maturin

Zumwalt is firing its gun. So unrealistic.

Why do the waves need to change shape in real time? If you tag someone in an OW storm zone, can't the server just plop you down in a storm instance? Maybe when the battle is over, the storm on the OW has passed. Doesn't matter; that's time compression.

Yay! On a historical note, contemporary people were bad at biology and fir was their name for pine (such as Baltic Scots Pine or American Pitch Pine). Redwood of course, was hilarious to begin with (soft matchsticks from California?).

There were plenty of experimental and innovative cannon later in the period, but all had drawbacks that can't represented by the game's parameters. Overheating, excessive recoil, etc. The single most consequential characteristic would be how fast guns can be traversed. If you want an alpha spike gun, make it slow as hell to aim the thing. Maybe you can't traverse and reload at the same time. That will require a ton of skill in brawling.

People clicked out of the storm battles because 25% of battles were storms for months on end. Everyone got sick of being force-fed storms. This was Sea Trials where people expected a balanced battle line fleet engagement. PvP'ers were frustrated that they could not find their enemies, and people were bad at shooting, resulting in dismasting and ramming. BUT... In the OW storm battles would be fought only by choice, or in a sudden panic when two ships blunder onto each other in the fog. We all play this game and know how rare OW storms are. It would be an infrequent, dramatic occasion. You wouldn't have the storms ruining fleet battles all the time. This should be a non-issue.

So have storm instances where the day/night cycle doesn't change. How is this a problem? Nights in the OW are not dark, and OW storms are dark regardless of time. Only a few pedants will even notice. No one asked for the sun moving (way too fast) in battle instances, but everyone wants storms. Reviewers will love storms. The game needs more varied material for trailers and the game needs content. Is the day/night cycle the only obstacle? Indy vs. Droits d'Homme, Battle of Quiberon (two French 74s foundered by opening gunports), etc. The game's storm instances are not particularly threatening conditions.

If you lose 20 men and have to hire them afterwards, that costs 10,000 gold. Add in 1,000 for repairs and that's 80-90% of your profits for a normal mission.

Unity has a limit on the number of instances that can be running at once, or something. But I would be surprised if the devs couldn't find a workaround, were the community to motivate them by speaking out in favor of storms.

If you used the repair kit and XP redeemable, anecdotes as to the ease of progression are scarcely relevant. Obviously the progression is very simple when you Redeem a huge pile of repair kits, cash and XP. New players won't have that advantage. Missions give a lot of cash, but 80% of it often goes away when crew costs come into play. Not to mention the issue that OW hunting is usually much less reward for far more risk.

They're coded, tested and tuned. They look hello kittying awesome. They were removed from the game over a year ago.

Absolutely! Solo and PvE players have no way to make money except doing missions, and don't create targets for anyone. And you can't make money trading unless you build up significant capital by... doing missions. Even to participate in conquest you need to suffer through a wall of newby crap by doing missions. Your comment about making money via crafting is downright cruel. No new player will be good enough at PvP to raise money for a shipyard until he ragequits twice. McDonald's cashiers don't make enough to start their own hamburger factory. When I ask for more goods creating by breaking up, I am only asking for subsistence-level rewards. Enough so that each prize can create a hull repair or two. I think you should rework the missions with inspiration from historical buccaneering voyages. We need some missions that take us halfway across the Caribbean to hunt on the OW, with much higher rewards.* This will prevent people from grinding them because they take so long. On the way, you will PvP and take other prizes. Then the short-distance missions can be limited to 3 per day. *"Proceed from Port Royal and patrol between Isla Mugeres and Isla de Pinas. Search for the convoy and cut out as many ships as possible." When the player approaches the mission area, a target fleet is spawned somewhere in the area. Imagine attacking a swarm of trader's snows with one powerful escort ship and trying to capture one.

That wouldn't change anything on the cutter since the boom is already free to clip through the backstays. It's only restrained by the shrouds (sort of), which can't be tightened and loosened on the fly. It would be nice if the backstays would deform automatically to avoid unsightly clipping errors on the cutter. But oh well. Also, if we can't change the angle of the boom, we won't be able to spill our wind in combat. (The way we do so is not very realistic, but a captain of a real gaffer could always just drop the peak halyards to depower the sail.)

