maturin

I don't know if we'll get quite to that level of detail of Destraex. I would settle for 20-30 second gusts of wind. This would involve a momentary increase in heel, a sound effect, and a 10-30 degree temporary direction shift. That means that the player who adjusts their yards or course will have a speed advantage, while the inattentive player may lose a little ground. This would instantly make chase gameplay viable. Pretty much all wind has this characteristic. In addition, wind higher up tends to strike the sails from farther aft. But anyways, what I wanted to say is that wind shifts are a necessary feature. But currently they are not a particularly well-implemented one. The arrow on the UI can switch around and no one even notices. This puts us at such a disadvantage to real sailors that it's not even funny. I know that this sort of thing is not a priority for sea trials. But we need audio cues. The sound of wind, slatting canvas, groaning spars. Just something to indicate a change.

Have you read any of my (periodic) posts on implementing ship surrenders without ever removing player choice? I try to sidestep that limitation with my suggestions: Let's not have automated surrender, but instead model catastrophic morale failures among crew. Instead of slowly sinking, your reload and yard turn rate plummets. At which point you either flee for your life, surrender, or get boarded and taken. Because if 99% of battles end in sinking, this is bad from both a realism and gameplay perspective. It's predictable and boring; it hamstrings any sort of prize-taking economy. I know that sinking will always be more common in the game than it was in reality. But capture needs to be a viable alternative. This much was already promised in the Damage 3.0 topic. Different routes to victory. As I constantly state, IMHO a battle which results in most of a defeated fleet scattering in all directions, being hunted down one by one (if the victors want to take prizes, rather than drive their foes away) is much interesting and more fun. Arma 2 ships with a surrender button. The most popular single mod ever created for the series includes handcuffs and prisoner functionality. As for the vanilla AI, both fleeing (morale failures) and surrender are implemented. The topic is 'Sinking by Gunfire.' None of these ships would have succumbed had a severe storm not followed the battle.

You can actually remove the yacht's guns, by the way.

Remember, you don't know which mast was hit by which shot. So the we only know that 8 rounds is sufficient, but it could have been less.

He knows the yacht is optional, right? In the sea trials you don't even have to use it to progress.

Mast 9.2 [2] Means that two rounds hit the mast and did 9.2 damage.

I hope that they make battle sails a modification to the other sail settings, so we can get battle sails with t'gallants set, for more speed. Currently it makes you too slow and sluggish to be really useful?

That was 8 hits to the mast, actually. But they could have been different masts.

AKD posted an excellent source in another thread. 30 inches being the benchmark for a ship of the line. As I recall, in your heroic fight you guys were well over 800 yards away, most of the time.

Those tables pretty much confirm that carronades and double-shotted guns had dramatically longer range than they do in game. It's difficult to argue with you when you don't actually know anything about age of sail combat. So here's an analogy. Someone releases a tank videogame where the best way to win is to present your rear armor to the enemy and back up towards them. And then when someone points their front armor at the enemy like you're supposed to, you call them an idiot.

Brig, cutter and surprise could all pass for merchant vessels if you strip away some guns. But I hope there will be various indiamen and small craft.

I would rather just make lower masts (which warships did not have spares for) extremely strong. That way, being a mastless hulk would be even rarer, even if you ran out of repairs.

Exactly. Chain should be less effective than ball, but it should weaken masts.

I think the earlier poster was referring to "whole mast" as all three sections of mast with all the yards and sails.No warship ever carried even one single lower mast replacement. Replacing a lower mast was completely impossible. That's a fact, and an unusually obvious and indisputable one.

None of these damn numbers ever agree. It's worse than tanks and RHA.

Mast repairs should DEFINITELY be separate. But also much slower. Much, much slower. That way, taking down a mast gives you a fleeting tactical advantage that only affects part of a battle. You must seize your opportunitu or lose it. That is good fair gameplay. Ships should carry many replacements for topgallant masts, one of each topmast and no lower masts. But lower masts should be pretty much invulnerable until sails and hull lose around 30% HP. This is realism-inspired balance. Personally I think dismasting is the most exciting thing that can happen in this game. And at the end of the day repairs will extremely cartoonish until we get some specific animations for them. Jury rigs would be awesome too.

THANK you for including that .exe. Why doesn't every game have this?

Well let me put the question a different way, then. The ship is on a broad reach, and you are sitting astride the yardarm, trying to untangle a stun'sl halyard. Suddenly the weather brace snaps. When the yard swings, do you fly forward or aft? And when you are in stays, and the order comes down for 'let go and haul,' does the foreyard brace in with the help of the wind, or do you have to haul hard and overcome it? Edit: I meant the weather maintopsail yardarm with sail trimmed properly.

No distinguishable voices, please. They will get annoying the tenth time you hear them, much less the thousandth.

This is precisely why I constantly recommend making damage types co-dependent.My ideal game is like this: It's nigh impossible to sink a ship (with roundshot), unless you degrade crew with grape. Otherwise the hundreds of men will pump and pump forever. It is impossible to rout a crew with grapeshot alone. You need to shatter bulwarks and guns with roundshot too. It is hard to destroy a lower mast without destroying the chainplates and channels (hitting the mid hull with roundshot).

Audible cues for sails coming aback, wind shifting and heel angle changing are all essential features imho.

I think naval action needs to greatly increase spread at max range. Atm you have people in lineships taking the leeward position to kite and fire fron maximum range. It's incredibly boring for one team and frustrating for the other. The windward player cant ever get a shot in.

Anchors, you seem to have real-life square rigger experience, so answer me this: What does a trimmed square sail want to do on various courses. On the wind, the pressure is on the weather leech, and the yard 'wants' to fly fore-and-aft, I know. So if you were to try to brace the yard around, you would be pulling against the force of the wind. Does it work the same way with the wind abeam? What about with wind on the quarter? To complicate matters, Seamanship in the Age of Sail claims that it is very quick and easy (and not labor intensive) to deaden way by letting go the mainsail brace, sheet and bowlines. According to what I've said about, letting go the brace would make the yard brace up sharp, and probably rest against the shrouds. That wouldn't lose much speed at all. So maybe the author meant that you let go the sheet first, taking most of the wind out of the sail, in which case the yard reverses its tendency and will square itself when the brace is slack?

Solution #1 is to make the backing mainsail bleed off all your speed, as you mentioned. However, this means increasing the backing force overall, and the devs worry that this will make ships too good at screeching to a halt and stern camping, etc. It could also result in increased sternway while tacking properly. And that wouldn't even fix the problem, because a mainsail full aback is so good at making you luff up in this game. Even at 2 knots it will be powering you through stays. Perhaps the best solution would be dynamic yard rotation speeds, penalizing an early mainsail haul.

I know, but how to fix it?