Aetrion

When you actually delve into the history of cannons there are some calibers in the game that practically didn't exist or would have been extremely difficult to come by. For example 42 pound cannons were basically not installed on any ship, since the 32 pound demicannon was considered to be the superior weapon and lighter on top of that. A full cannon would have been exceedingly difficult to come by during the time, even though they technically did exist. The quality of cannons was also all over the place. It wasn't until 1805 or so that the french started machining the bore on their cannons instead of casting it, so pretty much any gun made before then was a lot heavier and a lot less accurate. Iron cannons were also lighter and cheaper than bronze cannons, but less accurate because iron isn't as easy to cast or machine to exact tolerances.

So, nobody either likes or dislikes this idea? Given how much discussion there is about adding more avenues for map control and taking emphasis off teleporting I kind of thought this would be relevant to someone at least.

I think the game could use an expanded crew system where crew isn't just a number, but you have to actually recruit crews and train your officers. Crew wouldn't simply jump back to 100% after a battle, but you'd have to actually land in port to recruit new crew. This could also tie in with a more expanded experience system that doesn't just increase the number of people you have, but also lets you train up different officers. That way experience remains relevant even for people who aren't just shooting for the top rate ships, since they can improve their crew by earning more experience just the same. Different officers could be: Bosun - In charge of the deck crew and ropework on the ship. Could grant bonuses to sail and yard adjustment speed, or rigging durability. Surgeon - In charge of treating injuries and seeing to the health of the crew. Could grant a percentage chance for crew to recover after battle rather than being dead. Purser - In charge of the ships treasure and wages. Could grant a reduction in crew wages or an increase in your ability to recruit while in port. Quartermaster - In charge of manning the ships helm and crewing its watches. - Could increase the speed at which crew move around the ship. Steward - In charge of preparing meals for the crew. Could grant an increase in crew morale and general effectiveness. Gunner - In charge of the ships armaments. Could grant an increase in reload speed. Master at Arms - In charge of the ships small arms and training the crew in close quarters combat. Could increase your crews power while boarding. Carpenter - In charge of the ship's carpentry team. Could increase how much hull your crew can repair with a kit. Sailmaker/Ropemaker - In charge of the ship's sail and ropemaking team, Could increase how much sail your crew can repair with a kit. Cooper - In charge of building the custom crates and barrels for odd cargo. Could increase how much space you have available on your ship through more efficient boxing. Maybe you could pick up named officers as you play, recruit them from around the map, and they would work sort of like ship upgrades, higher grade officers having better stats. Maybe when you level up you could assign mates to each officer. So, you rank up, and you get to promote, let's say, 5 people. So you could make your crew more specialized in various areas. You'd say "Ok, I want to promote 2 guys to Gunner's Mates, and 2 to Carpenter's mate, and 1 to Surgeon's mate", and so on. Giving your officers more petty officers who serve under them increases their ability even further, and would make it so that as you rank up and get to promote more and more of your crew into mates positions your small ships would gain benefits, so leveling wouldn't just be for crewing huge vessels. This isn't a fully formed idea, since I'm sure the devs already have some ideas of how they want to do officers and crew when they fully implement the system, just some thoughts on what I would like to see.

Arranging the cannons from heaviest to lightest bottom to top probably also had a lot to do with just keeping the ship stable. The rigging and armaments all sit above the ships longitudinal axis, while regular cargo would be placed below. No idea exactly, but I'm pretty sure they had to add ballast to account for any weight that was riding above the waterline.

Dumping guns would only be possible with the smallest guns anyways. There is no way to haul a 42 pound long gun out from the bottom deck and throw it overboard while in a pursuit with someone. A large naval cannon would weigh between 2000-5000kg, depending on its model and whether it was cast from iron or bronze.

During the age of sail guns were basically considered cargo, not fixed armaments. It wasn't unusual at all to remove some from a ship to make room for other stuff, and the main difference between a warship and a cargo ship was often whether it was loaded down with weapons or with goods. I think it would do this game a lot of good if they switched the economy from replacing ships to replacing equipment, so that when you sink you lose stuff like your guns, and guns can be crafted.

No it doesn't. In reality it's the length and quality of your service that gets you a big ship, not how much money you have. XP simulates that much better than the arbitrary gold the game chucks at you.

Whenever anything highly desirable is made unattainable for the average player it shrinks the community till it is attainable by the average player again. That's just a constant rule of game design.

