Idle Champion

The game is not a historical simulation, drawing broadly from history and using plenty of game logic. Even if it were, the players are not part of that historical simulation unless they choose to be. There are plenty of variations on Michiel De Ruyter sailing in Dutch waters - they chose historical names. The OP chose a historical name and wants the game to not just support that choice, but enforce it for others. Until a whole bunch of players who didn't choose historical names say they'd agree to change their names, which seems quite unlikely, there's not much point to this idea.

I doubt I'm the only one to do so, but I suggested a version of this using the F1-F4 commands to lock a gun deck to load and ammo commands as well as fire, so you could make the sorts of adjustments being discussed here. http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/15179-loadammo-orders-and-locked-gun-decks/

The British would use sloop-of-war, noting the vessels rigging as ship-sloop or brig-sloop, for a vessel suitable for a Commander and post ship (always ship, there were no post brigs) for a ship that suited a Captain but was not a frigate. The French and other continental navies described these ships as corvettes - the British only really adopted the term in the 1830s. Unlike 'ship-sloop' and 'brig-sloop', ship-rigged is implied in corvette; a ship-rigged corvette is simply a corvette, a brig-rigged corvette is distinguished as a brig-corvette. The French Bonne Citoyenne-class is corvettes, the French Palinure-class is brig-corvettes. Lightly-armed ships or brigs that are in naval service but aren't set up for fighting don't count as corvettes or sloops of war. Currently, the Cerberus's armament has been tweaked to make it more like a heavy corvette than a frigate, and the Surprise sits on the margin of heavy corvette and frigate. All of the brigs in game are powerful enough to count as brig-rigged sloops-of-war or brig-corvettes, but none of them are French and they wouldn't be labeled as brig-corvettes. Rattlesnake is the corvettiest ship in the game, and is pretty lightly armed. But yes, I would like to see more corvettes in the 50-100 BR range. Bring on the corvettes.

With the battle rating victory condition in port battles, BR values aren't all created equal. The recent BR tweak for Pavel and Bucentaure, putting them both on 630, is a clear indicator of this. Bucentaure has the heavier broadside by cannons and carronades, the more effective weather deck guns, the bigger crew - even before its speed and turning comes in it is quite simply the more powerful ship and the old 700 vs. 600 BR reflected this. Hopefully once the port battles change there can be an overall finessing of BR. The Diet Bellona, on the other hand, is my least favourite ship. There's no distinctive flavour, no hole card that gives her an advantage over Bellona, just a weaker ship with identical sailing that feels like a placeholder.

There are a lot of suggestions I like in here, and I'll probably repeat a few of them in my own collection of thoughts: 1. Mechanical differences between the pirate faction and nations should be concentrated at the national level, not the player level. The pirate player should have an equal footing, with no impediment to crafting, no unique mechanism for death or loss of durability, no exclusive perks, ships, or upgrades, and similarly no excluded perks or upgrades, or ships. 2. Extending from that, no restrictions on ships of the line, and the Pirate Frigate either removed or made generally available as a Heavy Frigate. 3. Pirates should not be able to take or hold ports, but should be able to build production buildings in free towns. There should be no black dots on the map. 4. Pirates should, however, be able to raid ports. They should be able to raid the heck out of them. 5. The in-development diplomacy and lordship patches should not apply to pirates, or rather should not apply the same mechanics to the pirates. There should not be a centrally-led pirate faction or a handful of pirate players who can direct or limit the piracy of others. Every pirate is an individual, every clan is a collection of individuals, and the pirate faction is a broad label for individuals with varying play style. Then it gets a little weird: 6. Pirates should not be 'universal pirates' - a pirate who has not attacked or joined forces against a particular nation and has in essence committed no act of piracy against that nation should appear as a Neutral and have access to that nation's ports without the smuggler flag. Players should be able to choose just how cutthroat they want to be. 7. Similarly, a pirate should be able to purchase or earn a pardon, restoring their Neutral status with that nation. A Neutral or smuggler pirate should also be able to earn or purchase a Letter of Marque from a nation's ports, enabling them to function as a Privateer for that nation. Privateers should be able to join battles, including port battles of any scale if accepted in a port battle lobby, and while flying their Privateer flag count as a friendly to players of that nation. Players who currently enjoy port battles and piracy together should have some recourse to PBs, and pirate clans that play as privateers and muscle along with nationals should still have that option, even if the pirate faction becomes less 'nation-like' as a whole. 8. Players who become pirates by crimes against their own nation, rather than going to sea as pirates, should have a similar loss of assets and blueprints as national players defecting to another nation. Suggestions not bundled with the above: 9. Aggressive NPC pirates should be added to the open world. The lack of a hostile element or any sort of 'dangerous waters' has a stifling effect on PvE, and this can carry over to some areas and some times in the PvP servers. 10. A pirate ship, such as Black Sam Bellamy's Whydah, should make its way into the game as a commerce raider with a greater cargo capacity than an equivalent warship and more offensive potential than an equivalent trader.

