Digby

Its a very interesting and appealing style, quite unusual. It reminds me a lot of my old miniatures wargames table on which I used 5mm troops. Will the buildings give defensive bonuses, or will there be ability to occupy them? At the scale of the map shown it looks to be too large a scale for stone walls to be shown; what are your plans to show the important walls such as The Angle and the wall west of the Maclean Farm on Oak Ridge where Rodes division was so badly cut up on the afternoon of the first day?

It was a strategic Union victory. The battle forced Lee to use up almost all of his artillery ammunition and with all of his divisions damaged to some degree he had no option but to retreat back the way he'd come. The battle resulted in his offensive camapign in the north ending in failure. The Union did not however follow up rapidly and aggressively enough to prevent the Army of Northern Virginia getting away across the Potomac, so it wasn't a decisive victory. As the first really successful major Union win in the east it was also of great morale significance for the North.

Every time you post now, I am disliking your attitude towards game development less and less. I can see I made a mistake hoping this game would be what I wanted. In the end far too many devs just want to make money, sometimes even in a seemingly greedy way, and are not committed to designing a great or groundbreaking game. If the game is going to be a WoT clone you can have the ships behave like rubber ducks, because the kinds of players you'll attract won't care.

Just to close this part of the discussion down and I don't want to wander any more off topic but sadly DG had other problems. It had a rather invasive DRM which caused big chunks of the gaming community to distrust the devs and boycott their game and unfortunately the AI was extremely weak. MP play though was superb and it was there that the gunnery and damage models really shone. It was a great pity, since this aspect of the game was brilliant but it was sunk (literally) by other problems quite unrelated to how good the physics engine was. You chose two rather unfair examples to compare it to though, since DG was a niche game by a garage company aimed at wargamers so it was always going to have a small market. Football Manager has a VAST market and ArmAII's sales exploded in May last year when the DayZ mod was released. Football games and zombies have a much wider appeal than WWI warship combat... and considerably more than the Russo-Japanese War! But anyway, enough about DG. But there's lessons to be learned there regarding DRM and good AI. You need not go for a calculation of every shot fired and where it hits if the sheer numbers of shot flying around the battlespace are too high - and I can well imagine they might be once you get around 8 ships or so in an action. I gave some rough percentages of where shots ought to strike (80% on thin upperworks where the damage falls on crew and guns but ship itself is not injured; 15% main above waterline timbers where apparent damage is minimal, few or no loss to crew and guns but streess cause leaks; 5% shots low on or at waterline where again apparent damage is minimal but leaks are worse). With most of the shots hitting the upperworks in your game calculations and a crew morale check system you should find that most ships will strike their colours before they get near a risk of sinking, so such a system is still a practical proposition even without a specific ballistics model per shot. As to ships pumps which were hand-cranked as Barberouge was saying, putting more crew onto the pumps would mean you'd have men spare and resting, and not tired ready to take a "shift" on working the pump, so with a number of rested or semi-rested crewmen available the averge speed at which the pumps could be worked would be higher. One group of about 10-12 men would work the pumps in a frenzy, very fast and they'd tire quickly, but then the next set of 10-12 guys would take over. Adding more men adds more "shifts" so each "shift" can rest longer and be more efficient when they take over but you waste many men idle awaiting their "shift", so it becomes a minigame within the game if you like - not always a good thing. I personally would not want to see too much crew- and ship- systems micro-management as the game may be in danger of becoming a click-fest and that would spoil the mood of an age of sail battle. Perhaps a player could have a set of "automanage" buttons to set various tasks to different settings and then forget about it. Sorry... OT, we were talking about a sinking and damage model.

It might be fun but I disagree it would be realistic. It would be complete fantasy.

BTW, just so you are aware, Storm Eagle Studios "Distant Guns" series uses an individual shot trajectory and point of strike system in its calculations, so an accurate ballistics system is practical. Their games are set in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and WWI so the kinds of damage done inboard with an explosive shell are a lot different, but the fundamentals are the same. And their ship to ship combaat is stunning, the damage modelling is excellent, which is another reason to take such a route. Your system described with points 1 thru 8 is fine. It'll work because that exact same system has been used in dozens of games, going right back to board games in the 1970s like "Men of Iron". What I'm saying is that by taking a different approach, something different and ground-breaking (which in itself becomes a strong selling point of the game) you'll get a much better game, far more realistic.

