maturin

Any chance we could wait for the 'I told you so's and skip everything in-between?

You can just log off in the BR screen, as I understand it.

Or won't get any real experience because of low volume of noobs in that faction.

Right, the idea is just to continue the permament autoskipper for steering that we have now. And just add a simple little script debuff, which simulates the work the must be doing with the sails (invisibly). Locking the rudder at smaller deflections is a popular grognard idea, but in combination with actual lee-weather helm it sits in simulator territory. Dunno, I rather thought the reverse. Rudders are so easy to repair that it would be easy to avoid decisive speed penalties. Maybe the penalty only kicks in at >50% HP.

Here is a feature idea that should have occurred me to earlier: Ships with broken or damaged rudders should suffer from speed penalties, especially on a close-hauled point of sail. Why? Because a ship does not steer like a car. In almost all cases, the wind will exert a turning force on the rig, which needs to be counteracted by the rudder. Rather than holding the wheel in a constant position, frequent adjustments by the helmsman are required to keep the ship on course. When sailing upwind, the helmsman usually needs to keep the rudder slightly (or more) to leeward. If the steering is impaired, then the ship will often spin out of control. It then falls to the crew to trim the sails as a replacement for the rudder (manual sails). Invariably, the ideal sail trim to keeping the ship on course will not be the optimal trim for fast sailing. While closehauled, the spanker may need to be taken in entirely, and the after yards depowered to some degree. Of course, this happens mostly in our imaginations when in-game rudders are damaged. Why is this a good feature? Imagine yourself the victim of a gank. If the enemy comes to grips with you, you are usually doomed. But what if you have a brief opportunity to swoop down on the enemy squadron, carry out a careful raking broadside of their fastest ship, and then flee upwind while repairing sails? Likewise, if you want to stealthily deny your opponent a chance to escape, or preserve your own ability to leave the fight, you can aim for the rudder without wasting firepower on his sails. He might not realize what you are attempting, while a load of chain gives away your plans. TL;DR Significant speed penalty for damaged rudders on close-hauled courses. Mild speed penalty for heavily-damaged rudders when sailing downwind. If wind strength and storms ever get (back) in the game, this effect would be far more serious in rough weather.

Please no frankenships.

They won't be ubiquitous like Mission 3rd Rates.

Timed exit?

There has to be some sort of margin of victory. Otherwise one side will just spam dozens of store-bought grey ships that are cheap as dirt.

lol @ random nun in the stern sheets, 1:37

It's an odd sort of person who plays as a completionist in an incomplete game. Can't say I have much sympathy.

That had absolutely nothing to do with durability and everything to do with the fact that they were free. The experiment is to test 1 durability ships. No one is proposing a capture-only source of vessels in the long term (except for pirates, I would hope).

So how can hostility be countered via PvP? If the defenders send their own fleets to contest the hostile fleets, is a certain margin of victory required to reduce hostility? If the two sides each sink 5 SoLs, does hostility go up or down? Do the defenders need to drive off the hostiles entirely, allowing levels to fall over time (and helped by deliveries and missions)? I do 90% of my PvP in a captured ship that I've already decided to lose in advance. It means not mounting mods, though.

I spent a week sailing a Rattlesnake around Jamaica and the Windward Passage, which are two of the biggest hotspots, if I'm not mistaken. Some good fights, but also an enormous amount of hanging around.

Must be a funny view of the world from your 80% pirate server.

F11 report?

This isn't aimed at you, but sometimes it seems like I'm the only person on the planet who realizes that prevailing winds will let players go places faster and easier, if they have half a brain. The real Caribbean has easterly prevailing winds. This means that you can start in the Antilles and take take a long cruise downwind, then seize a prize and teleport back upwind to your outpost. Do the upwind sailing offscreen. Or you can take a long journey to the Spanish Main with the wind abeam, therefore guaranteeing a fair wind for most of the way. Either way, the result is >50% fair winds over the long term, while the current shallow system rigidly enforces 50% fair/foul. It's no different from a river with current. You plan to paddle downstream as much as possible, and orient your trade routes or naval strategy accordingly. Then you get the upstream portion out of the way all at once when convenient. Compare that to a river that is nothing but an endless series of eddies. Then *every* long trip is doomed to traveling against the current, much of the time. Right now the wind is constantly rotating to be in your face, and yet this is somehow the player-friendly system?

The internet is just a giant nursing home, filled with geriatrics reminiscing about their golden age. That cherished two-week span when the grass was greener, men were men, and the digital children were well-behaved. There's little point trying to interfere with their own private nostalgia.

That fight was nuts. Top shelf stuff.

There's not even a real UI yet. Let's not be anal.

The French were in the habit of lying down at their guns until after the first crushing close-range broadside that the British fired. But I think the warm-up period should be considerable to avoid making raking fire irrelevant. Or maybe a Brace button could be implemented at the same time as making ball rakes more effective against guns (and masts!). (Any chance you could comment on the feasibility of mast hitboxes being vulnerable from at gundeck-level? It gets proposed very often now.)

Timers longer than 2-3 minutes are utter insanity. It's a matter of simple math. In 5 minutes you can sail hundreds of miles to barge into any fight. When Constitution was chased by a British fleet off New York harbor, the Americans did not send reinforcements from Boston. You would be hard-pressed to intervene at that distance if the combatants were supersonic fighter aircraft, and not sailing vessels. When John Paul Jones attacked merchant shipping in the English Channel, he didn't get pounced on by every 3rd Rate in Portsmouth. There wouldn't be any single-ship engagements in the Channel using a Naval Action-scale map with 5-10 minute timers. Long timers will screw up just as many even fights as ganks. The zerg always wins. And it's a teleporting zerg, too.

Timers sometimes help defenders, it's true. But this is where emotion gets in the way of logic. In the vast majority of situations, no help is ever going to arrive in time. Or if help can arrive, the attackers can reinforce even more. But the victims of ganks can't help fixating on the one or two instances where they were jumped near a friendly port, and had reinforcements locked out by the timer. In this situation they can blame the timer for all their woes, instead of the ganking fleet or their own failure to escape. The opponents of short timers want to ruin all PvP just so to avoid the frustration of one highly specific set of circumstances.

Thanks for reminding me to go downvote that video. The idea that short timers helps gankers is a mind-boggling case of cognitive dissonance.

Taking down a whole crew with grapeshot doesn't make sense either. The mechanics can be tweaked for any outcome: it just depends what we decide is "really" happening on deck. Whether we're really shooting grape or canister, whether the numbers of lost crew really represent dead, wounded, or just panicked men.