Juan Navarre

+1 Beyond getting stuck, I understand that there is some historical precedent for ships running into underwater rocks suffering some kind of damage. It would be great to see naval strategy pull some more weight in the game. It seems to me that the strategy in the game currently is all about choosing which mods and upgrades to ruin the authenticity of your ship's performance with. Getting the weather gauge and keeping your bearings provides precious little advantage compared with having l337 sniper skilz. Having to pay attention to shallows would go a long way to bringing some more strategy into the game.

Wierd. And you are zoomed in all the way with your scroll wheel? I wonder if it has to do with which ship you are sailing. I seem to be able to stay on the deck in my Indefatigable. Might be because it goes right to the bow chasers or stern chasers. Anyway, I agree that a first person view from the helm would be ideal.

Can't walk around the deck, but if you are zoomed all the way in with the scroll wheel, you can look around a full 360 left and right and stay on the deck in the center of the ship. That is how I usually do most of the battles, just turning from starboard aiming to bow chasers, to larboard, to stern chasers. Unfortunately, if you press Ctrl+H, it won't seem to let you switch out chain, grape, charge, etc... So it is tricky to do the whole battle without the holographic HUD.

I really thought, reading the game's description, that the OW was what the game was all about. That it would be like Sailaway, but with 18th century brigs and frigates instead of modern cruisers and catamarans, and with the occasional naval battle to spice things up. There is no combat in Sailaway. Sailing the OW is the entirety of the game. Just like the OW is the entirety of MS Flight Simulator and XPlane. The OW is fun in those games because there is more to sailing a boat or flying a plane than just WASD around the map. Sailing in the open world would be fun if there were any actual sailing involved.

This seems complex, contrived and like it would require a completely new mechanism. Missions in an assigned ship dedicated to that mission would be simple, intuitive, and the mechanism is already in place for the tutorials. As the OP observed, the appeal of the game for many is to be in an interactive Jack Aubrey story. Jack got assigned to the Sophie, and told what his mission was. He didn't have to purchase her, outfit her with mods and upgrades and then wander around looking for something to do. It is just intuitive that if you have the skills, but don't have the capital, you sail someone else's ship until you can afford one of your own.

As I mentioned in another thread, missions on the PvP server should play matchmaker. French players getting a mission in a 5th rate at no cost will defend their nations weapons shipment against British players whose mission is to capture said French weapons shipment, etc... If you have no control over what ship and upgrades you are using, it would be a way to create balanced encounters in which people's objective will be to accomplish their mission, rather than to preserve their irreplacable Hercules, so that they don't get stuck in a cutter. Letting people run missions without having to use their cutter to capture a snow, and then using their Snow to capture a Cerberus, and then using their Cerberus to capture a Belle Poule, just to get back to where they were each time they lose their ship, won't ruin the game economy. It would in fact be less disastrous than the current setup, where deleting and starting a new character is extremely lucrative. I've seen those naval clocks going for 10Mil, and a Hercules note going for 4Mil + 800 combat marks + an Agamemnon. Even aside from all the nonsense that can be done with alts, if I were inclined to join a clan, what would keep me from outfitting my whole clan with all the Hercules notes and Naval Clocks they want, and then getting a few quid pro quo from my clan afterwards? Seems to me that if you get no starting cash, no ships, and the reward for passing the exam is just the rank, and the missions that go along with that rank, it would eliminate a lot of those types of shenanigans, and be better for the game economy all around.

I am not quite sure how you distinguish between captaining someone else's ship, and being provided with a ship for a specific event and nothing else. Is it your ship that you own and can do whatever you want with, or is it a ship that you are captaining, but do not own?

Not true. M&C can have a max of 280. 400 is post captain. I think a better route than having basic ships to buy for free like the cutter, would be missions where you captain someone else's ship. So, for example, a M&C without a ship of their own could take a mission in a Surprise, which they would be unable to sell. They would only be able to attack the target of the mission, and would not be able to place anything in the hold, or remove the supplies provided from the ship. If they have the fleet perk, they can keep any ship that they capture during the mission, and by completing the mission, they will receive enough reals to afford to buy their own ship.

I stand corrected.

Historical accounts aside, I can't think of any mechanism that would prevent ships with similar velocities from grappling because of their speed through the water. The leeward ship would presumably be able to cast grappling hooks from further away due to height advantage of the increased heel. Other than that, what else would STW or SOG affect with regard to casting grappling hooks?

A better historian than I might correct me on this, but I sincerely doubt there are any accounts of boarding that include the speeds of the ships. 18th century ships were not equipped with the precision speedometers we are accustomed to in Naval Action. They had chip logs, which were pieces of wood cast overboard and attached lines with knots tied at regular intervals. A sailor would count the knots that were payed out over a period of time accounted by use of a sandglass. Needless to say, this involved process would only be accurate at all if the ship were kept on course for the duration, and would be impractical to use in a pitched battle while maneuvering to board an enemy. Additionally, the crew might have had other priorities than determining their speed at the time. We can infer that grappling was accomplished at a variety of speeds though. The first and most obvious inference is that if bringing the enemies speed down was a challenge that boarders had to overcome, there would be some account of it, and of the techniques used to reduce an enemies speed to a point where boarding would be possible. There are also accounts such as the 1779 battle of the HMS Serapis and USS Bonhomme Richard, in which Captain John Paul Jones tethered his ship to Serapis as a counter to the smaller ship's superior maneuverability and gunpower. If he had to reduce the Serapis to 2 knots before lashing the ships together, then lashing the ships together would not be an effective way to reduce her maneuverability, since it would be a moot point if he had to effectively reduce her maneuverability in order to reduce her maneuverability. Further, in 1799, the USS Chesapeake was heeling enough that she could only hit the rigging of the Shannon, when she lost maneuverability and became entangled with the other ship, and was subsequently boarded. The only way she would be heeling that much is if she was under enough sail to be going more than 2 knots.

