Hello Captains
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! New year presents will be distributed after this patch
Patch is being deployed today.
Sailing model 2018
- New sailing model has been applied to 6th rates and unrated vessels (some ships could become too good but it will be tuned)
- Ship displacements finalized and ship colliders (game development term) tuned.
- Yards have been overhauled.
- Force is now being applied to the position of the masts
- Yard forces rebalanced for historical feel (adapted to be usable in gameplay)
- Leeway
- Staysails now provide sideforce
- Square sails now provide sideforce
- Sideforce depends on ships form and sail power
- Side and yard side force now depends on speed (due to keel resistance rising at speed)
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The higher the speed the more keel resistance you will encounter. Yards will not be as efficient on maximum speed.
- Heel
- Sail/Yard power now provides heel
- Heel depends on hull form and Sail power
- Fast ships (especially ships that has fastest speed beam reached) will heel more.
- This opens new options in combat (for example conserving broadsides to focus on waterline)
- Turn inertia and acceleration added both to rudder and side force
- Bigger ships will take longer time to reach maximum turn rate
- As a results you might need to plan maneuvers a little bit in advance and plan to change direction a little bit earlier, especially in heavy vessels
- Nimbler ships will reach maximum turn rates faster
- Autoskipper no longer balances ships when you receive damage or lose masts.
- If you lose sails or masts your ship will drift more at the point where you have more sail power
- Due to positions of masts on the ship if you want to unbalance your opponent more focus on frontal mast (as it usually has more sails than the stern mast)
- As a result for full removal of artificial limitations from the sailing model we will no longer see ships jumping or climbing each other when using yards.
Turn rates (especially for frigates) will probably require another pass of optimization for historical feel and gameplay. But we are very happy how all the changes turn out in internal testing.
NA has the best sailing model now, fully representing the majority of decisions age of sail captain had to make when sailing a combat ship. We plan to adapt the steam page description and website to reflect this accomplishment
Tunings and fixes
- Additional reload bugs fixed thanks to Twitch and Youtube Streamers
- Fixed the bug that locked the mouse cursor when alt tabbing
- Battle group cannot be exited instantly (it takes 60 seconds to leave the battle group) - this will reduce using battle group exit as a way to avoid combat
- PVP leaderboard will count all kills and assists
- Penetrating waterline leaks water intake slightly increased
- Pumps have been buffed
- Close hauled performance slightly nerfed for the following ships, still keeping them the best beam reach/closed haul sailers
- Wasa (Gustav Adolf)
- Constitution
- Endymion
- Surprise will remain the awesome close hauled sailer.
- Closed haul performance slightly increased for
- Wappen
- Ingermanland
- Turning slightly reduced for Wapen and Wasa
- Final round of turning changes will be done in next patch, as there are still some aberrations in the turn rates that need to be adapted for historical feel
Combat tutorial is already in game, but the button is disabled as it needs additional testing.