Aetrion

Only if the damaging effects can be avoided. If you can't avoid it and simply get caught in storms that slowly drain your money it doesn't add anything to the game other than being even more frustrating to people who don't have all the time in the world and might not be able to just wait till the weather clears because they have no other time to play. If you can avoid it and skillfully navigate around the danger then it will actually add a bit more excitement to open world travel, which wouldn't be a bad thing.

I don't know why you have to hit control all the time.

You'd still get splinters if the balls don't penetrate though, in fact you'd probably get more visible splinters because it means it went in and got embedded rather than going through the wood.

I think ports should have lights at night and in the fog so you can find them more easily. It's silly that they are completely blacked out at night, there should at least be some fires or lanterns burning somewhere.

I think having a solid reputation system would be a huge benefit to this game, especially the PvP element. For example, during a pirate raid offering your surrender and letting them have your cargo should be a viable option if you would rather not risk your ship and instead just surrender your cargo. However, you would only consider doing that if you know the captain you are surrendering to will honor his word and let your ship go. If the game had a reputation system that kept track of that sort of thing there would actually be a real incentive not to screw people over, because it goes into your reputation. Of course having a reputation as a bloodthirsty butcher who sinks anyone they fight is what some people are going to go for, but having a reputation as an honorable captain who accepts surrenders and lets you get on your way would also be beneficial, since not having to fight at all is obviously it's own reward. There are other factors to a captains reputation that could come into play to facilitate other systems, such as switching nations. Your reputation could also have a loyalty score that goes up the longer you stay with a certain faction, but drops back down when you switch factions, so that people who constantly switch nations would have a very low loyalty score, thereby tipping people off that they are unlikely to stay on their side. I'm seeing reputation not just be one single measure, but sort of an array of different values. For example an "Honor" score that gives people an idea of how you deal with captains who surrender to you. The "Loyalty" score to give people an idea of whether or not you switch factions. There could also be a "Defiance" score that measures how often you've won a fight when you are attacked. There could also be a "Daring" score that keeps track of how often you successfully attack ships that have a higher battle rating than you. There could be all kinds of reputation scores like that. Having a system like that could create a lot of interesting social dynamics in the game, where you can deal with people by actually talking to them, and not just by exchanging gunfire. You might be able to talk people into a surrender if you have the right reputation to convince them you'll honor the terms. You might be able to send people running in fear if you have a reputation for leaving nobody alive.

I think instead of having a limit to one character we should instead have a system where you have an Account name that displays along with your characters, the way that Startrek Online, or Guild Wars 2, or Elderscrolls Online do it. Friend lists and whispers etc. all run through the account name, not the character name, so that way people can't easily abuse multiple characters to act as spies and infiltrate other guilds, which I guess is the main concern people have when they say you should only be allowed to have one character. Personally I don't think limiting characters really helps anyways though. Someone who's obsessed enough with a game to create a spy character and pretend to be friends with people in a game just to screw them over isn't going to get stopped by having to buy a second account. Seen it all before in Eve, there were no-lifers running dozens of accounts just because the game rewarded it in a variety of ways.

Yea, being able to make more characters would be nice. I kind of wish instead of restricting you to just one character they instead went to a Character@Account system like Cryptic, GW2 and ESO use, where you have an account name that shows up with your character name, so that way you can have multiple characters without people having to worry too much about spies and saboteurs.

The sort of irony here is that in today's society "masterwork" or "mastercrafted" means the absolute pinacle of skill, while back in the day when the apprentice system still existed a masterwork was just the thing you made that got you recognized as a master, and everything you ever made afterward was mastercraft. So, since most apprentices eventually became a master those things were neither the highest of quality nor particularly rare.

Money seems to be just as much of a grind in the beginning as XP. I can't afford the ships I can use at least.

Putting the really huge ships far off for people really doesn't have to mean that getting out of the basic cutter has to take several days of just grinding away. Also let's face it, the reason why the game feels like a race to 1st rates is because the progression is purely framed as acquiring more crew. It would be so much better if there was a real skill tree where you can build up your captain with various abilities and perks that form the basis of some kind of play style, rather than having all the progression in the game revolve purely around getting bigger ships. Ultimately there will never be a game where only the people who earned it have top end stuff and stick out from unwashed masses, because people simply leave once they realize they personally don't care enough to get to the top in a grindy game. A game will always be filled with majority top end players for that reason, so the only way to keep the number of first rates down in the long run is to not make them the only thing you can actually achieve with deep progression. Unless there is some way to leverage a high rank on a small ship the game will always have a progression that leads to 1st rates, so that's where everyone is going to go. Breaking that up by making the really huge ships sub-optimal without including a different levelup system at that point also becomes stupid, because then you don't actually need to level to the top to be competitive in smaller vessels, so it's a huge burden piled on people who like big ships while giving people who like small ships a free ride. The XP system needs to do more than expand crew.