Hazardous fishing, eh? I suppose there's always that loading screen of the guys firing a musket at the sea serpent. "You have caught 1xLeviathan." "What?" "Leviathan has targeted you. Battle will begin in 20 seconds." "Cancel fishing! Cancel fishing!"

No matter the game, preventing the player from leaving the game in a straightforward manner is bad game design. Giving players the impression that they are being forced to keep playing because there will be an in-game punishment if they leave may keep a player in the game for a time, but it will leave a bad taste. If the finished battle remained visible until everyone either left the battle or logged off from the game, the battle marker disappearing would notify anyone in the area that people had logged off, and the battle marker reappearing would notify anyone in the area that players had logged back in to a battle screen; essentially, whether by ship or by battle marker, logging back in would make you visible in the open world. But as for the idea that people should be rewarded for lurking in the open world to ambush people leaving a battle and logging off from the battle screen constitutes skullduggery, or that players who lost a battle should have any burden of defeat lifted if the players who inflicted said defeat don't provide them with the opportunity for revenge... its a one-sided incentive for ganking.

Yep, crew costs are unpleasant at Flag Captain to Rear Admiral, but looking at the sort of earning power people have at Second Lieutenant and First Lieutenant and the level of protection small ships provide their crew I'd imagine its easy to get stuck in a rut or even get kicked back down into the Basic Cutter (barring bypassing crew costs with the to-be hotfixed cutter trick). Reducing crew hire costs for the ranks that could previously hire NPCs before the current fleet setup, along with increasing the chance of getting med kits from NPC traders and search and destroy missions seems reasonable, even necessary.

I don't think AFK fishing in the protected zone is killing the game, I just think it adds relatively little to the playing and testing experience and would prefer if no-risk, no-player input strategies like it weren't rewarded.

You set sail from your capital; perhaps you see a handful of ships, perhaps you see a forest of masts, but you see it all the same. The AFK fishing fleet. I wouldn't say I hate the AFK fishing fleet, but I do find it dispiriting. High-ranked players, ships of the line at anchor, people I've seen in port battles just sitting there, not really doing very much and not getting very much tested for mild profit, no risk, and no player input. As a way of rewarding players for the open world sailing they get done, I actually like fishing and wreck-diving, but the fleet of ships and players that are there when you log in and there when you log out in the same spot collecting fish and hoping for bottles doesn't add much into the game. Suggestion 1: The protected area as a non-yielding fishing area. Pretty simple - deep water fishing catches big fish, shallow water fishing catches little fish, and protected area fishing catches either nothing or nothing worthwhile. Clumps of seaweed. Old boots. Waterlogged planks. Loose rusty anchors. Suggestion 2: Stationary fishing in general encounters diminishing returns. After a given period without moving (not just keyboard activity, but actual sailing), fish stop biting and the fishing returns aren't reset until you travel a distance greater than the span of a protected zone. Who else would like to see the game reduce or remove rewards for AFK fishing in the green zone? Are people in the fishing fleet just doing it because they can, or is safe fishing something they want to see kept in the game?

