Juan Navarre
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Posts posted by Juan Navarre
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1 hour ago, EdWatchmaker said:
I know that some would not like this, perhaps most on the forums.
Well, I'm new here, so I have no notion of how the majority of the forum may feel as a whole. So far on this thread, however, those who want some real sailing in the open world seem to outnumber those who don't by two to one.
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Some more ideas for crew:
Ship's master- Can take the helm to autonavigate to a selected destination port. Better Master's would be more efficient and less likely to take storm damage.
Lookout- Calls "sail ho" and "land ho." Better lookouts would spot land and sails further away.
Superiors would provide a bonus to their inferiors in proportion to their own skills. For example, a gunner with high reload skill would provide a bonus to the reload skill of the gunner's mates, who would in turn provide a bonus to their respective gunnery teams.
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1 hour ago, Christendom said:
It’ll be nice for about 5 mins. I like to just point my ship in a direction and then alt tab on reddit until I get there.
@Cetric de Cornusiac had a brilliant suggestion about having Crews. Implement that at the same time and let your second in command have the helm while you go to reddit. It could go beyond just pointing it in a direction, they could navigate around landmasses and make AI pathfinding decisions like the rest of the AI ships until you take command again.
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3 hours ago, Oberon74 said:
The realistic sailing that is advertised does not specify OW and the sailing in battle instances is more complex (granted still not to your standards)
Ah, a sea lawyer! There is the immersion I was looking for!
How silly of me to imagine that the sailing and the open world would be at the same time. I don't know what I thinking.
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2 minutes ago, Oberon74 said:
I don't disagree with anything you have said, but the reality is that most people on this game don't want to spend their hours actually doing the work of sailing between two ports. That's a sailing Sim. As I said, an options menu with different difficulty settings for OW is the answer IMHO. Much like what we had in Silent hunter (im actually a submariner and setting up a shot using the historical model was a big kick for me). The level of difficulty that you have suggested would be max, and perhaps you would get more xp for accomplishing a journey at that level.
An option menu with different difficulty settings sounds fine to me. A real sailing sim would have realtime sailing, so it might take you literally 100 hours or more playing the sim to get from La Habana to Ponce. I think sped up time is cool, but enemy ships shouldn't be the only challenge at sea.
I am just honestly baffled that suggesting realistic sailing in a game that highlights realistic sailing as a core feature would encounter such resistance.
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40 minutes ago, Oberon74 said:
I believe you are asking for additions that would please a small niche (in an already niche game). OW sailing for most of us is a means to an end (combat, trading, etc). Your proposals are very interesting and I would probably enjoy them for a period of time, but I don't think I would want to do it all the time. Most times I just want to get there! Similar proposals have come out from the hard core sailing school and while they are attractive to a few, the majority would hate them. I think this kind of thing, if it ever gets instituted, should be selectable from an options menu.
I don't understand how sailing in the OW can only appeal to a small niche. This is half of how the game is advertised on steam.
QuoteEnormous open world – Large open world, recreated based on 18th Century maps, historical harbors, positions, and town names. We do not believe in the various modern hand-holding markers, thus player position is not shown on the map: you will have to navigate yourself using compass, sun or landmarks. PS. battles are instanced to allow extremely complex sailing and fighting calculations for 50 ship battles.
Freedom – Build ships, trade, sink enemies of your nation. You can attack anyone almost everywhere. Remember that every action could have consequences. So don't attack everyone - or you will become a pirate. Conquer almost every port in the Caribbean, but remember! other adventurous captains will try to ruin your plans.
Beautiful ships – Accurate hull models, sail plans, guns, internal upgrades, historical speed, turning and heel performance. Ships from small cutters to large 100+ gun 1st rates will allow the player to experience every possible role of the Age of Sail period.
Realistic sailing – Advanced wind and physics model provides for realistic portrayal of ship’s performance in the age of sail. Yard angles, ship angle to wind, fittings and ship condition affects speeds and turning rates. Correct tacking, boxhauling, clubhauling and other elements of the age of sail sailing are possible. Hidden ship characteristics will allow to gradually uncover potential of the vessel – every ship in game will be unique.You would think that the people who "just want to get there" would say to themselves, "Enormous open world? Realistic sailing? Tacking, boxhauling, and clubhauling? Accurate sail plans with historical speed, turning and heel performance? This game sounds like it's made for a bunch of nautical history nerds! Why waste my money?"
Meanwhile, us nautical history nerds show up, and we say, "I heard there would be some realistic tacking, boxhauling and clubhauling in an enormous open world recreated based on 18th century maps. Why on earth am I motorboating around at 25 kts with a heading indicator and electric wind meter? Wouldn't it be cool if that stuff on the store page was actually in the game?"Is it really demanding an unreasonable level of immersion to suggest that a game billing itself as having realistic sailing in an enormous open world actually have realistic sailing in an enormous open world?
