Destraex

JJPettigrew your subordinates do not make those decisions. Nobody including yourself and your subordinates can change formation, whether they wanted to or not. I am mainly referencing line infantry... I generally see them in videos and such just forming according to their numbers. Two lines if their are too many men. Am I wrong about this? Do they actually spread out to plug a hole?

Is their any possibility for mods to fix the lack of uniform variety? Or is the same model tied universally to each unit type in general? I don't mind not having contours but the map has to show hills properly and units descending off them properly. As for the contour lines being god like... just think of yourself hovering over the battlefield giving orders in real time? Play scourge of war if you want to know what less god like realism is. Units will not move in that game unless the courier with the orders arrives and their is a mode that does not let you see further than your general can! No formations is another big problem as you say they are defaulted for you. Is all this simplification so that the AI and Ipad can keep up?

More the former definition.

bugbear ˈbʌɡbɛː/ noun 1. a cause of obsessive fear, anxiety, or irritation. "the biggest villain is that adman's bugbear, saturated fat" synonyms: pet hate, hate, bane, irritant, irritation, dislike, anathema, aversion, vexation, thorn in one's flesh/side, bane of one's life; More 2. archaic an imaginary being invoked to frighten children, typically a sort of hobgoblin supposed to devour them.

Any coop multiplay planned. If so it would be an instant buy for me. Coop vs AI is a great option when you play with less skillful or interested friends.

Curious if these bug bears have been fixed since UGG. Formations Unit uniform variation Recognisable weapon models Map contour numbers Unit & weapon descriptions Better map Unit flags (other than the default one) Lay down Fire and move or ignore enemy Messengers for orders

Are you sure this was not just steam early access release they are talking about in your quotes Des Moines? As far as I know their is still no firm release date. But I am fairly sure that XP both crafting and normal will be preserved when the game is finally released.

Nobody really knows what that looks like yet is why.

Hethwill I have discussed this elsewhere. It would work on the premise that once you lose sight of a ship (say for more than 5-10 minutes) they get to warp. But so do you. To warp though they need to be out of sight of any ships. So it would just make the longer journeys at sea for the crafters less time consuming and enable ships to travel the whole map without taking a life time. You would drop out of time compression if any ship was sighted and an alarm would sound. It would then take you 10 minutes to start again. This would also prevent interceptors from using chat or voice coms to triangulate somebody based on sighting information it would not be possible to pass on instantly in this period. In short anybody not in sight of his fellow interceptors should have no information anyway and only intercept by chance. Thus it follows that interceptors should keep sight of their prey anyway or consider them lost. Ships sightings in nation chat would become far less accurate and the game far faster for those with less time to sink. It would also in effect make the map seem smaller and if the devs want us to travel without the time killing us then this must be done. This in turn would also mean more journeys and more ship building and more population returning. Because things would be doable in a single nights play again. It would also be a huge help for those clanners that log in and then want to fast track to their fleet who are already heading for a mission or territory. We should then actually see the population mobilise a bit more and there would be a tonne more people willing to leave home waters because time allows. Time compression would obviously be optional and need to be manually started again once dropped from it by a sighting. So those that want to enjoy the games time sink still can. I don't care what it would "look" like in terms of ship bobbing... it's time compression and everybody understands that looks strange. I don't think it would be hard to implement and I reckon the devs should have a crack at it before release... but that is just my opinion of course.

Personally I think one of the things that would pull the current patch together and make it work is open world acceleration away from ship sight silent hunter style. I think the time sink is what is stopping most people.

Stroopwafel, but you will be fair and post a steam review AFTER release right? Does steam have a "alpha/beta/early access" tag for reviews? Because Stroopwafel you are right. If people are posting reviews as if they are reviewing a finished product then the whole gaming industry is in trouble. Steam needs to fix that so people understand which reviews are of a half finished game.

I would also like to add that this idea would in some respects add to realism. What I mean is that ship sightings are instantly reported in nation chat and this means that ships are instantly plotted for the whole national community across the whole huge expanse of map that we have in game. This is highly unrealistic and enables people to use what are essentially satellite reports in the modern world to intercept enemy players or fleets. If once out of sight the ships could speed off in any direction it would mitigate these effects somewhat and stop some of the strange and un-natural gathering of chase fleets or even those that use spys or friendly radio contacts (yes radios were not invented yet but the game allows this) to intercept merchants.

