Callaghan

One thing that is nice about the current grading system is that it adds a bit of granularity to player progress. Levelling up and getting better ships can take a fair while if you are not willing to use exploits and or 'power play' (dishonourable nonsense for kids imo), and so have categorical variations within ship types helps add mini objectives for player progress in between the larger objectives. This is not an argument for getting rid of the current system, just a case for preserving what is good about it. In other words, please make the new system use visuals and language to distinguish between ship; varieties, as opposed to just a percentage change in the stats here and there. A bit of 'flavour' - an algorithm to generate adjectives for the ship based on the stat changes, much like loot in many RPGs ("Race built traders cutter", for example), can really help make crafting and purchasing new ships based on small changes seem a lot more significant and exciting. Colour coding according to ship strengths could also help in this regard. With the current lack of proper UI, the game in general lacks these small but important elements that all come together to make that 'hook' that keeps people playing and coming back.

"it is ok if you comment on that without personal attacks he is also not allowed to troll you and might lose his position because of that" Fine, but where do you draw the line? The more I get into the game the more I like to role play a bit. There have been occasions where I have, in good humour, called a fleeing french captain an ´amphibian brained field-hand´, for example. It was technically a personal insult, but I don´t think any player that isn´t a humourless sourpuss would want to censor any such banter.

All sounds good apart from compression of power of lower ranked ships - unrealistic and unhistorical, not to mention counter-productive. Taking on and defeating a snow in a yatch or whatever is already possible if the player has enough skill, it shouldn´t be made possible for players who aren´t willing to try harder, just seems to go against the core design principles of the game.

Some of us don´t spend every day on the forum, and I don´t have the time to look through the entire forum to see if there is another topic. These are my suggestions, and I put them in the correct place.

This game can never be advertised as ´realistic´if pirates are able to crew, use and maintain 3rd rates and larger. This is obvious, and the fact that the devs allow pirates very large ships goes against the core design principles of the game and the reason why many people invested in pre-alpha. For whatever reason, the devs seem incapable of simply sticking to their guns and denying all the Jack Sparrow wannabes from getting these large ships, so here´s a mechanics compromise to make it more viable. Pirates are unable to have crews large enough to effectively use SOLs, but they can still capture them, sell them and even use them if they like, they would just have a MASSIVE penalty. They would have the same number of ranks as the other nations, but each rank would correspond to a smaller crew. To compensate for this, and to reflect the pirate ´flavour´ with a bit more emphasis, I suggest that pirates are able to keep all of the durability on ships that they capture. This would be a fair compromise, and would also make being a pirate more ´piratey´ i.e. you would now have a great reason to go out and capture more ships as part of the core gameplay, as opposed to having one mastercrafted for you which is just ridiculous for a pirate. Thoughts?

I voted Exploration and Delivery missions, but feel that the option isn´t good enough. Filling out the missions to make them fun as opposed to crushingly mundane should be priority number 1 right now. it´s what all players use to learn the game and gain their initial ranks via XP- if this isn´t fleshed out ASAP people are going to get very burned out on the game because of this oversight. I have made a post on the suggestions page for mission options, it doesn´t simply have to be limited to delivery and exploration (yawn). Get creative guys!

So long as they never ever ever allow players to use unrealistic colouring especially for sails, sounds good. PotBS looked like a f*cking children´s swimming pool with all of those black and red sails everywhere, instant immersion killer.