We're talking about a game here, not a job, and I'm not saying things should come easy, I'm saying you should be allowed to earn them at your own pace. You guys are the ones who don't want XP so you can just skip to the end as long as you have enough gold stashed away.

It's not functionally equivalent, since XP is permanent once gained while money is spent and has to be gained again.

If something is relevant it can't be rare in a game. It will simply cause the community to contract till practically everyone who still plays the game is also someone who puts the time in to get that thing.

Yea, but the idea is to have a good spread of different ships with their own role to play in the game, so slashing the performance on ships of the line while retaining their huge cost doesn't really do that, it just moves another ship toward being the optimal choice.

I think that largely comes down to the excessive cost of replacing high end ships though. You can buy a sixpack of Surprises for the cost of a Victory.

XP is not a good point of attack for faction balance because people already simply go to the PvE server to grind XP, it won't make them play in underpopulated factions on PvP servers.

That's not the right way to fix the issue. You will never be able to control the most powerful thing in a game through economics, all you accomplish by trying to do so is driving off all the players who can't afford it, leaving you with a smaller game that is still full of only the most powerful thing. Trying to control the most powerful thing in a game through hard limits accomplishes nothing other than annoy players who have worked their ass off to get it only to then be told they can't use it by some arbitrary counter. The only real way to ever control the numbers of something in a game is to make sure that there simply is no definitive most powerful thing. Introduce some mechanics that make ships of the line not into the best possible solution to every problem. For example, fire ships were used extensively when the Greeks fought for their independence from the Ottomans, who owned a huge fleet of ships of the line. Knowing that they couldn't possibly outshoot the Ottoman fleet the Greeks adopted a strategy of taking rowboats up to the large cumbersome ships and simply blowing holes into them with powderkegs, or setting them on fire with oil. In the game this type of scenario could be implemented in port battles, by having the ports spawn rowboats that head toward the enemies to set them on fire. By giving the rowboats a speed of roughly 10 knots no matter which way they travel you would create a situation where a ship of the line cannot outrun them, while smaller, more agile ships wouldn't have a big problem keeping the fire ships at arm's length. Rowboats could also be filled with marines for small scale boarding actions, which again, would be a major annoyance for big ships that have no way of outmaneuvering small scale attacks like that. Another major factor to consider in port battles that hasn't come into play at all yet are Mortars. Mortars were usually mounted on smaller ships, sometimes specifically built for that purpose and designated as bomb-vessels. Since the mortars had to fire from the deck past all the rigging ships with smaller masts and less complex rigging were most effective as bomb-vessels. So that's another thing to consider as a way to make small ships more useful for port sieges: Make them more suited to using mortars. By giving them weapons that ships of the line can't effectively carry but that might be essential to taking down certain types of coastal defenses you create a demand for smaller ships. I think it would help the game significantly if the progression system was overhauled a bit a bit less one sidedly focussed on just getting bigger ships. Right now there is very little incentive to stick with a 6th rate if you can go 5th and so forth, because you just can't develop those ships any further in an interesting manner. That's a whole different topic worth of ideas. Lastly, from what I understand the various ports in the game are going to have custom maps to play on when you capture them, so that will also introduce all sorts of extra ability to utilize ships with a shallower draft. Anyways, there are tons of ways to make people want to use something else than a ship of the line that aren't just some arbitrary counter, but actual solid systems of gameplay.

Trying to artificially limit how many ships of the line are allowed to be in any portion of the game will never work without just ending up being an elitist crapfest. What we need is more good reasons to use smaller ships and more meaningful advancement for people who prefer them so that people are going to be more naturally inclined to use them. Also, let's stop making "historical" arguments about how many of this or that are supposed to be around. Always keep in mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Naval_battles_of_the_Napoleonic_Wars The entire Napoleonic wars saw fewer sea battles than one hour in Naval Action.

