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Gunnery can be a pain. The ships is moving, your target is moving, the cannon shot is going all willy nilly...it is all just a very large best guess. This make it a challenge, and there is the fun. What I do not like though is that some how, you can not give an order to fire while using the Spyglass. To range a shot you need to fire, then quickly press Shift and hope you can spot where the round lands. What I propose is that the Spyglass and Gunnery sighting are integrated. While in gunnery mode, if you use the spyglass you get the same elevation indicator as without. By raising and lowering your spyglass for far off targets you can then press space and see the shot land with out having to exit. When you leave the spyglass the indicator is in the same place you left it. This would make ranging a little easier to do since it removes a step and ungags the commander of the ship. A different method would be that the player in spyglass mode could use keys to alter the elevation of the guns in the glass. So instead of having the the marker dead center of the glass. We could use keys to increase the elevation pushing the marker higher in our view. It would still be a judgement call and in no way would make it easier. But it would alter the chance of having to raise the glass so high you loose sight of the target altogether. I find it hard to believe that when using this aid, the character can not order the ships guns to fire. It seems a little silly doesn't it? Please note dispersion, chance to hit something far off and so on would not be hampered...they would still be a fat chance past a point unless someone gets really good at gun by gun aiming. To them I say...good for you, congratz.

Hello Devs, We all know why broadsides were fired, it was to put as many shots as possible into a target 'area' where our enemy had the miss-fortune to be. Now, at point blank range, we wouldn't expect many shots to miss if any, as the shot would be flying horizontally to the sea and the enemy would be in the way, but as range increases the broadside would be fired in a higher and higher arc and produce an ever growing area of effect where its shot fell. Caused by many things, poor aim throughout crew and officers, inconsistency in weight of charge, irregularity of cannon ball shape, roll of ship hull etc etc. I have seen so many times every single shot of a long range broadside falling just inches from a ships hull, and at the same time so many long range shots where every single shot hits. There seems to be a little more dispersion left and right than there is near and far. I understand that we need some skill in learning targetting etc, my point isn't that the targetting needs reviewing (Please don't hijack this thread along those lines !) far from it I think the ranging shots, leading and height adjustment mechanics are just fine as they are. My point is that these ships cannon just weren't that accurate, you would expect misses, and the further away, the more misses you would expect. Imagine a huge rough tear drop shape on the ocean where your target ship sits within and the narrow point of the teardrop points at your ship. Hopefully you would judge correctly where the majority of your shots would fall, but even if you judged it wrong, you may catch it with a few shot that were destined to be slightly off centre. I don't know if you plan to add accuracy enhancing features in the release version and reduce accuracy until these are achieved, but for me the shot fall area at range is far smaller than any captains expectations should be.