tater

Health bars are weak. "I'll not fire at him right now, as he's a heartbeat from sinking, I'll shift fire to that fresh ship that I have not even seen int he last 10 minutes through the smoke because I magically know he's fresh."

That's always true for YOU, the dev in this game The rest of us have no need to know via a health bar. WW2OL has no health bar for vehicles. Your tank has holes shot in it, and components may be damaged. You can be hit 10000 times by small arms, as they do no meaningful damage to a tank (of sufficient armor thickness), but the first AT shot might hit the ammo or fuel, and the tank brews up in one hit. There are virtually no "instant kill" hits on an age of sail ship. You'd see masts coming down, holes, etc.

Any damage system where you know if you take X hit you'll sink is gamey.

I agree that experts could read a lot about the enemy by actions, and the way their movement "felt" to see. I mean hard to read in the game sense. Holes in the hull show. Sails holes, masts down, etc. It will be tough with just visual cues, but having too much information (the % damage number on some sort of dumb health bar) is just as bad. I agree completely with damage reports from your officers and crew. Reports from your crew on the state of the enemy as long as it is something they could know is fine. Best way would be to have such information ranked based on it being easily visible, or something experienced eyes see, then use the skill level of the crew (including your captain) to decide if you get informed. I don't want a health bar even for my own ship. "2 feet in the bilge, sir! We're pumping, but one of the chain pumps was destroyed." "The carpenter reports he's patching 2 holes between wind and water, sir." That's what I want to see.

Damage would be very hard to read from one ship to another. Even crew would be hard to see, particularly given the smoke that will likely not be as persistent in game. Blood in the scuppers is not a terrible idea, and in fact a small amount of blood turns a great deal of water red though, so a tint to it would indicate someone was wounded, past that? <shrug> If the damage is not a generic texture, but holes where balls enter… count the holes. Really, just get a sense of "a lot" or "few." The less information the better, frankly.

Sam Willis (the author of the excellent paper linked by Barberouge) has a book that should be read by anyone here, it's been sitting in my pile of "to be read" for a while, and NA got me to start it (even though I have 2 others going as well). Fighting at Sea in the Eighteenth Century: The Art of Sailing Warfare Not a long book, but important. This is now up there with Seamanship in the Age of Sail to me. Excellent, excellent book.

For the french an obvious choice is a Pallas class frigate of 40 guns (1805). They built 45 of these (40 before Waterloo), it was the standard frigate of the First Empire. <EDIT>they built 54, the excess number being built in the Netherlands and Italy (under occupation at the time). [/url]

An obvious choice is to see if there were any standard classes of ships that were made in substantial numbers. Better to go to the trouble to make a ship that has 20 sisters, than some unique hull. (RN Enterprise class (28 gun), or Amazon class (32 gun), or Apollo (36 gun), Cruizer class brig-sloop of 18 guns (they built 110 of these!), etc) Ships taken prize are also good choices I guess, because they can rightfully exist in 2 navies, and they would be slightly different (when the RN took a French ship into the service they'd rerig her, strengthen her if needed for their own standard guns, etc. Some sloops of war were brig-rigged, and some ship-rigged, right? Make a common sloop, and make a brig and ship version. Same with a brig and brigantine. That's just a sail plan change, but you get 2 for the price of one. heck, dump the squaresail on the mainmast and make it all fore and aft, and you get a hermaphrodite brig. 1 hull, 3 sail plans. Adds some variety for little extra work. Add the trysail mast, and you get a snow. 4 for the price of 1

In a game, it's like herding cats, unfortunately. With a good squad (guild? whatever it is called here, I'm used to squad(ron)), people will follow a chain of command, and take orders at least. In reality, if told to stay in line, and you didn't obey, you better end up winning the day, or otherwise being hugely successful, or you might be in potentially life-threatening trouble for disobeying orders (go out of line, then somehow end up disengaged through no fault of your own and they'd shoot you for cowardice).

Amazing videos.

Checked Tunstall last night for some fleet reality checks. Battle of Minorca: the RN was about close-hauled in line, with the french on an opposite , parallel course in line. The RN tacked in succession to a parallel heading in line with them, right in front of them. Ushant (29 RN vs 32 French): the french wear in succession in the morning, then tack together before the squall hits. The RN then tack together at the beginning of the actual engagement. In the afternoon, the french van tacks again, but it falls into confusion, and the RN tacks in succession to follow. Byron and D'Estaing: the french tack or wear to St. George's Bay (some tack, some wear). Battle of Negapatam: Sufferen (french) tacks to pass astern of Hughes, Hughes tacks to keep the weather gage. Glorious 1st of June: On May 29th, before the battle of the later date's name, the RN tacked as a unit (late). Battle of St. Vincent: RN tacks in succession. Villenueve and Calder: Villenueve wears in succession, and the british tack in succession to parallel them. So unambiguously, fleets tacked in combat. <EDIT> on the very first page of this thread there is a video posted of some battle that looks like a very overcrowded, messy version of E:TW with ships spinning around with neon labels in the sky, etc. Is that PotBS? Regardless, um, yuck.

From a practical standpoint, this seems unlikely to be a huge concern anyway (as much as I'd like to see details like this). In a storm, visibility range should be pretty short. That means that in "map mode" (open world mode, whatever we call it) you'll not detect another unit unless you are virtually on top of it. It'd be like a periscope patrol with no radar, no smoke, and no hydrophone. Coming within a few nm of a target would be pure luck. In heavy weather, combat seems like a bad idea (opening gunports with seas well above deck?).

There had to be many, many engagements that came to combat where the leeward ship was not superior, much less vastly superior. Parallel running with the wind dead astern is a special case (one vector out of infinite vectors) and every other case except exactly that has one ship windward of the other, even if just a little. So basically all fights that ever happened had one side leeward, and none the less there was a fight.

How far away does an engagement start in PotBS? Admin said current NA is 2-3 km, which is very, very close. Any game which starts the tactical map at a couple thousand yards has basically abandoned maneuver I think as a given. Large, fleet level maneuver, anyway. If you have 10 SOLs in line of battle, how close are the ships? Half a cable apart? That's 100m or so. A SOL is 150-200+ feet long, so 50-70m or so. So each ship in line takes up call it 150m at least. 10 ships is 1.5 km line. Try anything large scale and historical and you can double or triple that. Start a map with the enemy 2-3 km away, and the bulk of the starting area is already filled with ships. There is no possible maneuver on any large scale that can happen. If you want any chance to really experiment with maneuver, you need to start at sighting distance. If you want any sort of tense, interesting frigate actions, ditto.

Wind, the top US flag in post #31 is from 1890 (43 stars), which means that all those flags are likely of that era. The only other option is that those hard to count dots are 38 in number, which makes the flag 1877-1890 (the 44 star flag looks really different due to the way the stars line up).