maturin

Rigging Parts (I assume this includes all masts and yards) should always be pine, and never oak. Cable and Hawsers should be renamed as Ground Tackle, since iron is required (anchors).

And the on-deck camera views are terrible, exactly. We need something like this: Numpad 8: Forecastle view Numpad 2: Quarterdeck/helm view Numpad 5: Mainmasthead view etc, etc

Still can't tell who's being serious and who isn't.

Surrendering, no. Deserting the guns to shelter below the waterline, leaving the ship helpless, certainly. I'm all in favor of catastrophic collapses in morale. That leaves players the option of running away, or hiding behind friendlies with the possibility of slowly rallying their men.

Involuntary surrenders will never happen. You can only incentivize surrenders. When we get officers in the future, I expect there will be a good way to do this. I would be in favor of applying the low-integrity planking (low-HP) idea to crew and guns. Hitting a broadside with 0-10% integrity should result in exponentially higher gun loss, so that even if the ship has the pumps to remain afloat, it will be forced to surrender or lose a boarding action. Ships with shattered broadsides could also suffer low morale in boarding, or even lose automatically if boarded. Right now we have ships that sink more realistically, but it's anything but realistic that we can shatter all the planking and then just sit there helplessly, watching it sail around. There should always be a reason to keep shooting and damage it further.

I'm confused. What is the relevance of ending the battle with one inconsequential enemy vessel still afloat? Everyone knows that your side won, and the game doesn't assign victory to a side.

We need immersive keybind masthead, fighting top and forecastle views, not more ugly transparency.

So where is the screenshot of what you said?

This is the 'simulator' proposal, pointing out how it could be done most authentically. Of course adjustments would be required, if it is technically feasible at all. It wouldn't need to guarantee repeat boarding. You guys put a Disengage command in boarding. Most player interpreted this as meaning that the ships completely separate. So of course the entanglement colliders would deactivate for 10-20 seconds, long enough for the ships to drift apart under the sail that remained set throughout the process. I can't answer for the performance drain of adding colliders. I imagine that such hitboxes can be disabled by default, only activating on ships that are in Boarding Focus, and on ships located less than 50 meters from them. That would mean no performance hit in Trafalgar battles, until boarding actually started.

What is the relevance of age? You could be a Ltn. until you were old and grey if you never won any glory and had no important friends.

Naval officers should probably have some say in their ships as a reward, but not necessarily the replacements they get after lost battles.

How about restricting third rate assignment and up to NOs, but allowing privateers to enlist in the navy at any time. Players who favor freeform gameplay could level up as privateers, then use their cash to join the big leagues with their ship of choice. And of course piracy should be a role as well, based on scavenging and smuggling supplies because their ports lack resources and serious shipyards.

I've always been in favor of cash-poor NOs that get things for free. But of course naval officers should get prize money for ships sent to the admiralty, with a bonus if its a high quality ship that could be bought into the service (and potentially assigned to someone else). And they would get head money for sinking ships, in a lesser amount.

In the current build, we board enemy ships using the Death Star's tractor beam invisible grappling hooks. Ever wonder how they did it in real life? Here is what Boudriot has to say about it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-pwrC9JR7ahVGUzbHdWeGxuWXc/view?usp=sharing TLDR: The best method of boarding is to cut across the enemy's bow, and let him get his bowsprit tangled in your shrouds. What follows is my suggestion for implementing this boarding technique in the game. I realize that it would be difficult to code and balance, but the result would be very interesting and demand considerable skill from the attacker. In short: The existing Grapple buttons remains, but it only works when ships are actually touching, and moving at > 4 knots. It doesn't actually pull ships around, it just makes them stick. 80 preparation points required. My proposed boarding system relies on new colliders that should be added to the bowsprit and shrouds of ships. When the bowsprit collider of ship A intersects the shroud colliders of ship B, there is a chance that the colliders will become stuck together. Say, every 2 seconds of contact, there is a 30% chance of entanglement. Once the bowsprit is entangled in the shrouds, boarding can be initiated if either ship has 30 preparation points. If ship A rams ship B hard enough to break the bowsprit, entanglement will not occur. (This is unrealistic, but necessary to discourage crazy rageboarding.) Colliders for shrouds: Bowsprit collider (1) entangled with shroud collider (2): Note: For our purposes it doesn't matter whether Pavel rammed the Surprise with intent to board, or Surprise let Pavel blunder into him. What matters is that they are stuck together now, and whoever has Preparation can board. The above picture proves that the system can work when SoLs board frigates. For boarding actions between frigates and smaller craft, use of the heavily-nerfed Grapple system would be required. But this is fine, because small vessels should be unable to make themselves pests by boarding huge battleships. And if the SoL wants to board a light vessel, it can always obliterate its sails. And as a fun bonus, the shroud colliders can be used as hitboxes for chainshot! Damaging them would threaten the lower masts.

One Redeem button per account. It was meant to be a quick tweak that would only last a few days. Just go pirate on your neutral character and you will have plenty of fun before the darkness of the servers comes for him.

Small boats sometimes had tanned or red sails in certain regions. It would certainly be nice to see a subtle range of sailcloth colors from pure white to something more drab and weathered. But I certainly hope we don't get ahistorical sail colors while historical paint schemes are still missing. I want my beautiful 1790s-era Connie and Trinc.

What's the use of starting downwind? Having the weather gauge guarantees that you can initiate boarding at the moment you choose, as well being able to point your bow at the enemy faster.

Even if customization doesn't make it, i think we really need a few alternate paint jobs at the very least. A non-Nelson checker for Victory and Surprise-style coloring for Connie, Trinc, Mercury and Pavel would do wonders for the visual diversity of the game. I would love to use Trincomalee with an 18th century look, as the black and white is very unattractive in my opinion. In the second decade of the 19th century you already start to see the soulless and puritanical aesthetic of the age. I know that textures take require an enormous amount of man-hours, but certainly replacing the Constitution's two main outer hull colors with existing textures would be simplicity itself?

When repairs are cooling down in battle, I am still playing the game. In port, I am not.

Would be nice to see, but I bet it would add a lot of complexity to the ballistics and thus the hardware resources/netcode.

I think most of the modules should be replaced with officers. Officers have lives that need to be protected (no more suicide bombing in Tragalgar), and the Admiralty will only let them transfer between ships if you behave. They can also be earned with experience rather than purchased with gold. That's newb-friendly. The modules that remain should bind on equip.

The cities look fine IMO. The problem is that they all look like Gondor, when 80% of them would be tiny hamlets with a harbor.

Can't you just look at the color of the speedmod (ie, Yellow, +5%) and solve for the vanilla stats?

The ability to partially arm a gundeck is also critical for merchant ships. No merchantmen the size of the in-game brig would be unarmed. A few pairs of 4-pdrs or carronades would always be present.

Hmmn... the thing is, having only 4 guns per broadside already creates a lot of frustration for the new player. If we are going to have ships with even weaker armament, we are going to need much weaker merchant vessels to hunt as well. Tiny galeases, feluccas, barca-longas, galliots, collier brigs, etc.* Otherwise you just make the problem worse. A mitigating factor would be to add a bunch of swivel guns, or 3-pounders. Best to make to make an 8-gun cutter the starter ship. A lugger (chasee-maree) would be another excellent starting vessel. That could work. *I hope that at some point we do get a wide variety of small non-combat merchant craft, even if they aren't modeled to the same standards as our current ships. There's an enormous amount of regional flavor to be had there, much different from every ship we have so far.