General feedback

[Timm]

Haven’t found the right thrread for it, so i created a new hread, Sirs!
In here you can post what you think bout the game, what u like changed, what vexes yoz etc..
mfg eX

[Timm]

As a the gud lil sailor i am ill start myself:
1. I am a tad confused by the ingame ship ratings, currently i am running a 4th rate 60 gun Dutch frigate and am loathed to find a suitable 3rd rate replacement with better firepower.
2. I am a very visual person, is there any way to get rid of the fish eye optic? i like to see my own ship in the right proportions..
3. Still now improvement in the trade screens, there was/is a mod out there with simple check boxes: show only goods u have on your ship, good at trader, all goods..
4. I can’t trade items with my officers? was that a mod or vanila feature?
5. Lacking information, changed gun values apparently, but which are shown ingame, which are used by the pther seatting?
6. 4th rate ships running round with 42 pounders?
7. How can an enemy ship with 7 man left manage more than one broadside per 5 minutes?
8. Why do enemy Captains outperform my own way higher skilled by such a huge margain?
9. No more dismasting except for ramming, spent nearly an hour pounding a ship with 4 ships with chain ammo, still no mast fell..

Nuff ranted,
Now to the parts i like:
1. Way more stable than any other AOP2 version i’ve had ever played..
2. Luvly new ships, so many shiny new ships and only so few i can keep…
3. Game look s way nicer than any mod before
4. So many swords, what to take they are all so shiny
5. Ieks i get lost in boarding, cool im in the hold i wonder….
6.

hm, way more negative points so far,
still im playing this one like an addict, so please consider that anything not mentioned as negazive is a positive ones!

mfg eX
PS: ain’t finished yet with this post, only played couple a dozen hours, will update.
PPS: can the topic be changed to “Rant of a very satisfied player?”

• This reply was modified 9 years, 10 months ago by Timm.

[Devoidbrah]

1. Im running the dutch frigate with 60 guns too… I think the luck with 34 guns is a tad bit better, you will sacrifice a bit of firepower but that ship has around 18-19 sail as stock version…
2. umm did you tried to scroll in and out?^^
3. There was a mod for this in AOP, dunno about AOP2 though.
4. you can, simply press enter than face towards your soldiers and choose trade option. Also theres a perk that lets you trade em in battles like boarding and stuff.
5. Didnt understand you question. If youre speaking about not being able to see your enemies cannon power through the scope, I suggest you look into the mod option and set it to coas default.
6. I personally prefer culverines, but yes if the game allows that and there are such cannons, then mount em 😉
7. The skills of the captain play a big role too, if that captain has 100 cannons, he will still be firing reloading fast.
8. I guess the stats are OP right now. But MK is working on balancing the enemy ship captains.
9. Dismasting was made very unlikely because it caused ctds, Its a tradeoff, I for my part still manage to dismast enemy ships, but I rarely do, because you may stumble upon a crash then. 🙂

If you have more question then feel free to ask here 😉

[modernknight1]

Thank You Timm for the awesome feedback and Welcome to the Reef!

So a few answers to questions:

1. There were no real ship ratings in the 17th century like those of the 18th century British Navy. The ratings I have put into place are more historical than they are an organized manner of classification across all nations.

I have no argument that they could be a little confusing. I am still working on ship classification and as I spell out in the “Ships of GOF ERAS2” topic I am about 85 percent complete with ship descriptions and classification. As I develop the illustrated guidebook, things will be a lot more clear when you can see the ships broken down by nation and description. I think there is a way I can even embed the illustrated guide into the game itself so that you can access it with a tab. This would be better than just a PDF download.

A couple other considerations are that I made 2nd and 1st rate ships more rare so they are harder to find/encounter. Where they will always be found is in large national fleets. One other thing is that there are still a few more ships I am working on that will fill some blanks.

2. The “fish eye” complaint is not new. I don’t get that on my screen unless I zoom in on stuff. I had posted a fix that puts it back to stock on PA! and will post that fix here as well soon. The severity of the fish eye effect is worsened by setting the screen to full screen rather than wide screen. It is meant for widescreen and if you look at Dennis’s Youtube video you can see it gets worse on full screen. I recommend setting widescreen in your options file. If you don’t know how to do it I will post directions. I believe the instructions are in the “read me”.

