remove sniping

[Old Crusty]

11 minutes ago, Dibbler said:

 

 I'm not saying demasting didn't happen,  just that single shot sniping as we see in game didn't.  Doesn't bother me either way tbh as is a game,  but the tech for long range accuracy didn't exist (rifling started in 19 century). Cannons were smooth bore and the actual balls were not "perfect size" for gun calibre, there was variance in shot and even gunpowder quality mix (even humidity could affect power of powder on the day).  Of course in game we don't have rigging damage etc that contributed to  masts falling,  and  the game is what it is a representation of the whole.  Whole broadsides were hurled into rigging in order to demast.

 As i've said is a game and mechanics work well, and single shot sniping is what we have whether historical or not it's still same for all and fun :).

 Just for some reading this is an interesting read

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21533369.2005.9668349

People under the age of 20 cannot understand how we got things things accomplished 30 years ago. We didn’t have the internet or cell phones. The question I get asked the most is “how did you find a place you have never been to before’? 

   Believe it not the people of 200 years ago became professionals at their jobs just like we do. 200 years ago they were working with state of the art equipment. To you and I it is barbaric, but to them it was miraculous. 

   Those gun crews knew their business. They had the extra motivation of failure=death. Have you ever heard of Kentucky windage? They adapted to what they had and the best of them could hit small targets with a little luck.

   You may not understand it but people even back then overcame adversity to accomplish what others said is impossible.

[HachiRoku]

13 hours ago, rediii said:

make accuracy worse and you get what you want. (and I want too)

Doesn’t work. You can even snip with carros at 100m with around 50% accuracy. If you made longs so inaccurate that you couldn't snip then you would need to rebalance all other guns too. It would be way worse than it is now. 

Please community Stop asking the devs to fix stuff that are well balanced! If they mess with gun accuracy we will have loads of new major problems to fix a minor unrealistic one....

Guns are one of the things naval action has done excellent! It's just at the sweetspot between realisim and gameplay. 

[William Death]

1 hour ago, Limpear said:

What about top mast? Its very low thicknes or fights with near distance (or your fights is 1.5 hour joke in 700+m)? You dont have ricochets in masts

you will not have ricochets

Yes, topmasts and topgallant masts have a lower thickness and lower HP when compared to the lower masts. They fall easier and from farther away, as they should. You may lose a topmast, even with a great mast mod, but at least you haven't lost your lower mast (the part that takes the most of your sail repair to rebuild). Regarding fights up close, read what I wrote above: if the thickness of your mast is greater than the penetration of the cannon, at that range, you won't get demasted. Example:

   

The thickness of this Santisima's lower masts is 108cm+39.36cm = 147.36cm    The base penetration of a 42pd long cannon is 140cm at 50m. My enemy cannot demast me at 50m without having at least 5.3% increase to pen. Thats assuming he can elevate his guns high enough to hit my masts at that 50m range (he can't, a first rate's hull is too tall). Of course, double charge exists, stronger penetration modules, etc. But the lower masts on that Santisima won't fall from any long range "sniping," short range "sniping," rolling broadsides, or anything else; unless the person shooting those masts is equipped to deal with a ship having masts that thick. Its not a 100% prevention for demasting (nothing is), but it is quite close.

[Cmdr RideZ]

20 minutes ago, HachiRoku said:

Doesn’t work. You can even snip with carros at 100m with around 50% accuracy. If you made longs so inaccurate that you couldn't snip then you would need to rebalance all other guns too. It would be way worse than it is now. 

Please community Stop asking the devs to fix stuff that are well balanced! If they mess with gun accuracy we will have loads of new major problems to fix a minor unrealistic one....

Guns are one of the things naval action has done excellent! It's just at the sweetspot between realisim and gameplay. 

Well this is so not true.

The game combat is in pretty bad spot so saying that something is at the sweet spot would not make sense at all.

Every change to combat system will affect to cannon balance. If cannons are really well balanced now and we don't want to change it, that would mean that we cannot do any changes to combat at all.

Also Edinorogs are so out of balance that hard to see any sweet spots.

They could also take it step by step and start from horizontal dispersion. Start from 10% and see how it goes. As masts are narrow targets horizontal dispersion would affect mostly to mast sniping.

