maturin

Wind, what is that Hide UI key again?

The difference really becomes apparent when zoomed farther in.

The largest audience will assuredly not be in the U.S. Europe plays just as many videogames and has a comparable population. They also go in for this sort of historical, realistic gameplay. And that goes double for Russians, who already outnumber us English-speaking forumites and will flock to a game by a Ukrainian developer with familiar design preferences.

If the smaller ship is a modern speedboat with a high-HP gasoline engine (which is what would be required), then I suppose it will have to be sunk with bow chasers. With the game as it is now, it is no longer possible to use silly stern-camping tactics anyways. Superior maneuverability can be used to get in more broadsides in more damaging places, but the larger vessel will still get shots in. In a battleship vs frigate match-up, one or two broadsides will leave the smaller vessel in a sinking state, forcing it to take damage control measures. And the instant it stops maneuvering at maximum efficiency, it gets hammered instantly.

Eh? Of course a ship of the line will kill a small brig. In one broadside, most likely.

На самом деле прокачка обших морских навых (работа парусами, судовождения)--ненужная фича для экипажа. Капитан и офицеры ни как не могут превращать крестянина в моряка. Это требуется много лет опыта, и скорее всего прибрежного культурного происхождения. Тем более, человек или рожденный рулевой, или нет. Так что, реалистически говоря, мы могли бы учить быстрой и точной стрельбе. Пусть будет прокачка. Но уровень морской способности увеличится только в течение несколько лет. Хороший компромисс получается. У экипажа есть определенный уровень, а он не особо меняется. И у опытных игроков и у новычек будет возможность собирать опытный экипаж.

Скажите тогда, как скорость постановки парусов можеть зависеть от навык игрока? Сложно нажать W?

Err, that's called Asia and Australia unless you're just trying to be cute. Not too many gamers in Samoa and Hawaii.

Oh. Well your suggestion goes without saying, I should hope. That is just an inexplicable limitation.

I think that constant reminders about sailing details and tactical tips (with diagrams) will be very useful parts of loading screens.

Minimum, or maximum? I hope that instances don't close based on group numbers, but based on sailing time. If it would take more than 5 hours to get there in the real world, everything is over by the time you get there, and the battle is hidden from you. That way you can have people jump in to your rescue, but you don't have an entire society vengefully setting sail from half a world away while your opponent kites.

Err, not really, since it's located on the edge of the largest wilderness in the world: the Pacific Ocean. Anyway, the game runs surprisingly well with a slow-ish internet connection. I'm currently out in the boonies getting wifi by satellite, and the 25 v 25 battle went just fine.

So far as I can tell, focus tests come in stages, the current cycle being the third. I would be very surprised if they didn't let more people in somewhat soon, but counting posts on the forums to identify and select active participants is clearly not the focus at the moment. The game is nowhere near beta, so there isn't any large pool of testers. (Given the development style, it seems like there must be at some point.) And disregard anything you hear about any dates for anything. No one around here even asks such questions.

Out of curiosity, what were some of the earlier, more realistic concepts that they had?

I imagine that this game will be perfectly playable even with 300 ping or so. The players move very slowly and predictably in a two dimensional space, so there's oodles of room for server error to go unnoticed. Heck, a military sim like ArmA works just fine with high ping, even with a hundred sprinting players shooting bullets into a million trees.

And a monthly subscription fee is better? $60 (remember when games cost $50?) can't fund an MMO with servers and GMs and patches and content upgrades and support staff. It can barely fund a SP shooter with deathmatch servers anymore.

If we plopped you in the middle of New York harbor with an iPhone and Google Maps, how long would it take you to establish your position to within a quarter mile? Sure, you could do it, but the several minutes inbetween are still a form of gameplay. If you are straining to identify the subtle landforms of the horizon while mentally estimating the ever-changing angles between a lighthouse and a prominent tree, it doesn't matter if you have perfectly accurate satellite maps sitting at your elbow. You are already performing the most meaningful (for our purposes) form of navigation. Lack of "You Are Here" markers on a minimap is an extremely powerful feature. The ingame chart (or lack thereof) is a character-skill feature. But that still leaves the player-skill of putting that knowledge to use.

