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Solved So, knocking out sails and masts.

T

Teemu Elo

Landlubber
Trying to get a bit of a consensus on this matter. The in-game tooltip states that chain shot would obviously be best for the job, doing 1.00 damage to sails. But I hear some people suggest manually aimed cannonballs, despite their pitiful 0.10 damage to sails, according to the tooltip. So let's hear it. Chain shot or cannonballs? Manual or automatic aiming? Cake or pie?
 
i use chainshot for sails and bomb/cannonballs against hulls i dont even keep grapeshot on my ships. they just take up room in the hold. cuz i go after the big gold/silver convoys.
 
It depends on how large my guns are, how close I am to the enemy, and how good my skills are. Ball ammo outranges chain. So I will pepper with ball from far off.

As I get a little closer I use chain. When I'm about 250-300 yards away, I will go back to ball if my skills are good and manually aim at the center of the sails paying no attention to whether or not my reticle is red or yellow - in an attempt to bringing down the masts. I have a good track record with this technique.

If you just want to slow the ship down to catch it or delay it from catching you or attacking your other ships, then chain is always the best.

If you want to bring down masts in close battles where you want to disable ships and come back to them later or remove them from the action while you go get other ships, ball is best.

If your gunnery (accuracy/cannon) skills are low, you have no assigned gunner, or your crew is poor in gunnery, then these rules do not apply because the raw number you cite will be as affective as you can be. Your gunnery skills, your gunners skills, and your crew skills all increase the potential of success markedly. In fact I think you're a little too effective when you get up to 95 or 100 on those particular skills.

Automatic aiming works better in the beginning if you have a gunner. If not - aim manually. Once you have skills - auto can be really good but not if I'm wanting to bring down masts with ball ammo. Auto with ball will hit his hull. You have to aim manually just above where the red turns yellow on the target reticle or manually guess by eye only once you get a good feel for the game.

Pie in the morning - Cake in the evening. Also depends on what kind of pie it is...:D

BTW as Napoleon said to Pedro - "girls like skills." My nun-chuck and bow-staff skills are really good. :rolleyes:

MK
 
I don't know Ben, I always thought that the grapeshots are a great preparation for boarding the enemy. I am not a very patient pirate, so I mostly go for the fast boarding approach :D
 
Grape shots are designed for killing the crew, but if your skills in gunnery are good then you can easily kill a lot of crew with just round shot or even chain shot. Bombs are just as deadly although I personally don't like them, but I do carry them and all 3 other shot types so that I have all options available (you never know when you might need to run). A perfect example is, lets lets say for the sake of it you enter a battle where you are on your own in a small Lugger and ahead of you is 3 enemy ships (you can run but are you capable of escaping?). The 3 enemy ships are 1 = Lugger, 1 = Barque and 1 = Sophie, you can perhaps go faster than the enemy Sophie since you can sail into the wind to escape where as the Sophie is not able to do so as easily. How ever the Lugger and Sloop can both sail into the wind like yourself and keep good momentum going, you could use chain shot to damage the sails on which ever seems the faster of the 2. Then again the Sloop most likely will have a larger cargohold and perhaps be able to mount a larger calibure gun than your Lugger, so maybe capturing her would be a better idea. This means the enemy Lugger needs to be slown down or sunk, you load grape shots so not to damage the sails or hull of the Sloop before the enemy Lugger can get in range to start firing broadsides at you, before you are able to board the Sloop the Lugger is almost in range to board you. Do you capture the Sloop now and sail away or do you turn and fight the Lugger?

I personally would load chain shot as soon as I felt I had a good advantage over the Sloop in crew and start to damage the enemy Lugger's sails so that I could slip away more peacefully, some might just board the Sloop and then either fight the Lugger or sail away. But this is when both grape and chain shot come into play and is the reason why I carry them (you never know when they will be needed).
 
From a realism standpoint, (for consideration in future mods) grape shot was commonly used against rigging. It could shred sails and more importantly, had a high probability of cutting multiple lines. Hitting the right line line can take two sails out of action very easily*, although the game can't show that.

Now the question is can the game differentiate between damage to sails and damage to masts? grape isn't going to do much to a ship of the line's lower masts, even if a single shot can take out its tops'l, t'gallant, and topmast stays'l.

*An example: If an individual ball of grapeshot were to cut a main tops'l halyard, the yard would fall to the mainmanst head, just above the tops, essentially collapsing the sail. The t'gallant sheets (lines holding the corners of the sail directly above the tops'l) would part under the strain of the falling yard, leaving the bottom of the sail free and making the entire sail unable to provide thrust.
 
's all quite technical to me. More than my foolish head can grasp. But now that I think about it I wanted to ask. Do masts count as 'hull' rather than sails? Would explain why round shot is advocated by some instead of chain to rip the things down.
 
That's what we all thought but its sail related, lets say 50% sail damage = a mast falling, if we increase the sail value so that it takes longer to damage them that would reduce the masts falling so easily. But I do think masts have a value some where, its just finding it, we have looked high and low for it and perhaps (because of the none stop work over 2 or so years, we might have been looking right at it but not noticed it). In the end we accepted sails damage added to mast damage and increased the sail value for each class making class 1 ships have a higher sail value than class 7 ships.
 
But we do have the mast damage. The file is AIShip.c

case SHIP_MAST_TOUCH_BALL:
int iBallType = sti(AIBalls.CurrentBallType);
switch (iBallType)
{
case GOOD_BALLS:
fDamage = fDamage + 0.1;
break;
case GOOD_GRAPES:
fDamage = fDamage + 0.05;
break;
case GOOD_KNIPPELS:
fDamage = fDamage + 0.25;
break;
case GOOD_BOMBS:
fDamage = fDamage + 0.15;
break;
}


Jonesie85 kindly pointed that one out :)

Just a quick edit: It always feels like the masts are knocked down frustratingly fast. And all you have afterwards are near intact hulls which lie useless in the water.
 
blackmane said:
But we do have the mast damage. The file is AIShip.c

case SHIP_MAST_TOUCH_BALL:
int iBallType = sti(AIBalls.CurrentBallType);
switch (iBallType)
{
case GOOD_BALLS:
fDamage = fDamage + 0.1;
break;
case GOOD_GRAPES:
fDamage = fDamage + 0.05;
break;
case GOOD_KNIPPELS:
fDamage = fDamage + 0.25;
break;
case GOOD_BOMBS:
fDamage = fDamage + 0.15;
break;
}


Jonesie85 kindly pointed that one out :)

Just a quick edit: It always feels like the masts are knocked down frustratingly fast. And all you have afterwards are near intact hulls which lie useless in the water.
Click to expand...

We did edit this already and it still seemed like the masts fell to easily.
 
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