Decreasing accuracy too much will make the game to be less skill oriented and more rng and mass based. Accuracy cannot be decreased too much. Another question is how badly we want to remove this tactic and playstyle from the game.

We also have really bad upgrade system. There are upgrades like Elite French that are very hard or probably impossible to balance.

Mast hp and thickness are another way to do this. Can be set to values that we don't really care about accuracy after that.

Convergence speed is yet another way to affect this. Nerfing accuracy mods...etc. There are many options.

[Farrago]

Sniping masts just feels wrong whether you are the shooter or the target. It doesn't fit in with age of sail combat, the weapons we're using, and the manuevers we sail.

So, an adjustment to make that undoable should be implemented. I'm totally okay if some other mechanism is used to better simulate that masts did fall as their support was shot away. 

[HachiRoku]

34 minutes ago, Cmdr RideZ said:

Well this is so not true.

The game combat is in pretty bad spot so saying that something is at the sweet spot would not make sense at all.

Every change to combat system will affect to cannon balance. If cannons are really well balanced now and we don't want to change it, that would mean that we cannot do any changes to combat at all.

Also Edinorogs are so out of balance that hard to see any sweet spots.

They could also take it step by step and start from horizontal dispersion. Start from 10% and see how it goes. As masts are narrow targets horizontal dispersion would affect mostly to mast sniping.

Decreasing accuracy too much will make the game to be less skill oriented and more rng and mass based. Accuracy cannot be decreased too much. Another question is how badly we want to remove this tactic and playstyle from the game.

We also have really bad upgrade system. There are upgrades like Elite French that are very hard or probably impossible to balance.

Mast hp and thickness are another way to do this. Can be set to values that we don't really care about accuracy after that.

Convergence speed is yet another way to affect this. Nerfing accuracy mods...etc. There are many options.

let them do it. Mark my words when I say if they touch the cannon dispersion to an extent that you cannot snip the crying will start. You wont be able to hit a thing and longs will become completely obsolete. Also, gun accuracy is one part of the combat system and you are taking stuff out of context there....There are plenty of topics about the combat system in other topics. 

Start with 10%..... You have any idea how much 10% is? that meds and longs.

Edited August 2, 2018 by HachiRoku

[Cmdr RideZ]

8 minutes ago, HachiRoku said:

Also, gun accuracy is one part of the combat system and you are taking stuff out of context there...

I am speaking from mast sniping and what options there are. It is true that OP was talking from and only single shot damage. You know, speaking from accuracy is actually out of context.

There were many marked words and plenty of crying. Devs did not care. Many left the game.

Somehow I think that I know way better than you how much is 10%. I don't still see that we are going to be able to talk this out so lets just agree to disagree.

[AeRoTR]

I say again, let's simulate rig, sail damage for mast fall. 

Should be very hard to demast when sails are %100 hp. 

When sail damage falls below %90 down to %60 percent, should be increasingly easier to demast. This will simulate a more realistic approach.

We do not need to reduce cannon accuracy. 

 

Edited August 3, 2018 by AeRoTR

[Barbancourt]

10 hours ago, HachiRoku said:

 

Please community Stop asking the devs to fix stuff that are well balanced! If they mess with gun accuracy we will have loads of new major problems to fix a minor unrealistic one....

Guns are one of the things naval action has done excellent! It's just at the sweetspot between realisim and gameplay. 

I thought people used to complain that it was the hitboxes being too large?

[Sir Texas Sir]

2 hours ago, AeRoTR said:

I say again, let us simulate rig, sail damage for mast fall. 

Should be very hard to demast when sails are %100 hp. 

When sail damage falls below %90 down to %60 percent, should be increasingly easier to demast. This will simulate a more realistic approach.

We do not need to reduce cannon accuracy. 

 

Please doubt touch accuracy and I know folks say ping don’t matter yes it does for us on the other side of the pound when we go for mast and leaks I can tell and adjust for the delay.  Even worse for the poor SAE/Aus players.