The navy was authorised to order ships of the line in 1816 - USS Pennsylvania wasn't even lines on paper then. Technically, she was commissioned in 1837.

As much as I like the idea of a set of in-game navigational tools and an interactive map, I'm afraid I can't let that sentence slip by without also asking if you dreamed a dream where God was kind. As for the maps, the 1775 west indies map looks great, but it isn't the most straightforwardly usable map - there's a degree of flourish and little details visible at the full 'zoomed out' scale that make it very busy. The licornes map or Prater's re-styled version of the current in-game map have a good age of sail flavour but are much more accessible for a map you can bring up with a keystroke and examine quickly while on the move. It'd be cool to see them or something like them when the UI updates come.

Indiaman was initially slated to be based off the VOC ship Amsterdam, but the original plans weren't found and the replica is not based on the original design - the in-game Indiaman is based off an EIC ship built to a Swedish design. The first page of that poll says 2 ships will be selected (Christian VII and Diana are vote leaders) and no wild card has been confirmed. I'd like to see Venus, but neither Venus nor Wasa have been confirmed. The schooner brig Prince de Neufchatel has been indicated to be in development. The US currently has Lynx (with it the Trader Lynx and Privateer), Brig (with it Trader's Brig and Navy Brig), Rattlesnake, Niagara, Essex (barring its capture by the British), and Constitution. Including Traders and variants, there are more American-built ships in game than any other nation.

There are plenty of American ships in game, and one more is confirmed to come. I'd agree that American ships are over-represented compared to their relevance in the period, and that ships like the Essex and the Fair American Brig/Navy Brig fill roles that could have reasonably been filled by ships of another nation, but Lynx and Constitution are suitable examples of ships in their roles. Pickles are not a generic type - HMS Pickle is an individual topsail schooner. Pinnaces (referring to ships rather than later pinnaces as boats) are older than the game's time period. Galleons filling the smaller man-of-war roles predates the game's timeline - galley-frigates and early sailing frigates had wholly subsumed them by 1670 (current earliest date for ships to be added to game) and even the largest ships of the line were frigate-built rather than galleon-built by 1715 (launch date for Ingermanland, current oldest ship in game). The galleons in service in the 18th century were solely large armed merchantmen (such as the Manila Galleons). Eventually the game may have enough ships that every nation could fill all roles with their own ships, but that is currently pretty far off. The British are currently the only nation that can fill most roles, while the Danes and Dutch have no ships in game at all.

There's definitely room for directly trade-related upgrades or officer perks. Some ideas: "Light Ballast" - Regular Upgrade, craftable. Increases ship's roll angle by a flat percentage across all quality levels. Slightly increases ship's hold capacity, improving by quality level. "Cleared Bulkheads" - Permanent Upgrade, craftable. Increase chance of damage to crew. Increase chance of damage to pump. Increase ship's hold capacity, improving by quality level.

The swedes had two separate ship design philosophies between the Baltic ships (slightly shallow in the draft, but ocean-going) and the Archipelago Fleet (18th and 19th century holdouts of galleass and xebec-type designs, extremely shallow in the draft). Still, there are plenty of interesting Dutch ships that could come into the game. The 1665 De Zeven Provincien is too old, but the 1694 one is still an impressive example of an old-fashioned three-decker if plans can be tracked down. The Wreker-class ships like Chattam and Admiral de Ruyter would make a splash in game - two-decker 80-gun ships of the line with a main deck of Dutch 36-pounders (42-pounders equivalent) and an upper deck of 30-pounders (32-pounder equivalent). Not the heaviest broadside, but solid penetrating power. Admiral de Ruyter did fairly well in the poll that doesn't yet have an announced wild card. The Dutch didn't quite embrace the bigger open-ocean frigates, but they were big fans of corvettes and man-of-war brigs.