You should absolutely be allowed to switch nations. It's simply too complex and slow of a game to expect people to be able to know exactly what nation they want to play in before they have ever even set foot in the game, and having to delete their character once they figure it out is just dumb. I personally don't think there should be a huge grind to switch nations, but there should be a reputation rating with the nation you're in that requires a lot of XP to go up and always starts at 0 when you switch. That rating would be visible to other players, so that way you can play a freelancer who switches nations all the time, but nobody is going to trust you if they see your rating as being that low. Basically: You can switch all you want, but people can see how long you've been with the nation you're with, so if they run a conquest fleet or something like that they might simply say "We're only inviting people who have been in the nation for long enough to have a high trust rating". On the other hand, if you find out one of your IRL friends plays the game and you want to switch factions to hang with them then the game won't stop you from just hopping over and playing with that person if they have reasons to trust you other than the rating.

With that progression it takes almost twice as much experience to be able to get a Snow than it does now, which doesn't seem like a good thing to me. The game having a painfully slow start before you can get a worthwhile ship that isn't just a variation on the capabilities of a basic cutter is already a problem as it is.

Boarding ships with rowboats also happened a lot in real life. More ships got captured while they were in a harbor than while they were at sea in real life. Ships offering their surrender because staying alive was more important than XP also happened a lot in real life. Grapeshot could not be used to kill everyone on a ship while leaving the ship completely intact in real life. These "real life" arguments are idiotic. This game doesn't resemble real life in any way. It completely ignores all realism when it comes to making sure you can fight a dozen naval battles in a play session and not spend most of your time just sailing somewhere, but nobody is making a stink over that despite the fact that it's done for the exact same reason - making for a fun game - as when people say there should be more ways to capture an enemy ship than play that awful minigame.

Why would I risk the crew by sending it onto a ship that's full of enemies? The system as it is is neither realistic nor adequately complex for something that determines 100% of whether or not you get a meaningful reward for a battle.

Given that the entire damn loot scheme in this game centers on boarding and you get absolutely nothing for any battle where you don't do it I don't think it should be a throwaway system.

I don't understand how we're ever supposed to get decent PvP going when everyone has to be afraid of getting sunk so much.

Who said anything about magic boxes floating out of the ship? How about when a ship is so badly damaged that it can't possibly be made seaworthy again the crew abandons the ship, and you can pick up prisoners from hunting down the rowboats, or pull alongside the ship to plunder the purser's coffers, raid the infirmary, grab the maps and charts and loot the officer's quarters before it goes down? For that matter, how about a more realistic implementation of boarding actions where pulling your ship alongside the enemy isn't the only way to board someone, but you also have the option of using marines in rowboats to board? There are plenty of ways in which they could give the game more options to get some loot than just one singular formula you have to follow to get anything.

The point isn't that you have to work for a UI update, the point is that having an omniscient UI that tells you EXACTLY what the status of your enemy is eliminates good judgement from determining your course of action in relation to how badly your enemy is damaged. You can't fake someone out into thinking you're more damaged than you really are, nor can you bluff someone into thinking they should run when really they are way ahead. The system I'm proposing isn't there to force you to just go through certain motions to get all the information you have now, it's there to insure that you DON'T get all the information that you get now.

Like what? You don't have to check it all the time, just when you want the damage readout to update. I mean you might just as well say having to aim your cannons all the time is busywork.

You don't fight for the crown and then have to pay for your own repairs either.

I think this game would be more interesting if it was significantly harder to tell how damaged an enemy ship is. Right now you have a foolproof readout that tells you exactly how hurt they are, how many crewmen they have left, how much of their sails are intact, how much armor they still have and so forth. That kind of eliminates a lot of the good judgement needed to know whether you should press the attack or retreat. You know exactly where the enemy stands and where you stand. You know exactly how much crew they have for example, so it's very easy to determine whether you are in a good position to board them. But pretending you have fewer crew than you actually do to trick an opponent who outguns you into trying to board instead is one of the oldest pirate movie tricks in the book. So, I think it would be an improvement to the game is damage assessment was actually something the player has to do, not something that happens automatically. Like, you'd go into your spyglass view and look at the enemy ship and centering the view on the right things reveals their status. Like, if you wanted to know about the enemy rudder you'd have to have your spyglass on it for a few seconds, then the game updates you on whether or not its damaged. If you want to assess their armor you have to look at the appropriate side of the ship for a while, so an enemy could potentially be hiding a lot of damage from you, but could also be hiding a completely undamaged side. Determining active crew would require you to observe the decks for a while, but if the enemy is in Survival mode you will see fewer crewmen than there really are, because they are below decks pumping water and fixing leaks. So, basically the amount of information you get on the status of your opponent is much more limited, and you have to work a bit to get a decent idea of what the status of the enemy ship is. That also means you can develop a variety of strategies around deceiving your opponent though, like for example if one side of your ship is really banged up and the other is just fine you could deliberately sail in such a way that the opponent only sees one of the sides to make them think you're too tough to beat, or to make them think you're an easy target.

From a visual perspective it'd be nice, but I'd prefer it much more if there was useful salvage in the debris. The game seems a little too one sidedly focused on capturing right now.

There is a Mount & Blade offshoot called Caribbean which is thematically the same as this game, but has the Mount & Blade combat system still in it for boarding actions. Their naval combat is really primitive and rudimentary compared to this game, but being able to train up your captain and equip him and actually join the fight during boarding is really cool.