[Bluetooth]

15 hours ago, William Death said:

Once again, to the people saying demasting wasn't a tactic and happened "by accident." Thats just silly. Do some research before you say that. It was a tactic, used in many naval engagements, not just by the French vs Brits, US vs Brits, etc. Downing a mast would cripple a ship, at least till the mast could be cut away. It was certainly something that guncrews could be trained to do. Captain gives the order to demast the enemy, the gunners aim for the shrouds, chainplates, topmast caps, and the masts themselves.

Also I'm very skeptical of the idea that a pine mast could "bounce" a 42pd iron cannonball simply "because the mast is round." I'd like to see something to back that up. Everything I've researched regarding the power of these naval cannons says that, unless you've got some massively thick oak timbers, you won't be bouncing much.

 

One note to people who complain about getting demasted in game: you know that there are no less than 5 mast-specific modules that you can run that will make your masts literally impossible (or very nearly impossible) to shoot down, right? You can even stack some of them!  But don't confuse mast thickness modules with mast HP modules. The first type (+mast thickness) are great. If your mast is thicker than the penetration value of the cannon you're being shot with, at the range it is fired, it will do no damage. The second type (+mast HP), however, is nearly worthless. Mast HP values are so low that buffing them, even 10-20% can be worth as little as 1-3 extra cannonball hits before the mast falls. What a waste of an upgrade slot.

So don't complain you got demasted. Next time run a Kiritimati, Elite French Rig, stacked French Rig and Pino Ocote masts, or some other combination (I think there's a PvP-mark permanent upgrade for mast thickness...navy mast treatement or something like that); and you won't get demasted, at least not nearly as easily.

 

The game caters to the iron mast crowd too much already, IMO. No need to make demasting more difficult (we tried that not even a year ago and found gameplay suffered with default iron masts). I think the ideal balance for demasting could be achieved as follows: 

-mast HP very high

-mast thickness very low

-1 rig repair, 1 hull repair, 

With this, demasting would take a very long time (especially with small guns vs a big ship's masts), but could be done with smaller guns, and at longer ranges.

Dismasting was a tactic and no one has said othetwise but not like it is in the game. 

You should read some accounts of actual combat and then think about the relationship between two ships moving on water, fuse/flintlock cannon, powder varibles, weather, smoke, etc etc the list goes on.

Please don't say that when an enemy is full broadsiding you in a chaotic naval engagement your men would be licking their thumbs and sniping at masts.

And anyone who knows anything about ballistics knows that roundness or curve is desirable for force deflection.

It why tanks are not square.

 

Edited August 3, 2018 by Crow

[Raf Van Boom]

It's like you know, soccer/football, when you kick the ball you give it a spin so that you know where it will go. Firing cannon balls from 19th century cannons is like kicking the ball with your toes without any spin where you have no freaking idea where it will go eh? Stop saying that in history they 'single shot' cannons at a mast and managed to bring them down because that definitely never happened.  It's a crutch because it takes less time to take down masts than to sink someone, k?

[RedNeckMilkMan]

18 hours ago, rediii said:

aiming is one thing but front and back fire mode already works correctly. Also on a wasa

They work for full broadsides but for single shot you shoot top down. I get it because you would want to range with your lighter guns.

[Cmdr RideZ]

6 hours ago, AeRoTR said:

I say again, let us simulate rig, sail damage for mast fall. 

Should be very hard to demast when sails are %100 hp. 

When sail damage falls below %90 down to %60 percent, should be increasingly easier to demast. This will simulate a more realistic approach.

We do not need to reduce cannon accuracy. 

 

The same idea was suggested years ago by someone. I think we went multireps instead.

 

All steps belong to this idea.

I also say there -10% to accuracy because it is early access and I don't see any reasons why not to test it.

...

Realism. It was common to shoot rigging and some historian can fix me here but what I remember reading, there were some cannons dedicated for more accurate fire. I assume these gunners were the best gunners on board. It would still be hard to believe that their hit % would be anything like we have in game.

...

About 10%

Take a ship without accuracy upgrades/books and go snipe masts.

After accuracy nerf that would be almost the same as sniping masts with Pellew's Sight.

[William Death]

17 hours ago, Crow said:

Dismasting was a tactic and no one has said othetwise but not like it is in the game. 

You should read some accounts of actual combat and then think about the relationship between two ships moving on water, fuse/flintlock cannon, powder varibles, weather, smoke, etc etc the list goes on.