I think the Devs need to make decisions sometimes based on their own common sense. The community has input that can influence but that does not mean they have control over every decision the devs make or that the community are right about game mechanic directions. Only the devs see the actual stats in game from every change they make. What I see personally in a lot of cases is community members simply arguing as one would lobby government for a vested interest. What I am trying to say is that most people are bias towards an in game faction, role they like to play or other consideration. I think the devs are doing just fine trying to test a whole bunch of things before release. They know that it means a lot of people won't necessarily play all the time. But they need to do it to see what works before release. I love the list of things they intend and the direction of the game. Cannot wait for the next big patch. There are some things I do not like, travel times for instance. But each feature builds on another and eventually they will all come together with a cherry on top I hope. The population will not stabilize until final release, especially as most people seem to want to play the game rather than test it. People seem to think that they are playing an early access game that is like WOWs or some other game that is actually not alpha or beta but final release candidate and fully featured. That is why they care about population numbers so much. This is not a fully featured game yet. It is not in the final stages of balancing. The devs list of things they are trying to add still tells me that. The mechanics are not as simple as WOWs or WOT or even a simple simulator ether. This game is massively ambitious. An open world with good physics in combat and realistic immersive 18c ships. A game that has an economy, assorted sloop\frigate\SOL and other specialised ship combat. A game that has good AI compared to other games. Some of these things are a little broken at the moment. But the fine tuning will probably come after all the features are in and gelling together. When you consider what other games with larger dev teams like star citizen have done, this game is already stellar and a stand out in my book. I have tested games where we have literally only been allowed to test one tiny focus of the game at a time. That is the real hard core testing. The repetitive boring grind style testing. Not fun at all. We are doing that here and yes we are doing it after a year. Everybody has an opinion about how long a game should take to make. But the devs I am sure are not lazing around in the sun. They will be working as hard as they can to make the game a success. We either have to believe and be content to test and give feedback without expectation or move on until release. I personally believe that in order to test things and move the schedule as fast as possible that informing the community while good for public relations is a luxury during testing phases. We have to roll with the punches until release. I am pretty sure personally that on release most who purchased this will be downloading it again to see how it turned out and if it hits the spot for an age of sail NAVAL ACTION game. My 2c

Does not have to be perfect. But should not be overtly like a nation.

Merchants in particular are the ones that have the long travel time problems.

I disagree, very rare in history to have a pirate fleet. Pirate mechanics should reflect this rather than massive mercenary armies gathering at ones borders. I would not want to encourage players to once again flock to the once again popularised pirate banner knowing that they can play on any side. They should simply put be against everybody and everybody should want to kill them. They should never operate in gigantic nation killing fleets. The game mechanics should discourage this. Trafalgar sized battles that only nations can and should be able to support realistically should not be accessible to what are essentially small time pirates. Daringly raiding under the noses of the large ponderous nations. In short pirates should be pirates, not nation killers!!!! Pirates should be something somebody who likes the life of a lone wolf who likes evading enemy patrols and raiding merchants should be. A pirate with his\her limited resources should never take on warships which offer little profit but a lot of misery. Any self respecting nation would not want to put gold in the hands of pirates. Even privateers were generally single ships built by private owners because they knew the government would pay them to do X against nation X.

If you have a dynamic IP address yes, do ISPs around the world still go with dynamic IPs or (hackers with spoofing just for a game)? Guess we could go to MAC address level. Unless you are a business you are not going to have 10,000 computers behind your account's IP/router's NAT. Mostly it will be 1 router with only a few computers behind it. Where I am from a lot of ISPs give 1 IP STATIC address for a person and allow only 3 changes throughout the life of that customers account with that ISP. Guess I was thinking of that. But in any case I guess we don't even really need to worry about any of the above. Because it will be about ONE PUBLIC (internet facing) IP ADDRESS logging in two accounts concurrently at a single point in time. That is where you will find the spies by also looking at activity and nation of the other account. The accounts will be using the same IP addy usually but the IP address could be any IP number at any time. But at the concurrent login time they will be the same. I don't really expect it to be fixed. Was just an idea. I don't want to stop the crafters with ALTs. They work hard and paid for it. But sometimes it annoys me that everybody is expected to be on national voice coms (impossible right) and somehow get information while the enemy concentrates against them on voice coms which is possible. That is where raiding is probably much easier than trading. You can pick and choose your attacks with little or no risk when you have radio intercept tech not really invented until much later. Imagine how valuable nation chat would be to enemies if merchants were listing their positions? Instead we have a kind of information blackout which is almost as bad especially for new players.

