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Take away the GPS


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32 minutes ago, The Red Duke said:

Both options got merits but Equal rules. Either we like it to stay or we wish it to go.

As both options have merit we are discussing both.

Why not give an option to turn it off or on? People would be knowingly putting themselves at a navigation disadvantage for the challenge/fun. I see nothing wrong with that, they couldn't complain because they chose to play that way.

No point in restricting gameplay in this situation when it could be an option that gives the player more freedom. I found trying to navigate using coordinates and that old map quite immersive. 

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I do that already.

While we vow for a asymmetric world based on player decision making, at the very least the table layout should be the same :)

So keep the GPS or remove it. The option of not using it is already there and plenty of players do not need to zoom in to know, give or take, their relative position.

Exact location is used as a homing beacon for interception fleets, other than the "skill" of the player at relaying information, that is my take on it. Anyone can "copy paste" a string of numbers. Keeping an eye on yer whereabout... now that takes a bit more "effort".

The immersion value of

 

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I vote keep GPS.

The reasoning is this: In the age of the game the primary means of knowing where you are were dead reckoning and taking sights with a sextant. Dead reckoning relies on knowing the ship's speed (log line every half hour or hour), current (from charts), leeway (observation), compass, deviation (table) and variation (charts). All of these may have inaccuracies, all likely to be small in themselves but they all add up. I have no idea how well currents and magnetic variation were mapped 200 years ago, and variation changes quite significantly as you travel east to west across the Caribbean.

Taking sights requires an accurate knowledge of the time. Sure, you can measure your latitude daily at noon (provided you have a clear sight of the sun and the horizon) without knowing the time, but you couldn't prediuct your longitude. If your chronometer is just 15 seconds out, your position will be 1 minute of longitude out, which at Caribbean latitudes is about 1.7 km. Many ships in the time of the game either didn't carry chronometers or didn't trust them,.so they took lunars instead, looking up the angle in tables. But taking sights and taking lunars both use a sextant which will have its own errors and is a fiendishly difficult instrument to master, and then, except for the noon sight, you need to spend ten to twently minutes with the almanac and calculation tables working out from you sight or sights where you are - or even (in the case of running sights - sun sights not taken at noon) drawing a single line on the chart and using dead reckoning from the previous running sight to work out where on that line you were likely to be.

I am no skilled eighteenth century ship's master, brought up to the sea from a boy, but I have done a bit of sailing, and on one ocean passage I and another crewmate decided to try our hand at celestial navigation. The boat already had a sextant and almanac, so we bought a set of air tables and some ocean charts for our latitudes and spent a happy 4 week passage, in excellent weather and sea conditions, taking dawn, noon and dusk sights and the occasionally running sight as well, using the GPS as our chronometer. By the end we could plot a set of star sights in under 15 minutes ... and we could usually get it within 10 miles of our actual position.

Now, I'd quite happily see all this stuff in game, but since all we can do is point our boat without leeway or currents using an infallible compass, quiite honestly we may as well have GPS.

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My vote is to be rid of it.  Early reviews from last year (or was it even earlier) specifically highlighted the ability to truly get lost as a benefit to the game.  I think it makes the game more immersive, and I think it raises the challenge for those revenge fleets.  Navigation is an art in this game, or at least it was once.  Now it's just look at the numbers.  Yes, you can just turn it off if you want, but there's no real sense there.  It's like playing one of the action RPGs like Diablo or Path of Exile on Hardcore mode, but, you know, with the option to just respawn if you really want it.  Then it's not hardcore mode.

Similarly with the compass.  It's not really gone, the immersion isn't really there, if everyone else is using the GPS, and you can just "have a peek to make sure" whenever you get uncomfortable.  Being uncomfortable should be a major component of this game.

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I'm a relatively new player. Been here a couple months. At first I didn't see the coordinates for my location, only the grid. I had a great time planning my trips and trying to evaluate the shape of islands in the OW versus the map. I am, however, a weirdo for minutia.

How about this: option to turn it on or off, but you get more sailing xp with it off?

If it is a binary choice, it is probably best to keep it for the more normal people among us.

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I would like to see the GPS removed, or as a option.  

Perhaps we could buy a GPS in the shop at a port.  Navigating is fun, but as someone else pointed out the ship is fixed to laser straight course unaffected by currents or wind.  But it does require more attention to re-establish one's location after fleeing off course away from a hunter if the GPS was removed.  Although it is my preference to not have the GPS  I'm not crazy about removing a feature that so many people wanted and begged to have added for such a long time.  If players really want the GPS, then let them have it.  

At least there is no magic icon on the map showing the location of my ship.  I can just ignore the GPS on the map.  It is not very conspicuous.  But it would be nice to be able to toggle it off.

What I would really enjoy is:

With the HUD (UI) off, some added tools: (toggled, so they are not always in use)

  1. Compass for taking bearings (rather than the one that is fixed to the ships heading).
  2. Chronometer or watch.
  3. Chip log.
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They had navigation charts and means to figure out locations.  It's not even a true GPS cause it doesn't give a dot where your ship is.  How hard is it for you guys to just ignore it if you don't want to use that feature?  For the New players and casual it needs to remain.  I hated when I started how easy it was to get lost or having to use a third party app to figure out where the hell I was.

