Aetrion

I don't like any system where people get banned or silenced because someone felt offended. There are just too many people who are offended at everything and wield it as a weapon to get their way.

Some ships list their gun decks bottom up and some top down in that chart. It also says small square rigs on the second column, but the Xebec seems to be a fore and aft.

Unfortunately not. Right now the economy in the game is so rudimentary d that it exists purely by ensuring that you have to replace ships periodically. That basically means taking the expensive upgrades off when it hits Dura 1.

I guess it depends on who they raided. If it was someone who was likely to launch some kind of punitive expedition to hunt down the pirates they might have preferred to leave no witnesses. Of course that would never work in this game since the player can always tell someone.

Pirates were shown no mercy, but to pirates in particular having people surrender to them was an important part of their trade, because at the end of the day nobody was paying pirates to kill people and sink ships, and every lost man, every cannonball fired, every hole in the ship to fix would just hurt their bottom line. Having a reputation for being merciless wouldn't have payed off at all for pirates, it would have just made their job more difficult. What they wanted was a reputation for being merciless to those who didn't surrender.

The rank structure is definitely messed up. There are several ships that require 280 crew that effectively don't have an associated rank at all. I kind of wish they would add like 10 "Sub levels" to each rank and have your crew go up a little more gradually, so that there is a right time for every ship, rather than these weird huge jumps by 100+ people, and then sometimes you only get 30.

I think the changes to put more emphasis on raking are good because it creates more balance between the various ship types. I want people to be able to captain whatever ships they enjoy, and these changes will go a long way toward making smaller vessels able to better compete with the ships of the line, so it will make people who like smaller ships more able to compete, and it will let larger ships be less subject to additional penalties to try and balance their high combat power.

One of the things I'm currently really missing in the combat system is the psychological aspect. A lot of the fighting in the age of sail came down to morale and intimidation. If you could convince an enemy that the best way for them to get out of a certain situation alive was to surrender then you could take prizes without firing a single shot. Currently surrendering is basically just losing in every way, so there is no reason to ever do it. With a system that makes surrender a viable option in a fight it'd create a much more interesting dynamic where talking to your opponent might actually under some circumstances be just as good as shooting at them, if not better. So I think it would be great if there was a system in place that did two things: 1. Allow you to offer someone a surrender with specific terms. 2. Let people see your reputation for honoring terms if someone surrenders to you. Basically when you are trying to surrender to someone you could make various offers to them what you will give them if they let you leave. Being allowed to loot your cargo obviously. A sum of gold you specify as tribute. The powder in your magazine so you are disarmed until you get to a friendly port again. Unconditional Surrender (an option they can't reject that simply makes them win the fight as though they had captured your ship) The other party would be able to see your demands and then decide if they want to Honor your terms, Betray you, or Reject the terms. If they honor the terms the fight ends, they get everything you offered them, and both ships leave. If they betray your terms the fight ends as though they had captured your ship in a boarding action. If they reject your terms the fight continues. The second part of the system deals with the reputation you gain depending on how you react to an offer of surrender. Basically it would keep track of every time you Honored, Betrayed and Rejected offers for about a month, so that people can see what they can expect from you. (Only the last result goes on your record, if you reject three offers and then honor one the record for that battle shows 1 Honor. The fight needs to end by other means than a surrender after an offer has been rejected to get a reject on your record) If you're known as being honorable and sticking to the terms of a surrender you can use that to get people to give up their cargo or disarm their ship or pay you a tribute by merely threatening to fight them. However, if you have too high of an honor score with no rejects people might try to lowball you with their offers, thinking you just accept any surrender. If you have a few betrays on your reputation people are unlikely to offer surrenders to you. Likewise if you have a lot of rejects people will think you only accept unreasonable terms and it's better to fight you.

If removing durability loss would make skirmishes more popular than open world fights it stands to reason that removing durability loss from everything would make the whole game more popular.

Huh Whuat? That example has like the most absurdly huge rudder and pump and worst placed magazine imaginable.

Having a highly customized ship to play with is a huge deal for me, and I'd be willing to put money into that if its implemented in a way where the durability system doesn't take it away from me if I get into too many fights where my opponent has a chance to win.

I like incomplete information about the enemies status because it introduces a psychological element to the game when battles come down to the wire.

How is that in any way an argument for why boarding which is so vitally important to the game should be a weird little rock, paper, scissors minigame instead of a fully featured system?

Maybe when you are in the open world you could hit a button called "Battle Drill" that just puts you into whatever instance a fight would be in by yourself, and you can practice shooting and sailing to your heart's content there.

Sounds more like an exploit than a tactic. You shouldn't be able to win at defending something by abandoning it so that you can't be killed.

