PL_Harpoon

Pretty much what I said a couple of posts earlier. With few exceptions. I'd add the option to leave the gun elevation for gun-captains. It could even be linked to your officer's exp. But while for some of us this would be a great feature, others would flow the forums with topics like "my guns don't hit, game broken".

Yes, if you want realism automated fire would be a good idea, but it would have to be implemented among other things like roll having effect on the trajectory or realistic elevation changes, matchlock misfires, guns getting hotter etc. But that would make the game extremely frustrating for some players.

TBH, currently there is no AI on the open world. It's just simple pathfinding I think that even the simplest AI would greatly enhance the liveliness of the game's world. And by simplest AI I mean behaviour like running away from enemy ships if they have superior force or actually attacking other ships/fleets (bots or players). Then later this can even be applied to missions where instead of sailing toward sword symbols you'd be tasked to hunt down an AI ship that, for example is itself hunting for AI traders in a certain area or to protect an AI convoy from beign attacked by AI pirates etc.

All this is true, but if we're going to have some kind of crew management AND a new surrender system (which IMHO is mandatory in this case) there needs to be a way to deal with those situations. It would affect all battles, not only those with capping in mind and definitely not just PVP. I think that those changes will affect PVE just as as than PVP.

Well, my original idea was that when you capture a surrendered ship it isn't exactly in a pristine state. But I admit that with the current costs of repairs (quite justifiable) it's not much of a drawback, and your idea of paying back other captains from "your own pocket" if you decide to take the ship is much better. This opens another question. Theoretically if you send a ship to admiralty it still needs crew to reach a friendly port. If we go with that option than who will supply the crew?

I'm not so sure about that part. Firstly, it sounds a little convoluted to new players who don't have time to sit on forums. Secondly I don't think that battle wounds would deplete surgeon's supplies that much. This shouldn't be available for pirates. This sounds great on paper but could result in situations where bad players with more spare time (just farming their crew) could stomp on players with less time. And it would screw up those that use their labour hours for crafting. Just as above this could result in time>skill. I suppose they were just prisoners. Unless you were British capturing American ship, then you could press some as "deserters".

Actually, I was thinking of even more automated system. Let's say we have a 2v1 engagement and after some combat the single ship has struck his colours. Player, who dealt 30% of all damage instantly receives his share (30% of prize money and 30% of crew available for reinforcements). The other player gets to decide whether he wants 70& of prize-money or the ship.

I'm pretty sure that with a proper surrender mechanics we could eliminate rewards for sinking ships. After each battle prize money of a surrendered ship would be divided upon all captains based on damage they dealt to it. This could also mean that if you surrender and your team will still win you do not lose your ship (unless the enamy managed to secure it which I'll explain below). Also (I don't remember how it works now) you could cancel your surrender anytime during battle unless someone from the opposing team has send some men (you could do it by means of boats, so that you don't have to be stationary) to secure the prize. After that the ship will act just like AI merchant, doing all it can to escape from battle. So, even if you've lost the engagement, if you manage to capture at least one enemy ship you can still get some money back. The real problem with this proposed system is if the devs want to give us back ship captures. But then it too can be solved. The player, who did the most damage (boarding included) will decide if he wants to keep the ship or the prize money. The rest will get their share of money regardless of the first player's choice. This will need extensive tweaking with values of hull vs sail vs crew vs masts though. EDIT: Small corrections here and there.

Reading most of the posts here it seems that the biggest possible drawback of adding persistent crew is that we would have to visit a port after almost every battle. And it is understandable. But I haven't yet seen anyone trying to find solutions for this other that "leave things as they are". And there are multiple possible solutions: 1st. Instead of just killing men, a significant part of men would get wounded. They won't be able to operate the ship during battle but can be healed after it, during a certain amount of time. Sure, it won't be 100% realistic (we'd have to wait weeks to get the crew back to shape) but IMHO it's still better then killing ALL men. 2nd. Surrender mechanics. After battle you could press some of captured men to refill your ranks. If it's a PVP engagement the player that lost could still keep his men after surrendering (for gameplay's sake). In PVE enemy, especially traders should strike their colours not only during boarding but even when they can't win. Let's say for example that you demast a trader and have 2x his man. Or you fight another man-of-war and take out most of his armour (to the point when your single broadside will kill him). In both of these situations AI should strike their colours. As with PVP, I guess most of us will take the opportunity to at least save our crew when we've no chance of surviving a battle (BTW we could also have a surrender button on boarding window). 3rd. Giving real value to the crew. For ex. by adding experience. That would give another reason for losing player to surrender saving both his and some of your crew. Just a few examples that came to my head, I'm sure there's more. There is one thing however, that I would change, however and it is the fact that you personally need to escort the ship into harbour. I'm sure that RL captains only escorted the most precious prizes. So instead of choosing between "is the ship worthy to take it back or should I sink it" we'd have actually 3 choices: - sink the ship - assign some of the men to the prize and escort it into port - assign minimal amount of your men to it and order them to sail to port on their own at even greater risk of it being recaptured.

I fail to see how putting a free port on Jamaica would help with ganking fleets close to US (or any other) capital.

It wouldn't add anything to the learning curve. If you want you could control the sails just like now, with "w" and "s" keys.

I think turning leaks from ramming off is a good idea for testing. We could disable them for a week or two and check the results. In my opinion it's a good idea. Instead it should do some damage to ships armour/planking.

I know I've read somewhere that Devs said that at some point they tried the system when you control each sail and it failed, but I think we should consider it as an additional feature, on top of the current system. Especially after planned weather upgrades. There may be for ex. situations when in strong wind you'd want to stow topgallant sails to prevent them from pressing the bow of the ship towards water (or breaking the mast if it too could be implemented), or you just want more control over your speed. I have an idea on how this could be implemented without cluttering the UI. All you had to do was to press the control key to show the cursor, and then click on the selected sail to raise/lower it depending on it's current state. Right clicking on it would reset it to default state. Also changing sails with "w", "s", or "b" would automatically reset all sail to their preset states so you don't have to click everyone of them. As you can see this would not over complicate the game, cause it's totally optional and doesn't even need additional key bindings, shouldn't take too much time to develop, and would add even more depth to the game.

1st. I don't think this would slow gameplay at all. You'd just learn to start the turn sooner, that's all. 2nd. It would add a lot of plausibility to how the ships move. 3rd. Since the turn rates aren't that big anyway, I don't think it would change meta in any way, unless the differences between ships would be huge, which I doubt. In other words, I don't see any reason why this shouldn't be applied other than the fact that it would put a lot more work on dev's hands. But even using one universal turn acceleration model for all ships would be better that the current system.

Yes! Also add a condition in which cargo ships surrender if they can't escape and have less then half of your crew. Also, surrender if crew morale is below 10 (this should be an instant boarding loose even for players).