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I also got some kind of dissapointment when I first saw the coordenates appear. I first thought it was crazy to sail with no reference but then I realize this is meant to be a sailing simulator, and so is the way it was before. I agreed with all those feelings missed now. Im not agree with making it a perk, cause I think navigation should only be up to the player and his/her experience in the sea, and the perk could make it so much easier for anyone to sail afk taking no care that we would finally all take it as obligatory.

I hope the coords are there for the tests to be easier, and I have no problem with waiting till release to get that restored the "hardcore" way but, I could agree with some toogle option like @Alcar mentioned, as long as we could only toogle that help only at ports (allowing real lost ships at ow being fu***) and giving so much exp only for those without it. 

Anyway, is there any known change to happen for the final release yet?

Edited by Gorkal1ty
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21 hours ago, LeBoiteux said:

Navigation could also be skill-based and funnier. All it takes is removing GPS

Agreed, but then drift  and current should be implemented. Without those navigation would still be a joke.

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Quote

You are aware by the 18th century most captains, could tell within a pretty fair distance (within a couple of miles) of where they actually were by using a sextant, compass, and a Marine Chronometer

There weren't any reliable chronometers until the latter half of the 18th Century, and even then they took a while to spread around. Harrison's timepiece was still in final testing in 1772.

That makes longitude very different from latitude.

Dead reckoning without a chronometer is only accurate if you perfectly account for your speed (which can and will fluctuate wildly over the course of a few hours) and heading (which is affected by leeway and current).

 

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17 minutes ago, Hodo said:

A skilled captain or even a Jr officer can find their way around in open ocean with reasonable accuracy, even at night using the star constellations.

If you ever try to use a sextant on a rolling and pounding deck you'll quickly discover that it takes a lot of years to get a position thats even near to reasonably coherent to your real position. Even on land it is not so easy an requires a lot of training.

But anyway, I'd vote for to keep to "GPS", since it is unrealistic to have no means of getting your position.

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1 minute ago, Hodo said:

At least this was standard practice for the Royal Navy, the US navy, and the French Navy.  

I was just refering to my personal experience while trying to do it while crossing the atlantic. But maybe I'm just a little bit more clumsy then you are, since I had problems to get a good position even at 2 Bf.

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In 1802 only 7 percent of British warships were equipped with a chronometer. Many of these were privately-purchased, and not issued by the Navy. That tells you that they would have been pretty much unheard-of in the privateer and merchant marine, probably with some technological lag in other nations' navies as well.*

By that point there were lunar calculations that could be performed, but these required very complex calculations and were only available 20 days per month.

https://books.google.com/books?id=xh4aUiwxnW0C&pg=PA383&lpg=PA383&dq=chronometer+merchantmen&source=bl&ots=S6r5CSzoTa&sig=SnooZl2JVe_0XZ07LPM0axGkfxQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwisscGwpa7TAhUj7oMKHe7zDs4Q6AEIIzAA#v=onepage&q=chronometer merchantmen&f=false

 

*The French Navy only had 34 chronometers in 1815. Bearing in mind that each ship needs about 3 of them for best reliability...

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3 hours ago, Hodo said:

A skilled captain or even a Jr officer can find their way around in open ocean with reasonable accuracy, even at night using the star constellations. Hell I learned to navigate using stars in middle school when I was on my orienteering team.  To this day I still remember how to find my way around with out a compass.   

This is sort of possible in NA.  But because the stars are spinning quickly across the sky and the sun is often a huge smudge of glare it would be very inaccurate.  Using a sextant would be very difficult with the rapid celestial movement in OW.

And then there are the clouds.

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2 hours ago, The Red Duke said:

1 minute equals how much ? 60 nautical miles ? That a lot of sea.

1 nautical mile was historically defined as a minute of latitude. Rather less accurately this is also taken as being one minute of longitude at the equator.

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3 hours ago, Hodo said:

No a real crew will have the captain, and the first mate, along with the chief boatswain take readings.  They double check their numbers and go with the the two closest to each other.   

At least this was standard practice for the Royal Navy, the US navy, and the French Navy.  

Be careful what you are referring to here. There are people one here far more knowledgable than me about naval practice 200 years ago who can doubtless put me right, but every discription I have read where more than one person takes sights refers to the noon observation, which does two things: it establishes the ship's latitude and it establishes local noon. 8 bells and the crew go to dinner.

I have never once read of a noon sight being cross-referenced with the ship's chronometer (if it had one) to establish longitude. Even at the very end of oceanlic celestial navigaiton in the 1990s, to use a noon sight for longitude was regarded as unreliable, because of the 15 seconds of time to one minute of longitude relationship. It is relatively easy to establish the highest point the sun has reached in the sky, and therefore your latitude, but to determine exactly when this took place, and to do so within a few seconds, is very tricky indeed.

Edited by Remus
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