Naval Action - Age Of Sail Mmo

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Quineloe

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
6,978
4,463
http://www.navalaction.com/ and on steam

Currently in alpha Early Access, it has a steady userbase with ~1000 players online on the PVP1 server during peak times, allowing plenty of good PVP

Game is frequently receiving content updates, more ships, more mechanics being added and lots of fine tuning.

it's getting more and more sandboxxy as production, fishing etc is being added and enhanced.

Developer dialogue is fairly strong, they do have a tendency to nitpick stupid posts and ream them, though.

Currently main gameplay activities are
  • sail around on your own, capture AI traders for money and cargo
  • sail around on your own, try to get player traders for more of the same
  • sail around in a group, engage in large AI fleet battles for exps and moneys
  • sail around in a group, protect your home waters from enemy intruders (this is only true for a few factions)
  • sail with your group into enemy waters, engage enemy players for double exp and moneys
  • sit in your capital, make money from trading, manufacturing and selling ships.
  • sail around to obtain cheap resources as a trader to sell in your capital
  • Form an assault fleet of dozens of ships to conquer an enemy held port
  • and of course notice the huge Arial 72 warning that an assault fleet has been formed against one of your ports and rush to defend with dozens of ships

Combat Gameplay is single ship, you steer the rudder, you adjust sails up/down and left/right, you manually aim the cannons, range your shots with single fire and unleash the entire broadside when you think you got your aim correct. A big weakness here is that this part of the game actually gets easier as you progress, as hitting a tiny cutter with the hull barely above the waterline from your own shaky tiny cutter is pretty hard, hitting a three-deck ship of the line is very easy in comparison. Some twitch streamers really lose their shit here.

Diplomacy will be added next, but the game is already remarkably heavy on outside game mechanics diplomacy (mostly non-aggression pacts regarding port captures)

for those interested in it, a quick rundown of the current situtation

Group 1 is the Soviet Union, consisting of Denmark Norge (aka DK-RUS or Soviet Denmark), sitting on Puerto Rico, the Russian pirate players sitting in the Bahamas and the French sitting on Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique and Barbados. DKN is called that because it's really just Russians. Russians picked DKN as their nation, and you won't really find any in other nations. And because they're calling the shots in that group and France just falls in line, it's the Soviet Union.

Group 2 is Britain, holding most of central America, Jamaica, and the Vereinigde Provincien (the dutch), holding the northern coast of South America and is at war with Group 1.

Independents are the United States (13 colonies coastline + eastern Florida, currently holding a lot of bahamas ports too), fighting mostly Pirates and occasionally Spain

Espana, holding western Cuba and the Gulf of Mexico, pretty much isolated by Britain and the United States at this point, were a former ally of the Soviet Union, but seem to be no longer interested in getting fucking beaten down by the Royal Navy and pulled out of the east coast of Yucatan. Faction requires Spanish language.

Lastly, the tiny nation of Sverige, holding only a handful ports around Gustavia, regularly attacked by the Danish aggressors when their own war on Hispaniola is on hold and the French that have them pinned between them. However, they agreed to peace a while back, so now they mostly do long range assaults on the pirates from a few ports they captured on Hispaniola. Sweden is the choice nation for many German players, but they don't make up the vast majority of the player base like DK-N is Russian.

This is pretty much how it will work out in the long run. The French, almost exclusively played by French players, fucking hate the British, and will never agree to peace, Soviet Denmark is doing the same, and that's pretty much the main conflict in the game right now, with smaller nations joining in and dropping out.


There's also a PVE server where you can just shoot AI and get nice ships, if you're super casual.
 

popsicledeath

Potato del Grande
7,362
11,574
Is the ship combat in the open world, or do you load into an instance? I really enjoyed a lot of Pirates of the Burning Sea when I beta tested it, but having a tiny, miniaturized 'travel' world where you then loaded into separate fighting instances was a turn off.
 

Quineloe

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
6,978
4,463
It loads into an instance that is the same size as the real world, ie if you're a good bit away from the coast, there'll be the same coast line a good bit in the distance. And if you're hugging the coast, that coast will block maneuvering in battle.

unlike potbs, the world isn't tiny. It's five minutes from one port to the next.