If you folks don't like any of the realistic sailing elements advertised, what on earth inspired you to get the game?-
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9 minutes ago, Batman said:
I would recommend to pour a bottle of salt water over your head every thirty minutes while staring at the screen for hours for total immersion.
Not looking for total immersion, thanks. Just looking for a good sailing game set in the age of sail period.
I believe the game where you just maneuver around and shoot stuff has already been done. What was that game called again? The one where you have a number of weapons you can switch between?
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32 minutes ago, Abram Svensson said:
Just no.
It is intended, that you can sail faster and against the wind so traveling doesnt take that long in OW.
The center of the game is the combat of sailing ships and not traveling with them. All these changes would make the OW just more annoying and time wasting.
Not to mention the huge amount of programming you ask for.
Keep the OW simple.
There could be a arena style server where people just match up for combat, then after combat can immediately match up for another round of combat, thus avoiding the hassle of the OW altogether. Presumably the OW exists because someone thought that it would be fun for someone. I would have fun sailing in it if there was any sailing in it. I know others would as well.
For those who just want immediate combat, and think that travelling in the OW is a waste of time, why mess around with an open world at all? Why not just go from combat to combat, and leave the OW for people who will appreciate it?-
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The OW doesn't seem to let you use yard controls. You can sail directly into the wind without ever ending up in irons. With sails fully reefed, you can turn on a dime, regardless of where the wind is coming from. The speeds in the OW far surpass the speeds listed for the ships, and the speeds seen in combat.
I have seen others mention the tedium of traversing the OW. I imagine much of it has to do with how it involves hardly any sailing skill. Here are just a few things that I think would make travel in the OW a game unto itself.
- Include the sailing mechanics already present in combat.
- Reefs and rocks that you can see if you look for them, but will tear your hull apart if you miss them.
- Planning supplies for your crew. Do you take extra in case you don't get to your destination by the time you had planned? Or do you go with the bare minimum that you can get away with so that you can pack more merchandise into your hull, and risk losing crew?
- Storms! Outrun them if you can, or reef your sails and heave to. Folks sailing broad reach in a storm under full sails will get torn sails, dismasted, or even sail straight down to the ocean floor.
- Replace the heading indicator and wind arrow with a simple compass. There are plenty of other ways to tell which way the wind blows already in the game.
- Ocean currents. Contend with the prevailing currents while navigating. Just because you know which way your ship is pointing, doesn't mean that is the direction your ship is going.
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As a new player, having only recently completed the tutorials, exams and final, I thought the difficulty was ok, but that the tutorials were ineffective at covering essential game mechanics.
As others have noted, things like trading, outfitting ships, outposts, buildings, perks, etc... should be covered by the tutorial.
Hopefully it will be a moot point, as I hear that the rock-paper-scissors style competition to see who has the fastest connection may be replaced with a better boarding mechanism, but the boarding tutorial covers hardly anything about boarding.
Also, when the overwhelming bulk of the content focuses on shooting, it gives a new player the impression that naval action is a shooting arcade.
I think more sailing info in the tutorial e.g. sailing profiles, shallows, storms etc... would make it seem more like sailing was a part of the game.
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1 hour ago, vazco said:
This can't be done due to technical reasons. You don't know when a ship is hidden from sight, and calculating this would be probably impossible with the current engine.
Checking for line of sight in Unity is definitely not impossible.
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Physics.Raycast.html
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A small, easy change would be to replace "left guns", "right guns", "front guns" and "back guns" with larboard, starboard, fore and aft guns respectively.
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6 hours ago, Wind said:
Explain it to Devs and other realists.
I don't know where you get the idea that it needs to be explained to realists. The people who expressed opposition talked about how it would "ruin gameplay" by limiting the ability to perform a coup-de-grace on AFK players.
To quote vazco: "Historical correctness is useless if it ruins the gameplay."Doesn't sound like much of a realist philosophy to me. As a realist myself, I am all for the idea of lookout calls.
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17 hours ago, Macjimm said:On 5/31/2018 at 12:16 PM, Juan Navarre said:
For the current NA community it would be a very serious shock and cause an up-swell of anger, perhaps even rage.
I don't understand why. It seems like there is demand for more content, when the interface is actively suppressing content that is already there.
Get rid of that grey arrow, and suddenly you have a new "determine the wind direction" minigame. I don't get how people who value a game for it's authentic ship designs and sailing profiles can be the same people who would get angry about having to read which way the wind blows as part of a sailing game.
