Warning: I'm a nerd.
Let's start with Sailing Intuitiveness
First: straight headwind. Sailing directly into a headwind makes little sense as is, but I think we all understand why forward motion, even into a headwind, is necessary in this game. That said, to have to have your sails squared (on any ship) in order for it to be the "fastest" setting, makes zero sense. Make it so that the fastest way to sail into a headwind is to have your sails fully tacked to one side or the other. The only reason you should have squared sails is with a straight tailwind.
Second: sail management penalties. There should be significantly larger speed penalties across all ships when proper sail management is not done. Too often are larger ships able to maintain way too much speed regardless of how their sails are angled with wind. And sloops can keep squared sails and see minimal impact to their speed.
Next, we'll move to Ship Speed Balancing
Let's start with a baseline. We'll use the more widely accepted speed values in m/s for the different ships in the various wind conditions. I've used max speeds for each ship in the various wind conditions. We'll omit the recent evidence that suggests the brig is actually the fastest in a straight headwind.
The "% Greater" column is used to show how much of an increase in speed one ship has over the next slowest ship in that same wind condition. As you can see, the differences are very inconsistent.
Now, I've created two separate proposals to try to balance the speeds. What I did for each of these proposals was eliminate differences/advantages for one of the four wind variances and made each ship have the same speed. This would allow for each ship type type to only have one wind condition in which they have an advantage.
The color coding indicates whether a ship is getting a nerf, buff, or is unchanged in that wind condition.
In Proposal A, Changing the crosswind (head) condition to be neutral across the ship types would be the least impactful to the average speed of the brig and galleon. It would result in a more significant buff for the sloop, while keeping it in a logical pecking order across the wind variances.
In Proposal B, it would be the most impactful to change the headwind condition to be neutral. It would result in a noticeably lower average speed for both the galleon and the brig while buffing the sloop. While it makes more sense to have each ship be neutral in a direct headwind, it would require some further adjusting and/or narrowing of the speed advantages of each ship type, which I'd rather avoid.
Let me know what other alterations you can think of. I love making spreadsheets and would love to create proposals C-Z lol.
