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Inkompetent

Ensign
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Ensign

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  1. No. No. Just... no. This is a game about actual age-of-sail ships and combat in the Carribean. Not some made up monstrosities from movies or cartoons.
  2. Nor can I, really. That's exactly why I'd love to run a live server test for a few months to see how it actually plays out. It is a quite drastic change after all.
  3. To begin with I want to present the preface to this idea, and it's pretty simple, actually: Accurate gunnery at sail-plans with a lot of sail are way too accurate, and it does to a great degree defeat the purpose of at all having the "Battle" speed mode (sail-plan). My idea for how to fix this would be relatively simple to introduce, and I think it would be very interesting to try this for a few months on the live servers: Remove the "gyro-stabilization" on the follow-up shots after the first one. Currently it doesn't matter how much the ship rolls after the first shot leaves the barrel. ALL other shots will head the exact same direction. Instead guns should be affected by the roll, so that firing while rolling heavily will scatter shots all over the place. This means that firing aimed shots at the hull or other specific sections with a ship that rolls more than just a little will become pretty much impossible beyond point blank range. The result of this would be that players either need to accept that shots fly all over the place (which might not be much of an issue of you toss a crapload of iron on the enemy's masts at range), or they will need to drop to battle sails or otherwise depower and turn their sails so as to lose a lot of wind in the sails and thus acceleration and speed. The more tricky part of this implementation would be that gunners shouldn't fire exactly ALL over the place, because they wouldn't be that dumb. Instead there should be some kind of maximum vertical limit (above and below the point of aim) at which the guns fire. Consideration must however be taken for how to combine this with the "walking" fire of the front/back fire modes, because to get the maximum rate of fire (and as many shots on target as possible) it might be necessary that guns fire out of order. On the other hand this could be exactly what the "Random" fire mode will be better at, so that people will need to make a concious choice of if they want walking fire, or if they want maximum rate of fire but in no particular order. I think that this could have a very interesting effect on gameplay, and to some degree promote other attributes in ships and other modules (for example having as little deceleration as possible from water resistance could become pretty important), and it would also promote ships that sail well with "slower" sail-plans, like for example how the Essex can sail really fast at beam reach with Battle sails.
  4. Then again real captains captured maybe... 0.2-2 ships a year, while we can cap fourteen in a day, so...
  5. I agree with most points here. We shouldn't be able to "snipe" masts, at least not nearly as accurately as now. Downing masts should be done with broadsides. As for felling masts IRL you are right there too. Generally it was done with chain and ball shot to tear off the standing rigging so that uneven stresses on the masts snap them off. Of course some lucky shots to the mast itself could be the critical component, but seeing ships have been able to sail with really rotten masts that still remained standing it'd take one hell of a hit to crack a mast with ball. The last point I'm not entirely sure of as I'm yet not convinced that one type of system is better than the other, but they certainly affect the whole dismasting-system and require very different balancing.
  6. Last battle I was in required 342 hostility to get to join early.
  7. Here comes the update! As stated in the earlier post the focus has been on simply actualizing the guide to the current state of the game. Not everything has been updated, and the most notable example is the port battle chapter which's contents have been entirely scrapped for now. I am sure that there are bits that I have forgot to update, at least entirely, but I felt it was better to get it out in its current state than to polish it for eternity. Some small layout improvements have been done for readability and also to make the guide more suitable to printing (even though I doubt anyone will print the guide in its half-finished state), but I especially need to get to work on more pictures. I guess it's time to dig out my Wacom tablet from the boxes in the loft. As always feedback is welcome! DROPBOX LINK A Naval Action guide to sailing and combat 2017-06-09.pdf
  8. We need several more ways to make money, I think. One is transport contracts, so that it's easy to get material X from port Y to port Z, without having to go there yourself. The other is bounty contracts since that can make it worthwhile for people to chase down someone notorious (or so annoying that he's got a bounty on his head) despite the risks; risks that would make the "normal" payout of a PvP fight waaaaaay too small for the risk being worth taking.
  9. Uhm... it was possible to repair sails before too. It's not a new feature. The only thing that has changed is how the repairs work.
  10. It is now exactly a year since the last post in this thread, and the reason at least I haven't posted is simply because I quit playing Naval Action around that point. Now after the wipe and this far seemingly lovely changes to the game I am back and again have a reason to keep working on it. I am currently in the process of updating the existing content to match the changes done to the game, as well as doing some improvements to the readability of the guide. No major improvements this far, but because of the guide's length (currently 61 pages) I am in the process of coming up with a structure for that, so that someone actually will endure reading it. Once I am done with the actualization of the guide I will upload it as-is. PS: Although I know that getting the thread going after such a long time qualifies as "necroing", please don't lock the thread.
  11. This would probably be a good starting point. Means that point-blank chain does a lot of damage (as can be expected seeing the amount of canvas, and both running and standing rigging that would be hit with significant force), but chaining people down from range become a venture more of luck than anything to be relied on.
  12. Maybe something like a "Leak Shock" could be introduced, so that when enough leaks are caused simultaneously the damage control teams get overwhelmed and for a moment can't do anything about it?
  13. They are still awfully light, and quite blunt. You'll get some shallow cuts, but a lot will be stopped by a simple sailor's shirt, and even if you'd get a piece sticking a centimeter or two into you, how much would it bother you with a splinter the size of a pencil when you are pumped up on adrenaline? The few large pieces that fly, the very few pieces, those are really dangerous. But most of the fragments are nothing that'd stop a person in battle.
  14. Not really. There were of course moments when there were ships with enormous complements of marines, but these were usually specialized ships (for example a large trading vessel like the Indiaman pressed into that role, or a hospital ship being assigned to that task), but since these ships were very underpowered in a gun battle they required plenty of escort. In NA the boarding vessels of course get a significant disability in gunnery, and maybe in sailing depending on crew allocation, but they can still carry a full battery of guns. For example the Victory carried ~150 marines, and a decent 5th rate around 50. In battle the majority of these would fight from the weather deck and the like, and I mean... where the hell would you fit more of them? Sitting on their butt right between the cannons on a gun deck, being in the way for the sailors who are running back and forth to load the guns?
  15. Exactly, and as can be seen in that video the splinters produced by a proper gun are quite pathetic. Some harmful bits of wood are shot out, but most of the splinters produced there wouldn't do anything at all unless they hit you in the eye, and barely then. This is exactly why carronades were invented, so that you could hit with a large ball at as low velocity as possible while still penetrating, so that you produce large splinters instead of small. This means more damage both to the ship and to the crew. All of this is already abstracted in the guns' damage values, as for example long guns have less damage than mediums do, reason being that they produce less splinters.
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