Inkompetent

I suppose pirates were too poor to make their freshly tared ships pretty?

No. No. Just... no. This is a game about actual age-of-sail ships and combat in the Carribean. Not some made up monstrosities from movies or cartoons.

Nor can I, really. That's exactly why I'd love to run a live server test for a few months to see how it actually plays out. It is a quite drastic change after all.

To begin with I want to present the preface to this idea, and it's pretty simple, actually: Accurate gunnery at sail-plans with a lot of sail are way too accurate, and it does to a great degree defeat the purpose of at all having the "Battle" speed mode (sail-plan). My idea for how to fix this would be relatively simple to introduce, and I think it would be very interesting to try this for a few months on the live servers: Remove the "gyro-stabilization" on the follow-up shots after the first one. Currently it doesn't matter how much the ship rolls after the first shot leaves the barrel. ALL other shots will head the exact same direction. Instead guns should be affected by the roll, so that firing while rolling heavily will scatter shots all over the place. This means that firing aimed shots at the hull or other specific sections with a ship that rolls more than just a little will become pretty much impossible beyond point blank range. The result of this would be that players either need to accept that shots fly all over the place (which might not be much of an issue of you toss a crapload of iron on the enemy's masts at range), or they will need to drop to battle sails or otherwise depower and turn their sails so as to lose a lot of wind in the sails and thus acceleration and speed. The more tricky part of this implementation would be that gunners shouldn't fire exactly ALL over the place, because they wouldn't be that dumb. Instead there should be some kind of maximum vertical limit (above and below the point of aim) at which the guns fire. Consideration must however be taken for how to combine this with the "walking" fire of the front/back fire modes, because to get the maximum rate of fire (and as many shots on target as possible) it might be necessary that guns fire out of order. On the other hand this could be exactly what the "Random" fire mode will be better at, so that people will need to make a concious choice of if they want walking fire, or if they want maximum rate of fire but in no particular order. I think that this could have a very interesting effect on gameplay, and to some degree promote other attributes in ships and other modules (for example having as little deceleration as possible from water resistance could become pretty important), and it would also promote ships that sail well with "slower" sail-plans, like for example how the Essex can sail really fast at beam reach with Battle sails.

Yessss! Now I finally don't have to play ships I don't want to touch with a 100-foot pole (looking at you, Brig and Cerberus!) just to at all be able to play higher-up ships without being super-suicidal!

Okay, that's just a sick, sick joke... So from too easy dismasting, to there not even being a point in aiming at the masts unless shooting at the tops only...

Yes, because the big issues are so easily handled in just a few days. After all, being so easily fixed is why we call them "big".

Not sure if a this severe change (at least it sounds very severe) is warranted, because even if masts were too easy to destroy I'm not sure if they should be much harder to destroy. Guess we'll see how it plays out. Does this mean that the ships stop faster (in shorter time)? Sounds like it to me, but want to make sure nothing has got lost in translation.

Then again real captains captured maybe... 0.2-2 ships a year, while we can cap fourteen in a day, so...

I agree with most points here. We shouldn't be able to "snipe" masts, at least not nearly as accurately as now. Downing masts should be done with broadsides. As for felling masts IRL you are right there too. Generally it was done with chain and ball shot to tear off the standing rigging so that uneven stresses on the masts snap them off. Of course some lucky shots to the mast itself could be the critical component, but seeing ships have been able to sail with really rotten masts that still remained standing it'd take one hell of a hit to crack a mast with ball. The last point I'm not entirely sure of as I'm yet not convinced that one type of system is better than the other, but they certainly affect the whole dismasting-system and require very different balancing.

Last battle I was in required 342 hostility to get to join early.

Here comes the update! As stated in the earlier post the focus has been on simply actualizing the guide to the current state of the game. Not everything has been updated, and the most notable example is the port battle chapter which's contents have been entirely scrapped for now. I am sure that there are bits that I have forgot to update, at least entirely, but I felt it was better to get it out in its current state than to polish it for eternity. Some small layout improvements have been done for readability and also to make the guide more suitable to printing (even though I doubt anyone will print the guide in its half-finished state), but I especially need to get to work on more pictures. I guess it's time to dig out my Wacom tablet from the boxes in the loft. As always feedback is welcome! DROPBOX LINK A Naval Action guide to sailing and combat 2017-06-09.pdf

We need several more ways to make money, I think. One is transport contracts, so that it's easy to get material X from port Y to port Z, without having to go there yourself. The other is bounty contracts since that can make it worthwhile for people to chase down someone notorious (or so annoying that he's got a bounty on his head) despite the risks; risks that would make the "normal" payout of a PvP fight waaaaaay too small for the risk being worth taking.

Then please just give us that update, for example "Patch 10.1 bugfix 1: Stability update" or whatever. That way people don't need to guess. Can be good for us players to have an idea about if this "new" thing we experience (could be running into a pre-existing bug or something) has to do with the recent patch or not.

Yeah..... Right. Got anything actually substantial to support that? Can say that judging by the changes that happen in the game the devs most certainly are working full-time with it. Don't know if you have experience in programming or game design, but it isn't exactly something you can fart out while having a cup of coffee. Sure, I don't know how much money they have earned on the game, nor how much their dev studio costs to run, but neither do you so your statement is pretty darn bold. Take for example the whole "putting land into battles no matter where in the big world you are" thing and add the forts&towers PB stuff on that. That has definitely taken a crapload of work hours to do. You'll have to count time on features like that in man-months, not man-hours. If anything your kind of posts is what makes game devs sick of making games and sick of interacting with the community. Good job.