Ok so I have sunk god knows how many lynxes, privateers and what not in missions, and am getting bored quickly by how easy the missions are and the lack of variety. I´m picking the missions that are above my rank and they are still too easy. Some suggestions for mission types that should be added ASAP to make the early game more interesting, more of a ´game´ and less of a ´grind´in an attempt to get to supposed game content. Mission variety is especially important at this early stage when trading and crafting aren´t really viable unless you play the game 24/7, and would greatly improve new player retention. I can see that the devs have their hearts in the right place, but I´m worried they are getting distracted by less important aspects of the game. Right now, to be completely frank, the game doesn´t feel like a sailing adventure where the player feels drawn to explore and discover and, well, play. Right now it feels like being a coffee boy for a faceless corporation that has been given the vague, distant promise of a better afterlife if they make enough coffees and run enough errands. Rewards relative to difficulty - Why on earth do I get the same gold and XP when fighting a rank 3 mission enemy as with a rank 1? This just goes against common sense, creates a sense of grinding where there neednt be, and is probably one of the easiest things to change from a coding perspective. Unique/Special AI enemies - In line with the style of the game, I´m not talking about characters with abilities etc. I just think that this could be a good way to make the missions less crushingly predictable and repetitive. Every 1/10 missions, for example, the AI could be in a uniquely powerful ship relative to the player, with XP rewards to compensate. Convoy intercept - accepting the mission would create a trade convoy on the map (good escort compared to OW AI convoys) with very valuable cargo. Any player could attack in theory but the player who started the mission would have the advantage of knowing the departure and destination ports, allowing them to plan an ambush point. This would be an especially good mission for groups, as it nicely bridges the open world map and the battle instances in a way that the game hasn´t yet explored. Convoy escort - not a personal favourite, but more or less essential for this kind of game, could maybe be a good low level mission type that encourages new players to explore the world earlier on, as opposed to waiting till they get an SOL, which seems to be the case right now. Delivery missions - exactly what they say on the tin Pursue and capture - pirates would often flee from navy ships as opposed to stand and fight as they do in the game, I would love to be able to play missions where I chase a pirate ship loaded with booty through an archipelago or series of rock formations around a cove, needing to catch them before they escape to deeper waters where they will be able to escape. Spy/scout missions - could be held within specialised battle instances where the player ship has to get close to a port or fortification (rendered within the instance) without being detected, and then escaping with the intel. Sailor retrieval - entering this typr of instance would place you in the aftermath of a large battle, with floating burning hulks and a few surviving victors roaming looking for survivors, your mission would be to enter this smoky landscape and rescue friendly sailors while fending off the enemy. Just a few ideas off the top of my head - the combat is very well implemented in this game and it really should never feel like a grind, a few simple changes just need to be added for this to be the case.

Thanks guys, keep being good devs, fighting the good fight, and resisting the demands of the onslaught of casual kiddies since Steam release!

Ok so it seems like their AA is very badly optimised. I appreciate that with the level of geometry added by all of the rigging and lines then AA is going to be expensive, fine. But in 2016 we´re so used to not seeing jaggies that it really undermines the beauty of the game, especially because there are so many lines that need AA. FXAA is a nasty blur and counteracts the effects of having high res textures and anisotropic filtering. Are Gamelabs looking into ways of optimising their AA options further, or will it be down to the players to just lower their settings? In response to Octanen, AA is anything but ´useless´, it is one of the most powerful ways of adding verisimilitude to a game, and any experienced gamer should easily be able to tell the difference between 0x, 2x, 4x, and then also supersampled AA. Anyway, looks like other people are having equally bad performance. Now I just want to know if this is something that is being worked on.

So I just booted the game up for the first time in a very long time. I upgraded my system recently, and now have an i5 6600k OC´d to 4.4Ghz, an R9 390 8GB, and 16gb DDR4 2666 on a good motherboard. Why then do I see no performance improvement in Naval Action over my 2010 system? I ran the game with the very same settings, 1080p, everything maxed out apart from AA which I had on low, and I had maybe 24 FPS. I´ll try again later, could be an anomaly, but I have the latest drivers and everything. I´m running it on Windows 7 64 bit. Am I the only one getting shockingly bad performance? This PC should easily be able to handle the level of geometry and the textures and simulation in Naval Action.

Each deck clearly states which class of cannon it can handle. Normally a number range i.e. 7-9.

I hate the idea. This is supposed to be an age of sail simulator, not a camerman with a time machine in the age of sail simulator. It´s like motion blur and lens flare, they should have been killed off a long time ago.

Wow the whole thing came out the water? Haha.

Not of all the things, I want to have them all if possible. In this case I´m more interested to know exactly why not.