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SkyKevin

Make Sloops Faster For Solo Players

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I think increasing the sailing speed of sloops would make them a viable ship for solo players. I do a lot of solo sailing by myself and with the current meta everyone uses schooners. Right now using a sloop is a complete joke given they are not good for travelling, cargo, or combat in any way. Here are some reasons I think Sloops should be SLIGHTLY slower than schooners.

1. Sloops are for the solo player, not much room to build on them or base crew so they should accomodate smaller groups of 3-5 people.

2. Sloops are easier to manage. less resources when a plank is destroyed or to repair them means solo players who DONT have access to tames and other high efficiency resourse gathering can still keep their ship repaired with less effort.

3. Sloops have little cannon ability. The size of the crew and size of the deck on a sloop doesnt allow for gunports and barely room for a few cannons on the main deck. So they still wont compete with other ships when it comes to combat.

4. Swivel cannons might matter. Right now canister shots are pretty much never used as they have terrible range and damage compared to medium cannons. It would be nice to have sloops be agile enough to take a few shots with their swivels at larger ships with more canons and hopefully deter them from just outrunning and outgunning them.

5. Sloops are friendly. If I pulled up to an island on a sloop to do a treasure map, no one would care, they probably wouldnt even sink my ship because its not worth the cannon balls. If you pull up in a schooner or brig, chances are it will be attacked while you're busy dealing with the Army of the Damned on the island. This can happen with a sloop too but usually i find its less threatening to island owners so they ignore it.

6. Light weight. Sloops already have the smallest cargo capacity and the least capacity increase per level. This means that they end up being even slower than schooners due to the fact they simply cannot carry as many resources. This is obviously intended given the size of the ship, but seeing as weight effects speed, it is much easier to load a sloop up to 70% capacity than a schooner. Yet a schooner at 70% is arguably still faster than a 10% weight sloop!

7. Personalized ships. Sloops should be the type of ship that you decide to go do a treasure map on or possibly a scouting or exploration mission. They cap out the crew and plank health in a way that makes them the perfect personal or small group ship. They dont need to be stocked as much as any other ship so theyre great to just jump on board and sail to your destination. However, given the distance between islands and speed difference from sloop to schooner, I believe the idea of having a personal sloop for exploring further than your home tile has been lost due to this lack of speed.

8. Incentivising Sailing. Right now it is a rather large chore to take a ship out. Most people assume it is a responsibility that if they do take their schooner out they need it properly stocked and to make sure it doesnt sink. More people may take ships out onto the seas more often if sloops provide an inexpensive and casual way to travel between the islands. It would allow them to move with out as much of a fear of sinking from other pirates. This helps those who want to be pirates as well because they have more targets available on the waters.

I hope everyone can keep an open mind about this, sloops at the moment are considered as worthless as rafts when it comes to seafaring and I would love to see them used more often so there is more variation than the current Schooner only meta most people use.

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I never understood why a Galleon with all speed sails was much faster then a Sloop, the Sloop should be the fastest ship in the game but i feel Atlas dont bother to factor in ship displacement and therefore friction with water is never taken into account and hence the Galleon is the fastest ship in the game in the right configure. 

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The sloop is a starter ship.  There needs to be something (or several somethings) between the a Sloop and a Schooner.

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Should be this, should be that. None of these are real reasons. You need to give some reasons why making the sloop better would improve the game or at least sound like you know what you are talking about if you want to convince anyone or even a dev.

So many people seem to think smaller sail boats are faster than larger ones, but I would bet they have never even stepped foot on a real sailboat. Ask a sailor or Google it. I've sailed a few sizes and read a few sailing books. Just watch the America's cup race (mainly a race from a few years back, the new boats have way too much high tech to compare to Altas ships). The faster boats are longer. It is just how displacement hulls work, longer boats sail faster.

You can ignore reality though, it is a game, but still why should the first ship you get your hands on be the fastest?

For PVE, I get the ramshackle, upgrade to a Schooner ASP, then eventually make a Brig. All this solo, but on a private server, so much easier than official. Usually about 4x rates.

Edited by wildbill

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It's a good idea but, I'll bet they have other ships coming there were many in history that they can choose from. These are the first to test the game out and see how the sea legs work.

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7 hours ago, wildbill said:

Should be this, should be that. None of these are real reasons. You need to give some reasons why making the sloop better would improve the game or at least sound like you know what you are talking about if you want to convince anyone or even a dev.

So many people seem to think smaller sail boats are faster than larger ones, but I would bet they have never even stepped foot on a real sailboat. Ask a sailor or Google it. I've sailed a few sizes and read a few sailing books. Just watch the America's cup race (mainly a race from a few years back, the new boats have way too much high tech to compare to Altas ships). The faster boats are longer. It is just how displacement hulls work, longer boats sail faster.