I think I may try to play the game in numerous screen resolutions and then tweak the numbers for each one. Then I could put a screen tweak option together in the Mod Options interface that would give multiple options for setting up your screen. Players could try each one and set it to the one that looks best for their screen without having to go in and modify multiple files. If you look at my screenshots I have very little “fish-eye” effect in my game on my screen. SO I want everyone to have the best experience possible with their monitor. I use a widescreen 38″ HDMI TV screen as my monitor. I originally made this change because I felt like the game was claustrophobic and looked somewhat like POTC because of that. I like to zoom way out with the mouse scroll and see everything – especially during large battles.

3. I will look into the trade screens. I was planning on doing some things there anyway but it was low on the priority list. Some of the good restrictions are historically wrong. Slaves would not be available in any Spanish port nor would you be able to sell them there. The Encomienda forbade slavery in Spanish America but allowed Spanish land owners to enslave their indigenous natives as labor provided they taught them to be good Catholics. I also found some additional goods that would be excellent historical cargoes.

So yes expect a new Trade mod but not for a while. The AOP goods screens were described today on PA! as being un-piratey. How stupid. In the topic the good man was trying to tell the devs that the POTC trade screens are clunky. I’ve thought the whole POTC interface was clunky for ages. But they justify it by saying its “more Piratey”. I am laughing my ass off at this. The AOP interface looks just fine and the fact is that you can see everything you need quickly. Its a TIME SAVER and EFFICIENCY AIDE – so that you can get to playing the most fun and important parts of the game. Bottom line: GOOD INPUT. We will try to do something about this.

4. You can trade items with your officers, however as Dennis said you have to have the perk enabled. AS it is now, you should be able to trade with your officers on land anywhere and/or in your cabin as well without the perk. The perk is only used when you are in battle situations or are looting bodies after the battle on ships. This is useful when you find lots of good stuff on the dead aboard ship but can’t carry it all yourself.

5 & 6. I am still working on the full cannon mod. 42 pounders will not be in the game. 50 pounders will be rare and will only be found on the largest Spanish ships. (See “What I’m working on…”)

7. Completely agree and it was something Luke159 and myself tried to change over and over again. I do not know how to make this one better and if anyone has any ideas I am open to them. I would love to fix this problem and think it may be related to (8)

8. I am modding the caps for NPC captains abilities. I am convinced that some of the random boarding issues and super fast firing ships are related to SUPER Captains on board the enemy ship which is random. I have familiarized myself with the code here thoroughly and have been experiment a lot with some good results.

I truly believe when I have the character_init work done that about 70 percent of these problems will disappear because they will default to the particular indexed character instead of a randomly generated character which can be rather high level with super abilities. I believe there is hope of much better gameplay here in the future.

9. Masts will still fall. There are a handful of ships that were made differently. Some of the Voyage Century ships have mast models where two masts are actually one mast for damage purposes. The POTEHO ships also have masts that will behave differently.

Masts become an individual entity model like a ship when they get shot off. I have been playing with the weight and x,y,z hex location numbers as well as speed and angle of sinking. Some of these numbers cause crashes and some of this has to do with the range of Z motion the ship itself progresses on when it loses the weight of a mast.

There has been slow progress over time and when I finally can get consistent stability when multiple ships lose masts I will dial the numbers back down a little again. However, from a historical standpoint there are lots of precedents where ships would take hits for days and not get dis-masted. The Zeven Provincien lost its fore topmast on the 4th day of fighting the English at the Four Days Battle of 1666 after putting three English flagships out of action. So I would say that the numbers are not overly unrealistic. You can still dismast ships given the right conditions. When you get into fleet battles you will see mast fall. Its much more stable with the way I have it currently set up.

I don’t see any of your feedback as negative my friend and am very glad you provided it. THANKS!!!

I am glad you are an addict and glad you are enjoying the game so much!

MK

[Timm]

ran into another problem, this time the first “real” one:
game starts stuttering/freezing for milisecs in battle, only a few battles so far, but a running away with double the speed takes me over 1h real life time, cause “r”/faster makes it stutter even worse….
any ideas?
mfg Timm
PPS: will try that officer trading as soon as im out off my current (stuttering) battle!

[Timm]

Bout the guns,
in mod options i can choose different settings,
but the ingame values don’t change, so i’d like to know what stats my guns now actually have.
According to ingame values the 32punder culverine is the best i can get, except for 48 pounders right?
mfg Timm
PPS: won my stuttering battle (boarding unsuspecting friendly ship cause his ship looked nice) still stuttering, is near charlestown, ill try to see if i get:
a.) always stuttering if charlestown is in sight
b.) always get stuttering when british 64 is in sight
c.) it is just random

[Timm]

Sadly,
it looks like the british 64 gun ship (the one based on Centurion) was causing my stuttering/freezes.
Sold her and now all is well again, reload old save with her and it stutters again..
mfg Timm

[modernknight1]

In answer to your gun question: Yes – but not for much longer. That will change after the patch comes out.

