Add OARS to game.

[Bleakwise 6]

Oars, as in paddles.

How do they work? You would add them to cannon ports. They would row by holding W or D on keyboard, or pressing some hotkey to manually leave them on.

They would do a few things. You would back-pedal faster, you would go faster without wind, and you would have some speed advantage with wind as well.

You would also be able to turn the ship faster by holding A or D, causing them to row appropriatly to turn the ship.

This would have the following effect on balance.

Schooners could go even faster.

Brigs and schooners would be closer together speed wise, as brigs could have two more oarmen than schooners.

For galleons, Oars could only be placed on the bottom row, but it would help them maneuver better, and give them a speed advantage.

Yes you would have to have a gunport and crew member to man the oars. I personally would opt to use them as I mostly do trade and most of my cannons are at the back of the boat.

I also prefer to use Swivel Guns/Liquid fire in PVP because you don't need as many of them and can use hit and run/ramming tactics if you put many points into resilience (resistance?) instead of weight.

It would take a shit-ton of frustration out of the game when going on long runs, as you would be able to navigate quickly in any direction with or without wind.

All things considered I think Oars/Paddles would have a fairly low development cycle, as in getting the animation in and the game logic and so on in scripting.

Furthermore it would lower the dependency on speed sails, as having 5-6 oarmen on each side and 2 speed sails on a brig or 1 on a schooner enough for a "fast" boat.

It would also make trade Brigs more viable for "fast" boats as you could drop a speed sail in favor of 12 oarmen, something I would defiantly do.

It would greatly diversify ship building methods, adding points in weight would no longer be the only way to make your ship "faster." You would have to balance this against the fact that you're sacrificing a cannon for an oar.

I would suggest each oarmen add something like 5% speed boost, and you could perhaps make one of the stats of the NPC effect their ability to row, maybe stamina or fortitude.

You would even see more war-ship designs, as some people would use oarmen and flame guns and harpoons to make fast take-down boats, while others would do the traditional cannon/flame/ballista setup and all speed sails.

The "oar" would also add something for the NPC to sit on and plant his feet down on, and some mecnanical crap for the oar itself.

You could have two variations of the oar, small and large, one for each cannon-port, this way galleons could have two npcs per port ont he bottom deck instead of one, but it wouldn't be 100% necessary.

Of coures a galleon with it's whole bottom row on oars would be a huge speed bonus, but it would also be a huge sacrifice in DPS, and some balancing of the Galleon's speed might be required, perhaps even to make a few oars necissary, which would honestly make the galleon experience much more enjoyable as they turn like absolte garbage, even having 4 oarmen on each side would greatly improve this.

I will say the double-oarmen on large ports might be a bad idea for balancing reasons, perhaps just making it so two npcs could man each port by default would be better, so you could row with 20 on a schooner and 24 on a brig for the ultimate speed boat.