Discussion Some game play questions

[smrtwhkd]

1. Where can I find forts for some of the cities?
Such as:
Sao Jorge,
Bonaire
Martinique
2. One of my captains in the fleet has low gunnery skill. If I assign another officer with high gunnery to his ship, would gunner's skills contribute to that ship's performance?

 

[Grey Roger]

1: You can't. Those are stock game locations - Conceicao, Douwesen and Falaise de Feur respectively. You won't find land entrances to forts in San Juan (Isla Muelle) or Port Royale (Redmond) for the same reason. Only Speightstown (Oxbay) and Bridgetown (Greenford) were expanded to include new locations including land-based forts. Beyond that, all land forts are in mod-added towns, and not all of those have forts.

2: Yes. Once you have assigned a captain to a companion ship, you can add more officers to that ship. It should have four slots. The first slot is the captain. The other three are secondary officers which you can assign, one at a time. You'll get the usual warning if the officer's Sailing and Leadership skills are too low for him to command the ship, which doesn't matter as he won't be commanding it. So you can add a gunner, surgeon and carpenter. There's not much point adding any other type.

 

[smrtwhkd]

1. So, btw, you can only obtain bombs from the stores at fort, right?
2. Some officer positions' contributing perks are overlapping: such as gunner has increased crew damage, but surgeon also has that skill. Do overlapping contributing skills double up the effect? For instance, if both gunner and surgeon have increased crew damage and each contributing 20%, the total would be 40% increase? Just wanna figure out the math there.

 

[Grey Roger]

1: Forts are certainly a possible source if you find the right civilian and he doesn't call guards instead of talking to you. (Useful hint: get a special sword such as Francis Drake's sword from the "Angelique Moulin's Father" quest. It never deteriorates. So if you have to fight the entire fort garrison, you don't need to worry about your sword dropping from"Excellent" to "Worn" and then finally breaking.) I'm not sure if you can find anything during direct sailing which might have bombs. You certainly can't buy bombs from any store.

2: Multiple officers with the same skill don't add that skill together, you just get the best one.

 

[smrtwhkd]

I know the max stat you can have for each skill is 10. But would it be possible to bump the actual underlying stats beyond 10 using those skill enhancing items?

 

[Baste]

I know the max stat you can have for each skill is 10. But would it be possible to bump the actual underlying stats beyond 10 using those skill enhancing items?

May or may not work mathematically, but in-game the skill values won't be lower than 0 or higher than 10. Even if you would have one or several items that give +20 to something the skill value would still be used as 10 in-game.

 

[smrtwhkd]

Also, I have a question regarding cannon caliber. Are 32lb cannon and 32lb carronade the same in terms of firepower? Or carronade of same caliber is always more powerful than cannon?

 

[Grey Roger]

Carronades are less powerful than cannons of the same calibre. That's because they're smaller, shorter barrelled guns, so they don't have as high a muzzle velocity. The advantage is that you can use them on smaller ships - a 32lb carronade can be used on a ship whose maximum normal calibre is 18lb. The idea was that gunnery in those days wasn't all that accurate so you wouldn't be likely to hit anything at the longer range of a long cannon, so a carronade allowed a small ship to carry more firepower. The disadvantage was that some ships could hit things at the longer range, which is why USS Essex, armed only with 32lb carronades plus a few 9lb cannons, was outgunned by a British ship armed with 18lb cannons. And so USS Essex became HMS Essex, and the British, not wanting to be caught the same way, replaced most of the 32lb carronades with 18lb cannons.