If I was making an Age of Sail mmo, I would implement various time limitations for important tasks. Refitting a vessel with new characteristics, enrolling in the service of a different nation, recruiting seamen, obtaining a temporary command, getting your officers paroled or exchanged after a defeat, etc. All these things are important events that realistically should have a cooldown or warmup period of a real-time day or so. At the same time, they are things that won't break the game if sped up, and are therefore great targets for microstransactions.

That said, I'd still like to do a controlled test with Victory and Surprise. Anyone want to try and stern camp?

Close range yardarm-to-yardarm fights are rather uncommon in the testing battles I have seen so far. Someone will always try to break the symmetry and seize the initiative for a raking shot. Midrange maneuvers with carefully timed broadsides are the order of the day. I think you'll have to better explain your prejudice for me to tell you anything more concrete. What exactly do you mean by 'spinning like a top?' I will say that the time it takes to reload a gun deck is now comparable to the time it takes to change tacks. So the aggressively maneuvering vessel will just be depriving himself of speed and options if his moves are not carefully timed, with a cost-benefit analysis from looking ahead a few minutes.

I think that's the way to go. Navigation error can be region-limited, affected by chronometer, map and officer quality, and above all weather. Storms and maneuvers make it difficult to keep track of your position. So if you just have a nice jaunt across the channel in a straight line, there's nothing to worry about. But when you are roving all over the North Atlantic in storms and chases, error increases. Anything to add some actual gameplay and interest to map travel. Player position error also mitigates the problem of having instantaneous communication between players in a situation where sending messages was impossible. Catch a player in the mid ocean and it will be hard for him to whisper his society mates to come gank you. People will have to rendezvous near major ports and land features, which will naturally sculpt the gameworld in terms of pvp and pve activity.

Unlike in POTBS, accuracy is a result of player skill. So if you can't shoot, no amount of top-spinning will save you.

Is that any worse than losing that same Spanish gold to gank in Potbs? And couldn't that fate just as easily be avoided by not sailing into the unknown? I can't imagine that you guys would create a navigation system so hardcore that it would be possible to get hopelessly lost when traveling between two major ports. So just like Potbs red zones, I'd assume that getting lost would only be possible in certain uncharted areas. So that risk can be managed by sticking to familiar areas. There's nothing you can do to stop occasionally foolhardiness among players, but you can make certain dangers easy to avoid or prepare for. Anyways, even assuming a seafaring simulator, it would be hard to get so lost that you run out of all stores. Ships should carry enough water to cross an ocean with time to spare, and there's always land in some direction. Problems arise when a storm holds drives you back for a week and disables your vessel, so you have to limp onto an unfamiliar shore under jury rig, only to run straight into Cape Cod and be driven onto the beach. Running aground was the single greatest cause of loss, followed by foundering in storms. Dying of thirst was only something that happened when the ship suffered some serious, serious damage of some sort.

And this is a problem, because in real life it would result in a royally-screwed up tack. What's worse, I can't think of a way to tweak parameters and prevent this method, which is unrealistic and yet superior to all the others. In real life you would never throw all those sails aback. It would cause an enormous mess and bleed off all your speed just when you needed it to power through the upwind turn. Backing all your main and mizzen sails would throw you into the wind, for sure, but you probably wouldn't have enough turning momentum to cross onto the other tack once you got there. In the game, you should at least be stuck in irons and have to accelerate to around 2 knots of sternway before using the rudder to come about and pay off on the other tack. Devs and experts, we need help brainstorming ways to limit this tactic without messing up all the interrelated parameters. What can we fiddle with? The speed of rotating yards at various wind angles? The deceleration caused by backing sails? Perhaps the rudder should be down to minimum strength at speeds under 1.5 knots? And at low speeds there could be an artificial barrier against turning through the eye of the wind. It should take some real rotational momentum, not just a tiny little push of rudder. At this stage the ship is weathervaning in the water and there is considerable inertia to overcome. Because if I have to do silly things in order to compete in the game, I will just keep auto-skipper enabled.

If any topic is above the pay grade of a forum fan, it's probably this one.