Rudi Starnberg

Are you really going to participate in flaming, compare someone to Goebels and then tell people to stay on topic please? I know mods are allowed to take sides in game and that perfectly fine, but posting like this under a moderator tag on the forums is undignified in the extreme. You can't expect people to stay polite and reasonable if this is the example you set.

Properly handled the brig is extremely maneuverable yes, but I have to disagree on the firepower front. Compared to the privateer it has 2 or 3 extra guns per side, and this is just not worth the trade off of being a huge target. At ranges much beyond 100 yards or so, the profile a schooner presents to you is just so low it's very very hard to hit it consistently, especially if the captain is jinking it around. Conversely a drunken one eyed pirate would have no troubles hitting a brig at any range within his cannons reach.

The problem is that in order for test data to be valid, everyone has to be trying their honest best to win. If big ships make a habit of siting around and letting small ships kill them, it will appear in the data as if small ships are much more powerful than they really are, thus leading to nerfs that then make them underpowered. Obviously a few games one night isn't going to make much a of a difference to the accumulated statistics, but it can't be allowed to become a common behavior, or else it will start to screw with the test results.

It's not so much about not being rude to people, but if some random person starts ordering you about just because he claims to be a dev, its not unreasonable to respond with skepticism. If we are to avoid further incidents then people who have the right to expect to be obeyed, i.e. devs, need to be distinguished somehow.

I'm not convinced we really need to simulate ships drifting with no sails, of course it happens in real life but you need to ask yourself in what situation would that behavior actually have a significant effect on the outcome of a game? I can't really think of any, in game a ship drifting down wind at .2 knots is not really any different from a ship stationary. What is far far more important, like maturin said, is stopping people playing ship forts. It would be nice to see a greater effect on of rolling on gunnery in general, not just when stationary, but before that can be implemented we need an improved mechanic for firing guns. When your guns fire at a random time over 3 seconds, imagine how frustrating it would be to be trying to fire at the right time of a roll cycle, you can already see this in storm games when people tend to send 3/4 of their shots into a wave they couldn't time for. Until the game has come up with a solution for that, I don't think rolling should be allowed to have too much impact on gunnery, so that leaves us with spinning on the spot as the other aspect of ship forts. Quite simply just make a ship with no sails up not be able to turn at all. Technically it might not be 100% realistic, and it won't be 100% effective at stopping people from abusing stationary gun platforms, but it will remove 90% of the abuse and can be done very quickly and easily until something better can be devised.

I don't think there is anything wrong with the implementation of the brig, the problem is it's a pretty obsolete design when up against ships that are mostly late 18th century or even early 19th. This isn't a bad thing in my opinion, and hopefully once the number of ships in the game is expanded it will gain itself a valid niche matched against more contemporary designs. At the very least it is a good way to teach/encourage people people to start using manual skipper for maneuvering, since on auto skipper it handles turns like a slug, but using your sails to full potential you can be just about the most maneuverable vessel in the game. Still not going to be fast obviously, but that's just what brigs were, so I don't think that should really be changed. Maybe a little bit more armour to compensate for the massive increase in size relative to schooners and cutters. One other idea I rather like but which might be unpopular is to take 6lbers away from the schooners, if schooners could only use 4lbers that would give the brig a real purpose. The cutter should probably keep its 6plbers with its much greater beam and heavier build, but that would mean people have a choice between speed and low target profile in the schooners or going for greater fire power but slower and much larger profile with the brigs, and in my opinion the more tradeoffs you offer players the more interesting the game becomes.

Component based damage modeling is obviously vastly more desireable than simple hit points, and I'd be very suprised indeed if we don't see it for this game.

Are you sure you actualy read anything about this game?

Well, having some canvas out actualy stabilises a ship in certain conditions. If you are sitting with no canvas out with a heavy swell and parallel to the waves, the ship will roll extremely badly, maybe even enough to damage the masts, as the angular momentum experinced by the tip of a mst in a ship rolling 40 degrees is immense. This is why getting stuck in the doldrums was such a danger to sailing vessels. If there is even a bit of wind and you make some sail, the wind pressing on the sails and being counteracted by the ballast and keel will tend to hold the ship at a constant angle as the forces find an equilibrum, even if if the swell would otherwise cause her to roll her masts out. E: I haven't actualy tried the suprise simulator, so it could just be a bug or something, but it is entirely possible for a ship with no sails set to capsize in the right conditions. Infact, a vessel capsizing very rarely has much to do with sails, if you try to apply suficent force to a ships's mast to make it capsize you will usualy just snap the masts off instead. When a ship capsized it was ussualy because a wave broke over the side of a ship, and applying a few hundred tons of water to one side of the deck and not the other causes her to roll.

I could definetly see OC making me sick, I don't really get sea sick but the combination of bouncing up and down vision whilst my inner ear tells me I am stock still sounds like a recipe for disaster. I suppose you could maybe have some kind of camera smoothing to make it more bearable, but I doubt it would be easy.

Community content tends to open a whole can of worms with reagrds to quality control and copywrite ownership. It can be done but it can also prove a net drag for the developers rather than a positive help.

I have to say that my vote is for anything but the most barebones singleplayer to be put aside untill the multiplayer aspects are working and polished. Any singleplayer game, no matter how good will get old when the (inevitable) flaws and predictability of the AI rob the game of any excitement.

The only observation I would like to add: please make wind sound vary not just with the speed of the wind, but with the speed and direction of the ship: if you are running dead with the wind with even wuite a strong wind, you should hardly hear any wind noises, just the creak of the ship and the splash of the waves, conversely, if you are clsoe hauled in even quite a soft breeze, you should hear a lot more whistling of wind.

I'm not sure I really like the idea of personaly controlled cannons, I feel that a captain should be worrying about other things than the exact aim point of a gun (especialy given how inacurate smoothbore cannons were anyway). I think all that is needed is the ablity to designate targets and then some modifiers. So you point your mouse over a ship and press the target button. Then you can choose from a few options: aim high/mid/low (maybe also foward/mid/aft, although I'm less sure why you would want to do that) and aim carefuly/balanced/shoot fast. So put those together and you could quickly make suitable orders for any engagement range, then leave you gun crews to it while you focus on the bigger picture of the battle and keeping your position properly. Maybe you could also give such orders to each deck of guns seperately, although again I struggle to think of many situations where that would really be much use, I suspect it would add more bloat than its worth. Ammo types should also be selectable of course, although probably in a seperate menu to reduce the chances of misclicks in the heat of battle. On topic of gun aiming, do you intend to have a minimum depresion for guns? So would it be possible for a very low ship to lie under the guns of a frigate if it can get close enough? Also do you have any plans to model the interactions of wave's with gun ports, e.g. will we see ships strugling to open their lower gun ports in heavy weather? This might be hard to implement and unreasonably fustrating for players, but on the other hand it's one of the few situations in sail combat where the lee ship has the advantage, since his ports will tend to be raised up out of the water, so I feel it maybe warrants some consideration.

Personaly I would see mutiple players on one ship as lower priority, I would love to see it some day though. It could also possibly give players a role in pvp without risking their own ship if they can't or don't want to.

Obviously this is just an immersion(heh) thing rather than anything game breaking, but I would like to shime in with pleas for ships that look good in rought weather, I have yet to see anygame that really looks right with the way large waves interact with ships without there being clipping issues ect. If in a storm our ships could be putting their bows into a wave and the water comes rushing aft and gushing out of the scuppers rather than just melting into the deck as the bows rise, I will die a happy man.