Please don't say that when an enemy is full broadsiding you in a chaotic naval engagement your men would be licking their thumbs and sniping at masts.

And anyone who knows anything about ballistics knows that roundness or curve is desirable for force deflection.

It why tanks are not square.

 

Of course the ships are moving and there is smoke, etc. But lets not forget the people shooting these cannons were trained and used to it all. The technology was state of the art at the time. I'm quite sure the gun crews were disciplined enough to aim their cannons, even through the smoke and rolling ships. Also, if my men aren't "licking their thumbs and sniping at masts" and I've ordered them to demast the enemy, I'll bloody well bring them up after the battle to be tried and punished for their incompetence and failure to perform their duty. Having some chaos and getting shot at by the enemy is not an excuse for them to forget their duty and fire randomly. Cannons still must be aimed. 

I'll quote Old Crusty here because he has said it very well.

On 8/2/2018 at 1:08 PM, Old Crusty said:

Believe it not the people of 200 years ago became professionals at their jobs just like we do. 200 years ago they were working with state of the art equipment. To you and I it is barbaric, but to them it was miraculous. 

   Those gun crews knew their business. They had the extra motivation of failure=death. Have you ever heard of Kentucky windage? They adapted to what they had and the best of them could hit small targets with a little luck.

   You may not understand it but people even back then overcame adversity to accomplish what others said is impossible.

Very well said^

Regarding the round pine/fir/softwood masts deflecting cannonballs: again, find a reliable source on that. I fully understand how a round, curved, or angled surface is desirable to deflect shots. Its why we value thickness and angled sides in Naval Action. Its why Constitution got her nickname of "Old Ironsides." Its why, as you say, modern structures meant to withstand being shot at are not square or blocky. But all these things are either a hard wood, and very thick hardwood at that, or a type of steel, modern synthetic, etc. A pine mast is very soft. A 24pd cannonball traveling at over 1600 feet per second has a lot of energy. Basic physics (energy=1/2mv^2)says over 950,000 foot pounds of muzzle energy. Of course calculating ballistic energy isn't quite that simple, a round cannonball bleeds off a lot of energy as it travels, it doesn't have a perfect shape to penetrate armor, etc. but it at least puts the power of these naval cannons into perspective. I don't think a soft pine mast is going to "bounce" a cannonball that powerful. Even "because its rooouuuunnnddd!" The cannonball doesn't even have to lodge in the mast, go through it, take a chunk out, or anything like that, it simply needs to provide enough shock impact to make it fall. If the rigging is cut up from shooting at it, and the sails are still applying force to the mast, it may not take much to shatter that mast.

 

Returning to the single-shot issues:

So a ship might not "single-shot snipe" an enemy's mast in real life the same way you see it in game. But remember that, IRL, each cannon is being aimed and fired individually, as soon as it is reloaded. So if the Captain tells the master gunner to shoot down the mainmast of the enemy, he'll have each guncrew aim to take out that mainmast. In Naval Action, we don't have this ability. Our cannons aim where we, the captains, point them. If we want each cannon aimed at the mainmast, we have to do it ourselves, and we don't have the ability to aim all cannons, then fire all cannons. So we have to do it one cannon at a time, "single-shot sniping" style.

Furthermore, remember that we don't have the ability in NA to weaken masts by cutting up the rigging first. Masts in NA don't become easier to demast when carrying a full press of canvas. We have to have the ability to "snipe masts" in NA to work around this. We can't aim our individual cannons any other way. We have to have cannons that are accurate enough to hit masts because thats the only way to make masts fall. We have to have masts with set thickness and HP values because there are no mechanics in place to make the strength of masts dynamic (besides structure loss). Unless devs do a complete redesign of the rigging damage model, we can't get rid of single shot demasting or screw around with accuracy values too much without further upsetting the balance of combat.

Now I'd love a new rigging damage model that is more realistic and less arcadey; but there are far more pressing issues in NA, such as the ever dwindling playerbase, lack of real PvE content to keep casuals coming back, overpowered 6th rates running around, overpowered mods that further widen the gap between casuals and hardcore players, meaningless RvR, broken ROE in patrol zones, reinforcement zones that are very dangerous to new players who don't understand them but protect veterans who don't want to PvP, just to name a few of NA's current issues.

