maturin

No vessel would have survived that long, though. Warships were entirely temporary constructions, and were very elderly by 30 years old or so.

Once you get back into the 17th century, the nautical practices result in less seaworthy vessels because of the inability to reef. They also lacked decent storm canvas because staysails were not used and the courses they carried would get becalmed in heavy seas. On the flipside, they had a lot of freeboard and the stability it implied. The very high prows and sterncastles (optimized for boarding combat) also made the older ships less weatherly, which often proved fatal, on a less shore.

The furling and unfurling is of course too fast. But if they would change the animation to represent the sails being clewed up, then it would be much more natural-looking, as that is a fairly fast operation that requires no men on the yards.

Yeah, it must have been pretty janky. Sources report that it was a good way to have your shot bounce off the enemy's hull.

Not unless I can also recruit the cast of Donkey Kong to fight on my forecastle.

The devs indeed said 1670-1820, but haven't actually shown any signs of building anything that would look out of place in 1800.

A ship's full complement was always enough to fight both sides. Nonetheless, many ships didn't have a full complement, or the men lacked the experience to be of use. Fighting both sides was disorienting, chaotic and a challenge for leadership. The officers may not always have been up to the task. Certainly a merchant ship would never have been able to man all its guns, provided it carried a full broadside. As a realistic limitation, it would be a very powerful tool of balance in the hands of the devs.

Post on the forums regularly and you'll be picked up in the next round of testing invites, most likely.

I chose four. Sorry. *Improve Sailing....Only because of all the features, this one is closest to completion. We need tweaks for the tacking system and a way to disable the fore-and-aft sails. I also strongly feel that we should have an advanced optional feature for control over individual sails, even if in prototype form with a proof-of-concept UI. I would also love to see some visual features like luffing and clewing up, but that can wait until the future. *improve damage model....This feature is about half-done, with very nice hull damage, and some progress on rigging damage. Sinking is still the only outcome of battle, and that is a dangerous state to release the game in. Rigging damage needs to be better than POTBS, which it barely is, right now. And crew damage needs to matter. The devs' vision of different paths to victory does not yet exist. *Prototype of open world.....This prototype can be as janky and crude as you like, just get it out there. It seems to me that only 5% of the English-speaking forum has much interest in a WoT-style game without persistent open world play. The prototype will be your promise of things to come, and draw people into the testing more by offering more unpredictability. *Add full line of ships......Well, maybe not a full line-up. Just give back the testing ships we had earlier. Your poor new testers haven't seen anything but Victory the pregnant elephant.

Haha, did you give him any advice on how to get out of the bind?

Already in the game, fenthedog.

Непредсказуемость геймплея. Приключение бывает только в услових неожиданости.

I don't understand where the OP is coming from. POTBS didn't require pirate grinding.

The thing about studdingsails is that they are goddamn complicated. Their chapter in Seamanship in the Age of Sail is like five times longer than all the other chapters. I don't think it's really worth it if they're just going to be a speed-boost where we set all the canvas willy-nilly, with no regards to any of the real factors at work. Paintings of ships with every studding sail set are due either to artistic license or a flat calm where the captain wants to take maximum advantage of ANY puff of air from a butterfly ruffling its wings in China. In practice, the most common use of studdingsails would be set them on one side of the ship only. And most of the time you would only use one or two: a foretopsail stun'sail on the windward side, maybe a maintopsail stun'sail on the leeward side (before stun'sails were mostly discontinued on the mainmast). Basically you would need to allow a huge variety of configurations, including weird stuff like stun'sails on the maintopgallant but not the topsail, making the higher sail wider.

Not sure why current always seems to come up. They're not really that critical unless you are a climatologist or are drifting around helplessly in a raft. Coastal tides, on the other hand, were critical for all aspects of seafaring. Practically the stoplight of the age of sail.

Haven't they hinted that there will never be POTBS-style avcom? I think that RTS-like control of groups of men would be best.

Brig refers to rig, not size or role. (Thankfully the British only screwed the pooch on nomenclature once, with the whole sloop-of-war deal.) It's an error in the article, but I didn't correct it because there is a citation posted. Hard to know whether the source contained that description or not. I always thought that corvette was a French term, aimed at just this sort of vessel, so I'm surprised to see it called a frigate.

Auto-skipper is more than capable of tacking. What was your starting speed and did you remember to reverse your rudder?

Or a corvette, in this case. 18 guns and 170 men is too small for a frigate, including in French usage at the time.

Hmmn, maybe. For sure we need a more pronounced effect from loss of rig balance. Losing a foremast doesn't result in a particularly noticeable weather helm, when the ship should really be griping and fighting the helm.

I also agree that backwards rudder is too powerful. When backing, the rudder can only be used very gingerly to avoid damaging the scantlings or even tearing it off altogether. Furthermore, when making sternway water tends to pile up under the counter, causing rotational forces that often push the stern up into the wind. Steering in reverse is an all around awkward process that could be modeled by low rudder efficiency in-game. I disagree, however, that the squares are powerful enough in terms of rotation. Ink's tacking method proves that they are so potent in that regard that we can turn into the wind without any momentum whatsoever.

Great! Now we need your help complaining about the tacking procedure and the inability to disable staysails.

Но каждому кораблю нужна коза и цыплята. ))

But his method works just as well at 9 knots, in the current build with the new stationary turning speed values. And this makes Maturin a sad doctor. Just did the same test myself. Tacking through 180 degrees with an initial speed (on a bream reach) of 9.2-9.5 knots. Time required using Ink's unrealistic method (switching the main and mizzen 90 degrees too early)..........2:12 Time required using the proper method that would work in real life............................................................2:55-3:11 That means that people who tack "correctly" will be penalized by as much as 30%. That's huge. The devs promised us realistic tacking, but if we tack realistically now, we are just letting the enemy catch and kill us. The stated goal was tacking that requires speed and proper timing. As it turns out, both are irrelevant. I would recommend trying out the following tweak: Increase the deceleration force of the main and mizzen sails. (Only the braking force, so these sails will decelerate you faster, but not increase sternway speed.) As an added bonus, this would make heaving to a little easier, and model the historical reluctance to back the mainsail.

Yeah, the Leopard was one of the last true 4th Rates, if I'm not mistaken. The better design was probably the only reason they built any so late in the century. Anyways, Victory just got a speed boost in the game, so that's nice. Lineships should be terrifying, not to be laughed at and kited.