Tom Pullings

Well, I bought the game...because...of course I was going to buy the game! At any rate, I thought I'd report that I'm able to run on High settings (just clicked the one High button and made no other changes) and I get perfectly good framerates. I haven't paid close attention, but they seem to be in the 40-60 range whenever I glance at them. Just so others know that my now far from cutting edge system handles it fine.

For the first time ever, I chose a different name from my first and only online game name of Griphos. This is the game I've waited for for. The age of sail is a deep and long held passion, so I wanted a name that fit. When I first joined the forum, one of my favorite characters in the O'Brian series came to mind. I thought I'd probably change it once I got the game. I love names that just invoke the sea generally, such as Leviathan. I thought of names that just invoked ships themselves, such as Chainplate, or Hawsehole. I thought of fictional figures like Billy Budd or Disco Troop or Odysseus. I thought of historical figures, particularly privateers (my likely open world role interest) such as Jean Lafitte, Sam Reid, or Black Sam Bellamy. In the end, it was a toss up between staying with Mr. Pullings and Black Sam (the Robin Hood of pirates). I couldn't decide, but I know that the fictional Tom got to captain the HMS Bellona, one of the most beautiful and best sailing ships in the game so far, so I just stuck with him. I think of his fictional character as an inspiration in some ways. There's lots of great naval names left to use. Do a little research and you'll come up with a good one.

Quite delighted to have gotten mine. One battle under my sea belt so far. I love it!

Yes, I'd like to see other shots of it Chainsaw. What I see in this one shot looks good! I'm working on a canoe at the moment. Hull is built, about to start interior. Here's a Peapod that I've finished. I like doing smaller boats in between the big projects.

I think the width is probably fine, if, as it appears, you have six on the larboard side, but they are too large overall. I believe you should be able to stack them within the parameters of the netting (which looks quite to scale to my eye). Oh, and the guns are on the gun deck, so they would be targeted by looking through the gun ports.

Nice work on the COREL kit. Very good, Aracno. And very nice admiralty model out of paper, Mirones. I've never tried that. I do ship models. Takes a long time, but I very much enjoy it. Here's one I have some pics of, the HMS Halifax.

Steam is Steam. It's inevitable that something like Steam will be the distribution and payment management structure for most new games. My question is about min requirements. With the Paypal debacle about to be resolved, I'm poised to get this game (the kind of game I've been waiting on for a very long time), but I want to make sure my current system can handle it at good settings. I have an i5 system running (o/c) at 4.3ghz and a nVidia GTX 560 card. It runs everything else I have (a lot of flight, racing, etc sims and a fair number of other kinds of games) at good or ultra settings. Am I safe purchasing it without fear of needing to upgrade my video card?

The interface and larger game experience is certainly not WoT, and I'm thankful for that. But battle mechanics are battle mechanics, and introducing variations of the sort you suggest into the actual battle mechanics are arbitrary and grounded in sweeping generalizations without basis. If we are going to introduce such arbitrary differences based on sweeping generalizations, then it makes much more sense, to me, to do so on the basis of longevity. Crews that have fought together for extended periods could receive bonuses that reflect their practiced and likely superior gunnery and sailing skills. "faith in their veins..." Indeed. I want my crew to have ice water in theirs. We might as well just generalize that crews with faith look toward their reward in the afterlife and thus have a more fatalistic attitude, believing that God will decide the battle no matter how they perform and we should subtract 2.5% from their fighting ability.

Again, I will point out what I believe to be a significant presupposition that is in error in the framing of the question: "Faith and religion played a huge role in the society and the fabric of life in 18 century." If the question is founded in particular on this assumption, then that is the problem. The "Enlightenment" was, in significant part, a reaction to what was considered to be the significant problems of theocracies of the middle ages and from the middle of the 17th c. on, religion played an increasingly smaller and smaller role in western european and American society. If the developers want to include a social phenomenon that played a "huge role" in society and the "fabric of life" at the time, they could ask about including science in the game. I can't see how that would make much sense in this game either, and certainly wouldn't vote for it, but I can warrant that on board a ship at war, facility with chronometers and mathematics and geography had a much bigger impact on success than faith.

Speaking as a professional historian with a specialization in the study of religion, I can say that faith and religion are human phenomena that have always had a large role and influence in human societies, even now. The 17th-18th centuries were no different and not particularly special in that regard. Indeed, if anything, religion was waning as a social force during that period. And both played mere perfunctory roles on fighting ships of the period for the most part. As noted above, superstition was much more pronounced than religious faith on the ships of the nations modeled in this game, and had a much greater practical influence. I see NO place for either in the game mechanics. Faith and religion are important in present societies (witness US politics). But you don't see it implemented in WoT or contemporary martial games or almost any other game not specifically targeted at and for religious end users. Naval Action is a game about...well...er...naval action, fighting ships of sail on the high seas. Even as an open world sandbox, faith and religion should be merely part of the contextual backdrop. Ports can have churches or missions, just as they can have pirate dens and markets, and governmental palaces. I would expect naval trade to include all traffic faithful to the period, which might include the occasional Jesuit missionary or supplies on a given ship. Please do not make it a part of game mechanics any way, particularly a way that would tend to exaggerate its importance.