Sloop Speed: The finality.

  • I have seen many posts on how the sloop is the slowest ship. Here are my thoughts on the matter.

    The sloop is the ship that is supposed to be able to outsail any vessel. It should let you be able to escape from a brig or galleon unless they get the jump on you. With the wind or against the wind. It should be very fast.

    This game is not supposed to be historical accurate at all, but if I was designing my game to be built around 16th century vessels. I would probably at least do some research into, ya know, how they worked. And I really feel Rare did nothing of that sort. Galleons would reach bout 5 knots max. A Brig would reach about 11 knots max. A sloop would reach about 11 to 13 knots max. The galleon is a Indiaman, it is so obvious. The Brig is a Caravel(to me, it does not feel like a actual Brig or a Brigantine so I am doing it a big favor by letting it use the 11 knots of the Brig and not using the speed of either a Brigantine or a Caravel which is remarkably slower) . The sloop is a sloop.

    And it's like look, I get it. It would be very boring sailing in a galleon or brig in the game only reaching a max speed of 5 or 6 knots with full wind. It would be boring. And that's okay. They can totally make those ships have a faster sailing speed. But if they up those ships speed, then they have to up the sloops speed.

    A galleon or a brig, should never be able to ever in a million years think they would be able to catch up to a sloop. Ever.

    It really makes me sad seeing how little research or thought went into the ships during development. They make a pirate game. And they make the ONE SHIP THAT PIRATES WOULD ACTUALLY USE THE MOST and make it so the others can be able to catch up to them at any given time unless they are into the wind. Pirates used sloops. They used sloops!!!!

    It irks me when Rare has taken the classic pirating vessel and has designed the other ships to be able to catch up to this ship. That would never, ever happen. Ever. EVER. The majority of actual pirates used sloops. Small fleets of sloops. Why? Cause you can catch up to the merchant Indiaman only going 5 knots. You would not really see for example a pirate galleon chasing down a ship. You might, it is possible, but it would be rare. If the band of pirates had a big ship like that, they would try to keep in hidden until it was needed to fight the big boys that would eventually come. Like Blackbeard! He had a big ol' ship. A frigate, and even that, a ship literally built for speed and warfare only had a max speed of 8 knots. It wasn't until 1777 when the French came out with the second generation frigs that could reach up to 14 knots. Blackbeard died in 1718. Blackbeard also had plenty of sloops in his band. After the Queen Annes ran aground, he escaped using the Adventure, the sloop.

    But to wrap up this rant/ history lesson. The sloop needs to go twice as fast in my opinion. Only a brig/sloop should be able to catch a sloop.

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  • Pirate sloops were indeed reputed for being very fast vessels. I don't know if the 20 to 23 knots estimate is true. There weren't really any reliable speed statistics I'm aware of. But the sloop was certainly the vessel of choice for many pirate crews, and it was fast.

    That said...

    I think the main reason sloops aren't faster is for game balance. If you really think through all the various possible scenarios, you start to realize that if one ship were significantly faster than the others, the whole balance of pursuit and combat would get out of whack. I wouldn't mind if the sloop were a smidge faster, but we're talking a single digit percentages, not double or more. And no matter what, it should be possible for a galleon or brigantine to catch a sloop. Not necessarily easy, but possible.

    It's one of those tricky sacrifices that are made for the sake of the game. There are many in Sea of Thieves.

  • I dont know about history or accurate realism etc. and i'm not sure if more sails doesnt mean more speed, but i agree due to games balance as well.

    There should ne something like
    more firepower and decks = slower speed.

    This would make the Brigg the average vessel.

    Galleon, 2 decks, 3 Sails, 8 Canons, slowest ship

    Brigg 1 deck, 2 Sails, 4 cannons, Medium speed

    Sloop, 1 deck, 1 sail, 2 cannons, max speed

    This is also for solo players to be able to get away from pvp versus larger crews if they dont want to.

