I like the changes. The big ship (ctrl+3), this might be exacerbated by the sounds, but it felt like I was shooting a machine gun. Might also be mitigated by having a larger array of cannon and bullet sizes displayed. The camera changes are a good, though felt a little high sensitivity for my tastes -- though that's one place where a menu option is inevitable. Though I might experiment with having it lag a bit more behind the player's mouse/aim point, to see if it makes things feel a bit smoother, as it feels a little twitchy. The ranges are still short, but eh, as Norman stated, that's hard to change. Combat seems a bit brutal, crits in particular. I think in the end, you'll want a stylized look for your ships, they still look mostly indistinguishable, I can't tell if I'm getting critical hit by location or by a dice roll. Might also need to do something to make it a bit easier to distinguish between allied ships and enemy ships.

Is there torpedo ammo? Historically they were mostly one shot weapons, but it looks like you can spam them a bit. Not that I think I'd mind that much, since WoW does the same.

Random bug that may not matter: Hitting Ctr + some num, the new ship I controlled would have damage and health carried over from the last battle, even though it wasn't the same ship.

Oh, and having damaged displayed on the left, I found myself not noticing. The red lines are good, but I'd prefer if I could see the gun tinted red right on the ship.

Also, are there any limitations to the gun rotations? On real ships, I can't shoot through my own bridge & stacks, but I couldn't tell if I could or couldn't here.

Yeah the heavy cruiser fires alot of shells:) And it's very scaled down already compared to the other ships. But it will mostly be a silly OP ship when the player has unlocked the entire world so priority for fixing that is low:)

Torpedoes have ammo (similar to shells). Making them one-salvo only will not work well with the game i think. Im reducing complexity with shells, removing different types, there's too much dealing with ammo for the player.

Red lines are only for enemy turrets. Your escort ships have blue lines. You think it's unclear which ships are which? The guns should be red but not the ships? Wouldnt that look wierd? Or do you mean only when the turret is damaged? Im redoing the turret sprites to make them more distinct (they were all the same no matter of size).

It's hard to distinguish ship types I agree. This is why hull symbol is drawn (BB, AKL, CL etc). Im not sure how to remedy this however.

No turret rotation limit right now. I tried some, but I think it's to much to handle for the player since the ships circle each other a lot (and i want to keep that).

Yeah, red tinted guns for damage, it's not easily discernible which gun is damaged. (or smoke rising from the gun maybe?) Not that it matters too much, if every gun has 360 degree arcs. Though knowing it was the big guns in the front and not some small side gun would still be more easily discernible, without having to glance at a separate spot on the HUD to the left.

Oh one last thing, if criticals are location based, it would be good to tell the player what was critically hit in the critical message. It's an easy way to tell the player that where they are hit matters, and gives them a way to learn where things are on their ship.

As for sprites and turrets, you may end up wanting to take a page from tabletop games, which often scale weapons up different than the rest of the model for easier identification at a distance. Warhammer 40k, for example, is known for upscaling weapons so it's easier to tell that the tiny guy across the table has a rocket launcher. I think this would be great for some of your small frigates and torpedos, by drawing the oversized torpedo launcher, with the torpedo on it when it's armed. Though it looks like currently, your torpedoes are all launched from the hull, and the launchers don't have any turn radius?

good input.

The crits are not location based, maybe later:)

I can scale the weapons already. Torpedo racks are lacking sprites so they are not drawn at all at the moment i think.

You mean all weapons should be bigger all the time? Or maybe highlight them when they are ready to fire? Or flash them when they do fire to give more visible feedback to the player?

I'd go with all the time larger, so they they are easy to see as they turn, and it's easy at a glance to tell how many guns an opponent has, how many are damaged, and of what type. Or if I'm facing off against some kind of insane specialty ship, like the, I think it's the Kitakami from WoWarships that has a large number of torpedo launchers.

Highlighting them when they are ready to fire is a nice touch too though. I'm not sure they need to flash upon firing, muzzle flash and smoke effects could probably cover that.

Ok new version again! :)

- Larger turrets (and red when damaged). More distinct with contrasts and outlines.

- Radar provides more info and color coded. Enemy ships have flags in battle to stand out from your own ships

- Smoother camera movement, speed controllable in settings (not yet added to interface)

- Symbols for guns close to cursor (if ready to fire and damage-status and weapon type is shown (this took some time to fix!))

What do you guys think?

The new fights? The cam feels better? The looting after fights?

You need windows with directx installed. File is 77MB (just unpack it and run game.exe, no install)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qi7txs1smyd0yxy/pirate4.rar?dl=0

Something's wrong with the camera in that build, it's very twitchy/jerky, much worse than previous builds, seems exacerbated when it's top/bottom as opposed to left/right. Seems to also jerk with shooting as well -- guessing that's part is intentional?

I still can't distinguish turrets on ships at all, though they look great on the repair screen =). What do the first row of icons next to the mouse mean? Is the third row always torpedoes? It looked like the same icon as the others, so I wasn't sure. You might try left/right side of the mouse for different types, it's a lot of things on just one side of the cursor.

Is the cam jerky? Strange it's not for me. It what situation (I assume during fights but when more exactly?). There is a small shake when your flagship is hit by large projectiles. Too much?

The rows of icons corresponds to weapon class (this differs depending on your flagship type). The small ones are light weapons (autocannons that has fire at will). Then different size turrets (see "ctrl+3"-fight for a cruiser with medium and large turrets) and the last row is for torpedo racks.

I wanted to include small weapons to let the player know which ones are damaged.