While the game seems to bias loading port guns over starboard guns in equal conditions, you can (within limits) already solve that by F5ing the port reload off for about half a second. Gunnery crew shifts to the starboard battery without getting assigned out of gunnery at all so there's minimal delay. The 'fully load port battery first' setup when everything is empty can be frustrating at the start of the battle or when you fire both broadsides and need everything reloaded but you are only engaged on your starboard. Rather than loading priority of one broadside over another, I'm talking about loading priority and other control for individual decks on each broadside.

Current system: the F1 to F4 buttons let you lock a gun deck so that it will not fire. There's a reasonable collection of strategies permitted with this - locking carronades when firing at long range with other guns, going for the thickest part of an enemy's hull with your more powerful guns while aiming for the gunwales or sails with your lighter weapons, saving up your big guns until they're all ready to fire while you keep peppering away with your faster-loading secondary weapons, so on and so forth. My suggestion: Locking a gun deck locks it to all commands, not just firing. An order given on a broadside to stop reloading or to change ammunition only affects unlocked decks. By locking and unlocking a series of decks and issuing load or ammo orders, different load and ammo order can be given to different gun decks. The intent is to open up more options for gunnery control and crew management. Compared to the above examples, rather than simply not firing your carronades at max range you could dismiss those hands altogether, or you could load your weather deck guns with chain to go for the sails while still loading your gun decks with ball and going for the enemy's hull. Other options become possible as well - using the double charge perk, a captain could load their smaller weapons with double charge separately from their lower gun deck to make the best sustained use of the penetration bonus. In the absence of a 'grape and ball' perk, loading lower decks with grape and upper decks with ball might provide an optimal raking broadside. Trying to slow and dismast an equal or more powerful ship might work better with the lower decks firing ball and any decks that deal negligible damage to the mast loading chain. On the face of it I don't think it would be especially difficult to implement and I think it would add to the combat without jarring with what's in place - the current gameplay is already very much about setting up in advance of firing. What do people think?

The flag creation system for Port Battles is already slated to be phased out - The August, September, and October content patches have been reserved for rolling out the War and Peace setup, which will remove the flag as a battle trigger. The intent seems to be to create formal in-game alliances and states of war while addressing some of the issues you identify - the lack of player attractors and front lines, the ability to game the battle trigger to take ports cheaply or deny port battles, and the dominance of one-off contributions by players with plentiful resources rather than cumulative efforts by nations as a whole. Angriff, you could wander along to http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/13606-war-and-port-battles-rework-moderated/ and lend your voice there.

Yep - enjoying this one so far. Fishing and bottles is a much better and more naturalistic incentive for open world travel than the previous travel xp system. Placing a value on crew was definitely necessary and the officer is a nice preview of what the system can provide in terms of character customisation. A lot has changed and for the better, and when we see fine tuning for the raft of content brought in with this patch and an opportunity to test some new ships I will also raise my glass and gently incline my head to the devs.

You may be overstating how differentiated the in-game Trader variants are from the standard warships. All have identical structural strength and armour with their warship variants, all have the same turn rate. The Trader Brig and Snow are slightly poorer sailors as they approach the wind compared to the warships, the Cutter and Lynx have identical sailing profiles as Traders or warships. It appears the Trader's Lynx has a smaller sailing crew than the standard Lynx, and the Trader's Snow has a larger sailing crew than the Snow (5 being the difference in each case). As a whole, they are slower as a substitute for a cargo encumbrance model, they have more fragile sails and masts to facilitate disabling and boarding, and they lack the weapons and the gunnery crew requirements of the warships. With hired crew replacing automatically generated crew, ships being crewed to their needs rather than their limits seems likely to become the norm, and armament becomes the only salient and naturalistic difference between a Trader variant and a standard warship. You describe them as "very different" - I see them as very similar. Perhaps there is a case that a ship might be sitting low in the water if it were a laden trader, but in-game Trader variants are identifiable as such even when laden. As for their armament, no one would mistake an eight-gun schooner for an unarmed merchantman with its guns run out and matches burning, but otherwise the two look much the same. Why is a Lynx recognisable as a Lynx when it is unarmed and a Trader's Lynx recognisable as a Trader's Lynx when unladen? Why can't an unarmed Lynx carry cargo or an unladen Trader's Lynx carry weapons? Basically, what difference which actual ships might have is the game attempting to represent? If it's just cargo capacity versus armament, then the difference being represented as inherent to the ship is only a difference in material and equipment brought aboard the ship which could be removed or replaced.