    The bigger crew is always in favor of doing anything you can do in the game, pve or pvp.
    The more hands you have and the more eyes watch out, the more firepower, oversight, ressources, rare ccb's you have.
    This need to come with a letdown and thats speed.
    But i dont think they should slow down the galleon.
    They should instead buff the Sloops speed and maybe reduce it for the Brigg a little bit.

    I maybe would just switch the speed of the vessels.

    Brigg Speed for the Sloop, fastest..

    Galleon speed for the Brigg, medium.

    Sloop Speed to the Galleon, slowest.

    And that should be for all situations, no matter if into or against the wind.

    To catch a sloop you need to plan ahead or surpirse it.

    Sloops of Pirates attacking bigger ships are fighting more people with more firepower.

    Turn Speeds btw should stay as they are, because they exactly follow the above mentioned "rule"

    Galleon, slowest ts
    Brigg, medium ts
    Sloop, fastest ts.

    So, where is the mistake, what do is miss so we have it not that way?

  • @genuine-heather I would trust it. As not only does the term knot for sailing speed generate from that period of sailing and has stuck around to this very day and age, but you can go get on board of a full masted sloop in this day and age and use a speed gauge if you want.

    It is pretty funny too how knot became the measurement. They would use a device called a chip log. Essentially a plank with some weights on it to keep it upright as it is being dragged along. And then the rope it was attached too had knots tied into it as certain intervals and they would count the knots as they slipped through the fingers using a hour glass to measure.

    But I have to disagree there. It would not effect game balance at all. As we already have a ship that is significantly faster then the rest, it's the brig. Brig is the fastest ship in the game unless they tweaked it without me knowing about it. But having the sloop be able to escape out of any situation is exactly what it is designed to do. Brigs and galleons can still be able to chase each other down no problem. But it would take a sloop to catch a sloop, and then sloops could then chase down the other ships as well if they so wanted. Sail by, and board. And then it would give people who are playing solo or with a friend and they just want to get on the seas and do some casual voyages and not get into any fights a ability to be able to actually escape the pursuers.

    And if it should be possible for a galleon or a brig to catch up to a sloop then it should also be true vice versa. The sloop should also be able to catch up to a galleon or brig going full sail.

  • First of all, I Love the sloop.
    But there are thigs you don not mention, Turn speed, acceleration, micro managing dif. things: Sail, steering, ex.

    Where if the other vessel are not micro managage well, then it's lost against a good sloop.

  • @greencamillion1 Well acceleration is speed.

    Turn Speed really has nothing to do with speed of the vessel. The faster you go in fact, the wider your turn angle would be so it would actually be harder to take turns in a sloop going at full speed then. Would require more skill in handling. And for the rest of your points, they are very basic things man. If you have poor sail control or bad steering then yeah. You lost.

    But what if they don't? Go into these examples as I have listed above please. Assume that the ship is proper sail and a competent pilot at the helm. Full billow.

    BUT, even if they did happen to not have good sails, they can still catch up to you once they adjust the sails or catch the wind. It isn't a question of if they can, it is just can. They can catch you. They will catch up. It doesn't matter how much distance you put between a brig or a galleon in a sloop. They can go faster then your sloop and will catch up to you.

  • @GreenCamillion1

    True, but if we talk about balance of ships, we need not consider all grades of skill of sailors, but proceed from an average or same playerskill.

    Question: is the Sloop not anymore the fastest against the wind?
    iirc it was.

  • @shinten-rai Well acceleration is speed.
    Well acceleration is time to reach top speed. or velocity.

    I find those small micro manage things important, but again, I dont run because of the example of OP.
    But if you flip the script an attack, an take micro manage an my other example in to a fact, the sloop is the best vessel for attacking an sneaky plays

    You just talk about running

  • @greencamillion1 You drop your sails, boom. You are now going that fast. There is not really a acceleration aspect to the game. You do not drop your sail and slowly pick up speed over time. The only time that happens is if your sails are not in the wind at all or your slowly one by one drop the sails on the galleon or brig. If you drop your sails and they are full in the wind, your ship is now going at max speed. There is deceleration in the game, but then really is it really deceleration? Cause once you raise sails, the ship stops moving. It then just drifts along by momentum on the water until it runs out of momentum or your drop the anchor. You don't slowly stop your ship, unless again, you raise each individual sail slowly but then you have to wait for the momentum to stop or drop anchor still anyway.