That isn't some esoteric hardcore bit of minutia. It is at least is basic and fundamental as points of sail and differential yard control.
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Another fun potential aspect of crews would be balancing crew morale with discipline.
In addition to their skill stats, crew would also have attitude stats. These would include:
Morale
Complacency
Sadistic disciplinarian captains would have more homogenous crews with stats in every skill category moving closer to the average as everyone keeps their head down and avoids notice from their lash-happy tyrant-captain. This would reduce the detrimental effects of complacency at the expense of morale.
Whenever average morale reached a certain threshold, the crew with morale below that threshold would mutiny, initiating a boarding minigame. All the crew with morale higher than the mutiny threshold would side with the captain.
When average complacency of the crew for a given duty reached a certain threshold, they would make mistakes.
For example, if the crew assigned to sailing reached a certain average complacency, pressing q would periodically turn the foreward yards to starboard instead of port. Or the crew assigned to guns might load chain instead of grape. Or the boarding party might defend instead of attacking.
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I love this. Beyond giving life to your ships and making the game feel more personal, it would better represent the historical duties of a captain. Managing a crew was one of the primary roles of a Ship's Captain, and has heretofore been missing from the game. I always thought of Naval Captains more as strategists than cannon snipers, and would love to see this game move more toward strategy, and less toward arcade shooter.
For implementation in the game, there could be a muster book accessible by hotkey in which the names of each crewman appear, with a ranking of their skills in the following stats:
Reload efficiency
Cannon accuracy
Sailcraft
Combat Offense
Combat Defense
The Muster book would also be where you would assign duties, so when manning the cannons, you would have to decide whether to prioritize reload time or accuracy. If someone was the best sailor and the best boarder, do you put them in the boarding party at the expense of speed? Do you fill your boarding crew with heavy damage dealers for a quick victory, or with good defenders more likely to survive the encounter?
A little more Total War and a little less Call of Duty would make the game feel more like captaining a ship, and less like playing a sniper to my mind.
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26 minutes ago, Cetric de Cornusiac said:
Too which game, I may ask? Do you know a current up-to-date game which could overtake Naval Action as flagship of the (semi-)hardcore age of sail game?
What I want to say is, when there is no concurring game which will steal away the crew, the niche players will stay on board no matter if NA is more or a little less as rustic as they would like it to be...
That's good.
Can also imagine a DLC later which will offer the ultimate purist interface instruments in exchange of the 'compromise' ones which give better accessibility.
To Chess.
I didn't come across NA while looking for a new game to buy. I came across it while doing some research for a writing project. The top Google result for "how did a first rate tack" was a video of someone tacking a first rate in naval action. I thought to myself, "what a fine thing it would be to not just read about tacking a first rate, but to try it for myself and get a more holistic understanding of the challenges of 18th century seafaring!" So I went to the Steam page, and read about how the ships are based on accurate historical designs, with accurate sailing profiles in a world based on 18th century maps. Needless to say, I was sold.
If the actual game experience is going to mostly consist of getting seal-clubbed by spawn-campers whose nautical skill amounts to aiming cannons like sniper rifles, then I won't be lost to any rival nautical simulation, I will simply be lost to other interests. It seems unlikely to me that I should be the first player to ever feel that way.-
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4 hours ago, Wind said:
Time shown that simulator/realistic player market is so small that it is not worth investing in those waters. It's so small that even movie Master and Commander 2 did score only 100k requests and failed. Russell Crowe sent out personal request to fans to write letters to movie studio, but there were simply not enough history fans. This is a first warning sign when trying to build a fully realistic sailing simulator mmo.
From my point of view if Developer ignores some realistic features and brings a mix of interesting content to Naval Action we will see a positive shift. They need to ignore those simulator fans and start scripting stories, scenarios, missions etc...
I disagree. Time has shown that the simulator/realistic player market is so small that it is not worth investing in those waters, for Ubisoft. If you aren't Ubisoft yet, it is the perfect market to invest in. The demographic of people like myself who want to play a historically accurate sailing sim are a niche, but a large enough niche to form a solid customer base for a small studio.
A two dev team can make a sim that those 100k fans who wanted to to see Master and Commander 2 will buy instead of AC Black Flag. If they try to appeal to a larger, more mainstream gaming market, they will lose the niche players who want a historical naval sim, and they still won't gain the more mainstream players, because then the two dev team has to try and compete with Ubisoft.
Besides, Laminar Research has has stayed in business since 1998 making sims for this theoretically unworthy market of sim fans. Probably due in part to how realistically their compasses look and behave.