 

[Slim McSauce]

I blame the accuracy and speed we can train our cannons on target. You can focus down on one masts with all cannons and before you know it the battle is basically over. That surely didn't happen IRL. It was probably more of a case of as a cannon bared on target you had two choices, aim high or aim low with maybe minor adjustments left and right, not traversing 30° in 2 seconds, or firing while traversing. Cannons are heavy and ships are unstable platforms, that wouldn't be reliable even if it was done.

 

 

[Hethwill]

8 hours ago, Slim McSauce said:

speed we can train our cannons on target.

Fair point. Especially the vertical. Horizontal is credible enough, although the spread recovery could take longer to focus.

[Hethwill]

8 hours ago, Sir John said:

How 'bout that new-fangled flintlock

Also, have you ever fired a cannon?  I assure you, it's quite fast.  No slow-match here

That's late era and not all navies had it at the same time  and yep, all our guns have it and is a nice game design compromise.

[Licinio Chiavari]

On 8/1/2018 at 11:58 PM, hoarmurath said:

I suggest the sniping use of single ranging shots to be removed, by preventing single shots from damaging ships, so only broadside firing would actually be useful for damage.

 

Discuss...

If related to the ubercrappiness of mast sniping, granted purposely aiming at masts should not be a viable tactic being totally unreal, same result could be obtained buffing masts HP.

I suggested to more or less double mast HP but making actual HP function of sail damage (ie. damage to ropes making mast less stable).

As an example:

Today mast HP = 100

New mast HP = 200x sail% at the moment. So 150 with sail at 75%.

It'll be still possible to demast a ship, still only one (as in reality) already damaged to rigging. And aiming at masts against a ship in good order would usually be a waste of balls.

 

Closed the mast sniping crappiness, the single shot is needed for proper aiming at long distances.

 

Conclusion: granted the reasoning is mast sniping, the proposal is getting another problem in place of solving the real issue.

[HachiRoku]

On 8/3/2018 at 11:38 AM, Cmdr RideZ said:

The same idea was suggested years ago by someone. I think we went multireps instead.

Willing to do a dismasting battle with me and no mods? We can even do it with meds and I'll show you mast sniping will always be a thing. 

[John Page]

Single shot should stay.

 

20 hours ago, William Death said:

If the rigging is cut up from shooting at it, and the sails are still applying force to the mast, it may not take much to shatter that mast.

Very true. All those running rigging are there to support the mast under press of sail. If a handful are shot away and the wind pressure is great enough, that mast is coming down.

21 hours ago, William Death said:

Furthermore, remember that we don't have the ability in NA to weaken masts by cutting up the rigging first. Masts in NA don't become easier to demast when carrying a full press of canvas.

As it is currently, but I believe @AeRoTR's suggestion below would simulate the rigging being cut up:

On 8/2/2018 at 8:49 AM, AeRoTR said:

Why not reduce mast resistance with decreasing sail hitpoints. This may simulate all that broken lines, damaged rigging that makes masts vulnerable due to uneven forces.

So mast slightly buffed when sails are in good condition. Very difficult to demast, when sail hp is high, as sail hp gets lower, easy to demast.

 

 

On 8/2/2018 at 10:12 AM, Old Crusty said:

Even if the Captain ordered the initial broadside fired all at once ( common for the first broadside in a line of battle ) the gun crews were then ordered to load and fire as fast as possible. Each individual crew loading and firing their gun independent  from each other at the target that the Captain has designated. It was extremely rare after the initial broadside for all guns to be fired at the same time.

   If you are unhappy with the accuracy of single shots and the speed at which a mast can be brought down that is a different discussion that I would be agreeing with you on. But to eliminate single shot starts a new problem. When doing a stern rake The order from the Captain would be “fire as you bare” (what I quoted from other poster) without using single shot if you ship is not going at the same speed that your guns fire from front to back you end up missing a lot of you shots because you are to fast and have passed the ships stern, or to slow and your guns are fired to fast.

   Thinking about this I believe that an extra choice in your broadside should be “fire as you bare”.  We have front to stern, stern to front, and random. Yes add fire as you bare.

