Ghroznak

As of 5:25pm CET today...

Nice comparisons.. I don't see Cerberus though Still being tested?

Surrendering system really needs to be added. Sure, there is a surrender option now, but you lose your cargo and your ship (durability hit) if you surrender. So why bother surrendering? You lose nothing more if you fight to the bitter end, but at least that way you can inflict some repair cost and whatnot on your enemy in the process. If there is a proper negotiation "minigame" of sorts where you can agree on terms then there might not even be a need to fire a single shot. A fast ship like the Renommee might catch a Trader Snow and open negotiations... the Snow will have no chance to escape, nor a chance to fight, so once caught in a battle then a negotiation and agreement can be struck within minutes, thus leaving Trader to carry on with at least some of his gold and resources, and an intact ship... while pirate (or privateer, you know...) gets a slice of loot as well. Of course, in no way am I saying negotiations would always happen, or that pirates and privateers will get things for free. There'll be plenty of cases where a fight will happen, or an attempt to flee will happen.. but in those cases, the negotiation can happen again once the ship has been overtaken, or sufficiently damaged as to offer no escape... or they simply escape and that is the end of it. Either way, a surrender option and negotiation would be a great addition to the game as it would give the game more content and options, thus making the game better. It's things like this feature that really help flesh out the game.

This is a small request... Would it be possible to implement a Split gold with group feature? Usually when we go capturing trading ships as a team we try to have same person get the ships so he can sell cargo, sell the ships and then split the coin. To split the coin it's a bit cumbersome with everyone having to dock at the port, then putting lines in group chat and opening trading windows to get it done. Why not have a feature where you simply select "Split gold with group". E.g. you have 4 players total in a group and 10.000 gold to split. So you simply select the Split option, add 10.000 gold and then it gets autosplitted equally to each member, i.e. 2500 gold each. And before you say trading should require everyone to be docked at the same port... I can put a ship for sale in Charleston, and still receive the gold while I am messing around in the lower Antilles, miles and miles away from the port. So magically teleporting gold already happens in the game. Split option would be a nice little quality of life improvement for the game.

Why not make it so whoever started the battle gets the ship. So if someone else joins, boards and captures the ship it still ends up in the loot window for the guy who started the battle. That way, if someone tries to steal a trader they actually end up doing your job for you. That would teach them

Great video Enjoyed watching it and the history behind the marine chronometer True, but the sextant was an evolved tool. Unlike the chronometer for finding longitude, there were other tools before the sextant to measure your latitude, such as the cross-staff. Granted, it wasn't as accurate as the sextant, or as user friendly as it was designed to be used on land and not a moving ship, it still allowed for finding the angle between horizon and the sun, ergo your latitude. Cross-staff was used as early as the mid 1300's.

Why is the Wasa an option? It will just capsize 1300m after you leave the port...

Are you calling my vanity and desire to name my ship unimportant? How dare you!

I don't care what we call them as long as they are called something. Generic names for them, especially when the name doubles as a category or class, then everything becomes messed up. 3rd rate is a size/class of ship... not a ship name. Frigate is a type of ship... not a ship name.

Then you need to hang out in the forums and read the developer blogs etc more. They certainly don't have a bad attitude towards customers and stating such would simply be unfair and untrue.

Make it the players choice if the battle is to be open, group/friends only or private. That will remove 100% of griefing by ninja-capping ships, and requires 0 effort from the developer other than simply implement the feature. It then becomes a matter of who initiates the battle first and pull the trader into battle. Anyone else who was too late... well... just like the resource nodes in MMO's... if you are too slow and someone else starts mining that ore node, then you were simply too slow. Problem solved.

Great idea, even if it's just temporary. The blue screen is a bit.... blue...

The answer is simple. You need bigger guns. There was a huge difference between firing my Snow's 6 pounders and my Niagaras 32 pounder carronades, let me tell you that!

I am not voting on this. Why? Because there needs to be a way of seeing how damaged a ship is. Experienced sailors and officers would know how damaged a ship was by simply looking through their spyglass. The amount of damage seen on the ships hull itself, the extent of damage of the planking, how many gunports seem to be in operation, how many sailors are dead, dying or otherwise incapacitated, what is the extent of damage to the sails, rigging and masts. Not to mention, what is the reaction and look on the face of the enemy sailors? Are they are afraid, panicked, calm, gritting their teeth? All of these things, both material damage and the human condition and behaviour onboard the ship is currently all rolled up into the top right stats and healthbars. Now to the point... I can't vote yes or no because I have never heard anything being said about how to estimate the extent of damage on the enemy ships, or their morale, amount of dead sailors or otherwise if we remove the healthbar, crew stats and ready-cannons indicators on top right. It's easy to jump on this poll and simply vote "Yes, remove it because realism", but realism means there is a plethora of things that need to be added (as mentioned above) for a captain to properly understand the condition of the enemy ship so he can make informed tactical decisions for his own ship. So someone please elaborate on how we are to know the status of the enemy ship if there is no indicators in the game? Just count the amount of textured holes on the side of the ship? I'm willing to listen, but I won't just snap-shot vote on a poll without more information about what is coming down the pipeline.