Let me tell you about the Centurion. I love that ship and I love Kris Wood’s work. Unfortunately there is something wrong with one of the masts that causes this issue. So the POTC version is awful. It will almost cause your game to freeze and sometimes crash. The German MOTCS version is a little better but still lots of lag and some crashing.

The version here in ERAS2 is one that I played with and used different pieces and parts on during the ships development. At the least the game works and plays with it in. When I put my computer in overdrive mode (AMD), I get no lag from that ship and so I kept it in the mod because I figured some people would have high end rigs and that they would enjoy it.

I have a modeler friend looking at the masts and we will see what he can do with it. I think the mast on the Spanish Balandra sloop is causing the same issue in my game. I am going to re-rig it and see if the issue continues.

I guess I really should say something about this in the Read Me file. You will notice the same slight lag when you go near English ports if they have that ship in port. I usually don’t run in overdrive mode but always do when I get that ship. It gets worse when your in large battles and there might be two or three of her. I almost didn’t put her in the game. Lets hope my modeler friend can do something with her.

MK

[Timm]

Hm,
i consider my rig to be quiet good:
AMD FX 83500 @ 4cores @ 4,3
16Gb Ram
7970 Gpu
mfg eX
PS: New website design cool!
PPS: and yes the centurion is a beatifull ship, that’s why i suffered through 3 hours of stuttering gameplay to get one… stored her for now, hoping for fix!

[modernknight1]

That is a VERY good rig. I hope we can get it fixed as well. I think it will happen. Yeah we only have one modeler on board right now, but I think as word gets out we will get more.

I may even be able to fix it myself. I am at the verge of really starting to produce some good things in MAYA.

Its such a shame that PA!’s actions sent most modelers underground.

They were either mad about how they treated me or they were pissed that they were being told what era they should build in. Several modelers came forward with some good models and were discouraged because those models wouldn’t fit in Hearts of Oak. They should have been encouraged to produce whatever interested them for whatever game venue they preferred.

This single point of contentions is a MAJOR reason why I left PA!. I don’t need to be “railroaded” into working on something I have no interest in.

I am hoping some of those modelers that PA! turned away and alienated come here. I can not only offer them a good home and a place to show off their work where it will be appreciated, but also offer some benefits and compensation if they want to produce models for us…..models I might add that will be shared with EVERYONE….NOT kept close hold for demos only and never introduced into any other game development for members and gamers/player to actually USE and PLAY with.

Centurion will be fixed for our needs. I know it.

MK

[Devoidbrah]

Well i get a slight stuttering too in the game, I always wondered what was the cause. Now i know 😉
Oh and the fast shooner has an interior of a 2nd rate ship, should be easily fixable.

My rig:

Xeon Intel CPU E5-2620 @2.00GHz 12core CPU
8GB DDR3 RAM
AMD Radeon Firepro V4900 1GB DDR5 RAM, with self optimized Cooler (I had to fix some parts on it, its a GPU from 2011^^)
Ima still will be in need to optimize my rigg a bit, seeing as i can put 2 gpus into my server mainboard pc.
It was kinda a fun project until my IT company told me i could keep that 800 euro rigg for myself if i wanted to.
Yay me.

[modernknight1]

Thanks for the heads up Dennis. I just noticed that as well. This was left over from testing cabin issues. You notice that class 7 ships don’t have cabins and that because of this you will never have a fighting encounter with an enemy captain after you defeat the crew. I was trying to ensure I didn’t get crashes when I was testing the different cabins.

One thing I haven’t told you guys about that I am working on as a side project is many new cabins. I not only have ones with different wood textures but also some completely new layouts and models for cabins. I was getting some crashes with a couple of them so didn’t include the new cabins in the mod. However they WILL be ready soon.

The fast schooner is one of the ships I was using to test cabins on so the 2nd rate cabin was left over from testing.

Thanks for pointing it out to me. That will be fixed for the patch.

