Cannon Equip Split

[MaryCeleste]

Apologize if this has been discussed elsewhere.

 

I would love to eventually see a split in cannon types equipped on single deck ships.  

 

You can do this currently in multi deck ships, for example I usually run longs on the weather deck of my snow and carronades on the gun deck.

 

But for single deck ships you do not have the flexibility.

 

I know the Niagara for example had 9 carronades and 1 long gun per side.

 

This would allow us to be more flexible in ship load outs and make engagement easier (given how horrible chain shot is in carronades).

[admin]

Cannon split is hard to do because of UI and aiming reasons

For example mixed deck armament is already hard to fight in (mid/long gun mixes or long/carronade set ups).

Separating guns will only be possible with fully automated mmo style gun fire where you select target and press a button

otherwise you will have a very very hard time aiming and hitting constantly losing to captains who use standardized decks.

[MalakithSkadi]

Then can we at least split the "sides" of the ship from the perspective of the crew distribution?

 

I fail to see why when in a 1v1 fight half of my assigned gunners would sit on the opposite side of the ship to the enemy watching their mates fail to reload quick enough because not a single vessel has enough crew to fully fill "Gunnery" whilst still being able to remotely control the sails.

 

Example: I disable Gunnery - Port and enable Gunnery - Starboard, all the Starboard guns now run at max efficiency and the Port guns do nothing as the crew that would currently sit on the Port side are instead helping out on Starboard / Sailing if the limit is reached.

 

 

A variation on the theme is a "Skeleton crew" mode.

Example: Gunnery and Sailing are active.

Under the current mode you end up splitting between the two and doing neither properly.

Put Sailing in "Skeleton" you get a minimum amount of men in there such that it is functional but terribly slow and everyone else goes to Gunnery.

Edited March 16, 2016 by MalakithSkadi

[maturin]

Exactly. Disabling a deck with the F-keys should halt reload and reassign the crew to the opposite battery.

[MalakithSkadi]

Exactly. Disabling a deck with the F-keys should halt reload and reassign the crew to the opposite battery.

 

I knew I was forgetting something. As mentioned, disabling the guns does NOT reassign the crew, that is another alternative but not really a preferable one in my opinion as you sometimes want to disable them just to fire by deck and having that cause crew to run off would be less than ideal.

[[MCC] Die Antwoord]

Then can we at least split the "sides" of the ship from the perspective of the crew distribution?

 

I fail to see why when in a 1v1 fight half of my assigned gunners would sit on the opposite side of the ship to the enemy watching their mates fail to reload quick enough because not a single vessel has enough crew to fully fill "Gunnery" whilst still being able to remotely control the sails.

 

Example: I disable Gunnery - Port and enable Gunnery - Starboard, all the Starboard guns now run at max efficiency and the Port guns do nothing as the crew that would currently sit on the Port side are instead helping out on Starboard / Sailing if the limit is reached.

 

 

A variation on the theme is a "Skeleton crew" mode.

Example: Gunnery and Sailing are active.

Under the current mode you end up splitting between the two and doing neither properly.

Put Sailing in "Skeleton" you get a minimum amount of men in there such that it is functional but terribly slow and everyone else goes to Gunnery.

 

The new crew system already works like that as far as I know... If you only use the same side all the time, that side has full crew reloading it. If you use both side, you'll notice that both sides reload slower as your crew is split, you even have entire decks stop reloading sometimes... Overall with a full crew, the default crew assignment to gunnery is too high for just one side, but too low to do both sides. When you look at the numbers on the button you see how much crew you have and how many are required to reload ALL guns simultaneously. On my 3rd rate for example, that number is something like 714 from memory and I only have 484 guys assigned to guns by default?

 

This means that if I fire a full broadside, about 350 guys are reloading that side... but when I fire ALL guns, I'll only have 240ish guys on each side, slowing my reload by that much.

 

So basically. nobody is picking their nose, unless there is just no place for them to be... Lets say it takes 8 guys to reload a gun... Putting 20 on it won't help, they'll just be in the way.

[MalakithSkadi]

The new crew system already works like that as far as I know... If you only use the same side all the time, that side has full crew reloading it. If you use both side, you'll notice that both sides reload slower as your crew is split, you even have entire decks stop reloading sometimes... Overall with a full crew, the default crew assignment to gunnery is too high for just one side, but too low to do both sides. When you look at the numbers on the button you see how much crew you have and how many are required to reload ALL guns simultaneously. On my 3rd rate for example, that number is something like 714 from memory and I only have 484 guys assigned to guns by default?

 

This means that if I fire a full broadside, about 350 guys are reloading that side... but when I fire ALL guns, I'll only have 240ish guys on each side, slowing my reload by that much.

 

So basically. nobody is picking their nose, unless there is just no place for them to be... Lets say it takes 8 guys to reload a gun... Putting 20 on it won't help, they'll just be in the way.

 

Except for where I have greater than 50% of the gunnery number, only fire one side and all the cannons DONT reload at the same time. I get like 8/14 then the last 6 trickle in one after the other I assume as men are "freed up" from the earlier cannon to push them across the finish line.

 

This implies to me a portion of the crew remains on the non-used side kind of like the following (numbers from thin air):

Each cannon has 3 permanent crew to man it at all times, then 3 extra who are deployed when it needs reloading. So even though I have over 50% of the gunnery number and only fire one side a portion of those men are "Locked" to the side that isn't used.