maturin

Has someone deleted all the Pirate ports from the map?

No time to chew through this on my phone, but does that graph predict that 5 m/s of wind will heel a frigate 40 degrees?

I was surprised by how little a difference it made, honestly. (Which is to say, increasing it further would pose no problems.) It's been a good long time since I've been in a big fleet battle, so the increased planking probably had a positive impact there that I didn't notice. Light vessels like Lynx seem to go down just as fast, especially when it comes to large guns The AI's lack of aggression in targeting their guns makes it very easy to survive large AI battles. They only chip at your health (otherwise the new repairs would bankrupt you) Frigates stand up to SoLs for longer The Snow is now enormously tough Most nations sought to dismast 'as a rule,' and everyone used grape. So I don't see the problem. When it comes to planking, the only change that will really matter to me is the change that stops ships from sinking 95% of the time. Maybe boost the repair costs again but make NPCs surrender before sinking. Remove the gold earned for damage dealt and balance great expense with great reward for selling prizes.

If this post is based on the 'pirate tactical discussion' why is it in a new thread?

Very thoughtful for those members of the community who log in from Mars.

I just read an interesting tidbit about an American privateer schooner that carried a crew of 32 men, but over 60 muskets. I imagine that they would load all of them before a fight, and then line them up for rapid fire.

Used in battle by John Paul Jones and by Nelson at Trafalgar.

That doesn't make any sense. A repair kit is an item that has to be scavenged for, and you can only carry a limited amount. Repairs are paid for with cash that is always with you in full. So you are more likely to get stuck without a repair kit than stuck without cash. --Edited - H. Darby--

Yeah, having rails instead of bulwarks is a big plus for aesthetics, as is a lateen mizzen yard.

Yeah, good idea. I can't wait to find out whether one of you Yanks spotted me anchored in Harbor River up towards Coosawatchie. (TIL, this is a real place.)

Still more accurate than the ships in Total War: Empire/Napoleon.

The system is essentially the same, except it's faster now. You could always PM Johnny Reb and ask him to update the OP. There are also plenty of video tutorials out there, but many are either extremely longwinded or do it wrong.

So many cheese tactics, all in one encounter.

Well, as I said, it means you have to press (and monitor) three keys instead of two. I know that I already find it hard to control yard and rudder simultaneously when I'm in close action.

Well, development time and resources is the reason. I think the devs view the sailing model as good enough, given that the level of detail is already unprecedented in a game. It's true that implementing individual sail control might not be terribly difficult, even with rig balance and heeling taken into account. But what would such a project get us? For reducing heel, the yard controls, W/S (and now T) keys are perfectly sufficient. I think you've forgotten about jibs and spankers. If we can douse these sails and alter rig balance, we suddenly need new control in order win a turning fight against an experienced player. We would need to be dowsing headsails and spankers left and right. This would be happening very quickly, in the heat of battle, and the workload of maneuvering ship would instantly increase by 50%. We already have to double-tap a pair of keys, so adding another sail control button would indeed complicate gameplay. Not to mention not looking very authentic. The only non-cosmetic reason that individual sail control would be needed is if blanketing were a feature. Obviously, it's a feature I would love to see, but I only expect to in my dreams when Naval Action's GOTY package ships with a mod tools for a dedicated server version of the game. Edit: Also lifting vs depressing sails, but ditto on the complexity.

True dat. Without modeling the complex effects of blanketing, lifting/depressing sails and sail height's effect on heel, individual sail control doesn't add much in the way of realism or player control. But individual sail control could be a very valuable cosmetic feature for screenshot photographers and roleplayers. I personally think it is a huge boon to be able to recreate historical sail configurations, even if it doesn't provide any gameplay advantage. Actually, implementation of individual sail control for cosmetic purposes should be quite simple. The game already tracks the surface area of each sail, and calculates your speed based on the surface area of each mast. Therefore, furling individual sails should be extremely easy to implement, so far as speed is concerned. Rig balance could simply be ignored for simplicity's sake. That is, if you furled all your mizzen mast sails, you would lose a proportional amount of speed, but your ship wouldn't gain the downwind turning advantage you would expect otherwise. In other words, furling an individual sail would affect speed only, using the very same sail surface area calculations already in use for yard controls and battle damage. Handling of heel and roll would be grandfathered in under the same system with no extra work, AFAIK. Imagine: For sailing dead downwind. (Without the stunsails, of course)

I just spent some time giving ports their proper flags. I hope you save offline versions of this in case of vandalism or carelessness.

Locking and unlocking instances is an enormous can of worms. Rather than debating it ad nauseum, why not just do everything realistically? As is often the case, realism is as good as any other option, and can be used to take a middle path. Max battle time is considered to be 4-8 hours of real time. Instances should vanish from the OW (from a newcomer's perspective) if their ship would be realistically incapable of reaching the area within that time.

There's no way this is in the cards for the foreseeable future. However, I hope the devs see the ENORMOUS potential for a mod-friendly SP version of the game. No special content needed, just a wide open testbed for the community to craft their own whaling sims, Erol Flyn fantasy adventures and kraken hunting minigames.

3-way battles should definitely be possible, so long as one side is AI. That will remove some of the complexity.

All of the game's warships have sufficient crew on board to fight both broadsides. However, in history (as well as in the OW), ships often sailed with far fewer. So this would be a good feature for an under-manned ship, but not by default.

Uh, yes. I'm pretty sure you could poll all the top players and the people who sail square riggers in real life, and you'll find that they have autoskipper engaged 95% of the time. Trying to aim and brace yards at the same time sounds like torture to me.

She's doing a little better than 6, but you're right. And she's in the trades, which are the best-case scenario for good performance and steady progress. Ships in Naval Action are guaranteed to sail around at their maximum attainable speed (plus 2-4 extra knots for playability). In reality they would only be at peak performance on rare occasions, completely dependent on weather conditions. When a captain brags about his frigate that goes 13 knots, he is really saying that he reached that speed a couple times last year when there was a freshening wind of 30 knots, a flat sea, a clean bottom and new sails. Most of the time he's plodding along at 4-7 knots, and if his is a fast ship, then he hopes that everyone else only gets 3-5 knots. The great seaman Allan Villiers, after a sailing the Mayflower replica to America, pointed out that the incredibly antiquated vessel made the same average speed of around 6 knots as did the latter-day steel windjammers with their towering masts, sharp entry, great length and steel rigging.

A medical study on scurvy prevention.

Well that's not a wind speed change, is it? That's a calm. When I think about wind speed, the first thing that comes to mind is squalls, gusts and directional changes. That is, exciting stuff that can be exploited by the attentive captain, turning a dull WASD run-out-the-timer OW gank-attempt into a dramatic chase that requires skill and rapt attention. You would make every sailor and realism-fan ecstatic by implementing wind changes in one direction only. That is, heck, make the current in-game wind speed the minimum. Just give us squalls and gusts to play with. Just say the word and I know I would go crazy with diagrammed feature proposals. I should also point out that OW storms in the current implementation literally cause your ship to halt. But there hasn't been any rebellion of enraged players to my knowledge. So a light wind battle with a 30-50% speed penalty shouldn't be absolutely out-of-the-question.