Re: Selection / Display / Camera Controls
I'd like to second the idea of not having the camera always jump positions when selecting a ship. Sometimes that's quite disconcerting. As the first poster described, I tend to have the view set the way I want it, then I select a ship to give orders and suddenly the view changes on me. For me at least, I loose my perspective on the battlefield and suddenly find it hard to know where my ship is and what enemies I have around it. I've played the Demo once, and ended up with a big fleet brawl with the Brits. No line formations here, just one big brawl. And keeping track of which ship I was giving orders to and what was happening around them was tricky, and the constant changing of perspective wasn't helping much.
Sometimes when I selected a ship for orders, the camera jumped far to the rear of the ship. Since the arrows are out in front of the ship, this wasn't terribly useful.
Any chance of a "Next Ship" type of button? Again, in my brawl I was loosing track of who had done what. I was using the Ship List to see what ships needed to move or fire, but if I could scroll through the ships still needing some sort of order ("can move" or "has targets") that would help.
Being able to zoom on a selected ship should help, but I at times had trouble even seeing what movements might be available to a ship. Again, in my big brawl type battle, it was hard to see the arrows out in front of a ship. Having smoke opacity of zero take more smoke off the screen would help. I wonder if zero should be no smoke on the screen.
I know I'm an old boardgamer, but I miss a "top-down" view. In these crowded situations, a top down view might make it easier to see movement arrows. Maybe two different scales. one just big enough to show the ship and its movement arrows. And a "bigger" scale to show the 10 hex firing arcs off each side.
Again, I'm an old boardgamer, but usually when given the option I turn on the hex grid on game displays. To me that might be a nice option to add.
One kind quirky bit of game play. I'd had one ship "capture the deck" of a near-by ship which it had grappled. Then the other ship cleared the grapples and separated the two ships. When that happened, the enemy ship seemed to return to giving its owner full control, and I think my men on th boarding party somehow returned to my original ship. Just seemed a little odd. I more expected my men to continue fighting aboard the enemy ship, and for my original ship to be severely undermanned.
I never could figure out squandron movement. Is there a limit in the demo of only one squadron for the French? Its probably user error, but I could never get my fleet doing anything like I wanted and ended up just moving all my ships manually.
Little eye-candy things wouldn't hurt. Like having the time of day (number of turns) displayed somewhere. Also maybe some more information on the ships. Like perhaps a second screen of the ship list showing some details like number of cannons left on each side, or the ammo loaded on each side, or the crew allocations. Or something that tells me which ships I've taken things like ammo or crew allocations off of "Auto". That's all little things, but as you start to add stuff that gives more information to the player and a bit better control, then the game will get more interesting.
An alternative might be a play mode where things like the squadrons are set in advance and the player can only give orders to those. Something where as Admiral you are limited to only what commands you can give by running flags up your mast. So you can give commands to the ships that can see your flags, but for larger parts of the battlefield you have to rely on your squadron and ship commanders to make decisions. As someone who likes to micro-manage, I'd probably find that rather frustrating. But if you want to develop a mode that really gives a player a feel as to what it was like to command a fleet, that might be useful. With the limited command available during the battle, then why there were such restrictive rules of engagement might become more obvious.
Still, all-in-all this is a pretty nice game. Like many others I see posting out here, I'm an old Wooden Ships an Iron Men fan. Age of Sail never excited me, although I couldn't put my finger on why. But this game I like. It seems to be hitting that nice comfort zone of it being easy to play and move large numbers of ships, and still allow the user to see and feel enough of the battle for interest. There's a very fine line in there where a game is fun and playable, but still interesting enough. And you seem to be very close to hitting it dead-on. THANKS!
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Hybrid Mode
