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).

1. Naval characters do what they are told, or face court martial. 2. It is a constant struggle to balance forces, and when players "role play" a specific character, their initial choice of nation will decide the rest. 3. "quantity has a quality all its own." On topic, time will also decide what you get. If a certain type of vessel was not in service in 1680, but was in 1780, then you should not get it 100 years early. The rating of ships changed over time, as did the armament. The game either needs to stick to a more narrow timeframe, or somehow have technology evolve over time. Heck, even simpler things like gunlocks instead of linstock had to be introduced, then slowly adopted. I think if we bothered to really look into the differences in ships over time it would become clear that they need to adapt over time (which time limits the game, functionally). There is zero point in ever using a type that is grossly inferior because it is 120 years out of date. The Age of Sail was pretty long, but not static technologically.

I just think that anything that adds "fog of war" improves gameplay. We have too much information even in a game like this, adding big question marks makes each encounter more fraught, and unique.

The rules were not to FIRE under false colors. From Blackmore, page 192: August 1798---Leander and Généreux "…As a ruse de guerre, LeJoille hoisted Neopolitan colors, but Captain Thompson was not mislead." I've read other examples in actual histories, this is not just something from fiction. Another I just found, American Captain John Barry ended up facing Thetis frigate captained by Alexander Cochrane (not Thomas, though Thomas was actually aboard his uncles ship at the time) flying french colors. and another: http://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/2012-05/constitutions-great-escape

The idea that all ships flew national colors at all times is incorrect, I think. (I'm entirely open to being corrected if you can show me a source, I have not read anything specific about it at all one way or the other) During wartime, or when piracy was a real issue, I'd expect that ships would fly no colors at all most of the time. When you first spot a sail, hull down on the horizon, you want to have options. Uncertainty increases those options. This is true of merchants, and warships. You could tell a lot about a ship by the look of her as you closed, and as an obvious warship, you could signal for some confirmation of friendly status (an enemy would not recognize the code). If you thought she was an enemy, and might escape, you might chose to fly her flag until you could work close enough that she could not escape. Many choices based on flags. I'm in the camp that would prefer imperfect "IFF" for everything, so the ability to chose the colors you fly would be interesting. It's like having to sort out neutral shipping as a submarine by having to actually ID the specific target ship.

One, using ww2ol as an example, they play campaigns til one side "wins" the map. It goes from Summer 1940, to 1945 in terms of available units. Campaigns last weeks, a few maybe months, I cannot recall. That's for 4-5 years of "game time." If this went 100 years, a single "map" might take a few years in the real world. Certainly months. Just use whatever the time compression assumption on the map is, and do the math. This is not a super frequent reset. 1. The game would look at the nation states, and their extant navies, and populate them as well as possible with active players. If 5% of Post ships are SOLs, the rest 5th and 6th rates, then 5% of people of the right meta rank get posted to SOLs, the rest get frigates. If there are not enough Lts for all the unrated ships, then some of the people with rank for Post ships might get a Brig. they can still rank up, it will change every time. Server has some weighting, plus random (assign points to get each, and you have weighting +- some random number. 2. You might start with a 2d rate one campaign, and a Brig the next. Even with high "meta-rank" it just widens the range of possible ships you might get to include the biggest. Maybe it's a normal distribution… dunno, whatever the distribution needs to be based on players ranks and actual ship populations in the various navies. Players might know that an unpopular (to play) navy might have a better chance of getting a better ship. Such dynamic balancing can help populate all the nations. Heck, the % chance of each class of ship for a given player might be right at the login screen for the first session of a new map. You can see for each nation what kind of unit is the best, and what "better" unit you have a better shot at starting with. In ww2ol, there were times of day (always a problem with a global MMO, BTW) where it was prime time in Europe. Except for brits, and the small number of french, virtually every other player in europe played German exclusively. Americans played both sides (US as a country was not in the game originally at all, UK, France, Germany). So during euro time, the Germans would roll the map. Playing Allied stank, a few guys facing many germans. US prime time balanced things out, though sometimes allies might have the edge in numbers. Numbers always win in games and RL. How does one balance this in the persistent MMO model with no death (yeah, this is OT to my OT thread). Still worth thinking about because there is a time range, AND certain nations. If the RN is super popular, pretty soon even in the most realistic world of consequences, no one aside front he RN will want to leave port.