What about making Basic Cutters only able to fight other Basic Cutters in PvP? For fighting players in something other than a Basic Cutter they would need to use a captured ship, buy a ship or craft a ship, even if it's a grey Cutter. Another benefit to this would be for the crafted Cutters to actually have a purpose in the game other than being disposable ships that get crafted and broken down for parts.

Getting rid of it simply takes content and options out of the game. Surrendering would happen at sea, especially if a merchant realized they had no way to escape. Rather than fighting a battle they are doomed to lose anyhow, surrendering is a much better option as it saves the lives of the crew (well, hopefully). Also, if/when crew management, training and such is added then keeping your crew alive becomes even more important, which in turn makes Surrendering an important option during battles. In my opinion, Surrendering needs to stay in the game as a choice you can make, with consequences obviously, but at the same time with incentives (such as sparing crew, retaining the durability point or other incentives that make it worthwhile for you to use Surrender while also making it worthwhile for attacker to accept the Surrender). If we remove the Surrender, or simply leave it in the game in the current, broken, form then the only options you ever have is to fight to the death or simply ragequit because you can't be bothered.

Sounds great. I absolutely want the crew to be an important factor. After all, crew is what keeps the ship going. I want crews to have varying quality, reflected in the cost associated with hiring them. I also want a poorly trained crew to progress and become better over time, as this will also make you care more about the crew that you spent hours on training and improving. Also, a separation between crew and officers would be nice, as crew might have more task oriented skills such as gunnery, repairs, tacking and so forth while the officers would have skills related to morale, bonuses to the crews base ability at different tasks or during boarding and such. This way you could have a superior crew with shoddy officers, or vice versa. It would certainly add more depth to the game and also make the ship feel more "alive" as it were.

If there is no reason to use Surrender, then why even have it in the game? I disagree that it should be there as just some kind of "screw it, I can't be bothered with this battle so I will just Surrender, eat the loss and do something else". If that is the case, use the Quit button instead. What incentives can be implemented to make it worthwhile for someone to actually Surrender and forfeit their gold, cargo etc? Only reason for me to do it would be to save the durability point. And for that not to be exploited, i.e. people will just hit Surrender immediately when coming under attack, the attacker will have to accept it. You could say that other incentives to use Surrender would be to keep your cargo, or parts of your cargo, or some such... but that would be rather unfair for the attacker as their purpose for attacking you, and accepting a Surrender, would be to seize the cargo for profit. Now, there are obviously situations where the cargo is of no interest, e.g. you just want to get a pirate out of your waters, or you want enemy faction ships destroyed... in those cases, if a Surrender is even offered, you can simply decline it and proceed with sinking the ship.

Durability is needed as a buffer. Imagine you spent hours getting everything together to build your own Constitution, then set sail out of port, engage in a battle, get disconnected for whatever reason (could be a million reasons why that happens) and come back to find your Constitution sunk... with no durability... ergo gone. Entire effort, crafting and gold wasted because of a disconnect that you had no control over whatsoever. No, durability is needed and 5 is a decent number to give you enough value for your ship. If you want a bigger challenge, ergo lower durability, then I suggest relying on captured ships which only have 1 durability. As for restoring durability, no... I don't agree with this. Losing your ship should suck, and for every point of durability you lose the more worried you should be. There needs to be some risk involved, and there needs to be a way for ships to disappear from the world, and by extension the markets. If the ships are never lost then the in-game economy will die very quickly as more and more ships are produced, and more and more are put up for sale, to the point where you end up with 50 Constitutions and 15 HMS Victory for sale in every port at ridiculously low prices. Ships being lost is good for the economy in the game as this means there is a money sink at play, and also a way to prevent markets from being flooded by ships and upgrades that are for sale.