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5 hours ago, Cetric de Cornusiac said:
The game as it is already can be labeled 'hardcore', we should be grateful for the amount of casual-play-denying features it has.
As much as I like accuracy, historical feeling, immersion myself (yeah, let me use a sextant, too), I understand the economic interests of the studio, having to make compromises towards the gamer audience, as much as possible and excusable, in order to stay profitable. A real age of sail simulation of how to operate a ship of decent size would be too hard for many gamers and I can already anticipate complaints about what they could not cope with...
Plus, there is this sportsman type of gamer who goes all for achievements and 'marks', he does not like sailing ships per se, he does operate tanks, planes, or triangles and squares, no matter what, for making points and leading charts, publishing videos of his performances. Those players also don't give a damn about historical content. Sad thing. But the market has to reckon with them, too.
Do you think that replacing the modern heading indicator with an 18th century binnacle would make the game too hardcore?
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3 hours ago, Macjimm said:
Juan,
You can also walk around on deck and climb the rigging. Press Home twice, quickly to access a camera view.
Use the W,S,D,A,X,Z keys to move. Your mouse wheel can adjust the speed. It is most unfortunately that a ship cannot be controlled from the camera view.
That's awesome! Thanks!
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9 hours ago, rediii said:
ctrl+H
Thanks.
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4 hours ago, Macjimm said:
Sounds like a great idea.
The features that Navarre described are not extreme modifications that only a fringe minority could enjoy. It seems very reasonable that lots of us would play a game that did more to recreate the feel of walking the deck of history.
Unrealistic requests would include; sailing Open World in real time, the possibility of dieing in game, real amounts of time needed to build ships, etc.
There is nothing outrageous about having a toggle for a compass, watch and chip log or being able to control the ship while moving about it in the camera view .
There are lots of simple changes that would enhance the genuine sailing experience, but because they have nothing to do with fighting are considered unreasonable and discarded as ultra realism or useless immersion.
The changes I suggested would affect fighting though. Combat right now seems to privilege marksmanship over seamanship. Staying out of irons is a simple matter of glancing down at the left hand corner periodically.
Skills like reading the wind and keeping your bearings, which would have been essential to captains of the time, are rendered useless by the handholding interface.
Meanwhile, marksmanship, which would have been less useful to captains who weren't manning each canon themselves, seems to be the essential skill to have in NA, so that you can snipe a headshot on those enemy masts.
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2 hours ago, Macjimm said:
You nailed it there mate. Pretty much summed up NA.
The concepts you value; compass, chronometer, chip log, wind pendant, enemy BDA, would enhance the game, but alas it shall never be. NA serves a mistress known as lady combat, and she is jealous of all other content in the game.
You will find that you can turn off the UI and it is fairly easy to judge your heading from the stars and sun. The wind direction is a challenge, but you can estimate it from the lay of your boom and the ship's speed.
The navigation is kind of fun, abeit very simple, and there are several helpful maps that players have created. With a draw program you can easily build your own course plans and then track your progress. Without variable winds and currents there isn't much need for more in game tools. But a compass, chronometer, chip log and pendant would help make sailing more interesting.
It's still a good game and if you work hard you can recreate a little sense of authenticity in the age of sail. It also helps to use your imagination.
Thanks mate. Could you tell me how this turning off the UI business is accomplished? They didn't cover it in the tutorials.
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A simulator of what? It doesn't seem to be a simulator of 18th century naval challenges, for the reasons stated above. I certainly wouldn't mind if it were a simulator in the respect of simulating historical seafaring and navigation methods, but it seems to have every situational awareness tool you would expect from a modern video game other than the dynamic minimap. What exactly is it meant to simulate?
A new *personal* approach to NAVAL ACTION: Crews, heart and soul of your ships!
in Current Feature Improvement Suggestions
Posted
Yet more ideas for crew!
If all the metagame info is really necessary for gameplay, the holographic HOD projected onto the visor of your space helmet could at least be replaced with chat-style crew dialogue.
e.g...
Lieutenant Marks: Direct hit sir! Half the planking of her larboard hull is in shambles!
Captain Navarre: Reef sails lads!
Boatswain Michaels: Sail's at half reef cap'n!
Quartermaster Kipp: They hit our rudder sir! It's in bad shape!
Captain Navarre: Mr. Sloane! Take some men down and get that rudder ruddy working again!
Carpenter Sloane: Aye Cap'n!
Captain Navarre: Mr. Judd! Aim your cannon 0.4 meters below the main topgallant, 2.3 meters abaft of the mast! A little lower! A little higher! Split the difference! Right there! Fire!
Lieutenant Marks: Direct hit sir! Her sails are reduced to 63% now!
You get the idea...