I almost have part of the forums ready to go up public. I need to include another topic on PC rigs so that people can talk about what their playing with and discuss what works best for them as well as brag about their “babies” and “hot rods”…LOL

MK

[Timm]

Hm,
is it just me or are hold sizes compared to actual ingame ship sizes a tad weird?
mfg Timm
PS: where did the ship.ini go?
want to see what ship has what hold so i can hunt on purpose…
EDIT: found it: do i have to launch new game so my edits take effect?

• This reply was modified 9 years, 9 months ago by Timm.

[modernknight1]

Take a look at the answers I gave Dennis on ships stats.

In general Warships have much less cargo space than their merchant equivalents because their ribbing/framing was much heavier/thicker and closer together. In addition the ribbing came into the hull much deeper restricting the space much more than merchantmen. Certain merchantmen are going to have advantages in cargo space but sacrifice in other areas like firepower, hitpoints/sturdiness and/or crew numbers.

Ships that are always going to have advantages in cargo space are Fluyts, Heavy Merchantmen, Retourships, English Great Barks and the Spanish Galleons. The Zabra also has excellent space but is a weak ship in a fight.

Also consider that COAS has a randomizer that has the ability to give some really good or bad stats. Its possible to get a faster galleon even though as a rule galleons are extremely slow. One of the slowest ships in the game.

As a rule anything you modify in the RESOURCE file will not require a new game. Anything that you change in the PROGRAM file will require a new game to take hold. However there are exceptions to this if you use the REINIT button that you will find at the bottom of the Mod Options Interface. However, the ship that you currently possess will not have its stats changed. If you find a new one of the same type it will enjoy the modifications you made to the ships_init file. Remember though that the randomizer could still produce a ship with better or worse stats than the one you have even after your edits. Its a wild card of a sort. Still it never seems to produce stats that are completely unrealistic.

I quite like it actually because its always great to get a surprise when you find one of your favorite ships with REALLY FREAKIN GREAT stats. Then you take that baby to Bermuda and make it into a supership!

MK

[Blas de Lezo]

One word about this mod:EPIC.

First of all,sorry for my english.After years i back to AOP 2 try this mod and now is like drug for me.

For example: I start a new game(pirate/corsair)I do missions cargo between pirates colonies to make some money.
When I have 4 ships a british 64 gun ship appers and destroy quickly my poor trades ship(level 5-6) and my french ship(class 4 but i dont remember the name).So i reload the game and play my best combat in this game,epic.
I attack with grapeshot and run,because two shot close to me with his cannons=sunk.
But i was still fighting surrounding the ship and attacking with grapeshot with my 4 ships,he sunk my galleon and the others dont resist the next shoot,when i think everything was lost a “miracle” occurs, the english 64 gunner surrender(mod option ocassionally)when i kill mostly his crew(hull was practically intacte).

Now,sadly I know why my game freeze in battle every 5 seconds because “british 64 gun ship” but i resist to sell because is my best ship with all upgrades and love the way i get.

Again sorry for my english,i only register to say Thanks for create this epic mod

[Daniela]

Is everything ok with everyone ? It´s so quiet around here.
Is MK fine ? Im missig his updates ? I am asking myself how his the work on the patch might be going on ?
I ‘m so looking forward to the patch and the innovations within.

[Anonymous]

..and you are not alone, Daniela:)
Since i’ve heard about new islands and other MK’s jewels, i started dreaming:)

[Timm]

hihi,
hope he is well and will return with many free gifts..
mfg Timm

[Anonymous]

Had no idea that Luke159 and Mk already tried to solve point 7)
For me, the most annoying 🙂
Changes your strategy, making it unlogic
Anyway, good to know you guys at least tried to make it better.
Thanks 🙂

Anyway, this is the best pirate game i have ever played.
Ever.

[Devoidbrah]

Been away for a while, connection issues and having vacation in russia 😛

MK mentioned he will make an update here is the source, last posted 7 Juni:

http://steamcommunity.com/search/users/#filter=users&text=modernknight1

I think he wishes for more activity on the forums 😉

[Anonymous]

I don’t think Mk will make any updates 🙂
He lost his joy – and this is sad – modding is all about joy and sharing . When this 2 are lost, it’s over 🙂
Boelen’s attitude&actions were too much, i never saw such a snake in the gaming area before. He never acted directly, always sabotaged COAS in a filthy manner , trying to protect his own “kid” (mod).
Anyway, i thank MK again for all what he has done for this game.

Good luck to you all

[Devoidbrah]

I will create a thread covering the latest statements of MK, just so the people know what up, maybe motivate others to join into the forums more actively.

keep you eyes open 😉

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