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Admiral_Ivan

Total rework of masts, sails and ship cannons for less ridiculous and more realistic ship designs and combat.

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I've seen a few older posts containing parts of what, but they are a bit incomplete (imho). I know people usually get angry over posting relevant things in older threads for some weird reason, so I made a new thread instead.

1. Why does it need a rework?

- Ships with ridiculous platforms with most guns on top deck facing fore or aft, all with large cannons.
- Almost no-one in pvp is using gunports
- Galleons with 6 masts look horrible and are totally unrealistic for the era that inspired the game's setting, even if it's not set on Earth. (17th or 18th century)
- We can't create any proper rig due to lack of headsails, staysails and inablily to attach gaff sails to the back of square rigged masts
- The large masts look too small on a galleon.
- The gunports look a bit too large.


For people who think a game full of 6 masted warships is not an issue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_sailing_vessels

As you can see:
- Not a single warship ever had more than 5 masts.
- Not a single pure sailing warship ever had more than 4 masts.
- The largest and latest pure sailing warships, when pure sailing warfare technology was at its pinnacle, right before steam engines were introduced on warhsips, only had 3 masts.
- Even the hybrid steamer warships from the 19th century in this list, that had more than 3 masts, had their rigging reduced to 3 masts at some point.

I did not find examples of 15th through 18th century merchant vessels with more than 4 masts either.

So do you now understand why any Age of Sail enthusiast will cringe at the sight of a 6 masted galleon?

In my opinion, the ingame galleon with it's maximum of 52 gunports and about 54 meter long gundeck, looks alot more like a 3-masted 4th rate ship of the line, than the earlier 4-masted galleons. Either way it should absolutely not have more than 4 masts and preferably only 3.


2. Solutions:

2.1 Sails

- Add a very large mast, with royal sails and if larger shipclasses are added, add huge masts aswell.

This would both allow for having a 3 masted galleon aswell as have the masts look large enough for the galleon and potentially larger vessels.

- Adding jibs and staysails

It would allow to have a proper Bermuda rig for sloops, a proper Schooner-rig or just about any proper rig that needs headsails.

- Separate mast and sail placement.

This would for example allow for an actual brig rig with 2 square rigged masts, a gaff sail (spanker) attached to the mainmast and jibs between the bowspirit and foremast.
It would also allow for a square rigged sail to be put on top of a gaff rigged masst for a proper brigantine rig.

- No weight sails

Because it just doens't make any sense, remove a weigth sails and suddenly a ship can carry less and starts sinking? Similar to weight reduction on tames.

2.2 Cannons and combat

- Remove the large cannon or restrict placement to lowest deck and increase range of medium cannons to at least match the range of SotD.

It would make people actually use gunports and give us less ridiculous looking designs. The largest guns were actually put on the lowest gundeck, closest to the water, where the ship was at it's widest, to prevent capsizing when firing them. Could also not restrict placement and make ships capsize when firing large cannon broadsides from top deck.

- Add fore and aft gunports and possibly restrict cannon placement (not sure about the latter)
 
No more 10 cannons platforms at fore and aft.

- Make cannonballs protrude the hull and damage, or just make the bow and stern weaker:

Turning your bow or stern into an opponents broadside becomes a bad idea and people would want to actually use their broadsides as much as possible and try to do "T-mavoeuvers" for max damage, while at the same time trying to avoid allowing their opponent to execute this manoeuver.

- No weight difference for cannons between openend and closed gunports. Opened gunports in high seas would just mean ur ship is sinking very slowly because it takes on water. I mean the ships sink with one plank removed, but keep afloat with all those oversized gunports open?


And why does it say submit a bug report, when i'm posting in suggestions? 😛

Edited by Admiral_Ivan
spelling errors and other mistakes
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Cannon placement idea.

only allow cannons to be placed at gunports, and add a craft-able gunport. 

At 1x1x1 it limits placing cannons next to one another. want to restrict it more widen it to 1.5 wide, or make top obstructed so you can't stack them.

multiple ways to restrict numbers means better fine tuning. 

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Yes good idea about making the top obstructed, indeed maybe just let us place one cannon on top deck, but not on planks placed above that first cannon.

the reason I am not sure about restricting cannon placement is because I generally don't like restrictions, but then they should add the physics to force us to use more realistic designs, I mean there are reasons 18th century people didn't make the design players make ingame. There are reasons why over the course of history ships changed from most cannons facing forward (14th-15th century) to most cannons on broadsides.

But I guess that would be too difficult to program, so just restricting it would be the simpler solution.

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