Yes, 'fire as she bears' would be a nice option. To build on and flesh out my idea from earlier:

@admin: The game engine would have know which ship to target, expecting you to aim the first shot and the rest 'fire as she bears' at the target. Also, Cecil's suggestions there are really good, although having to aim each swivel would be extremely difficult, it should be automatic (once you assign crew) with the option to aim, in my opinion.

[Cecil Selous]

7 minutes ago, John Page said:

 

@admin: The game engine would have know which ship to target, expecting you to aim the first shot and the rest 'fire as she bears' at the target. Also, Cecil's suggestions there are really good, although having to aim each swivel would be extremely difficult, it should be automatic (once you assign crew) with the option to aim, in my opinion.

Sorry for the off topic but thanks for the nice words. The main idea behind the swivels was just to have a tool against huggers and annoying little ships behind your stern. Therefor I thought it would be kinda nice to aim and fire them manually. A simpler solution would be of course an automatic musket/swivel mechanic in cqb. A mix of both is even better

[William Death]

I rarely use accuracy mods (or occasionally just one that is reload + accuracy like Gunnery Encyclopedia or Instruccions aux Cannoniers) on my OW PvP ships and I can still demast just fine with them. Single shot or rolling broadside demasting. Even using carronades up close to snipe with no accuracy mods is fine.  Granted, for duels I of course run some accuracy mods.

I practiced demasting ages ago with rum rations installed (negative accuracy). The more you practice, you come to realize that single shot sniping isn't necessarily dependent on the width of the firing indicator (although it of course helps when you have accuracy mods and the indicator becomes very narrow); its more about knowing how much windage to adjust for between shots--every ship is different here, because they have different widths between gunports and the guns toward the extreme ends of the ship have to angle differently in order to converge on the center of the firing indicator (assuming unlocked sector auto [but you won't always use that]). Victory, for example, has a non-functional gunport on the 24d deck, right in the center where the entry port is--you have to keep that in mind when using that deck for single shotting masts. Endymion and Surprise, on the other hand, have a very nice spacing between gunports, symmetrical throughout the length of the ship, and they don't have dramatic curves toward either end of the gundeck so moving the firing sector is fairly fluid and predictable. An alternative to moving the firing sector with each shot is to have your ship perform a slow turn as you single shot, this lets you "roll" the broadside, one shot at a time, into the masts (think about guncrews aiming each gun at the target--some will miss and some will hit).

Sometimes an enemy who doesn't understand demasting will set himself up perfectly for a demasting shot and you can simply select the proper range, tweak your course, and fire the entire broadside (left click) into the mast(s). I've achieved something like a 90% hit rate (though I don't average nearly that well) in a Cerberus vs Cerberus duel (granted there are only like 13 cannons in the broadside). I had long nines and I didn't have any slots open so no books for accuracy. His foremast fell with just that one well aimed broadside. Previously, with the old damage model, I took multiple masts in single broadsides and I witnessed several first rate duels where 2-3 masts fell in a single rolling broadside. Even now, if you aim well, you can take mast(s) out with a single rolling broadside.

Nerfing accuracy will just screw up other parts of the combat model. Its fine like it is. Best advice: learn how to outfit a ship to prevent being demasted, and learn how to sail your ship so that you don't make yourself a super easy target for demasting. Furthermore, if your enemy is focusing masts, you'd better be doing something useful before he gets your masts down. Shoot hull, rake, grape....do something at least semi-useful, whatever you do, don't just sail left and right while flipping out in teamspeak about a guy trying to demast you and how unhistorical that is because you think demasting should be a rare occurrence. I think it should happen in the majority of engagements, as it did historically .

[hoarmurath]

It's amazing how many of you didn't even bother reading the starting post.

 

I never suggested nerfing accuracy, i suggested making the ranging shots useful only for ranging, and not for damaging.

[Hethwill]

2 hours ago, hoarmurath said:

It's amazing how many of you didn't even bother reading the starting post.

 

I never suggested nerfing accuracy, i suggested making the ranging shots useful only for ranging, and not for damaging.

How to do it in a game design point of view ? What is a single shot, and what is a ranging shot ? A ranging shot is a single shot and a single shot can be ranging shot, or several when you constantly miss the ranges and need to range again.