You make a difference, it just ends when the period is over is all. Else people will still be in the age of sail in ww2. I suppose the goals of the game matter. I assume "naval action" is the primary goal. The rest of the world then exists to provide context and meaning to the various naval actions. "Production line?" To the extent players are even involved, it's to provide strategic context for the naval war, nothing more. Anything that reads as "grind" seems counterproductive to me. YMMV. There are basically 2 ranks that matter for players of the tactical game (using the RN, throw a couple more in for slop if you like). Lieutenant, and Captain. Unrated vs rated ships. You would mostly be a Lt, then once made post you'd get a post ship. In RL, that could be ANY post ship. For the game, in a world that resets, there is a simple mechanism. You have some global stats (I'll call it meta-rank) that cross each "campaign" reset. These stats change the range of ship you might be assigned. When a new campaign starts, it's not like the world should be all unrated ships, right? It picks your starting rank based on your meta rank. So you made Admiral once? You will start the game with the server assigning you a rank based upon what the game world needs, up to, and including Admiral. You have only been an Lt? You'll probably be an Lt again, but your total "score"might be such that when a reset happens, you will either be an Lt, or a chance at Post Captain. Any Vet player will have a chance of starting any given campaign at a higher rank. Changes within those will be earned to keep the right balance of units (server dynamically tweaking what distinguishes you enough to get promoted). Within this, some will start the game as a Post Captain in a 6th Rate, others in an SOL. If campaigns last a few months, very few months you get to play a different role. heck, RN on campaign, French the next, merchant another, pirate another, whatever. It;s not impossible, and has advantages, particularly if you want to have the game world advance over a long time frame technologically.

The downwind units can run as easily as you can chase. Having the weather does not guarantee engagement, it does, however give you the initiative. I think that is the point with respect to demanding attack of officers in the RN. If they have the weather, they can at least try and chase down the prey. If the enemy turns to engage, you have a fight, and if they run and escape, at least the logs of your junior officers will show that you did everything possible to give chase. Rereading Rodgers this weekend, I certainly see his discussion of how many Post Captains were waiting for commission as a reasonable incentive to not be removed of command for being insufficiently aggressive. There were many, many Captains on half pay all the time (and a ton of Lieutenants, since they were not really controlled in number, you had to just pass the test, and Mids were picked by the Captains as needed).

This.

Sad, admin's idea of the map resetting is a fantastic one, but the people that have to "keep all my stuff, forever" won't have it. Do you play games like E:TW? After the end of the era supported (world 100% conquered), do you keep playing, collecting taxes, building up armies just to gain even more stuff? How could the game not end at the end of the era? Given even very light (by "gamer" standards) time compression, the entire possible period in the FAQ (1600s through early 1800s) could be played through in several months. How long should the game world take to go 100 years? You are NOT fine with resetting if you think you should keep your stuff. The US starts with nothing of a navy, then 6 frigates. If the US players made the USN rival the RN by 1820 on one map, should they start in 1680 the next map the equal of the RN? That is exactly what you are for.

I have many of the book's he referenced, so I had seen elements of his ideas in multiple places. Particularly the notion that the weather gauge is not objectively better, and was not thought so even by some naval tacticians in the UK. I think it's an interesting take, because he's right in saying that if the weather was not obviously superior, it becomes reasonable to ask why it was their doctrine to have the weather instead of the lee. Other explanations are hard to imagine. The guy's an economist, so given his toolbox has incentives in it, he;s likely to describe it that way. Still, I don't think it's an overreaching premise, I think it's a reasonable one to consider, certainly elements of it. From all my other reading, the lee seems unambiguously preferably in so many ways (smoke, use of lower gun decks, ability to attempt to disengage easily, etc). The only clear mechanical weather advantage would be the old uphill recoil argument, but that seems a stretch to me. The RN, was, however, absolutely demanding with respect to aggressiveness in commanders. The USN submarine force at the start of ww2 was much the same, one patrol that was not sufficiently aggressive and you'd be on the beach.