maturin

Tell it to the real Royal Navy.

If there is no counter-tagging, then all battles need to start at the limit of gun range, with exit timers adjusted accordingly. Anything else is ridiculous and unfair. ...of course, that will also result in many long chases. What we have now is a tolerably decent balance.

I think you hit the nail on the head there. You would need quite a few new features. I can't imagine finding too much enjoyment in exploration without giving navigational hazards some real teeth. Storm gameplay, lethal shoals, currents, leeway, etc.

Every game besides EVE manages it somehow. I was responding to your first post, where you very clearly weren't talking about politics and metagaming. You were talking about de Ruyter turning out to be the Manchurian candidate with a satellite phone.

Keep EVE bullshit in EVE.

Paintings of peasants are often pastoral and romantic. Good job finding one of them. Sea paintings, on the other hand, were often exhaustively researched or even done by eyewitnesses. Everyone had easy access to actual naval vessels in various states of readiness and repair, and many artists were plainly striving towards photorealism. If you're familiar with the lifespans of wooden boats, you know that a coat of paint can make a vessel look brand new, even if her timbers are rotten through and through. I'm definitely on board with some dirtier sails (texture decals), but dirty hulls are an awful lot of visual work for something that is the result of rank lubberly neglect. We'll never know for sure, but I tend to think that even pirates would take sufficient pride in their vessel to dab on some new paint. A rustbucket is none too intimidating.

Except pirates didn't have any communication network. There was nothing to talk about. Pirates in this game remind me of entitled children with trust funds who expect everyone to recognize their hard work and discipline, now that they've landed a cushy job. Sorry guys, but it was all handed to you on a silver platter. All you had to do was avoid overdosing on the powder or knocking up the au pair.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=patrick+o%27brian&_osacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p2045573.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xpatrick+o%27brian+signed.TRS0&_nkw=patrick+o%27brian+signed&_sacat=0

The 3D model in the M&C movie is Constitution, no question. It sounds right that O'Brian's Norfolk was based on the Essex, however.

IRL stiffness is very useful in any vessel, and would be important for carrying heavy cargoes and sail in rough weather.

Difference in length that seem incremental make for really big differences when it comes to ship dimensions, I find.

Acheron in the movie was a digital model of the Constitution, which was referred to as a 44-gun ship in her day.

/facepalm You should watch less cowboy movies and maybe travel the world a little.

I will be so unbelievably pissed off if the French can't craft the Connie when they practically invented the 24-pounder frigate, but pirates can craft third rates.

VERY hard moderation is... very hard.

From where I'm sitting, most paintings are 'higher res' than the game's models. Artists actually had an age to 'render,' and didn't worry about framerate. Would be nice to see some texture decals, though. It's the sort of thing that could be handled by an equivalent of PotBS' user content system.

Not that much dirt to be found at sea, mate. Decks were hollystoned daily, and not painted. Ships also carried paint on board. The best candidate for visual wear and tear would be tar-stained sails: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Brig_Niagara_full_sail.jpg The other big one is weed growth on the hull, especially for uncoppered ships. This kind of stuff could all be handled with texture decals and overlays.

You're just uninformed. Every faction has a certain area of the map where huge battles take place every day. Florida for USA and Pirates. Yucatan for Britain, Spain and France I see the Danes and Swedes scrapping all the time too, but I'm not familiar with the exact regions.

Yes, with sailing ships you need to simulate actions, primarily. Tall ships are too complex to do it any other way. Planes only have two wings, and they never change. Square riggers have thirty different wings in different locations and combinations and sizes. Planes move in one element only. Sailing ships move according to the interactions of two. To my knowledge even academic researchers with supercomputers have never even attempted to create a force-based simulation of sailing ships involving even half the variables Naval Action does. On the flipside, the aerospace industry has done all this by necessity for aircraft, and their efforts have been passed down to videogame designers over a generation of constantly-maturing software and code. In short, you are asking the impossible. And if leeway was switched on and the sailing model polished, you would never even notice the game taking shortcuts. AFAIK Naval Action simulates certain forces, within reasonable bounds. Buoyancy, for instance, is beautifully done in stormy conditions.

You're very welcome to come here and suggest improvements. The devs have toyed with the idea of enabling leeway in the past, and they listen to players who make good suggestions of how it could benefit the game. But how do you expect people to react to arrogant statements like this? Don't try to describe your post as an innocent request for information when you are couching condemnation in it at the same time.

And the square riggers react to them properly. Bracing up square yards on a broad reach will, for instance, increase heel and reduce speed fast. AFAIK the increased heel doesn't translate to weather helm, because the game isn't a complete sailing simulation by any means. The cutter's response to oversheeting of the boom is not--I repeat--not yet implemented. The gaff booms already 'clip' through the lee backstay in most cases, so we can assume that they have been loosened. But then there are the shrouds. The shrouds cannot be loosened, and obstruct the swing of the boom. And the trim of the game's gaff sails is not remotely closehauled on downwind courses. They are sheeted out past what would be efficient for a beam reach. Traditional fore/aft sails are just not efficient for downwind sailing. That's why historical vessels almost always carried a few square sails. I think you are very ignorant about how videogames work, and arrogant statements like this makes no one want to answer your questions or discuss improvements with you. There is a button. It's called S. Since you seem to desire a totally simplistic anchoring feature, you might as well just imagine that you've let fall the anchor whenever you are stopped.

Really easy. It sounds like you are offended that the game doesn't have a full physical simulation of all the forces involved. Like it's some crime that the game doesn't plug in all the force vectors from elementary physics and just let the ships sort themselves out from there. I wonder if you realize that your expectations are impossible to meet. Have you played the freeware HMS Surprise simulator? Even after that impossibly complex effort, with zero graphical representations, you still end up with a deeply-flawed simulation. Excessive leeway, temperamental rig balance, feeble windward performance, strange heeling and roll behavior, no wave simulation and fantastically exaggerated speed in high wind conditions.

Because it's not finished yet. At this point manual sails are not terribly useful for schooners and the like. But if you try oversheeting while closehauled you will see a definite difference. Are you going to come here after playing one small battle and tell everyone how the sailing model works? For ships you haven't even used yet? This is a videogame. It works because of code. Every kind of sail is treated differently by the code. The square sails have been brought up to an acceptable level of simulation and the gaff sails have not. Let me know if there is anything unclear about this. Jibs and staysails, yes. Their animations aren't adapted to downwind sailing. But the gaffs are constrained by the shrouds and backstays, and can't be sheeted out much further. These aren't 1900s Herreshoff yachts. ... Yeah, easy. I'm sure the devs will code anchors in their lunchbreak today, cuz it's so easy.

What are you talking about? Oversheeting or backing gaff booms absolutely changes speed, causing you to decelerate. I recommend getting a grasp of the gameplay before running to the forums to pass judgement. However, manual sailing for gaff-rigs isn't implemented fully yet. It's the feature that keeps getting kicked down the road. Which sails? Gameplay compromise. Sure, a ship with all sail doused will drift downwind at a knot or so in most conditions. But if this happened in the game, the devs would have to implement anchors, which are incredibly complicated.