Canons are useless.

I've seen and survived ships taking barrels directly in lower hull.

Cannons are as useful or as useless as the people firing them. As are barrels.

@wisespade7 then you're a bad shot.

Barrels now come with the added effect of not being able to slap yourself into their hull injury free. They're also a liability if you come across someone better. The amount of people I've killed holding barrels only to pick it back up and bomb them with their own c**p..

Great, you barreled them. Now you're either dead too, or about to be as you struggle to catch a ladder and get shot in the face. We really prevented those repairs now.

Try putting holes alongside the entire lower hull both sides as you circle some ship and watch it burn. Fire someone over for good measure and interrupt repairs while you also focus existing holes and knock people currently repairing off with more shots.

@wisespade7 If you played like this against anyone who halfway pays attention you'd be gone as soon as you hit that ladder. Wouldnt even touch the anchor.

@wisespade7 l**o

@ttargetpractice said in Canons are useless.:

I don't think the damage should be unfixable but it should definitely be more than a tiny hole that you can repair in 5 seconds if the same spot is hit repeatedly.

The problem isn't that cannons are useless, it's that they can too easily be rendered useless by a guy with some planks.

Cannons are fine, the damage system is fine. The problem is that most people are simply poor gunners and can't hit accurately to keep the pressure on.
Naval warfare in the age of sails either came down to boarding or battles of attrition, and I for one am overjoyed that this game actually portrays that, rather than depleting magical health bars like virtually every other game out there.

A smart crew will start by sweeping the weather deck and quarterdeck with cannon fire, and then work their way down putting the middle deck full of holes, and then finally focus on keeping pressure on the hold below the waterline.
This is a good strategy as your opening broadside will hopefully kill some or most of the enemy crew. Punching holes on the middle deck may seem like a waste to many, but most people ignore the importance of patching those holes when riding lower in the water, and thus making a galleon easier to sink. Keeping the pressure on and landing continuous strikes all over the hold is essential as any subsequent hits will interrupt any effort to plug the leaks, which is why accuracy is so important.

A lot of people are jumping to extremes in this thread. It's important to separate personal experience from high level play. What works at the highest level is what a game should be balanced around, because all players can feasibly aspire to that level of play. Whereas if the game was balanced around beginner or intermediate play, there's a chance that the game becomes broken or unfun once the pros get things figured out.

From personal experience I love cannons and use them as my go-to strategy. The vast majority of ships I encounter go down in under a minute to pure cannonfire due to how accurate our shots are.

However, I am sometimes reminded of the game's bad design when we run into groups that actually know how to play, as rare as that is. It only takes two people to out-DPS a hole in every single spot on a galleon with their buckets. A third is needed to repair, but repairs don't matter if you can get out of the situation with a hull full of water. At this point, it doesn't matter if the damage comes from barrels or cannons. The only thing that matters is getting a player on board to cause havoc in order to disrupt repairs. Personally, I hate that with a passion. It should be entirely possible to sink even the most skilled crew with pure cannonfire.

I like to think of the ship fight game as being similar to MMA, where there are two umbrellas disciplines: Grappling and Striking. Nowadays every combatant is relatively mixed, but any individual fight could be won or lost within one realm.

In SoT, you have pure boarding (ramming), pure ballistics, and then a mixture. When both groups are extremely skilled, the pure boarding strategy is really frustrating because there is no way to sink a ship if there aren't gunpowder barrels whenever both get anchored next to each other. I've been in a couple fights against pioneers where this kind of engagement dragged on for over an hour in an endless respawn team deathmatch with two ships parked next to each other.

Pure cannonfire is also almost useless against really good teams that know how to bucket. Your best hope is to outright kill or knock off two or more players while also hitting them with 6+ waterlines.

So really, the only strategy Rare has allowed the higher level players to use against each other is the traditional sandwich tactic, where you start with a salvo of cannonfire, send a boarder via cannon, and then cover them with more cannonfire targeted at the main deck where the ladders are.

Again, it's not like every fight has to go down like that due to personal experience, but that's because there is no private arena mode to 1v1 another crew to see who is better. If SoT had the ability to test your skills against anyone, you would see that this is one of the only tactics that would win fights at extremely high levels of play.

So from a personal experience standpoint, I'm relatively fine with the game as we usually play our preferred method of engagement (long range) and sink most ships in under a minute. But I really fear for the day when the average ship is as good as ours. Those battles simply won't be fun at all.

@ttargetpractice said in Canons are useless.:

@only-alexraptor said in Canons are useless.:

@ttargetpractice said in Canons are useless.:

I don't think the damage should be unfixable but it should definitely be more than a tiny hole that you can repair in 5 seconds if the same spot is hit repeatedly.

The problem isn't that cannons are useless, it's that they can too easily be rendered useless by a guy with some planks.

Cannons are fine, the damage system is fine. The problem is that most people are simply poor gunners and can't hit accurately to keep the pressure on.
Naval warfare in the age of sails either came down to boarding or battles of attrition, and I for one am overjoyed that this game actually portrays that, rather than depleting magical health bars like virtually every other game out there.

A smart crew will start by sweeping the weather deck and quarterdeck with cannon fire, and then work their way down putting the middle deck full of holes, and then finally focus on keeping pressure on the hold below the waterline.
This is a good strategy as your opening broadside will hopefully kill some or most of the enemy crew. Punching holes on the middle deck may seem like a waste to many, but most people ignore the importance of patching those holes when riding lower in the water, and thus making a galleon easier to sink. Keeping the pressure on and landing continuous strikes all over the hold is essential as any subsequent hits will interrupt any effort to plug the leaks, which is why accuracy is so important.

I agree that cannons are fine but the damage model and bucket most certainly are not. The reason that battles played out like that back then is because they were actual people who cared about their actual lives. In this game, you respawn on your ship in 30 seconds and it doesn't really matter if you die unless someone is there to spawn kill you. If you didn't spawn directly on your ship, I would agree that the damage model is fine, but that isn't how it happens.

In the age of sails, you could destroy masts, rudders, and anchor riggings, and put huge holes in the hull that couldn't be patched with a single plank in five seconds. Ships during the age of sails could be destroyed by cannon fire, their buckets didn't hold 4,000 gallons of water, and the crewmen certainly didn't get a new body 30 seconds after their old one was killed. I'd be quite satisfied if that could be accurately portrayed.

Actually in the age of sail, Galleons were crewed by hundreds, not 4 people so the respawn mechanic in a way evens things out.
Also define "destroyed by cannon fire". If by destroyed you mean structurally shot to pieces and sink then yes and no. A small sloop being bombarded by 32-pounders maybe, but large galleons and warships were rarely ever sunk from cannon fire in battle, cannons of the era just couldn't do that kind of damage to well built and reinforced hulls. The main purpose of the ships guns was to maim and kill crew as well as cripple the ship through, as you mentioned, taking out masts, rigging, rudder and even other guns, something which I personally would love to see in the game.
And your right, buckets didn't hold 4,000 gallons of water, instead ships were equipped with a much more efficient "bilge pumps".