    And if you flip the script an attack, what happens if you are against a crew that is skilled? You will probably die and get sunk. 4v1 is not good odds, specially if they are all on equal skill grounds with you. Again, I mentioned this in the other thread at you. Everyone has varying levels of skill. You can not assume because you can do this that other must be able to as well. Stop projecting your self.

    Can you out shoot a galleon in a sloop? No. You can not unless the other crew is far below you in terms of skill and general knowledge of the game. What do these pro sloop players do? They keg or sail by and jump off and board to attack or lay down in the textures and wait and be "sneaky". Neither of those tactics involve the ship in form or manner for "attacking". It is just serves as a mean to get there. That is all. The sloop can not stand up to the sheer firepower of a brig or a galleon. This is if the ship had a crew of competent players.

    That is the key word here. Skilled. Competent. Whatever you want to call it. Not everyone will be on the same levels as you or me or these pro sloopers. Just cause YOU can doesn't mean others can or will be able too. It is just facts. Just like how most people don't get a kdr of 56 to 2 in BFV. The skill gaps are there and you have to think of them and not just in the terms of well I can, and you just talk about only running. Well what about the people who can't do that and running is the only option period for them? Huh?

    The sloop is not a vessel made to attack these galleons or brigs in a fire fight. And no matter how much the incredibly small percentage of people who can say other wise. The general populace will not be able to do that. And then your whose basis of it being the best vessel for attacking is solely hinging on the hope that those people are worse then you at the game. Cause if they are not.....well then, looks like you are in the ferry now and have to leave the server or those guys will be sailing around and they will kill you again.

  • @shinten-rai Im really not gonna respond to you message anymore, But when did I projecting myself.
    I said in general, that you have to take those other things in to account.

    You run away, so you can fight in favorable waters.
    or you fight so you can run away.
    If run away tactic only evolve on getting away, its only a matter of time before you are tracked down

  • This is what the "believable, not realistic" game design philosophy gives you. I hate it too. I think pretty much every game should strive for realism in as many ways as possible unless the mechanic in question would just be otherworldly levels of un-fun.

    Also, the sloop isn't the speed it is at for game balance, but rather to reinforce the idea that SoT should always be played in crews. Rare never wanted this game to be possible for solo players to begin with. They were pretty adamant about the core experience being a group one, but caved due to backlash. This is the result, where they gave players the technicality of being able to go solo whereas you really won't have any kind of fun unless you are a weirdo.

    That said, I don't care one bit because I actually like the balance of the game with galleons being the hunters and sloops being the easy prey. I just wish there was some sort of group advantage that could come about. Like, it still really baffles me that a server is capped by the amount of ships and not players. I thought that the idea would have been that sloops take up less server space, thus allowing for more sloops, thus encouraging these sloops to team up with each other and essentially form ad hoc crews within the game world rather than from within the menus before joining. But upon doing that you empty out your server and make the game boring.

  • @natsu-v2 said in Sloop Speed: The finality.:

    they gave players the technicality of being able to go solo whereas you really won't have any kind of fun unless you are a weirdo.

    https://media2.giphy.com/media/yoJC2Olx0ekMy2nX7W/giphy.gif?cid=19f5b51a5c6816cb6644612f6b5035f3

  • It’s not about historical accuacy (otherwise we’d be sailing nowhere close to anything like 2 points into the wind). So it is about balancing ships with one another the same way they’ve balanced guns.

    Sloop is the fastest ship into the wind - totally uncatchable so long as you control the weather gauge. Also the most maneuverable (by a lot) and the hardest to sink (one man can just bail even if every hole is leaking). It’s already the best ship in the game by far, merely requires that you take care to maintain the weather gauge!

    FWIW, I’d rather be in a sloop in any PvP situation than the galleon, and the brig is a total piece of garbage.

