Vicker3000

The in-game compass rose currently has tick marks every 15 degrees, which means that the full circle is divided into 24 pieces. With the current in-game compass, there are two tick marks between North and Northeast, dividing this space up into thirds. A traditional compass rose is divided into 32 points. Each point has a specific name. Halfway between North and East is Northeast. Halfway between North and Northeast is North by East. The traditional 32-point compass is a cornerstone of age-of-sail lore. It appears everywhere, including books, paintings, carvings, tattoos, and everywhere else imaginable. To connect this back to the in-game compass, there needs to be either one or three tick marks between North and Northeast. The current in-game compass has two tick marks between North and Northeast. The current in-game compass makes it very difficult to use traditional terminology when interacting with other players. This seemingly minor thing has a massive impact on immersion. Changing the in-game compass seems like it should be an incredibly easy thing to change. It's just a single image file. Making this change would be a small investment, and would be quite a substantial positive impact on immersion.

With the new crew focus system, the marines act as an additional "subsystem". The marines are effectively locked into being set as "marines", and don't help with any of the tasks on the ship. For one thing, I don't believe this is historically accurate. Marines would have helped with manning the guns and handling lines. But let's ignore that for now. The purpose of the marines is to help with boarding combat. Shouldn't they at least help with the "boarding" subsystem? If I switch on "boarding", a bunch of my non-marine, able seamen leave what they're doing (guns, sail handling, etc) to go and prepare for boarding. The whole reason I turned some of my crew into marines is so that they would help me in boarding combat, so why aren't they included in the number of crew that's getting ready for boarding combat?

I love the modeling of the rigging in this game. I have never seen anything else come as close to NA in terms of realistic rigging. That said, there are two major types of lines that are missing from the ships: braces and sheets. Braces run from the tip of a yard (the "yardarm") to a different mast. They are used to control the rotation of the yards. Sheets run to the tip of the boom of a fore-and-aft sail, and are used to control how far out the boom can swing. These lines seem especially relevant given that these are what the player is controlling when the player presses Q, E, Z, and C. For me, the absence of these lines is immersion breaking. Without these lines, there is nothing to control the sails' rotation and nothing keeping them in a given position. When I've mentioned this, several people have pointed out that these lines would have to move with the sails, and so they would be harder to add. It seems like this shouldn't be an issue, given that sheets are already there in game for headsails and staysails.