maturin

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Hooray! I was worried that we wouldn't get any small craft at all! Any chance of loading a 24-pounder on there? (Also, that brass post in the stern is for holding up a gaff boom that the vessel doesn't actually have)

It's not intuitive if it contradicts a universal convention that many people are familiar with.

I swear, yall don't read threads at all. For gundeck effects you have a good point. But for sail trimmers, a hail of grape is going to make people run for cover even if no one gets hit. It's going to break up the orderly line of men that you need hauling on the braces in unison.

Yes, they would be capable of that. But by modern standards, ocean sailing in a ship with the depth of ballast of, say, Niagara, would be a nerve-wracking experience. They just had a different view of acceptable risk, back in the day, combined with consummate seamanship and a willingness to sail conservatively even if it meant losing time. You didn't have HMS Bounty putting to see in a hurricane in order to make a profitable visit to Florida.

We also need sea shaders for froth, foam and bubbles surroundings ships in a storm and ships that are sinking. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Bounty_Sinking_2012.jpg

Ontario was built as the most powerful warship on the Great Lakes. It was a dominant military force.

Very true, but then there would have to be a lot of new code for only affecting part of the crew. Mainly instead of affecting global reload or aiming abilities, certain guns could be knocked out of action for a shirt time. All in all, I feel much more strongly about suppressing sail handlers with grape and small arms, than I do about gundeck-focused debuffs.

They only removed the guns because of the unusual (and very modern, by the game's standards) layout of the deck.

Leviathan, I agree that stun lock from multiple vessels should be avoided. Just another point to make. A lot of people are acting like I am proposing a morale-based feature. But a lot of this really has nothing to do with combat psychology and subjective human reactions. Much of it is entirely physical. You can give your crew magic videogame pills that make them immune to fear and stress. But when you a member of your gun crew gets cut in half and you need to scramble for the slowmatch that he dropped, that's still going to cause an interruption in whatever you were doing. And then an 18-pounder rolls crack against your ankle, the gun captain is momentarily blinded by flying sawdust, and the midshipman commanding your battery gets elbowed in the face and knocked down. And meanwhile people tell me that only crew death should affect the ship. What death? Do you imagine that you've killed someone each time the crew HP bar takes a hit? A fantasy world where the lethality rate of a black powder weapon is 100%?

A reason that had nothing to do with stability.Razees actually had unfavorable handling characteristics, so far as their movement in high seas was concerned. Can you imagine a car flipping over from a 10-mph turn? A large sailing vessel just can't generate that kind of centrifugal force at the speeds involved. The devs never suggesting giving Victory the turn rate of a frigate ahyhow.

Admin, I was about to mention that this idea is most useful for raking fire and grapeshot. Especially the latter. It will give us a tactical tool, and not just a pre-boarding procedure. Effects from roundshot to the broadside could be minimized.

Wow, if two guys think think this is magic, it's not even worth arguing with you. The only way to help you is to put you in a rowboat on a pond and start throwing rocks at you while you try to do logic puzzles. Your mention of realism is farcical. Like all those modders who implement realustic ballistics and lethality to all the guns in an fps and wonder why it turns into a sniperfest with no relation to a real firefight. I'll admit it's a radical idea that would need testing, though. So on the reasoned responses. In reverse order, yes, we would have to balance it by ship type. As in, a ship takes 60% of the damage from its own potential weight of metal. In that case a brig would have to rake Constitution to make an impact on crew cohesion.And maybe you're right that this proposal would put too much importance on the first broadside. The devs will hate that. But I like the idea of the opening shots being a game of chicken. Right now there is no drama unless you are squabbling over the weather gauge. Maybe the reload debuff is too much. Also, I never proposed a turn rate debuff. The penalty to yard control would see you bleed a little extra speed, though. Everything about taking effective fire makes your job harder. That's an objective, scientifically measurable fact.But I agree with the thrust of your post. Rather than have the suppression effect taper off, I would rather have an increasingly long cooldown for non-raking, non-grape debuff effects. So you can't get stun-locked by multiple ships.

In which case a mere 5-10 seconds shouldn't be too serious a handicap. But you can bet your ass that it will make players a lot less willing to get hit. They'll start doing anything to avoid it and pummel the enemy first. That's a big part of it, actually. Getting creamed by 24-pounders should do more than play the same old sound file and spray low-res dust all over the screen. It's like an ArmA mod that I play with, that causes you to fall down when you get shot. Those split seconds of getting back to your feet and scrambling to cover are the most butt-clenching moments of any game ever.