  • I'll say the same thing I reply when people complain about reality in the movies:

    "It's a bloody VIDO GAME....not real life, present OR past."

    Kinda' where the "game" part comes in.

    Have fun ! !

  • @vca-hombre I'll have you know I was contemplating tagging you after saying that. XP

  • This game is not supposed to be historical accurate at all, but......

    Allow me to post at length about how terrible the game is BECAUSE it's not historically accurate.

  • @haydnsym45 sagte in Sloop Speed: The finality.:

    It’s not about historical accuacy (otherwise we’d be sailing nowhere close to anything like 2 points into the wind). So it is about balancing ships with one another the same way they’ve balanced guns.

    Sloop is the fastest ship into the wind - totally uncatchable so long as you control the weather gauge. Also the most maneuverable (by a lot) and the hardest to sink (one man can just bail even if every hole is leaking). It’s already the best ship in the game by far, merely requires that you take care to maintain the weather gauge!

    FWIW, I’d rather be in a sloop in any PvP situation than the galleon, and the brig is a total piece of garbage.

    True, this need to be considered.

  • What do you think would happen if the sloop was the fastest ship, had the best turning ability, sank the slowest and is able to be operated by a single player?

    The sloop would become insanely overpowered and used to hit and run the other ships at angles where they cannot counter. I'm saying this as someone who has spent a majority of his time solo slooping. A 2 man crew would be unbeatable.

    If you want the speed to increase, it would likely have to sink much faster than it currently does.

  • @natsu-v2 said in Sloop Speed: The finality.:

    Like, it still really baffles me that a server is capped by the amount of ships and not players. I thought that the idea would have been that sloops take up less server space, thus allowing for more sloops...

    The ships are going to take up more resources than players because the server runs the wave simulation on them to determine positioning. More ships means more simulation. That's why the servers are limited by ship count, not player count.

  • @shinten-rai The trick to out running or catching other ships with a sloop is wind. Sailing with the wind a sloop will not out run a Brig or Gally. More sails more wind to catch. Sailing into the wind is a different story. Sloops are the fastest when sailing into the wind. That's the trick.

  • @d3adst1ck Well yeah, I know why it's like that. But it's crazy to me that the game is at the scale it is at and it just can't perform well. We can't even have a skull fort and kraken at the same time. How can they possibly be struggling so hard to scale up everything whenever other games have hundreds of players on a server with much more PvE content? Maybe they should scale the water down to N64 standards or something because it feels like for them to add anything they have to take something away at this point.

  • @greencamillion1 Hey that's fine with me. Ciao.

  • @natsu-v2 The servers need optimization no doubt; they shouldn't be this bad. Player pings are higher than they should be and the spike terribly whenever something is loading into the scene. There's no way they will be able to increase the ship count until they do though.

    The water rendering is mostly done client side. On the server end its likely a wave function calculation to determine ship height and which way the bow should be pointing (up/down) given the current ship position relative to server time. They might be able to optimize how many calculations they are doing to figure out how the ships should be behaving, but changing that could also have unintended side effects on behavior.

    There's a gamasutra article that goes into simulating a boat on water. I think the calculations there are probably way more in depth than what you'd need to get a good feel and probably overkill for this game, but its a good read.

  • @d3adst1ck Totally fine with that. Glass cannon, is how one would say it right? Yeah. It would be a glass cannon. It would have to be able to sink faster to make it balanced with it's speed aspect.

  • @brassymussel There is no "trick" to keeping your sails completely straight into the wind. That makes even less sense then the ship speed as well. The wind would push you backwards.

    And then, all it takes is one wind shift and welp your donezo.

  • @shinten-rai Traditional "sloops" came in various forms. None of them that went fast were single-sail vessels.

    A traditional sloop had 3 masts. You are just assuming, because of the name of our single-mast ship, that it should perform like a real "sloop". Not possible with a single mast and sail.

  • @brassymussel said in Sloop Speed: The finality.:

    @shinten-rai The trick to out running or catching other ships with a sloop is wind. Sailing with the wind a sloop will not out run a Brig or Gally. More sails more wind to catch. Sailing into the wind is a different story. Sloops are the fastest when sailing into the wind. That's the trick.