As Admin said in one of his posts aabout a week ago, the devs need to focus on how real battles were fought, not on odd inventions that in reality may have existed but were never used. The Puckle gun existed but was impractical - the technology was not there to support the idea and in fact the Gatling gun of the 1870s was a more robust concept. Devs could sink 100s of hours of time into coding those weapons and their effects and graphically making the models and of course players would want to use them and you end up with a stupid fantasy world with every ship toting fantasy weapons and the game ends up nothing like an age of sail game. This is where PotBs went wromg, by failing to focus on the core gameplay and doing odd crazy stuff. The Devs need to focus on what was normal and average in the era, on how battles at sea were fought.

I would not have stern and bow "armour", these two aspects of the ship were highly vulnerable to enemy fire, but not in terms of a target to sink them, but in terms of firing cannonshot down the length of the vessel and so disabling more crew and guns than a shot coming inboard through the broadside would. The large glass-paned windows of the stern cabins were easily the most vulnerable part of a ship but firing into them would hardly add anything to contributing to sinking it, it would though disable far more crew on the gundecks. Shots fired along the decks from a bow position were likewise effective at disabling crew and guns, though less so. So shots fired into these two areas do not contribute to sinking the ship at all, or very little, but just do much more damage to crew and guns, stern raking shots more so than bow raking shots. The masts could even be severely weakened by shots striking them where they pass through the lower decks. Also note that stern/bow rakes to be effective need to be done at extremely short range, something under about 100 yards probably so that the gunners can be sure of getting a shot on target. Point blank is obviously best. Please do not use a system of armour/strength and gun HP. Its a horrible system, really crude and cannot replicate reality at all. The concept of "armour" and HP is a really primitive gameplay idea that has been in use in games for decades. With a computer you have the ability now to actually detect where individual shots are travelling and where they strike. Can you not design a system that relies on actual ballistics and where shots fall? You can punch huge holes in a wooden ships side all day and it won't sink, if you're hitting well above the waterline (which is where most shots were aimed). Some stresses will be transmited to the ships structure by any heavy blow so some minor leaks will start after a ship has been hit in most places low in the hull. A ship sinks in a storm often because the pounding and shifting sea is placing undue strains on the hull, opening up seams so that leaking water overcomes the capacity of the pumps. So there would be minor stress and strain that induces leaking from some shots. You need to do calculations on the mass of shot against the thickness of the timbers at the point that shot strikes to determine how much strain/leaking could be caused. A shot punching a hole right through some light scantling is going to look impresive and it'll disable crewmen with splinters but it won't cause leaks. However a 32lb heavy shot thudding against a 2ft thick main sidewall is going to impart stresses deep into the hull. It'll bounce off without going through and hardly appear to do any damage at all, but deep in the structure of the ship, it'll cause stresses that will shift timbers against each other and maybe start leaks. So some shots that seem to be causing impressive damage high up on a vessel's sides should not be doing very much to a ships vitals at all - but they will be disabling many crew. This would be about 80% of all shots hitting (that are fired at the hull - shots at the rigging are not being discussed here - that's a different topic). Crew and guns are what suffer most. Other shots that strike the main timbers will not penetrate - 2ft thick oak will keep out any low-velocity black powder iron shot with ease - though lighter vessels like frigates and sloops would be in serious trouble. This is why sloops and frigates stayed away from ships of the line, because their weight of broadshide stood a high chance of punching through the smaller ships side timbers and letting in water. This might account for another 15% of hits. So you have shots striking thin upper areas, passing right through gunports or coming down the decks from stern or bow rakes all doing a lot of harm to crew and guns, and possibly having a small chance of striking a mast and weakening the main rig. Almost none of these shots seriously harm a wooden ship. A few leaks, but probably nothing the pumps can't cope with. Then you have shots striking the heavy main timbers which keep them out and don't seem to do much damage but do all have a small cumulative effect on leaking. These shots do zero damage to guns, crew and rig, but harm the water integrity of the hull. You might then get a third kind of shot that strikes very low on the hull side and does not penetrate but where it hits is on or below the waterline so that the effect of its force more directly causes leaks in a more vulnerable area. Here is where the other 5% of shots might strike. Big wooden warships very rarely sank in battle. They were usually so shot about and the rig shot away and unable to manouver, and with so many crew disabled that the surviving officers would strike their colours. There are some beautiful painings of Trafalgar that show French and Spanish ships disabled and helpless but still very much afloat and still fighting. Its generally a rule that the crew of a ship will surrender long before any chance of the ship sinking takes place. Please make this a feature of your games. The crazy, silly Hollywood crap in Empire: Total War with ships blazing like torches, exploding and sinking everywhere is complete rubbish. Please, please don't make a game as dreadful as that. Fire was very rare, ships almost never burned and the accounts of wooden ships burning at battles are well-known because they were significantly rare, such as L'Orient burning and exploding at the Battle of the Nile in 1798. Ships did sink - I mentioned above that small ships like sloops, frigates, brigs, etc had such thin wooden walls in compariosn to SoLs that heavy (24lb, 32lb) shot could punch straight through them and sink them within a few minutes, but a frigate fighting a frigate would mean that neither ship had sufficient weight of shot to seriously compromise the integrity of their opponent's hull. And ships of the line pretty much never sank in battle. The mass of the striking shot should be calculated (6lb, 9lb, 12lb, 18lb, 24lb, 32lb, 36lb - all impart a greater and greater impact) against the thickness of the timbers at the point of strike. You don't have to do lots of research to get this data. Every solid shot weight and force is found by simple calculation. Once you get a decent drawing of one ship of each type you wish to use you can use the thicknesses on the different parts across all ships of that type (but add variations such as green timber which the Russians often used), etc. So your game engine will know how powerful every shot is, where it is hitting, the thickness of timber at that point, where the waterline is, what crew are nearby, etc, etc. A proper ballistics and fall of shot model is the only way to do this properly. It'll give you such a superb game as well and will produce authentic results. So many ships sank after Trafalgar because their hulls were strained and leaking and the subsequent storm placed stresses on the weakened hulls that they could not contain, letting in more water than they would have in an undamaged condition. So your average Age of Sail combat is about forcing the other crew to give up, more than trying to sink his ship (in fact, you didn't want to sink his ship, you always wanted to take it as a prize and get the prize money - or if you were a pirate, sell the cargo and ransom the passengers). Work your design on those lines and you'll have a great game.