Under the current system gun carriages are included in the blueprint of a ship and these gun carriages give the ship the potential to be armed. The purchased 'cannon' is much more of a ticket, with no weight and no variation in cost for the number of cannons on any fitted deck. Once the ticket is added, the gun carriages now behave as carriage-mounted guns, adding weight to the ship and enabling it to load and fire and generally fight with the cannons of that deck. There is a massive by-design difference between traders and warships, with the traders having a minimal armament and a massive hold and warships having quite the reverse; the difference is so pronounced that the largest warships can carry less cargo than the smallest traders. But this difference is artificial: many small warships were not purpose-built but purchased commercially and subsequently armed, merchants sailing in convoys might concentrate weapons in a few ships, otherwise no different from their sisters, to serve as escorts. Pirate captures and by extension pirate ships themselves were largely ex-mercantile ships. The differences between a large merchantman with full lines and two stern galleries, pierced for cannon on two decks even if not armed on both, and a fourth-rate ship of the line were so marginal that even ranking naval officers could be fooled, and several ships were built for one role only to find themselves in the other. Even warships in naval service could be armed en flute if carrying capacity was required for a particular mission. Even in-game the difference is artificial - the gun carriages are the only blueprint elements separating trader and warship variants of the Lynx, Cutter, Brig, and Snow, and the models for the traders have not covered or filled the gun port piercings. What I am proposing is removing gun carriages from blueprints and removing the 'cannon ticket' from the shop, and replacing it with crafted and, within limits, NPC-generated carriage-mounted guns. This would also call for replacing the existing twofold abstraction of 'Cannon weight slowing warships' and 'Trader ships being slower by design than warships' with a unified 'Cannons and cargo both add load which slows all ships' system, and replace ships with otherwise identical 'trader' and warship variants with a single ship. Crafted cannons and unified load capacity in summary: No gun carriages in ship blueprints. Labour hour cost and craft xp reductions in proportion to lost carriages in each ship blueprint. Cannon blueprints added, unlocked at all levels. The blueprint for a batch of cannons consists of several carriages and some additional materials to reflect the labour cost/craft xp difference between unarmed and armed ships and the price of an existing cannon ticket. Gun deck UI is updated to show number as well as class of cannons that the deck can accommodate. Once crafted, cannons can be added to gun decks - eventually, going into gun decks should open up a deck UI that lets cannons be assigned to each gun port for maximum customisation. Every ship has a 'Capacity' - adding cargo to the hold takes up capacity, adding cannons to decks takes up capacity but does not take up a hold slot or count as cargo for the purpose of teleporting, adding cannons to the hold takes up a hold slot and a lower amount of capacity to reflect the gun being dismantled for storage and the lack of powder, shot, and tools needed to operate the cannon as a weapon. The 'Trader X' label gets removed from players, and is left to only mark AI vessels (think of them as mercantile ships, flying a national flag but no naval ensign) The intent: Removing artificial distinctions between trade ships and warships. Slightly increase the carrying capacity of dedicated warships, give traders more options in their defensive and economic play, and create the opportunity for hybrid play as armed merchantmen/warships armed en flute for both trade escorts and commerce raiders. Other advantages: Crafting conservation - crafted ships represent slightly smaller lumps of time, a player going up into a new ship can get a lot of the arming done by taking cannons off their previous ship, a player can arrange cannons throughout their personal fleet as fits their resources and play style. Payoffs for marginal play and customisation - e.g. lightening the broadside of a commerce raider also increases its free capacity for cargo, a leveling player can craft and crew a lightened armament and get into a ship they are interested in sailing easier. Cannons become a resource which can be shared or looted. Low-level Traders no longer stand out as a target from a mile away in the open world. Main disadvantage: Increased cost and detail management for maintaining a mission-variable armament for a given ship - the cannon ticket makes it easy to switch between carronades for search and destroy and long guns for PvP. Increased cost and detail management for arming a fleet that doesn't use overlapping cannons. Complications: Balancing the capacity cost of weapons and the capacity of ships is not entirely straightforward - there isn't a single relationship between capacity and combined gun mass between existing Trader ships and their warship variants, and there isn't a clear reference as to how much cargo an unarmed, unladen warship should carry. Its fairly evident that an unarmed Le Gros Ventre should be able to carry more than an unarmed Renomee, for instance, but how much more? Too much and the differences between trade ships and warships are as pronounced as before, too little and the role of specialised traders is compromised. Tl;dr: Remove gun carriages from ship blueprints, craft cannons instead, make cargo affect speed and cannons affect cargo. Y/N?

