A Long Day's Night

[William the Drake]

With the implementation of stern and ship's lights, I have been looking forward to night combat. Coupled with the outstanding lighting and flash effects from cannons fired at night, night combat seems to be one of the most beautiful bits of eye-candy in the game so far. 
 

This said, I feel that the Day-Night cycle goes far too fast: night goes by so quickly that you hardly get a chance to truly appreciate the stern lights and cannon flashes. Simply enough, I would suggest stretching/lengthening the Day-Night cycle. So both days and nights will be/appear longer, also giving a more grand feeling of time laps.

I know that this would inversely affect the "Days at Sea" counter, but seeing as this has no in-game mechanic other than bragging rights, I feel this could be ignored.

The question is, what is the "Goldilocks" time laps to make it work? Suggestions from the community could help here (as well as the current ratio of time for a day in-game)

Cheers,

['Sharpe]

I'm all for this and have been wanting to post something like this for a while.

But, I don't think modifying the cycle on OW is a solve, because the days are tied to real life sailing time (ie, you travel a distance in a naval action day equivalent to a real life day's sail). I actually quite like this because there's an authenticity to knowing the sailing day durations between ports.

That said there's two changes I'd like to see to get the most out of the day/night cycle.

1- Night is too short; there's too much dawn and dusk. There needs to be a longer period where it's dark - really dark. Historically a ship being chased could use a moonless night to escape, even when only a few kilometers away from the pursuer. We need nights like this ingame.

2- The day/night cycle within instances is silly. Currently it mirrors the OW cycle, which is an accelerated cycle. Yet in instances the action is "real time", so why are we subjected to the OW hyperspeed cycle? The result is that there's nothing environmentally memorable about any one battle, because in a 60 minute battle you're going to see all times of the day, and even a few different weather conditions.

Completely immersion-killing. Instead, the way it should work is your time of day and weather is locked in to whatever it was on the OW when you entered battle. This would lead to more realistic feeling battles - and epic memories. You'll remember "that night fight against the 3 santis", or "that fight in the crazy storm". I can't remember the environmental details about any of the fights I even had TODAY, because they are all a weird mish-mash of dawn, dusk, fog, day, in repeat over and over again. Completely forgettable.

And yes, such a system would mean that once your battle is over, you enter the OW and it may be a different time of day than it was within the instance when your battle ended. You know what? This is something almost nobody will care about. It's quite easy to consider any time discrepancy to be the period of time to gather the wounded from the decks, make emergency repairs, etc, before setting sail again. The benefits of a realtime cycle within instances far, far outweighs any perceived inconsistency when you pop back out to OW.

[Ned Loe]

I agree. It needs to be slightly longer. If spawn was at night then keep it at 25 minute between slow transitions. 20-30 minutes at night should be enough.  

[William the Drake]

But, I don't think modifying the cycle on OW is a solve, because the days are tied to real life sailing time (ie, you travel a distance in a naval action day equivalent to a real life day's sail). I actually quite like this because there's an authenticity to knowing the sailing day duration between ports.

I didn't realize that this was the case with the day-night cycle. if this is the case, I completely agree that the OW cycle should not be changed. Having the cycle in combat slowed drastically as Wind suggested  would probably work best; i don't think time standing still would be the best option. How cool would it be to have a battle at sunset/sunrise and clearly see it progress from twilight to night during (a single) battle?

[Prater]

But, I don't think modifying the cycle on OW is a solve, because the days are tied to real life sailing time (ie, you travel a distance in a naval action day equivalent to a real life day's sail). I actually quite like this because there's an authenticity to knowing the sailing day durations between ports.

 

 

 

I don't think it is.

 

The cycles were different before.  The nights were really long and a ton of us complained that we would enter battle at night, and get out of battle at night, and all we would be in was night.  So I think that is why it was changed.

 

However, what we have now needs to change.  I think it needs to be night from roughly 21:00 (sunset) to 4:00 (dawn).  That would be about 5 minutes of darkness and 13 minutes of day and a bit of overlap for dusk and dawn.

[Johnny Fletcher]

I think time passing ingame should be roughly x2 as long as currently in the game. I think we should also have sunrise at 5 am and sunset at 7pm, not the current 3am and 9pm lighting transitions.

 

edit - Wind rotation would match the x2 increase also. I think this would add another strategic tool when planning attacks. 

Edited January 16, 2016 by John Armstrong

[SKurj.]

night also isn't dark enough...