maturin

In a month or two the basic cutters will be rare.

Game-dev decision. You either have a game with ships made out of lead that unrealistically sink all the time, or you have to develop intuitive and complex crew morale mechanics so people surrender instead. The latter is really hard to do in a multiplayer game and the devs never showed much interest in it. When pure leak-based and debuff-based systems made battles too endless, they went with the sinking instead.

They're never placed more than a bit over the horizon. If you can read a map and estimate compass angles to within 30 degrees you can't miss them.

This is now extremely outdated. Hitpoints were entirely reworked and no one knows exactly how, just yet. For speed, look up the Speed Trials thread.

Not unless they want to make chase gameplay and/or races deeper.

Over a certain amount, extra ships should need to be mothballed, with maintenance fees due when they are activated again.

IMHO a Closed battle is more immersion-breaking than anything else. (We are accustomed to invisibility.) More importantly, it causes most of the angst over short battle timers. (Listen to Doran, by the way.) Ideally, a closed battle would change its icon to some wreckage and flotsam. Just telling players that a battle happened there some hours before they arrived. Then they will know to expect possible appearance of players exiting the instance.

Yeah, NPCs don't leave at the end of timers, so you can fight them indefinitely.

Always carronades for yacht vs. yacht. Your chances of hitting those low little hulls at range are too slim. Carronades are also useful for raking brigs and Mercs (still can't manage to outmaneuver a snow).

Actually, I gained over a knot doing this last night. But still, the main advantage of manual sails in a cutter is to slow down and reduce heel. If you rely on hammering the S-key to decelerate, you will be trashed by every manual sailor out there. Not because it makes you turn faster, but it does help you turn tighter (and slower).

It's just dang hard to hit little boats between waves. But IIRC a full broadside of 12-pdr carronade will demolish 70-ish percent of a cutter's planking.

When you are sailing close to the wind in the cutter (around 45 degrees), pulling in the boom halfway can give you a few tenths of a knot. But this is a bug as much as a feature and will likely change soon.

Someday there needs to be a real study of stability casualties from 18th century warships. One wonders whether they just had enormous righting arms or something.

It's sort of hard to fathom that they left off port lids in the waist. You just surrender like eight feet of freedboard doing that, and can ship tons of extra water in a storm.

Well, that depends. Ships of the line would sail with only their lower ports closed. Plus maybe the upper deck ports near the officers' quarters. I imagine frigates would leave their ports open in good weather as well.

Not until you have really heavy broadsides. And then mostly in group play.

Бом-брамсель требует небольшого ветра, так как лысели. Почему вы считаете, что укрепление лиселей значительно слабее бом-брамселя? У Бом-брамселя есть такелаж покрепче, но парус расположен в наиболее уязвимом месте из-за действия рычага и своей высоты. На самом деле у марса-лиселeй достойная прочность, поскольку они устанавливаются на самых сильных реях. Их ставили не только при слабом ветре. Американский автор John Harland пишет, что некоторые капитаны ставили марса-лисели даже после того, как они взяли первый риф в марселе. Взяли риф в лисели и плыли дальше. Между тем, Бом-брамсель исчез давно, конечно. Если вы знакомы с парусниками 20-го и второй половины 19-го века, надо сказать, что их бом-брамселя намного сильнее. Совсем другой вопрос в 18-ом веке. С 180 градусов относительно ветра до примерно 80 градусов. Я бы не назвал это узким. Здесь я говорю про марса-лисели. Конечно, ставить лисели ближе к ветре чем 100 градусов не совсем обычно. Причем здесь штормовой ветер? В таких условиях убирали не только бом-брамселя но и его рей и мачту. А почему марселя не хватает в данной ситуации? Я соглашусь, что есть разные ситуации, когда лучше поставить бом-брамселя чем лисели: Когда корабль сильно качает на волнах после шторма когда матросы заняты другими задачами когда маневренность важна Но в общем, погода для бом-брамселя--тоже погода для лиселей.

Если скорость ветра позволяет тебя поставить бом-брамсель без проблем, то можно также поставить лисели. Прочность парусины такая же. Правильноe использование лиселей требует намного больше опыта, чем другие паруса. Если будет полноценная фича, конечно. А я понимаю, что вряд ли будет.

Mногиe корабли в игре ставят свои бомъ-брамсели, независимо от погоды. Значит, условия для лиселей идеальны.

It would be more interesting IMHO if the reload shock was replaced with crew shock in perhaps 30% of cases.

AFAIK the animation for running out the guns is already finished, but turned off because of FPS issues. We should remind the devs to make it an option feature, enabled either for all ships (if you have a good PC), player ship only, or target ship only.

That's a geometrical impossibility unless the yards themselves are given six degrees of freedom, able to sag down and forward of their masts dynamically, and deform the slackened shrouds (which accordingly become curved, with the hundreds of individual ratlines adapting to the changing shape). In other words, ludicrously hardware and labor-intensive. There are some small improvements that can be made, however. Cut down on the leech of jibs to prevent unnecessary clipping with the topsails, make the leeward backstays temporarily disappear or deform on fore/aft vessels.

John Paul Jones' sluggish Bonhomme Richard also fought Serapis with stunsails set. AFAIK topsail and topgallant stunsails don't add any serious complication to maneuvers, besides sailing close-hauled and tacking. A very few men per sail, I'd imagine. Lower stunsails, on the other hand, would make rapid maneuvers impossible, and couldn't be set anywhere near the wind.

Perfect animations are expensive in terms of system resources and man-hours. It would be nice to have an occasional shiver to the sails, however. Just something that would only render up close, on your own vessel. We also need proper placement and textures for the reef bands, and the edges of some sails look like something that you'd see on a modern daysailer, where there should be a boltrope.

That's what I suspected. Probably would have been swarmed by groupies if he had been caught.