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maturin

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Everything posted by maturin

  1. As it should be. However, I doubt the OP is complaining about his expensive Connie just yet.
  2. You are suffering from sticker shock, my friend. But a successfully completed mission will always result in a profit, even if you use both repair kits.
  3. If we get Trader XP, it will be a separate progression scale. No crafting a ton of bricks and suddenly getting an admiral's commission.
  4. South Carolina is located within a 500-mile radius of Kingston. I was replying to Pandanator, not you. No, you are not reading my posts. The economy is not 100% player-based. It can and will change, based on the fact that invisible non-player merchants are expected to be conducting business behind the scenes. If cotton doesn't fetch a high price in Kingston, you just need to find a better market, as this one is obviously already having its needs met.
  5. Things can change by the time you complete a trading voyage. Your only advantage is instant communications. Players who manage to build a network of price-reporting agents will become millionaires. I know I would report prices for a cut of the profits. The AI sails 24/7, what's the problem? AI trade isn't directly simulated. But if you stepped in the real Caribbean, you would logically assume that people, somewhere, are exporting cotton. You just wouldn't see them because they are elsewhere on the wide ocean.
  6. Did Kingston already have a store of cotton from an earlier trader? Also, we shouldn't assume that the economy is 100% player-run when there are AI trader vessels everywhere. Clearly the cotton gets where it's going regardless of our actions. (Otherwise no one would ship it anywhere.)
  7. No one ever complained about the heavy weather performance of Spanish or large American ships.
  8. It really shouldn't be hard to code a proportional speed boost for storms. Slow setting would provide the same speed as Full does in normal instances. And if you go above that, you have a chance of your topgallantmasts falling off every few minutes. Or the sails simply being blow oun. We already have the visuals for all of this. There just need to be some scripted safeguards and warnings added.
  9. I doubt it, unless you heard it from an authoritative source. Of course, most lateen craft are not only lightly-built, as AKPyrate said, but have a very large sail area:displacement ratio. Compared to an oceangoing schooner of conservative rig, they may have proportionately more sail area. And nothing harms windward performance so much as light winds, so the advantage would be felt there most of all. However, the game lamentably ignores wind strength altogether. We sail around with canvas for light airs, but the speed of a stiff gale.
  10. Most of the mystery is due to the fact that development of features comes before documentation and tutorials. So far as what mystery remains, well, that's because ships are living things, not machines. And especially not spreadsheets.
  11. Ship class is meaningless so far. Just a sorting tool for menus.
  12. A day is every 40 minutes, right? You might hear it twice on a medium-length trading voyage. Anyways, repetitive and annoying sums up an awful lot of shipboard life. We could also get occasional whistles and such for changing of the watch, etc. The OW is not an audio-overloaded environment like battles are, so the more we have to listen to, the better.
  13. Gold, XP and goods in warehouse at an outpost are never lost. You reappear where you logged off.
  14. Not to get too off-topic, but absolutely every trader ship should be able to carry some armament. Basically you have two types of merchantmen: Warship-like vessel that carries cargo in space freed up by removing most guns/crew/ammo. Realistically you could convert warships into traders this way, and vice versa. Vessel with a hullform that prioritizes capacity over speed (especially close-hauled). This would make for a slow, permanently civilian ship. Perhaps with a built-in module for less speed but more capacity than type #1 above.
  15. As the game gets bigger and better, there will inevitably be certain features that get dropped or broken in the development process. Below is my list of useful bits of the game that have disappeared or degraded. Move Transparent Sails toggle back to the main Escape menu. When we want to toggle the transparency of sails, we want to do it fast. This option is not useful when buried in the Graphics menu. The result is that no one ever uses non-transparent sails, even in non-combat, traveling situations. Less beauty in the game overall. Possibility to bind more than one key for the same function. All through Sea Trials I used both X and C to rotate aft yards to starboard. This is because the keyboard layout makes it very difficult to control aft yards while performing certain maneuvers. In the heat of battle I often miss the key, and find it much easier when both X and C do the same thing. (In general, keybinding flexibility is essential in a PC game. Reference ArmA's libertarian system of ctrl-clicks and double-taps.) Give merchant vessels their guns back. Trader's Snows have lost their stern chases, and stopped firing the upper deck guns that they do have. Capturing these valuable vessels used to be dangerous. New Course (square mainsail/foresail) model is less accurate than original. Late last year, the game's artists started using a new animation/model for square-rigged lower sails. Unfortunately, this new model is less accurate than the old course animation that the older vessels (Constitution, et al) have used since Focus Test days. See Belle Poule for an example of the flawed new version. Were ships to set their courses this way, they would be unable to sail upwind.
  16. If there are too many pirates, there should be amnesties. If there are not enough pirates and people are switching every week, there should be no amnesties.
  17. You make contracts to buy, not to sell. You can only fulfill someone else's contract in a port by selling to the AI. You will get a higher price, they will get the tar. And you'll never know his name. As a word of advice, crafting tar is a terrible way to get XP. Only shipbuilding gives decent XP. If you do want to craft and sell, however, I recommend making gun carriages. People hate those labor-intensives pieces of crap, and will probably buy them off you at a premium. Just advertise in a capital city.
  18. Contracts are for buying only, not selling. It just ensures that any goods sold in a particular port go to you, and not another player. If you want to sell by fulfilling someone else's contract, you must advertise.
  19. Never shoot anything with a green label. Not only will you earn negative XP for every hit, your account may be punished by the moderators (even for pirates).
  20. Turning: Snow Speed: Merc Chasers: Snow Toughness: Merc Repair Cost: Snow Mercury is a more expensive vessel, and players will show you much less mercy in PvP. They might let a snow slip through a contested area.
  21. Yeah, I imagine xebecs were no better on the wind than your average schooner, although they likely excelled in (absent from the game) light winds. But a big lanteen is probably better downwind than gaff rigs.
  22. Take out all the shrouds with chain and the mast will fall. How is chainshot going to tangle in the rigging? Remember that Mythbusters where they eviscerate a pig by shooting a length of chain at it? Chainshot will shred everything in its path, exempting large spars. And roundshot is better at taking at masts because of its higher velocity. I imagine barshot would be more of a longer-range chainshot.
  23. I don't think bar shot would be much better against masts. You'd lose a little less velocity with the stiff short bar instead of the long chain, but the mass would be less when you hit. Basically, chain should start doing more damage to masts once the sails are shredded. 300% damage boost against target with sail HP < 60% or something.
  24. The devs have said that it's not the translations that's the obstacle. It's the code for multilingual functionality. They may well have files full of translated text already, but with no time to implement it. Having run a bilingual website, I can certainly understand the headache of having two concurrent versions of everything.
  25. The devs know there needs to be land. That's why it was an option in the dev priorities list.
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