Did they remove trading and crafting and switch to an arena style deathmatch game? I must have missed the memo.

Curiously enough, in his 1782 treatise on the subject of naval tactics, John Clerk sorely neglects the very effective tactic of ramming your bow into another ship under full sail in order to push them windward and get them down to the 2kts required to board. One would think he would have dedicated half the book to that, and the other half to the art of mast-sniping. It makes you wonder, "did he even sail?" It seems to me that DD is silly, but no sillier than the rest of the boarding mechanics. If there are going to be magic missiles in the game, why not have magic shield spells to counter them?

I love everything except the health bar, and extracting the oil onboard. Onboard tryworks weren't really a thing until the 19th century as far as I know. You should get blanket pieces for your hold that you can either sell, or refine into oil at a refinery building that you can build at an outpost.

Considering that these Xebecs are equipped with shipboard sensors that can identify the number of life forms on board an enemy vessel, along with detailed info on it's hull integrity and sailing performance, an INS heading indicator that incorporates wind info, and radar equipped with friend-or-foe info, I imagine they have cryogenic tanks for long voyages like that.

Right mouse button in combat takes you to the deck to aim your cannons. From there you can move around and you will be at deck level and still have control of your ship. Doesn't work for OW though.

It is different in several ways. Firstly, it removes the obligation for the players to break the ice and organize everything themselves. Secondly, it balances the encounter, so that it is challenging, but feasible for either party to succeed. Thirdly, the players can recieve rewards from their respective government for completing the mission. Fourthly, individual stories could be tied into a larger national plot progression. There are some other differences and advantages, but more to the point, I would contest the implied assumption that your scenario would be the prevailing alternative. The real question is "How is this different from two French captains and two British captains all wandering around the OW on their own, looking for something to do besides getting ganked?"

They can't replace the richness of a story driven by player interactions, but they can foster it. For example, the French Navy assigns two of their captains to guard a weapons shipment, while the Royal Navy sends two of it's own captains (who just happen to be evenly matched in terms of rank and ships) to intercept and capture that shipment.

For the tutorials, the player starts out as the XO on a naval ship tasked with protecting a merchant vessel. They have to follow the Captain's orders while learning the controls. During the mission, the captain takes some grape to the head, and the player takes command for the final exam. The merchant that the player saves offers to hire them to captain for their trading fleet if they ever decide to leave the navy. The admiralty of the nation commends them for their bravery, promotes them, and offers them command of a naval vessel if they decide to stay on. The player can then choose to captain the naval ship, and recieve orders from the navy, work for the merchant tycoon and recieve trade missions, or turn them both down and strike out on their own. The naval missions would relate the story of the nation's war effort. Trade missions would relate the story of helping build the merchant's trade empire.

You mean the thrill of pointing your ship directly at another ship and pressing the attack button? Wouldn't there be more thrill if you the hunt involved controlling your yards for better turn rate? If getting caught in irons while trying to escape was a real peril? If leading your pursuers into treacherous reefs that you could better navigate with your superior sailing skills and more maneuverable craft was a viable strategy?

I hope that the boarding mechanics will change more fundamentally than just little tweaks to the rock, paper, scissors game. The emotional pacing of combat in NA seems backwards it me. Maneuvering, getting the weather gauge, timing a rake, etc... should be a cerebral, strategic endeaver, but because each Captain has to aim the cannons themself, it is turned into a fast-paced, action packed first person shooter. Boarding, by contrast, really should be a visual, visceral, fast-paced, action packed game of firing flintlocks and crossing swords. Instead, it is a downright tedious game of waiting 15 seconds, pressing a little rectangular button, and then waiting another 15 seconds.

You are quite incorrect. At no point did I suggest that the OW should not be time compressed. In fact, I think the time compression is great, and have said so in this very thread. What I would like is the sailing mechanics of combat in the open world, and some sailing challenges to overcome, like storms, reefs, rocks, currents etc...

I made those suggestions over the course of this thread. Your use of the pronoun "his" in reference to the OP indicates that you meant "original poster" rather than "original post". Regardless, the OW was meant to be more than just a portal for RvR and trade. It was clearly meant to be a gameplay element: As a gameplay element, it could be improved with some sailing content. As a portal for combat, it could be improved with a "teleport to combat" button. Right now the OW seems like it is pretty boring for the sailors and the sport gamers alike.

Sure I did. I suggested a couple different options for people who don't like sailing the OW. I suggested an arena style server where people could have their combat and avoid the OW altogether. I also suggested that folks should be able to let their XO take the helm and auto-navigate to a destination port.

I realize that it isn't a sailing simulator. In fact, the lack of simulated sailing in the game (and the corresponding potential for there to be simulated sailing in the game) was rather the crux of my suggestion. Perhaps I was thinking of a different game. Maybe you know where I could find it? The game I was thinking of has all this realistic sailing stuff based on historical 18th century maps, hull models, sail plans, speeds, turning and heel performance: Naval Action Steam Store Page