Idea for new wind system

[themule08]

Which could be meaningless. The 28 who voted comprise just 1.5% of all members.

Agreed.. hardly anyone who plays this game is on the forums.. they might have an account but are no active.

Which is a shame since that is the job of testers.

[Edward Canaday]

So I started writing a reply to this post and seriously argued with myself before coming to a conclusion (sort of).  I personally would love to see the Devs taking a map of the wind for each month of the year for this region, and applying that to the wind in game.  However, I don't think it's really possible.  Though I would be willing to sail against the wind most of the time, I doubt everyone would.  Based on the map Paulus provided, the wind is blowing north along the American coast.  That would mean any time I'm wanting to go south, I'm fighting the wind, for the majority of the year.  I may be willing to personally put up with this, but I don't know if everyone is.  

[maturin]

 

 

 That would mean any time I'm wanting to go south, I'm fighting the wind, for the majority of the year.  I may be willing to personally put up with this, but I don't know if everyone is.  

This isn't aimed at you, but sometimes it seems like I'm the only person on the planet who realizes that prevailing winds will let players go places faster and easier, if they have half a brain.

 

The real Caribbean has easterly prevailing winds. This means that you can start in the Antilles and take take a long cruise downwind, then seize a prize and teleport back upwind to your outpost. Do the upwind sailing offscreen. Or you can take a long journey to the Spanish Main with the wind abeam, therefore guaranteeing a fair wind for most of the way. Either way, the result is >50% fair winds over the long term, while the current shallow system rigidly enforces 50% fair/foul.

 

It's no different from a river with current. You plan to paddle downstream as much as possible, and orient your trade routes or naval strategy accordingly. Then you get the upstream portion out of the way all at once when convenient. Compare that to a river that is nothing but an endless series of eddies. Then *every* long trip is doomed to traveling against the current, much of the time.

 

Right now the wind is constantly rotating to be in your face, and yet this is somehow the player-friendly system?

[Arctander]

Which could be meaningless. The 28 who voted comprise just 1.5% of all members.

It is a very small polling group for sure, but the fact that it is 100% says that it is an issue in the game design. Either way, I. glad the topic had gotten more discussing at least.

[Macjimm]

It is a very small polling group for sure, but the fact that it is 100% says that it is an issue in the game design. Either way, I. glad the topic had gotten more discussing at least.

Yeah. Glad it got discussion. I would love to see improved wind, current and damage from storms and shores. But you can't infer any reliable conclusion from the poll. It is very possible that hardly anyone is interested. Proportionally few people may be concerned about the topic. Players are more interested in game politics, combat mechanics/rules and crafting.

[Arctander]

Proportionally few people may be concerned about the topic. Players are more interested in game politics, combat mechanics/rules and crafting.

 

Perhaps, but the changes to game politics, combat mechanics, etc... will take a LOT more work to implement, tweak and balance out. My suggestion is something that would be a relatively easy thing to code into the game. Making it as complicated as you suggest with current & storm damage is a significant change from simply adding in some variation to wind direction rather than the static system in place now.

[DeRuyter]

Found this interesting graphic showing real time global wind patterns. You can rotate and zoom in on the Caribbean. Clicking on a particular spot gives you the wind speed at that location. Of course the pattern is a bit thrown off because of the hurricane/tropical storm lingering off the coast.

 

https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-75.85,22.10,1018/loc=-63.175,13.990

[Blackbrook]

I like the idea but I suspect programming wind as a variable as you propose would be quite a bit of programming,.  I knew an atmospheric physicist once. He used the massive computing power only available to government to write equations for clouds. Perhaps the devs can find a happy medium somewhere. Certainly the current system is a bit unrealistic and a bit annoying. If the wind kept rotating like that at the speed it does, in real life it would be at hurricane force lol.  

 

That is true if you want to simulate real atmosphere. However, there is a simple solution, which needs some preliminary work, but is quite simple to program after that. 

 

Weather model data is available publicly. You can retrieve for example 20 years worth of weather data and use that as a basis. This is a game, so I think it would be better to calculate the average wind vectors in the weather model grid and subtract that from the the model winds. Then you have gridded wind data (speed and direction) which varies naturally but does not have trade winds. To remove calms, you could add random light wind (needs testing).

 

Then you need to decide how fast you want to change the winds. This needs also some testing, but I suppose something like 1 day of weather data = 1 hour real time might work.

 

This way you have changing winds which are semi-predictable and different in the different parts of the Caribbean.

[Bragan Benigaris]

My 2 cents regarding wind & weather
=============================

Onshore & Offshore Wind
--------------------------------

Perhaps it would be a viable solution to differentiate between the near-shore and the (bigger) offshore regions. If it would be possible to create a more constant wind system in the ofshore regions, the travel times wouldn't get to much longer, perhaps. You could change wind strength in a night-day-cycle and change direction only every several days.

In the vicinity of land the direction could changed more often, again depending on the daytime, like in reality the effect of sea breeze and land breeze. It would it make a little harder to travel fast in the vicinity of (bigger) islands, but it's perfectly predictable for the player. And this leads to my second suggestion:

Weather Perk
-----------------

Make a weather perk for the officer. Wouldn't it be great, if your XO could say: "Well captain, i think we will have a fresh gale from SE all through the night. Tomorrow morning it will collapse and we will get a real strong fog." Perfect conditions for ambushing and smuggling! ;-)

[Arctander]

While I would love to see some real depth to the wind system. Things like off shore wind, or wind speed are really cool ideas. And realistic wind definitely has an interesting appeal too (hurricane season anyone?)

 

However, my original suggestion should be a very easy thing to implement - and though it wouldn't include nearly the variety that all the other suggestions have, at least it would include SOME variety. Which would be a great addition IMO.

[Wesreidau]

There's a day/night relationship with coastal winds, where cold land air and a warm sea at night, and a cold sea and warm land in the day, causes much of the coastal breezes around these islands. Consistent and predictable winds near the coast tied to the time of day with an open-water wind after you go far enough to sea would let us cruise coastlines, sailing out to open water and back in on a day/night dominated cycle. But in general, anything to make the wind and navigation more granular and skill-driven is fine by me.

[Arctander]

Agreed, anything that varies it more will make more interesting and force players to react and deal with it.

[Arctander]

Its been almost a month w/o any posts in this thread, but people keep liking it and taking he poll - presently 98% of people think that a change to the wind system would be good... but no reply from a dev or moderator about this (at least that I've seen)

My suggestion to tweak the system would be a VERY simple modification to it - some of the other ideas I think are also very interesting, though to implement, more complicated and would have a greater impact on game play. Either way, could we maybe get a single official person to say something here? Even just a "no" would be at least let us know that they're reading the forums.