maturin

Get yourself the Control perk. The enemy can't leave the battle so long as you are within 800 (ish?) yards.

Don't worry, I'm sure they'll come to you for help with their database shortly, since you are so well-acquainted with the technical details.

Why do the villains always chase the heroes past the point of no return? If your quarry had to resort to fancy stunts to avoid crashing, why didn't you slow down first and watch them destroy themselves?

Last I heard leeway was under serious consideration. Windward performance is exaggerated for gameplay reasons. Square sails keep drawing beyond the point they would in real life, and according to the true wind instead of apparent wind. And the square riggers' fore-and-aft canvas allows them to make headway to windward, unlike a real ship.

Welllll...?

Not sure I see the point of the structure. Why can't we just have super-easy Reload Shock when taking fire through a destroyed broadside?

Yeah, sending ships back with prize crews is very historical. Just make us sacrifice part of our crew to do so. (Maybe 40 men for a large frigate.)

When the wind rotates at a constant rate, you are guaranteed to spend 50% of your time heading upwind. And when you need to sail upwind, you can't do it AFK because the wind is always shifting about. With a prevailing wind, it is much easier to get upwind, and the sensible captain will plan trips which, combined with teleports, will be predominately downwind. Less upwind sailing overall.

Thus introducing route-planning and strategy, and adding natural texture to conquest. Why am I the only person in the universe who recognizes how prevailing winds makes sailing easier, not harder? It means that sailing upwind is a choice, rather than a RNG lottery that will unpredictably frustrate you half the time. All you have to do is trigger the ssscccaaaaaary realism part of people's brains, and they stop thinking.

3rd Rates weren't remotely rare.

Reviewers who post bullshit about Pay2Win and dev censorship are harmful regardless of their age. And does Steam filter out old reviews? People are going to read whatever comes up first on the page.

That hull design for Eurydice looks a lot better as a model than it does on the draught.

The benefit is that only a unique kind of player will roll pirate.

The devs just realized a deficiency in the AI enemies, so PvE is about to get a lot better.

Prince de Neufchatel is also in the game files.

Victory heeling made me really nervous. The dismasting was awesome.

Great, time for another convention of the Flat Earth Society of Nassau.

Historically, detonation of the main magazine meant instant destruction of the entire ship, with few or no survivors. The 'splash damage' to other ships is probably exaggerated, and I agree that rigging damage and fire hazard would be more likely for ships not in immediate contact with the exploding vessel. The magazine was located below the waterline, and that was its armor.

If the artist in that unnamed coloring book of yours was too lazy to draw more than one kind of shirt, that is not my problem. (Do you imagine that the brown shirts in the depicted 'uniform' are for left-handed seamen or something?) If you have issues reading books without pictures in them, I will refer you to Boudriot's The Seventy-Four Gun Ship, where there are many full-page color illustrations of French seamen and petty officers wearing a variety of costumes, none of which are uniforms. Or you could spend fifteen seconds on Google: http://www.thedearsurprise.com/a-brief-history-of-royal-navy-uniforms/ (There is a picture in this text too)

600 passengers?! No wonder they lost. It's impossible to carry out a battle encumbered by so many noncombatants. Again, that's not a warship but a drunken wounded elephant. Droits d'Homme (a much larger ship) carried far fewer men than that (soldiers and camp followers) and found it difficult to resist Indefatigable and her consort. I'll resist wading into the tangled mass of strawmen, other than that.

British First Rates visited the Americas, of course. Nelson took Victory to Barbados in pursuit of Villeneuve. But there was little reason to station such a powerful ship there. It was an armed ship transporting many civilians and families. The Mughals fired one shot, had a cannon blow up in their face, and then gave up. There's no comparison to a warship from a European navy with a dedicated crew in fighting trim. It's mission was transporting treasure and people, with guns to protect it. That makes it an armed transport. I'm not sure what the point is anyways, because the prize was never used as a pirate ship.

What? Explain yourself

Well, it does make sense, but it's way overblown and too abstracted right now. Masts should never fall unless you actually shoot the hitbox. I've wanted hull damage (whether planking or structure) to weaken masts for years now.* But you should still need to hit the mast itself for the coup de grace, whether above or below decks. *The chainplates, channels, shrouds and stays that support the masts are all liable to damage by shot aimed at the gun crews.

Just looking up what you left out of the Wikipedia paraphrasing: Speaker was a 450-ton ship, making it less than half the tonnage of a 50-gun 4th Rate. Considerably smaller than the 28-gun Cerberus, even. That tells you what kind of 'guns' were on board, given that you can't jam more than 30 guns on the main deck, and even that would be a dangerous/difficult. Bear in mind that in this period, the less authoritative sources (and especially the few sensationalist sources on pirates) tend to count swivel guns in the gun counts. These aren't sober naval or maritime records, they are about pyrates(!!!!!). And the Moorish ships fled instead of fighting, so your introduction of the word "defeated" is a bit tendentious. AFAIK no one has ever cited a tonnage estimate for Fancy, but the crew was around 150 men (again, considerably less than the complement for 28-gun Cerberus). So either most of those guns were swivels, or they couldn't actually fight them. As evinced by the fact that Fancy ran from three east indiamen at one point.

That would mean 24-pounders. Why would pirates want to turn a good ship into a slow one?