You can ignore reality though, it is a game, but still why should the first ship you get your hands on be the fastest?

For PVE, I get the ramshackle, upgrade to a Schooner ASP, then eventually make a Brig. All this solo, but on a private server, so much easier than official. Usually about 4x rates.

I would argue all 8 are reasons that would improve the game for all players. If you're going off of experience on a pve server then It really doesnt matter, you could sail a galleon around and be fine solo. Pvp official is a lot more dangerous and involved so you probably wouldnt understand why these changes improve things for the playerbase.

If you read above i said make sloops slightly SLOWER than schooners so they are still not the fastest ship in the game but still able to keep up if they are lightly loaded. I know larger ships are supposed to go faster but for the purpose of balance they need a speed buff.

Lastly, the sloop is not the first ship you get your hands on. Back on release the raft was considered your starter ship. Now you have on top of that the ramshackle sloop which comes with two small speed sails (much slower than a single medium) so why do you consider a sloop to be a starter ship when there are two much lesser types of ships available? by that logic the game only has 3 real ships when im saying make the 4th one viable. 

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Sloops make great bases for personal exploration, no doubt about that.   With a medium speed sail and the wheel behind it they are easy to solo without crew.  In PVE only need to be faster than damned because they lack useful cannon space, which they are as long as you have wind and a light load.   The fore/aft shotgun sloop can be disregarded as the  new damned fleet makes that design obsolete, and PVP should be using the same fleet tactics against it. 

But I disagree that smaller means faster.   That is not true for sailboats, the longer it is the faster it goes, and the more speed sails you can have the faster it goes.

smaller meaning faster is only true for cars, where more horsepower can make less weight go faster.   But sails do not run on horsepower.

However I do agree it is the starter ship.   The raft was made useless with the 30% min speed and no rudder means it is just wasted as it will run aground.   The dinghy is useless as it has high stamina drain, you would never use it for sea travel it is only good for marine beaching.  A dinghy with a sail and some storage space would make a much better starter ship than a raft, and should replace the ramshackle sloop and raft.   The only purpose for starter ship should be GTFO to lawless, where you built a sloop as a mobile exploration base.

 

Edited by krazmuze

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On 3/10/2019 at 8:56 AM, krazmuze said:

Sloops make great bases for personal exploration, no doubt about that.   With a medium speed sail and the wheel behind it they are easy to solo without crew.  In PVE only need to be faster than damned because they lack useful cannon space, which they are as long as you have wind and a light load.   The fore/aft shotgun sloop can be disregarded as the  new damned fleet makes that design obsolete, and PVP should be using the same fleet tactics against it. 

But I disagree that smaller means faster.   That is not true for sailboats, the longer it is the faster it goes, and the more speed sails you can have the faster it goes.

smaller meaning faster is only true for cars, where more horsepower can make less weight go faster.   But sails do not run on horsepower.

However I do agree it is the starter ship.   The raft was made useless with the 30% min speed and no rudder means it is just wasted as it will run aground.   The dinghy is useless as it has high stamina drain, you would never use it for sea travel it is only good for marine beaching.  A dinghy with a sail and some storage space would make a much better starter ship than a raft, and should replace the ramshackle sloop and raft.   The only purpose for starter ship should be GTFO to lawless, where you built a sloop as a mobile exploration base.

 

With the right Schooner set up you can solo one of them easily.  Been taking another crack at the official server for a little over a week and I found if you put the small sail as far back as possible, the large sail amid ship with the wheel right behind it (with a level, open route between the wheel and small sail) it's pretty easy to handle for one person.  

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I've been revisiting this idea and a lot of people seem to mention that Schooners are somehow a suitable ship for solo players, but in my opinion it is simply too large to manage the entire ship if you assume you are on your own. You have to run back and forth between the two sails and both decks if you don't have any npc crew to help. This is definitely doable but extremely inconvenient if you are under attack by any ghost ships or players. Based on the sloop's size it is all around better for this sort of multitasking and is pretty much already set up to be operable by one player. This is why I think if they just boosted the max speed a little bit, they would be fine.

To be clear, I don't think sloops should be faster than schooners, but they should be buffed a bit so that if you're running a sloop as an exploration vessel it wont take you twice as long as if you did it in a schooner.

 

As an example, a schooner with 7000 lbs of cargo (roughly 70% capacity) can go much faster than a sloop with only 1000 lbs (33% capacity). The sloop currently with that weight difference is completely blown out of the water as the schooner will zip by. It's fine for the schooner to be faster but at least make the sloop able to trail close behind or barely keep up. 

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