maturin

You can't be serious. Do you see any ships being bisected in this game? It's just a number. It's an abstract assessment of integrity. When the military says that a wounded soldier is 80% disabled, did you really think that meant that only 20% of his body is still left? A head and shoulders sitting on a hospital bed?

Wouldn't pirates be pissed off if they only got 1/100th of the worth of every prize? Of course, naval captains would be stuck with a 1/5 or so, IIRC.

Use your eyes. The hull is still there on your screen, even with 0% HP. It's just been damaged to the point where water seeps in. So you have to continue punching holes in it even at 0%. It doesn't magically go away.

There is no such thing as armor. The armor is the hull itself.

There is a very simple and realistic way to limit some battles to smaller vessels. If a cutter gets attacked while sitting on the edge of shallows, it follows that that area of sea will be too shallow for SoLs and even frigates to enter. So they should be locked out of the instance. Or else the instance should populate with procedurally-generated shoals and reefs that will limit the maneuvering ability of larger ships. On pain of being stuck on a sandbar or bilged by rocks.

Thing is, wooden ships are hollow balloons. There are no internal structural components there to be damaged. If you look at pictures or go on board a replica, all you will see are small numbers of rather thin poles that support the decks. Knocking those down would certainly affect the structural integrity of the ship, but you wouldn't notice until a storm came along. There is also no "undamageable black mass" inside the ships. It's just that shots penetrating a hull with 0% planking integrity still have loss momentum on the way in, and are unlikely to strike the opposite bulwark with much force. Shot is also likely to strike the deck itself, which probably has no hitbox for damage purposes. However, it it silly that we have no reason to shoot at 0% HP broadsides. Perhaps once you reach 0% planking integrity, further hits should start dismounting guns automatically, since the hull is so smashed that the breechings of the carriages are coming out.

Since we have instances, the game can fudge the timeline to make night battles rare. If we engage at dusk, the battle is considered to begin immediately, giving us a sunset instance. If we engage at midnight, the server can pretend that the ships took until dawn to come into range and engage. As a result, you only have night battles if you engage from 9pm to 12pm. That's 12.5% of battles.

I think it would be very useful for gameplay if there little villages and camps on remote coastlines, which would allow players to safely log off or carry out minimal repairs and trade. This would be extremely useful for pirates, and would add gameplay value to the many beautiful bays and cays that otherwise no one will visit. These little refuges would only be visible from a few shiplengths away, and could re-spawn in different locations randomly.

Why is the Caribbean Sea made of checkered urine?

Tell him he's roleplaying a yachtsman lol.

IIRC from Gardiner, the gold standard for a frigate in the Royal Navy is four months of water, six months of food. French designs were almost always less commodius by a month or more. I don't know how unrated vessels would stack up. Of course, without anti-scorbutics you will suffer from scurvy before you run out of water. I doubt many players spend longer than a month at sea in this game.

Galeas is the English term too. The galeas evolved from Mediterranean galleys into a Baltic seagoing vessel. Looks like this one has a schooner rig and a pinky stern. Galeases typically had a sort of ketch rig with a main abd mizzen, and sometimes square sails on the main.

"Long distance" boarding? The grappling is already crazy long-distance.

Sweden and Denmark being neutral is an incredibly silly idea. Obviously they were put in the game to fight each other. I suppose they could be neutral to everyone else, if there was a good reason for it.

IRL if you are any closer to the wind than 55 degrees your speed is guaranteed to be pretty much zero, no matter what sails you have up.

It would be a simply matter to let us load different shot during the few seconds before the battle starts, and have the change take place instantly. Realistically, however, ships would have round shot loaded at all time, and there was no way to unload it without firing the gun.

The gunports would usually be real. What we really need are partially-armed gundecks. Any trader in dangerous waters was bound to be armed with a pair of pop-guns or carronades at the very least. Naturally, the unarmed ports could then be shut.

Oh geez, are we using the abbreviation OP instead of OW now? If so, please stop. OP means 'original poster' and 'overpowered.' the 20-second timer has made things incredibly janky, though.

If you're not knocking out guns, you're just having bad luck. I often knock out more guns on AI vessels than I lose, at least in even fights. Raking fire does it best, because you hit the barrels that stick out of the ports. When you hit a gun there is a distinct flash of light. I wish people would stop claiming about cheating AI with invincible guns and upwind sailing. This is how silly unkillable myths get started.

Not sure I follow. If you are using your yards you have no reason to use incremental rudder (which would be 100% optional). Incremental rudder is for making wide turns without losing speed. Yard controls achieve the opposite. Yards are no good for smooth turns because you lose speed for no reason.

You don't go anywhere with your square sails pushing you backwards. Ships never tried to sail upwind without square sails set. They sailed as close to the wind as they could until the square sails started to luff, and could get no closer. Staysails and jibs just aren't powerful enough to move a square rigger upwind on their own. In some conditions you could maybe get a few knots out of them, and point the bow a little higher than you can with square sails. But you will be sailing mostly sideways because of leeway. Leeway is greater at slow speeds, so you are better using square sails and going faster, to reduce leeway.

Wait, seriously? Then there need to be other 24-pounder frigates added to the game. The French that you mention were deserve most of the credit for this armament, as they had multiple 24-pdr frigates actually in action before Constitution and her sister ships ever went to war. Not to mention the 36-pounder Indien/South Carolina. Of course, these vessels (Britain's Endymion included) all had shorter gundecks than Constitution, with 1-2 fewer guns in the main battery. But to omit them and restrict 24-pounder frigates to the Americans would be to foolishly incentivize a faction that is already bound to be drastically more powerful than it was historically.

Advanced rudder controls would be most useful with a 'Freeze Rudder' key. Hold A until the rudder is at the desired angle, then tap D to make it maintain that position. Hitting either A or D would unlock it again.

I cannot consider this game finished until there we can snap to various panoramic viewpoints on the decks and rigging. At the very least, we need the following: Main masthead Maintop Quarterdeck (weather side) Forecastle These views are no only much more immersive than the floating camera or gunnery view... some of them are much more useful. It's nonsense that I have to look through my own ship in order to focus on the horizon or up at the sky. I can't imagine a single advantage to the default perspective has over a masthead view, which allows you to swivel the camera around a stationary point, with a better view of other ships and your own sails alike.

We don't need Glatton specifically, we just need any old indiaman. Carronades were regarded as the perfect weapon for merchantman.