maturin

Read the last sentence of my post. I gave an example of the very same ship which sailed faster when loaded with more stores. Naturally, a sharp smuggling schooner would likely be happiest with a light, valuable cargo. Compared to a heavy frigates with good seakeeping qualities, the ideal displacement would be attained with a relatively unencumbered hold. But if you took the same vessel privateering, you would want to ballast it down to a similar displacement.

If it was always this simple, any idiot could be a naval architect without any education or experience. This is a rule of thumb. CaptVonGunn is nearer the mark. Ships are designed with a certain displacement in mind. For warships and merchant ships, this ideal displacement is usually when they are loaded down with stores and cargo. An empty merchantman with minimal displacement is unlikely to sail better. Without added ballast, the ship will be dangerously unstable. The ship will be crank, leewardly and might have difficulty steering. For many ships, the unloaded displacement will not be the fastest displacement. Of course, almost all ships can be overloaded, and this will cause all the same problems as an empty hold. For merchantmen, overloading is economical, so a stuffed-full ship should not be a fast one. So in terms of speed vs. capacity, there is a happy medium. The game shouldn't apply penalties for ships with holds that are only 50-70% full. Robert Gardiner on the Lively-class: In other words, exact same hull and rig, but the lighter ship sails slower.

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It's kind of ironic to be writing about AI that are dumb, yet cheat. Because the AI have the same maneuvering abilities that you do. The only reason you think otherwise, is because you fail to out-think the supposedly stupid AI.

Ships in the period of the game would perform evolutions with courses set, when necessary. AFAIK you just have to have more men on deck to drag the tack around and subdue the clews and yard. I imagine in some cases you wouldn't want to sacrifice any sail area by clewing it up. In any case, it's no mystery why modern tall ships tend to dispense with such a labor-intensive part of the operation.

To all 60 of them as they fly past from a Santi broadside?

No defensive tag = close tag

The manual sails have the same sort of effect that they would in real life, although the reality is more complex. For instance, in many cases ships would be unable to turn at all without using 'manual sails,' because the rig balance would overrule the rudder. This might happen in very light or very strong winds, or to a temperamental vessel with trim issues. It's hard to know how useful the game's maneuvers would be with a real square rigger, since modern tall ships are not at war and try to avoid doing things as fast as humanly possible. It's dangerous and it makes you break things. Most of the 'manual sails' maneuvers we carry out in game are really thought of as discrete 'evolutions' in real live. Either tacking or wearing to bring the ship around on a new tack. It just so happens that these evolutions also involve the ship making the tightest circle it is capable of turning, in either an upwind or downwind direction. So in short, these yard movements do enable a square rigger to maximize its maneuverability IRL.

Trader's Brig and Trader's Snow are faster than frigates? And it's not enough to be faster. So long as you spawn within chaser range, your are dead (if the pursuer is competent). So you either counter-tag or you lose.

Traders can't defensive tag much of anything because of BR difference.

What is the benefit to gameplay here, besides the ability of people to make an easy prize of the chronically bored? Because it's objectively unrealistic. How many ships were captured without making any attempt to flee? Are you really all such gankers at heart that you oppose a concept that might give you some decent sport?

Not with the OW, it wasn't. Hasn't been tested since I started in early 2014.

I think it should look like this: Click the Lookout's Warning button. The next time another ship becomes visible, there is an audible warning. But ONLY the next time. That means that when you are sailing through empty waters for hours on end, you will be warned about an unexpected sail. But the warning has to be manually reenabled each time. So for AFK sailing along the coast of Hispaniola, the frequent NPC traffic will render the warning quite useless, with false positives every few minutes.

A First Rate wouldn't carry any boat larger than 40 feet, with its four or five other boats rapidly decreasing in size. There's not going to be "quite a fraction" off 800-1000 men being saved by boats that size. You can only abandon a ship if you are near shore and can ferry the crew back and forth. Otherwise abandoning ship means abandoning the men.

Have the storms been silently banned from the game? The devs have said it themselves: if you remove every feature that someone hates, then you get a bland, colorless game. Well, this is the epitome of that kind of feature.

Isn't flooding the best possible reason to surrender? Do you forbid use of seatbelts once people drive faster than 50 mph? Watching from the sidelines, it seems that pvp competitiveness has gotten in the way of common sense here. Surrenders should be a powerfull buff to pumps, and prevent further damage. If you STILL sink, you lose crew and officers.

You can't abandon a ship unless you bought water wings for all your crew. Not enough lifeboats for everyone, or even close.

An option in the game menu, of course.

Spain used the same design of battleships as everyone else. After 1700 almost all 'galleons' were indistinguishable from British ships of the line. If anything, it was the light craft that differed the most by region and culture.

Where did everyone get this ridiculous idea that every player should come across multiple bottles per week? Is this some sort of cartoon show? Not only should you actually feel lucky to find one, but finding one should reduce your chances to nil for an uncertain amount of time.

Polls get bumped every time there's a vote because the forum software is *+46+*%#3$%&%$ stoopid.

At a cost, of course. The full-bodied hullforms necessary for shallow draft do you no favors when it comes to sailing performance. And on top of that, the Dutch never really adopted the classic frigate layout, and kept building single-gundeck warships with excessive freeboard that would hurt their weatherliness.

I love how the Centaur has a rather nervous look on his face.

That's a photo of a rain squall, not a storm. Visualized bad weather on the horizon looks ominous and atmospheric (geddit?), but any storm worth sneezing at will be too large and too fast to avoid.

Good idea, so long as the ships are still vulnerable to being boarded and/or burnt. But did anyone else think that he meant this?