LOL, yeah, comics tend to have cool stuff in them that isn't real!

Greek fire or things like it were not used in this period. Fireships were almost always only used against a fleet at anchor in harbour because ships able to maneuver could easily avoid them. Forts had shot ovens to fire red-hot shot at ships to set them on fire but ships themselves almost never fired heated shot or use combustible weapons because the danger of fire on your own ship was too great. Bomb ketches were not ship to ship weapons, their principle use was to bombard shore targets. I would prefer the devs to concentrate on the basic combat environment and not waste time on all the silly fancy add-ons which were of little use in actual sea battles. Every ship's crew fired muskets and such at very short ranges. You don't need a specific game mechanic to introduce this, it should just be assumed to take place once ships get very close and so there becomes a risk to crewmen in exposed positions.

Thanks Barberouge, I can see where you're coming from now and I think we are all saying the same thing in the end.

I couldn't even see the minimap, or concentrate on it with all that distraction. Music? What music? I just heard about 20 bulls being slaughtered.

Three reactions to that: 1) Terrible, terrible game interface, its so crowded I can't see a thing! 2) Dreadful choice of music. WTF? I switched off after 10 seconds. 3) Clicking between window and full screen on YouTube briefly brings up a view of a naked female. You need to watch what kinds of links you give.

I've seen "sandbox" used a lot to describe exactly what Verhoven is describing. Its how I think of it. You are given a space to play in (open sea or a map with island(s)) and a set of toys (list of available ships/types) and you make up a scenario using your rules (as in what ships or crew types each team has, strengths, missions). That to me is sandbox. We should probably try and agree on some terms. I use "2D map" and "campaign map" to mean the open world and "3D battlespace" or "3D instance" to mean a meeting of 2 opposing ships or sides on the open world that generates an encounter. The "sandbox" would be a completely separate entity and used for either team co-op play vs the AI or faction (or casual) battles.

That seems to sum this discussion up. Sales are more important than accuracy. I was hoping for better from this team.