And unless you're just keeping perfect distance from your target (which is dangerous, since it requires carefully-timed turns to throw-off an opponent's broadside), the information from your last shot will be useless by the time the guns are reloaded. Shoot low and they splash down in the water short of the hull.

Shoot too high and your shots sail harmlessly past your target. While your guns zero-in on a point on the horizon as you take time to aim, setting the correct angle is maddening guesswork.

Your smoothbore cannons are reasonably accurate, but they're definitely not precision weapons, and you have to guess at ranges. Targeting is where Naval Action is at its most unforgiving. You can send crew to make repairs in battle, but at the expense of doing other things, like adjusting sails and reloading guns at full-speed. Sails get cut to ribbons, hulls get pocked and holed by hits, often affecting a ship's performance. I know you can do this because I've sailed my ship backwards in Naval Action… just never on purpose.Ĭombat is as vivid as the sailing is authentic: during a heated battle, ships will effectively vanish behind fogbanks of gunsmoke. For instance, if you know what you're doing, you can steer into the wind, put your yards perpendicular to the direction of the wind, and use it to sail backwards, which can let you squeeze off another broadside against an enemy that was hoping you would overshoot. There are even some high-level maneuvers that a skilled captain can execute, Zasov says. Your crew can be used to make repairs in battle. To get extra from your vessel you need to use yards: just like with car-to push for more, use manual shift and use the handbrake at the right moments.' Managing sails adds a lot to the mental workload of captaining a ship, but Naval Action also gives you a lot of incentives to handle them yourself. You can play your ship as a simple WASD-controlled vehicle if you like (though it will still falter as you turn into the wind) but you also have the option of setting the exact angles and position of your yards.

That's especially true if you turn off the 'autoskipper' and start controlling your sails yourself. Naval Action beautifully captures the relationship between the wind and a ship's sails, but also the finicky, sometimes counterintuitive handling of sailing ships and how difficult it can be to precisely control them. Even in an early state, Naval Action's simple PvE and PvP battles already confirm that it's one of the first games that manages to do justice to both the violence and the grace of sail-powered combat. 'Correct tacking, boxhauling, tracking shots, yard control: we made all those mechanics realistic, but fun and useful in combat. 'It is easy to stand on the shoulders of giants, but in our case most of the mechanics we did are innovations-they were never done this way before,' he says.

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