I agree that Surrender is pointless in it's current implementation. Since the loss from a Surrender is exactly the same as a loss from being sunk, captured or blown up then why would you ever hit the Surrender button? What if Surrender meant that you lose no durability, but a message is sent to the enemy where they have to accept your surrender? If they decline then you have no other hope than to either fight it out or flee. If they accept then they get the same rewards as if they had sunk you, and only difference is that you are let away without losing durability. This way you can't just surrender immediately to avoid losing durability; the enemy still has to accept the surrender. On the flip side, the enemy has the option to accept your surrender which means they get cargo and gold with less damage (even no damage) to their own ship, ergo no repair costs. With a system like this it will also make it obvious who is an honorable pirate or privateer, and who is just an internet troll out to grief people Heck, there could even be a system that logs how often a player accept or decline surrenders, and when you look at that enemy through the spyglass it could come up as a small tooltip where you see name of the player, his faction and "Likely to accept surrender. Very unlikely to accept surrender" or some such descriptive indication to let you make an informed decision whether or not you want to strike your colors.

Watching NPC's disengage from boarding when they have 4 men left and I have 118 is just idiotic. There needs to be a certain attack to defender ratio where disengage is no longer an option. Then again... while boarding minigame is certainly better than what it used to be, there is still much improvement that could be done to it still. All in due time though.

What is wrong with the logo? It looks great! I guess you can always edit it in photoshop or GIMP or just add something else there...

There should be a fee + system where you have to show some redemption (e.g. do some missions or similar to help the nation) as well as a set timer before you can switch. You commit a pirate act then you should be stuck as a pirate for X days depending on severity. E.g. you do a mistake, never fired a shot and left then it might just be hours. However, if you engage, sink and plunder ships then it was by no means an accident and thus you should be forced to stay a pirate for X days (3-7 days I'm thinking). This way you can't just plunder ships and then go "oops, so sorry" and switch back within the hour. Deciding to go pirate should come with consequences that are felt. If you later want to redeem your ways then the fee and amount of work (missions, tasks, quests whatever) should reflect the amount of ships you sank, plunder you stole and so forth. With a rigid system in place it will prevent 1-day-pirates who just plunder "because they can", and it will make pirates, to a degree, band together since they can't just easily wipe the slate clean.