    The problem is that "trick" only works for as long as you have free ocean. Once you hit the end of the map it's over. The galleon is far faster than the sloop with the wind than the sloop is faster against it. You can run for 10 mins from a galeon, but if you're forced to sail into the wind they will make up that distance in less than a min. Also, there is much more freedom sailing with wind than against it(by that i mean if you wanna sail into the wind to run away you are pretty much locked in what direction you can go. If you want to sail with the wind you have a massive range that you can turn your sails to catch full wind and even more to catch some wind.).

  • @fluidsc said in Sloop Speed: The finality.:

    @shinten-rai Traditional "sloops" came in various forms. None of them that went fast were single-sail vessels.

    A traditional sloop had 3 masts. You are just assuming, because of the name of our single-mast ship, that it should perform like a real "sloop". Not possible with a single mast and sail

    Sorry, no. Most sloops were single-masted vessels. Yes, there were different varieties of sloops, with various sail configurations, but the standard, "traditional" sloop was single-masted. Sails on all vessels in Sea of Thieves are obviously oversimplified. But the number of masts on the ship types is one thing Rare got right.

  • @natsu-v2

    Misunderstood in my own time.

    Tragic, really.

  • I have been saying this for some time. Galleons have way too many advantages over a sloop.

    They are a lot faster in every direction except directly into the wind (apparently)
    They have 4 times the cannon power.
    A full crew will have 2-4 times as many crew.
    They can carry many more supplies.
    Over 50% of its damageable area doesn't let in any water in until the ships nearly sunk.

    Seriously if a galleon sees a sloop in the distance the sloop has no way of getting away. You can apparently sail into the wind but to what end? Till the end of the map? Are you going to get enough distance for the galleon to give up? If the galleon is coming at you from the direction of the wind no matter what the distance there is, there's nothing you can do.

    And don't say the sloop can out outmaneuver the galleon. You're in open water, what are you going to maneuver around? There's a few outcrops of rock and Ship Wreck Bay which a sloop may have an advantage but its not enough to lose the ship. With the huge advantage in speed the galleon, they will catch you up in moments.

    Also difference in maneuverability is only advantageous when the other ship is right on your stern. A quick turn of the sloop could gain a little more distance for a short time, but put you in direct line of a set of 4 cannons and close enough for the other crew to sword lunge over to your ship.

  • Damn i read all that and i really have for you is, its a video game....

  • @genuine-heather said in Sloop Speed: The finality.:

    @fluidsc said in Sloop Speed: The finality.:

    @shinten-rai Traditional "sloops" came in various forms. None of them that went fast were single-sail vessels.

    A traditional sloop had 3 masts. You are just assuming, because of the name of our single-mast ship, that it should perform like a real "sloop". Not possible with a single mast and sail

    Sorry, no. Sloops were single-masted vessels. Yes, there were different varieties of sloops, with various sail configurations, but they all had a single mast. Sails on all vessels in Sea of Thieves are obviously oversimplified. But the number of masts on the ship types is one thing Rare got right.

    I think that about covers it.

  • You also have to remember that the Sloop in Sea of Thieves is not actually a Sloop, it is a Cog, with the name "Sloop".
    Just thought I'd mention that =P

  • @shinten-rai A well driven sloop with two pirate legends on it is a force equal to a galleon with lesser pirates. Don't underestimate the sloop.

  • @fluidsc Well no. If you actually bothered to read the article you posted, you’d understand that it discussed the sloop-of-war, which is not the same as a sloop. Sloop-of-war is a more generic nomenclature for a variety of vessels employed by the Royal Navy from the late 18th century onward. The term referred more to the role of the vessel than the design, thus the subcategories such as “ship sloop” (three masts) and “brig sloop” (two masts).

    Sloops during the Golden Age of Piracy (1650 to 1725) were generally defined as small, single-masted vessels. What you have pictured is an 1854 U.S. Navy sloop-of-war. It is not a sloop by 18th century standards.

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