larger vessel with its bowsprit. The bowsprit will snap off, but this could slow the ramming ship down to the point that little damage is done to either vessel. Thus, using small, nimble vessels as rammers will be ineffective in gameplay. Likewise, a frigate cannot effectively ram and sink a lineship, because the bowsprit can act as a buffer or brake, making the damage minimal. Larger ships also have a long stem or cutwater, meaning that collisions will mostly do damage above the waterline. If you ram your nose into someone's sides, the collision has to crush multiple feet of timber before the underwater parts of the hull make contact. The devs could point to this fact in order to justify low-damage from collisions involving similar ships, with rigging damage as the primary consequence. Bowsprit of the ramming vessel hooks in the rigging of its intended target. If the victim is also sailing at full speed, it will drag the ramming ship along with it. As a result, ramming vessel gets slewed sideways by the bowsprit, resulting in a glancing blow, with less damage. Cruuuuuunch, glug glug glug. If a captain in a smaller, nimbler ship allows himself to be rammed by a 1st rate, he deserves his fate. The main question is what to do about ships of equal size ramming each other. If I am losing a gunfight badly, and can sink both myself and my enemy by ramming, I have a strong vested interest in таран.

Historically speaking, mercenaries were more often used by major powers with fleet. There were plenty of Western European captains in the service of the Russian navy, for instance. Mercenary work could be another clever way for the game to offer specific PvE options. The game could decide that two minor powers are at war with each other, but neutral overall. A PvE-inclined captain could enter the service of one or the other, and essentially have a POTBS PvE-flag on him.