(disclaimer: sorry for the wall-of-text and lack of TL; dr, but I feel this issue is one that needs to be looked at in-depth). I've only had the opportunity to do a little trading in the game so far. It seems extremely simplified (no more advanced than the system in Windward to be honest). And I honestly think it needs to be fleshed out quite a bit. But how? We were discussing this a bit a short while ago in O_Dingo77's stream on twitch and I had some ideas which we might be able to build upon. First off... what is trading? What do you expect when you hear that a game has trading? Most of us think something along the lines of: Buy item A at location X for low price. Transport item A from location X to location Y Sell item A for a high(er) price. Buy item B at location Y for low price. Transport item B from location Y to location X. Rinse _ Repeat Quite dull... basically you are a bus driver, doing something that even a basic bot could do. But I strongly believe that trading can be much more than that. Let me outline some ideas. Perishable items. In the Age of Sails there was no refrigeration. This is something we often don't even think about today. But transporting perishable goods on old sailships, relying on wind and weather to get to their destinations on time, was a race against time.Fruits and vegetables would rot. Same with meat (although they could salt the meat to make it last). Carrying perishable items should be rewarding, and further away from source you sell it the higher price (at the risk of entire shipment rotting if you get delayed) Warehousing. Buying and managing warehouses will allow us to stockpile resources. This means we could store items in expectation of an event to happen which will increase the prices on those wares. Or it could be items you initially planned to sell, but someone else saturated the market. So you put them in storage until the prices rise again.Having warehouses, perhaps even with a small running cost depending on the size, will open up some new ways to do trading. Especially long term investments (more on this below). It will also serve as a minor 'money sink', plus it also opens up another aspect to the game; plundering warehouses. While this is not beneficial for a trader, it does provide more content to the piracy game play, thus adding to the overall, intertwined game as a whole. Playing with politics. Countries wage wars. Ports were blockaded. Towns were raided. Poor harvests lead to famines and disease. Simply put, times were tough. As a trader these are potential opportunities to take advantage of. The cities should all be affected by various political situations.Will you attempt to be a blockade runner in a fast Lynx, offering weapons, food or medicines to a town in need? Knowing that a country is about to go to war, will you invest in the long-term and stockpile resources until the cost of war makes the price on horses, muskets and food start soaring? What about having your friends raid a town and steal all their food and supplies, and then you sail in as a saving angel with fresh supplies and wares for the town to buy, knowing that the prices will be high since they direly need them. Production / "Crafting". The key to trading is buying low and selling high. But instead of relying on what each port has to offer what about investing in your own sawmill, bakery, shipwright, smithy or even merchanthouse?For those familiar with Mount and Blade it had a very simple crafting system. You could invest in a bakery which made bread. But to keep that bakery running you needed to supply it with wheat. Another similar example is EVE Online. Although you don't own the factories, you could still buy (or invent) a blueprint then build items by providing the blueprint and the required materials and minerals. This could easily be done in Naval Action too. You buy a bakery in a town and it has a small running cost (employees and maintenance). Every few days (or weeks) it produces X amount of bread. The cost of producing the bread depends on the cost of the employees, maintenance and the cost of the raw materials (wheat or other corn). With a system where you can invest in your own "factories" that produce certain items you could start to create a network with other players, and thus begin the first steps towards a player driven economy. As an example: Your friend owns farmland in one town. You own a bakery or two. A third friend owns an iron mine. So your friend produces wheat. You make a contract where you will buy X amount of tonnes of wheat at a cost of X per tonne. You bring that wheat to your bakery which produces bread. Then you make a contract with your other friend where he will buy X amount of tonnes of bread at a cost of X per tonne since the workers in his mine need food to produce iron. This is a very simplified system, and surely can be more complex, but it illustrates how trading can be very, very interactive, provided the tools are in place. E.g. a contract system that ensures the players actually buy the X tonnes as agreed and that they get them at the agreed price. Breaking the contract should have consequences. E.g. a penalty fee involved at best, but might also mean that the "factory" is forcibly taken from the person who breaks the contract. And worst case, the person might be declared an outlaw! Smuggling wares. In some areas items might be considered contraband. While there might not be an active blockade in place (in which case it would be blockade running) there could still be authority ships operating under the flag of the respective nation which could routinely hail ships for inspection. Perhaps you just pirated some cargo from a merchant, or plundered a city. You are bound to have barrels and/or crates bearing the marks of the owner. No pirate ship sails with a hold full of empty barrels and crates to 'transfer' the goods over. Carrying such cargo which does not belong to you might cause an aggressive action from a navy ship which inspects your ship. Or your cargo might be illegal where you are trying to sell it. Perhaps gun trade is not permitted due to the political situation, and you are trying to bring muskets and cannons to the port. Having options to conceal your cargo with hidden cargo holds would allow you to mitigate the chance of discovery. Knowing what you can sell and where would be a key factor, and this could even open up for faction type gameplay where you build your standing with the criminal network in a city, which then opens up options to sell your smuggled cargo through a fence. Fleet bonuses. (Disclaimer: taking this example from Elite Dangerous) One thing that is very common with almost any game where you play as a trader is that you travel alone. Traders are often just sailing, flying or driving back and forth... often in 'semi autopilot' mode while watching Netflix or something else. It's not a very team-oriented activity in most games.In Elite Dangerous they did something controversial. They gave us 'money for nothing' when doing trading. How could they do such a thing and get away with it?!? The reason they did it was to encourage teaming up as traders and flying as convoys. So how does that work? The way it works it that you are in a group (called Wing in Elite) together with a friend, and you are both in the same system. When he sells his items to the market and gains a profit, you get a %-based amount of money depending on his profit. So if he sells something worth 1000, and gained 100 profit from it, then you get 20 as a bonus pay. Note, you get 20 out of thin air. It doesn't take 20 out of your friends profit, leaving him with 80. Nope... he gets +100 in profit, and you get +20 as a fleet bonus. But if YOU sell something as well, then your friend gets a bonus too! So if you both sell something and get +100 profit... then you BOTH get +20 in fleet bonus. Total profit per head is then +120, and the total profit between you is +240. Some might think of this as exploitable. But is it really? By being in a convoy you get the fleet bonus, sure... but keep in mind that you also saturate the market faster since you are delivering higher volumes of goods to the same locations. Personally I think this fleet bonus idea is great, and encourages teamplay as traders. But as I mentioned, it is a bit controversial and not everyone might agree with such a mechanic. So to conclude (since I am writing this from top of my head while at work and I need to head out ) There are MANY ways to make trading very interesting, intricate and intertwined with the rest of the gameplay (politics, factions, piracy, blockade running et.c.). I've only gone through the ones that came to my mind, and I am positive that you clever folk out there have many other brilliant ideas. Both new ideas and ideas that improve upon what I've gone through here. Lets try, together, to make trading in Naval Action more than just bus-driving. Thanks for reading!