Well, the game's square riggers can sail at 25 degrees to the wind, so I'm not sure how useful an indication of 6 points would be.

I think this game could use a few more tactical choices and consequences when it comes to battle damage and gunnery. So here are some proposals which can be grouped under the general concept of suppression and stun effects from incoming fire. (If you can't tell, I'm a big ArmA player.) I'm not talking about true suppressing fire or people actually being stunned. The general idea is just that taking effective fire will momentarily disrupt anything a crew is trying to do. There's a cloud of dust, a loud noise, some minor splinters, one or two men being wounded in a dramatic and disturbing fashion... all this is disruptive and distracting. So here are some ideas: Taking a well-aimed broadside (ie, receiving 60% or more of the maximum possible damage from what the victim's own guns are capable of) should: Interrupt the enemy's loading process for around 5 seconds. Interrupt the traverse and elevation change of the enemy's guns for around 5 seconds. Disable ranging shots for 5-10 seconds. Delay sail changes by 10-15 seconds. Decrease yard rotation speed by 200% for around 5 seconds. Prevent boarding initiation for around 10 seconds. Initiate an audio cue to indicate the disorder among the crew. It should end when they get their act together. Perhaps the reload timers, gunnery arcs and yard UI could also flicker or flash red to indicate disruption. And now some modifiers: Broadsides of grapeshot that disable more than 3 men should have all of the above effects. But they also affect sail changes, yard rotation and boarding initiation for twice as long. In addition, they interrupt the loading process of upper (spar) deck guns for twice as long.Raking fire always has these effects (as compensation, the actual lethality of raking fire could be reduced). Losing a lower mast, topmast, or bowsprit has all of the above effects, but does not affect main (lower) deck guns. Use of Survival focus cancels out these effects to prevent unfair stacking of debuffs. I think this sort of thing would make the gameplay a lot more interesting. Suddenly you have to think about the optimum time to fire, using patience and cunning. Right now the only good strategy is to fire as fast as possible in order to maximize reload rate. Save your broadside for when the enemy is about to tack, and you can mess up his maneuver. Likewise, the first player to land a good hit will receive an advantage, and perhaps be able to shoot out of the enemy's broadside arc while their gun traverse is still stunned. This will make the initial approach to close action more tactically interesting.

You can't actually capsize a square rigger by turning too fast. It's not a bicycle.

There is growing anecdotal evidence that unsynchronized shot destroy masts dramatically better. I just turned a Trincomalee into a hulk. For the first 15 minutes, I couldn't knock down a single stick. And then bam, two masts down with half a broadside each. Funnily enough, both of these hits were unsynchronized. This would explain why the mast damage seems to fishy and inconsistent. I highly recommend investigating this issue.

A 32 pounder has a crew of 10, btw. It is a big pot of soup.

Shall we move this out of Sea Trials?

That is exactly why I suggested that the shaded area show the point at which square sails comes aback or start to luff. Currently all vessels can point higher than that (I will hold my tongue on this point) using their fore-and-aft sails. And yet most fore-and-aft rigged vessels will have a square topsail or two. So the compass will remain common, yet useful to all vessels. It will have a reference for where upwind performance starts getting bad. The no-go zone can left unshown.

Ink, all your second quote is saying is that a bow chaser is more accurate and useful than yawing the ship to bring a whole broadside to bear. Which sort of proves the point that tracking shots are useful for finding the range of a single gun, and informing a single gunner, but can't really be used to improve the results of an entire broadside. But again, it's a good feature that has at least some basis in real practice. It just treats the ship as a hivemind, something that is very common in videogame abstractions. Complaining about ranging shots is very silly when the guns all have 22-nd century-quality hydraulic servos and stabilization mechanisms.

Rolling broadside are completely necessary for raking fire.

The shaded area should mark the point at which a square sail comes aback.

Ranging shots in the broadside of a large ship are not realistic. But who cares? It's good feature that prevents the gameplay from being frustrating or even less realistic due to magical aids and sniper cannon. A good gunner knows that at a certain (estimated) range, you have to aim at the maintopmast cap. In a smaller vessel, a gun captain could indeed fire a ranging shot, and then advise the gun captains near him what point to align the barrel at. Of course, on a large vessel in the heat of combat this becomes impossible.