Just wondering if the devs could allow ALTs but detect spies by the following criteria: 1) Two accounts logged in at once 2) These two accounts have the same IP address 3) These two accounts are of different nations 4) One account has never had any other activity than sitting in nation chat 5) Inactive nation chat account is not associated with a clan but active one is 6) Over a period of a few months Then perhaps give a warning asking why one ALT account has never done anything in game and the other account is very active. Ask to justify. ALTERNATELY - Make an all friends only chat that talks only to all friends logged in on your list? This way enemy reports and location of your ships could be reported to known and trusted allies without having to get on teamspeak. ALTERNATIVE 2 - Make a TRUSTED nation chat that is rather like a more open clan chat. People here have been verified by the community as actual people rather than ALTs..... oh I don't know. Nothing really works. It's the interwebs.

I always wanted to be able to accurately set my rudder by degrees. Currently it's pretty much full or nothing.

It seems this is what they are doing by denying some crafting attributes if others are chosen. If they are all valued attributes then people will outfit a ship for a specific purpose leaving them vulnerable to other specialised builds. I originally wanted tell tale graphical signs in the battle instances on ships that showed this...

I think this sounds like a move in the right direction. You cannot beat human nature and this patch will go with the flow. I agree that from what I have seen nobody will build anything but gold no matter how hard you make it. The differences in a ship now should be randomly generated and determined by upgrades as well as the traits chosen during upgrade. I think we have enough variety of wood types and ship building options to make this interesting without needing specific quality levels. This will also mean most ships are at least ok for any noobs and make the game more reliant on player fighting and crafting skill even if they are new. Please don't move testing to an internal build. This will just negate the feedback you will get that you got to bring these new ideas for this ship building modification forward and cause pain further down the road. Stay the course. Unfortunately another human trait we have running here is that people seem to be playing the game and pouring huge hours in like it was permanently released. I am referring to those that could not stand to lose ships. This is again human nature and I suggest you give people equivalent to what they have now in the new database (which you may have intended anyway). This should keep your testers playing and they will still replace ships as they lose them. As long as we are talking about human traits... please remove GREY from the game all together and replace it with a colour like green or blue for captured ships. Otherwise people may not use them. Heck why not leave them gold? Apart from 1 dura they will have similar stats will they not? Or do you want people to build ships by virtue of captured ones being unviable and have all ships be 1 dura? P.S. I hope gunpowder/shot is not too much of a pain to aquire. But just prevents people using unrealistic amounts in smaller ships to smash first rates from behind which would never have happened in cutters. P.S.2. Will ship colour scheme be a crafted by region and wood type combo thing? P.S.3 I agree that everybody hates the tournament/event blue print drops or rare drops. The problem is they are too pinpoint and most of the time only a select few powerful clans are successful at them or can attend the correct time zones. Rare things should be acquired with a more equal chance for all imho...

Inigo as per above. I wonder if the devs would allow it just for merchants and their escorts... perhaps each player only allowed 1 ship in this fashion. With the population being what it is I doubt it would mean more than the peak population of 2k ships.

What do you mean Mrdoomed?

Even with activities to do, which I think would serve no purpose but to require people to be at the helm 24/7 on long voyages unless they were a really rewarding and integral part of the game. These activities would have to be enjoyable and not just fillers like fishing. I think crafting while on the open sea is a great idea btw. Not very simulator like but you could consider that the crafter has a factory leading hand to do it. You also have to consider how the long journeys are taking people who want to hook up with their clan out of the game for long periods with no real hope of ever joining them in battles. That is why in another thread I suggested at least having the ability to allow a merchant ship to be set on a route to a port and left doing that until it is attacked upon which you are allowed to spawn into it or it's escorting AI.

Angus the open world is definitely not the sim part. It is highly unrealistic even in comparison to the battles which are also nothing like a simulator (although there is no simulator for this kind of thing out there either). The battles at least make sense and most things work as expected. The open world for me is just a means to an end. That end is to have a realistic battle that is meaningful because it affects the over all strategic setting. I know you said "leans" towards a simulator Angus. My type of games are simulators which I own and play a lot of. DCS and Steel Beasts Pro PE and il2 BOS, silent hunter series among them. Even in these simulators I do not spend 5 hours transporting something just to simply stop at the other end. The open world in naval action is not a simulator and ships speed around as it is. I don't think adding what single player simulators have a lot.... Time compression.I doubt much of the population wants to play grass growing simulator 2016. Which is what the latest patch has done because of the huge ,distances involved. The crafters in our clan that did not give up simply play other games while they sail. FOR literally half their life. I would not suggest this otherwise.