Fixing the ship battles.

[ronlosey]

Yeah, I was using "realistic" ... resulting in ships appearing at musket shot instead of pistol shot. That didn't really help much ... it was still a matter of 1. fight starts, 2. push the "blast ship" button, 3. boarding sequence, with the total degree of maneuver being that I really seldom had time to check the wind direction.

There wasn't THAT much difference ... like saying that getting hit by a 9x19mm hurts less than getting hit by a .45 - all factors being equal, I would rather avoid either experience.

And yeah, that would be a much better use for "arcade" difficulty than how it works now. Have it actually simplify things for the people who don't like tactics or having to maneuver past a blockade, and prefer to just beam here and there instantly. That would actually make sense, and scrap the multiple standards on speed and maneuver ... they don't really change much anyway.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Realistic sailing mode changes two things as far as I know: Sailing becomes slower and more realistic and wind direction becomes much more important. If you try and sail straight into the wind, you might actually catch yourself going backwards. The second thing it changes is that it adds some additional limits on when you can use sail to. For example: You can't sail to a ship that is faster than you are.

 

[ronlosey]

Right ... but it seems fair that the realistic sailing mode would limit "sail-to" (and transitions to-from map mode) much more so than it currently does, i.e. increasing the current distances to something large enough that map and sail-to could not be used to avoid confrontation and/or prevent escape of a potential target (or otherwise prevent an enemy from out-maneuvering you).

The whole "cannot use sail-to if the enemy is faster than you" would be irrelevant if the command still put you 2000 yards from the nearest hostile ship ... if he wanted to run, then when you got within 2000 yards, he would simply turn and run then. "Oh, look, a hostile ship is coming toward us. We should leave."

But yeah, only affect "realistic" sail mode. Leave "cartoon" ... er, "arcade" mode for anybody who doesn't want either the work of sailing the ship or of changing the numbers themselves. Meanwhile, those of us who would like a good ship tactics simulator built on this engine will have it.

Of course, if you're never actually going to sail the ship for more than ten seconds at a time, what's the point of the game anyway? But that's just my opinion.

 

[morgan terror]

i've been sailing for hours on end at times. but not that often. what i mainly object against the huge range is more or less what petros says: you often appear at the island, and the hostile ships are at the other side. if you'd use sail-to, you'd still be in roughly the same spot. it would be pointless. you might just as well sail to those ships manually anyway, without using sail-to.

 

[ronlosey]

The islands that are only about 1000 yards across in the sailing screen ... those are a little odd too. But that's another project, coordinating island sizes to something reasonable and/or completely reconstructing them.

Theoretically, cities should use up more than 100 yards, and islands should be the size of islands (not a sand bar). But one problem at a time. Don't let one bizarre problem prevent fixing another.