Let's face it, currently the game makes fighting anyone for the fun of it into a privilege that you have to be willing to pay for, that's why people don't do it. Anyone who wants to PvP with a spirit of competition and honor can't really do that as long as ship loss is in. I would much prefer a game where the majority of loss is incurred when trying to capture or defend harbors, so that the big clans that do the conquest stuff can have at it with the super expensive wars, but let the rest of the people battle it out for fun every once in a while without having to replace their ships.

I have no problem with people wanting to enjoy the PvE aspect of the game, Naval Action just doesn't make a very good long term PvE game in its current state and the devs would have to go into two completely separate development tracks to make it one. It's a question of "endgame". Building up XP and buying bigger ships is great fun on a PvE server, because you have a goal and you follow it. But what happens when you can captain any ship in the game and your coffers are spilling over? What more is there to do? On a pure PvE server entertaining people beyond that point usually comes down to having some kind of deep progression, like building up through various raid sets over months, or some other activity that simply takes forever. The PvP aspect in this game is sound, and has the potential to be very entertaining for a long time. I think most of the people who are on the PvE servers aren't necessarily opposed to PvP even, they just don't like the thought of losing ships to battles they didn't want to be in in the first place. That's something the game can remedy much more easily than trying to develop a whole second endgame scheme.

This sounds awesome actually. Will ships be able to run aground in combat once there is land in it?

I think you just spoke for other people yourself. And please, explain how a PvE game is supposed to generate content that doesn't eventually get boring? How can a PvE game ever create a real threat that needs to be confronted without having a situation where there is a possibility that no player at all walks away the winner?

The problem is honestly that an open world game that is purely PvE can't really work, since the whole point of open world PvP is to have the opposing players create the content and challenge of the game for you. At the same time, the PvE server is very obviously an outgrowth of people wanting to experience more of a swashbuckling adventure in the age of sail rather than be stuck in a perpetual cutthroat conflict where they need to be part of a clan or just get ganked all day. What we really need isn't a server that doesn't allow PvP at all, what we need is a server that has rules of engagement that make PvP palatable to more people. For example, surrendering should be a way to protect yourself from the worst consequences of a losing battle, not simply a way of skipping the fight straight to being destroyed. To me it would make a lot more sense to run a server where you are forced to accept a surrender, get to take someones cargo but then they get to go in peace, than a server where you are artificially restricted from attacking people at all for example. Enforced honor instead of enforced pacifism.

From my perspective the issue with pirates is that they still get gold just for hitting people. I mean, if you fight for an empire that makes sense. The empire has very specific enemies and they pay you to hurt them. If you're a pirate on the other hand it doesn't make sense, the pirates aren't at war with everyone else, they are thieves. Picking targets should be a matter of who you can steal something from, not simply a free for all with gold rewards for any act of mayhem you commit.

Currently this game doesn't play very nicely with multiple monitors. It doesn't capture the mouse in fullscreen mode, so it can run over to the next screen while you're trying to aim or look around and then the game minimizes when you click and the game loses focus. It doesn't have borderless windowed mode so you can use both screens without the game losing focus and being minimized. Ideally the game should do both. The best experience with multiple monitors in games is when the game allows you to play in borderless windowed mode, and captures the mouse whenever you don't have a cursor (when the mouse controls the camera). That way as long as you have a cursor on screen, like when you are in the harbor menu, the second monitor just becomes an extension of your UI, allowing you to have whatever else going on there. That's the ideal state for a multi-monitor setup.

I think this weird idea that some people have that in the past everything was dirty and grimy is really silly. People back in the day were actually pretty obsessed with keeping things clean and neat, because everything was a heck of a lot more expensive then. Of course they didn't have much of an idea about how hygiene works because they didn't understand germs, but when it came to cleaning and maintaining equipment they didn't let much slide. Personally I'm really hoping they will add some kind of customization option to the various ships in the game, so that you can have a unique looking ship with its own paintjob and figurehead and so on. All the cosmetic elements of a ship should be exchangeable IMO. When you can alter the paintjob they could very easily add a few skins that allow for more worn and neglected looking ships.

The reason why crafting XP isn't permanent is pretty simple, because it would distract people from testing the game. It would set up a situation where the best use of any gold you earn during early access is to buy materials to grind through so that when the actual game launches your craft XP is maxed out. By not retaining craft XP people will act a lot more naturally during the test phase and not funnel gold toward crafting in an attempt to shift as much value as possible to live.

How in the hell is it a good thing if people don't want to actually fight fair battles? I'm really afraid that this game is just going to turn into a boring gankfest where all the skill in the world doesn't actually matter because the only way to play it right is to never engage in a fight where how well any of the captains shoot even matters.