Reasoning for the Suggestion: Since we've had a lot of discussion on this board recently about how teleports are both somewhat needed because it's very annoying to have to traverse the entire map every time to get anywhere, but at the same time they really ruin the risk that should be inherent in traversing the open world with a hold full of cargo I was thinking that the game needs an alternate method of travelling to places a little more quickly and reliably. Historic / Realistic Underpinnings: In the age of sail making use of the currents and prevailing winds was the primary strategy for making long voyages reliably. The voyage across the Atlantic for example was facilitated by the North Atlantic Gyre, an ocean current that churns water from the mouth of the Mediterranean to the Caribbean and water from the American east coast toward the European north sea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Gyre Likewise the prevailing winds in the Atlantic form a similar pattern. The Westerlies blow most of the time from the American coast toward Europe, and the North-easterner back to the Gulf area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_winds These weather phenomena were predictable and relied upon to make ocean journeys. In Game Mechanics: The map would contain some regions out in the open ocean where winds follow a predictable path, and underlying ocean currents allow ships to exceed their normal speed limits as their hull is carried along with the wind. While inside of a tradewind your ship could travel downwind the whole way, and the water itself might add another 5-10 knots or so of movement in the direction of the current to anyone in those areas. Of course this isn't 100% realistic, these weather patterns are much more large scale in real life than what we'd need in the game to make it meaningful, but for the sake of making a good open world game I think this would work quite well. It would basically create a system of "Highways" through the map, where you can travel very fast and reliably, but that in turn also creates significant risk, because anyone using the tradewinds is in a place where they are much easier to intercept. Just like in real life, pirates knew where to look for trade ships bound for Europe or the new world based on these passages. Initially I'd suggest a current that carries people in a sort of loop, from the US coast out to Bermuda on the North Atlantic Drift, south of that you would encounter the Equatorial Current which carries you east again, and splits into the Antilles Current which moves along the north-side of Cuba and Espana back toward Florida, and the Caribbean Current which carries you along the South American coast line and then up from the Yucatan back toward Floraida. The Gulf of Mexico would also have a current moving in a clockwise direction inside of it. That configuration would be somewhat realistic to what exists in real life. That pattern could later be expanded with some more tradewinds that make sense for the gameplay, but may not necessarily be related to any real life weather events. Maybe the Antilles Current could be reversed in this game, and flow to the east, to give us a tighter loop around Cuba and Espana. That would make sense from a game design standpoint anyways. The currents would lie out a ways in the open ocean, not right up against the coastlines, since it would make coastal sailing really annoying if the wind was always going in the same direction there. Tradewinds would be something you seek out specifically for making journeys to other parts of the map, not something you'd encounter while doing missions and stuff.

So you fully realize that spending all your time on a game makes you a loser in real life and you still want it to be built in such a way that that is the main thing that makes you good at it? A game designed in such a way that you have to ruin your life to be good at it is the definition of inhumane design.

Making the game purely about what you can afford is exactly the kind of thing that you'd call inhumane design because it overly rewards people for spending unreasonable amounts of time in the game. No game should ever be designed in such a way that making it an unhealthy priority in your life yields the greatest payoff in the game.

They need to redo the whole system IMO, currently it's just awful. There are whole ships that are basically so weirdly situated in between two ranks that they aren't worth getting at all. Like Belle Poule and Frigate, both sitting at 280 so they are either undercrewed or you have access to a Trinc already. Crew should just go up smoothly with every so many XP you earn.

I think the XP progression should be a lot more nuanced than "Get more XP -> Use bigger ship". You should be able to customize your crew's training and so on, and have the ability to build crews that can handle small vessels so expertly that there is an actual reason to progress for people who prefer smaller ships. Removing it is a bad idea IMO, because at that point there would be absolutely no progression at all in the game, just "Have a friend who will give you a first rate? Congratulations, you have a first rate".

First you guys want PvP to create constant demand for goods, then you want PvP to create the most expensive components for crafting... At what point is crafting just a formality then and should simply not affect PvP at all?

I don't like that you can teleport yourself with cargo. That just seems like way too convenient a way to bypass any danger.

Why should the number of players matter? If a nation is conquering a lot of ports because they have superior population they get hit with the upkeep for having many ports, and if a nation is conquering a lot of ports because they have the most powerful hardcore clans they also get hit with the upkeep - seems like in either case it's perfectly deserved and required to uphold some balance.

I think they should scrap the whole system and make it so that you earn increases in smaller increments much more frequently. They can leave the ranks as they are, just decouple them from the crew increases. I mean they can take the XP curve the same way as it is right now and just break it up into little bites where you get 10 men. That way you level up a lot more often, and there aren't any ships that fall so weirdly in between two vastly different ranks that they are never really ideally crewed unless you buy them as a downgrade from what you could have. In fact if they just gave you 10 guys every 1000 XP it might even make a pretty decent curve all by itself, since when you get to the high end ships suddenly need hundreds and hundreds more crew.