The Road to v1.1: Ship Combat Accuracy Improvements

Version 1.1 has been published to our Testbed server and will be coming to the live servers next week. There’s a ship tuning change in this patch that’s significant enough to receive its own devlog.

Recently, it’s become apparent that there’s a problem in the cannon accuracy settings. The numbers are off by small amounts in several areas. Once they’re all added together, the compounding numbers make it so that many small and medium ships will win a straight up broadside exchange against large ships at close-medium range. While it’s important for small ships to be valuable, your first double-decker warship should not lose to a small ship in a close-range slugfest. We’re making numerous changes to accuracy values to help address this issue.

Here’s a list of the main changes:

-Added a small amount (1-4) of target tracking to the smaller guns. (Target tracking reduces the penalties caused by the relative motion of you and your target.)
-Added +2 accuracy to all guns when at maximum range.
-Added a small amount (1-2) of mid range accuracy to mid-heavy guns.
-Reduced small/medium ship defense by 4.
-Added +2 damage resistance to large, huge and colossal ships.
-Made small adjustments to target tracking, mainly on the mid to upper range ships. Most noticable on the Raa.
-Slightly reduced the relative motion accuracy penalty.
-Slightly extended out the range at which we start applying relative motion penalties.
-Decreased the defense of the MC La Belle. It was receiving its defense bonus plus the defense bonus of the regular La Belle. But even with this correction, it’s still the highest-defense ship in the game.
-Reduced the DR of some ships (such as the Cruizer) that were set too high due to having their size reduced recently
-Increased the defense for third rate and above line ships (they are still very easy to hit)
-Slightly increased the defense for some mid-range and high-end ships.

We still want small and medium ships to be harder to hit, and they’re particularly good in combination with defense buffs. They should be effective in PvP, but they should have to be cautious when theyre close to bigger ships. Upgrading to a typical large ship, like the Stralsund, should feel like you’re in a sturdier ship. This change isnt only about small ships beating large ships at close range. It also impacts fights with small vs small ships by improving their overall accuracy against each other.

This is the kind of change that will require a lot of testing, so be sure to hop on testbed and give us your feedback. Is it too much? Not enough? We’re prepared to make adjustments as necessary, so let us know what you think and stay tuned