I'd like to meet the basic cutter newb who can capture a player-controlled trader of any kind. And people are only going to be running around in Trader's Cutters for the next few days. After that it will be Trinc with 3 LGV's in the fleet. I already see that plenty. But more importantly there are only 37 people online. So basically I'm experiencing an enforced PvE environment. And that means missions or else I'm wasting my time. Now that the PvE server isn't going away, and there's going to be an arena game, this is the place for PvE players, right? Edit: By the time you hit rank three, the crew costs are eating up 80% of profits from missions. I'd say that you have the inflation problem pretty well solved.

So you view it as normal that a new player can't earn any money without grinding missions? I remember you agreeing that the missions are the worst kind of gameplay. A poor newb has to play 10 missions just to afford 12-pdr carronades for his basic cutter. He will need to break up dozens of captured brigs just to craft a single batch of repair kits, and you're worried about welfare? Just remove the Break Up button from the game. It is a fake feature now. Captured ships don't accumulate ship XP, meaning newbs need to buy from NPC shops. Meaning, again, that they need to run missions, and only missions. It is now impossible to make money by hunting on the open world. Before we were incentivized to grind missions. Now we are forced to. If we don't do missions, we can't even earn gold and XP at the same time!!! Fun and profit are now in inverse proportion. Everything (including missions) should be pushing people into OW hunting where there is high risk and (maybe) high reward. I don't see why newbs need depth and structure when everything is new and the steps of the ladder are so close together. Progression is the biggest motivator early on. I just wish I could progress doing things that were fun, and not the damn missions.

And yet there are delivery missions with rewards of 400,000 and 400% profit. People are making millions just trading around Jamaica. This isn't inflation control. This is kleptocracy. Денег нет, но вы держитесь. Are missions still going to be limited? Because they have only increased in importance as the best form of grinding.

Serious question: What's with all the deliberately killjoy decisions? Puny AI trader holds Comically small returns from breaking up vessels Captured vessels literally worthless for sale And now that XP for damage has been removed, I take it the devs are planning for no new players to buy the game ever? No one cares if a few people farm XP with alts. The devs should really play from scratch and not use their redeemables. Lots of great changes to the game, but you are separated from them by a wall of newbie-hating mission-grinding misery.

If Indiaman is not craftable we really need a Trader's Cerberus or something of that nature.

Darn speed mods ruin everything

Fantastic! Please allow us to arm trader vessels now, except that each pair of guns shrinks the hold space by the corresponding percentage. Every merchantmen without exception should carry at least a carronade or two.

Surcouf gave French 80-gun ship (Sané design most probably) tacking times for comparison: Speed / head-sails aback / head to wind / full tack to tack 2.5 / 2'30" / 10' / 13' 3 / 1'52" / 9'22" / 12' 3.5 / 1'33" / 8'07" / 11' 4 / 1'30" / 7'30" / 10' 4.5 / 1'30" / 6'50" / 9'10" 5 / 1'20" / 6'15" / 8'30" 6 / 1'15" / 5' / 7' 7 / 1'15" / 5' / 6'30"

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasa_(linjeskepp)

I'm in favor of teleports that need to be scheduled 3, 8 or ever 12 hours in advance (surely it doesn't stress the server to just wait for the clock to strike?). Either that, or econ-only teleports where you can't sail at the destination.

Allow ships of the line to enter free towns, but not dock there. You lose your SoL if you log off in a free town.

In 1802 only 7 percent of British warships were equipped with a chronometer. Many of these were privately-purchased, and not issued by the Navy. That tells you that they would have been pretty much unheard-of in the privateer and merchant marine, probably with some technological lag in other nations' navies as well.* By that point there were lunar calculations that could be performed, but these required very complex calculations and were only available 20 days per month. https://books.google.com/books?id=xh4aUiwxnW0C&pg=PA383&lpg=PA383&dq=chronometer+merchantmen&source=bl&ots=S6r5CSzoTa&sig=SnooZl2JVe_0XZ07LPM0axGkfxQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwisscGwpa7TAhUj7oMKHe7zDs4Q6AEIIzAA#v=onepage&q=chronometer merchantmen&f=false *The French Navy only had 34 chronometers in 1815. Bearing in mind that each ship needs about 3 of them for best reliability...

There weren't any reliable chronometers until the latter half of the 18th Century, and even then they took a while to spread around. Harrison's timepiece was still in final testing in 1772. That makes longitude very different from latitude. Dead reckoning without a chronometer is only accurate if you perfectly account for your speed (which can and will fluctuate wildly over the course of a few hours) and heading (which is affected by leeway and current).