Frigate vs Essex balance is one thing - the buff for the Frigate needlessly puts Belle Poule in the shade with more structure and sail HP for Frigate compared to Belle Poule, which had always been the tankier of the two. Meanwhile, Essex remains a ship that doesn't quite line up with a niche - 18s and 12s with no chase guns suggests it should be a heavy broadside specialist, but it can't match Trincomalee in a straight broadside match on firepower or defences. It doesn't quite work as a battlecruiser, since a more flexible ship with bow chasers makes a better tagger and it doesn't have the crew or resilience to stay in the line of battle for long. In a duel against the Frigate, however, I'd still back the Essex: the Frigate has the advantage in turn rate and sailing flexibility over the Essex, but a whole bunch of disadvantages - broadside weight, effective broadside at range versus masts or side planking, and crew size.

Primarily, it's cost, build time, and material availability. The larger of the 'original six' U.S. frigates were frigates by role but capital ships by intent; over on the other side of the Atlantic, 74-gun ships of the line were being churned out in huge numbers and the sort of resources that went into USS Constitution would have been reserved for a second-rate. That's not to say that something like Le Bucentaure or HMS Neptune was built in the same fashion as USS Constitution, but with a similar sort of budget for labour, materials, and shipyard occupancy for the whole project. The second point is that Constitution wasn't built as an 'armoured ship', but was built to be strong enough to support more powerful weapons than existing frigates without the need for additional decking: as a happy byproduct of its prodigiously strong construction it was resilient in combat. Ships of the line had the lateral support of additional enclosed decks, and could support bigger guns without requiring the same structural strength from the hull, while typical frigates weren't carrying the same immense weight of carriage-mounted guns as Constitution. They were built with spaced frames because solid frames weren't required.

Unless every nation had the ships to cover every basic role, restricting ships by nation would stagnate the game - low-level ships, for instance, are either American or British with the sole exception of Mercury. Similarly, several ships sailed for multiple nations - would Surprise be restricted to the British as its captors or the French as its builders. National traits - improved shallow water handling at the expense of stability for the Dutch, improved build strength at the expense of labour cost for Americans, things like that, could be cool, placing particular value on trading or capturing for ships where the national trait really complements the specialty of the ship. Cosmetic differences would also be cool - seeing a French-accented Connie like Acheron in Master & Commander. I will say, however, that it was highly disingenuous to introduce the article on the Constitution as 'well researched', or even relevant given that it refers to a much earlier patch and iteration of the armour system.