Quote Originally Posted by Sinan View Post
Hi everyone!

  • Does anyone have any tips on how to manage the naval engagements?.
  • Is it possible to capture the famous ships like "The Flying Dutchman" or any other famous pirates etc ?.
  • What are everyone's naval tactics ?.
  • Can you set your ships so they only use broadsides when the broadside button is active ?.
  • Can you assign keystrokes to control sail, turn, and fire broadside ?.


So I've tried holding a battle line, but this doesn't really work if you have ships of varying speeds which naturally you will. What happens is that the larger, slower ships end up getting rammed by the faster ships. So you have to spit the "line" into smaller lines which again presents you with the same issue.

Any other general tips welcome too. Thanks.

I captured the Flying Dutchman. Was an autoresolve though.

I finally had a reasonable naval engagement, after much floundering (literally... wait, no, that would be "foundering!") about. At first I couldn't figure out how to steer even. Too much habit with all the other naval RPG type games where the arrow keys control the rudder.

I went after 3 pirate ships with 6 of my own with a decent admiral. The pirate admiral was good too, which I knew meant trouble (and I was right.) I organized two colums of 3 ships each, had a sloop leading, then my 5th or 6th rate, then a trailing sloop or brig. I grouped the two columns separately. I space the ships out about 5-10 lengths apart and the two columns about twice that apart. I steered them so the incoming pirates would pass between, but the pirates did their best to avoid that crossfire.

I was just shooting round, which I now know is less than ideal, but it's a learning thing. The pirates tried to cross my downwind column's T by turning downwind, so I arcs both columns downwin also. He managed to force partly separate meetings that way (smart AI move!) since it threw them out of synch.

Steering the colums is pretty easy as long as you select the group. not one ship. They held station pretty well until things got messy (which I bet I could have mostly prevented with chain shot to stop the pirates cold.)

My left column swung in broadside to broadside pretty much and lots of round was exchanged. My right column finally caught up and got a bit of rake fire up the rear of the line. But everything went crazy at that point. I think sails may be automatically lowered once in close contact, because I had ships stopping on their own. Once I figured out what was happening, click-moving single ships to rake individual pirates worked well. My admiral boarded one, since it was that close, the trailing pirate was so beat up from the rakes it surrendered. The last was running away when it ran up the while flag also.

It was a close victory only, but I was happy it resembled semi-competent sailing after my earlier attempts! The battle report said I captured two ships, but none were present on the rearrange screen at the end. I think what someone else noted may have been the case... I wasn't close to two of the surrendered ships when I accepted the first result. Not sure why I didn't get the option on the boarded ship though, it was grappled to my Admiral's flagship.

You can turn off fire at will. That means you control the shooting. In smaller engagements that may make a significant difference if you have a plan and execute. Lashing a single ship with all the fire from yours to disable it would take it out of the fight in one pass... at least in a battle like mine above. That was my aim, but my execution was still poor. And should have used chain.

I don't know about assigning keystrokes. The keys by default control only the camera. I did find that very annoying and non-intuitive. I was paused mid-battle in my first fiasco rereading the manual pages trying to figure out how to manuever when nothing I did seemed to steer the damned ships!