Munro

A draggable protractor and ruler on the map screen would be nice, and a sextant during open world would be awesome. I mean, not actually going into first person and using the sextant, but being able to click two points and get the angle between them and the ship, or being able to calculate latitude while the sun or Polaris is visible. Maybe as an extremely hard to craft item.

People say PotBS died because of multi-account spying, meanwhile EVE Online continues to thrive with multiple accounts and characters per person; there was even that famous incident where a spy managed to bankrupt a rival corporation or something, and the developers CCP ruled it was fair game for that to happen and EVE is still going strong. The question is this: what was the difference between those two games? I don't know. I'm inclined to think EVE's clan management, ranking and permissions system makes its corps a little more resilient, but it could be something else. Whatever it is, Game-Labs should find out. Restricting the number of characters isn't going to solve spying. That's short-sighted wishful thinking. Once the game goes gold and the stakes get higher, having one character per account just means we get a pay-to-spy paradigm. Any clan leader that wants his clan to matter is going to have to buy second accounts for himself or his friends to spy with, because any clan or nation that doesn't have spies will have a severe disadvantage. Trying to fight that is going to mean IP tracking and other paranoia, possibly even DRM, which is going to cause even more grief for families and multi-user residences. How does CCP make EVE stay successful despite the spying? What tools do they give the player base to help deal with it? There are useful answers there. Send an email to CCP guys. They've been running a pvp sandbox for years and they seem like a nice bunch.

If this happened in game it would have to be a joke. A 1st April thing similar to Gaijin's giant snail in War Thunder. Adding it as a lasting serious element just wouldn't fly. Thinking about it while the game is in alpha is way too early.

If it bothers you that much you could always load carronades or short barrels into the lower deck until it gets fixed...

You can't make smoke an on/off option per player; it's strategically significant. Players with smoke on will see much less than players with smoke off, and if you adjust the game's use of smoke to more realistic levels that difference in visibility will be huge.

Everything on the ship can be used as a point of reference when adjusting gun elevation between ranging shots. Those points of reference are required due to the roll of your ship's hull between shots which forces you to change your ordnance's deck elevation to account for changing absolute elevation. Name labels appear at a fixed height above the ship's hull, making them more reliable than masts and sails as reference points because they don't change angle as the hull rolls. That makes them the most consistent point of reference off which to range your shots. It's really very simple.

Let players call their ships whatever they want if they own the ship and aren't just assigned to it. Give players the ability to approve or disapprove of a ship name, like an upvote/downvote system. Players can choose in their own individual settings how much a name has to be downvoted before they don't see it (and see a generic name instead). You get to call your own ship whatever you want, you get to set your own personal bar for how tolerant you want to be of other names, from not seeing any to seeing them all. Plus there could be some kind of incentive reward for highly upvoted names.

It wasn't always the Captain's job to order the trim. In the movie based on O'Brien's books they added a Sailing Master to the Surprise. Aubrey in the books was exceptional for his seamanship; the usual practice was for the Captain to have military knowledge and make the top level decisions while responsibility for the practicalities of sailing and navigation was delegated to the Master. And it's a very good justification for abstracting the sail management. If sail control needs any more detail, a couple of hotkeys to toggle use of fore-and-aft and square rigging at most. Stuff that isn't really a decision but an obvious course of action like limiting the amount of canvas that goes up in a storm should be automated if it isn't omitted completely.

The Captain should be directly controlling the minutiae of the sail configuration as much as he should be personally loading and firing all the guns and cooking all the meals.

If there are three players on the RN team and one disconnected player remaining on the French team, the three players aren't going to vote to kick the D/Ced player, they're going to kick one of their own so that the remaining two RN players can farm more damage off the remaining French hull. I reiterate what I said earlier: vote to kick is a poor solution to the problem.

You can lock the rudder fully to either side by double-tapping A or D. I'm in favour of a system where you could click on a bearing on your compass and your crew will work to hold that course. We're playing as Captains in this game, not helmsmen or navigating lieutenants. The main activity should be commanding and delegating, not trimming sails and making course corrections.

So if they change the temporary progression system instead, then they have a solution while at the same time addressing the issue that the current progression system has an influence on players' in-battle decision making that is having an unquantifiable effect on the ship performance data they're gathering. Meanwhile, if registering temporary progression were more important to me than moving on to the next match, I'd prefer to stay and shoot a sitting target for more damage points than vote to kick. Fortunately that isn't the case, so I can leave. Better solutions would be bots taking over disconnected players or a coroutine that loops through the list of ships and sinks any that is neither connected nor a bot after a particular time limit. Player voting introduces player drama and then the developers have to work harder to filter useful feedback out of the forums.

If the battle is over and only disconnected players remain alive on one side, you can leave the match. It's not like you're going to get banned for desertion, lose in-game currency or get a bad reputation. It's a solution that works, has no down side and minimum inconvenience to what should be everyone's priority: helping the developers get on with developing.

I hope Game Labs plan to model the traversal of individual guns. It could add a lot of character to some ships. Maybe at extreme angles the aiming overlay that appears on the water could change colour to show that not all guns will fire at those angles.

Because of the pace of the game, high latency doesn't make gameplay too difficult. Most of the skill in this game involves thinking several steps ahead and usually you have several seconds to react to your opponents' actions. However there are a few places where latency has a more pronounced effect and I wanted to share some observations about it. Rudder Control: the delay before the rudder responds to input is manageable because it's a delay in when your maneuver starts, but the delay after you release it to neutral is more difficult to manage because it affects your final heading and requires more accurate compensation for delays (and the delay often varies in the span of a battle). The delay also makes fine-tuning your heading more time-consuming. I think this issue would be solved by having the ability to click on your compass to set a heading that the helmsman will try to automatically hold (I also think this would be a good enhancement to the current controls for all players, improving the feeling of playing as a Captain who can switch between 'command' and 'control'). Yard Control: The delay after your input starts/stops is almost as long as the time it takes for the yards to move. When you want to move the yards all the way to port or starboard this isn't a problem, but it's impossible to accurately neutralize the sails quickly, for example when you want to momentarily minimize your heel while on a reach. A keybind to have the crew neutralize sails would be useful here, or an interface/option setting to adjust the sensitivity of the yard control so that high-latency Captains can have them move more slowly. Gunnery: The delay before the cannon respond to your fire command is fine, in fact it feels like a natural/intended delay. The problem is when you need to maximize elevation in aim mode while the ship is rolling: you can't aim higher than the cannons can shoot at that precise moment. With immediate response you can fire as soon as you feel the ship at the peak of its roll, but with high ping you have to predict when the roll will peak but each roll varies and by the time you sense the deceleration of the upward roll it's already too late. Being able to aim higher/lower than the cannons can actually elevate/depress (in the same way that you can laterally traverse the camera further than the gun traversal) would allow high-latency Captains to compensate for their delay far more effectively. You could alter the aiming reticle to notify the player when their aim passes beyond the cannons' limit. If a player fires outside of the current elevation limit, the cannon can either fire anyway or not fire, according to player settings (high-latency players will prefer the latter option).