CombatCombat will happen per turn. Movement and shooting happens simultaniously.
Movement is clumsy, as ships were. You can assign a specific tile the ship must sail to, and the ship will turn to go it, but it will almost never exactly reach that point.
You order you cannons to shoot, for example, by saying;
The three most northern cannons on the east side of the ship, normal shots, fire!
This will cause the three most northern cannons on the east side of the ship to fire and your ammo supply to drop by 3. You cannot order cannons to shoot at ships, the crew members themselves will pick the target, though there will almost never be more than 1. Reloading your cannon will always take 2 turns, except in the case that your supplies are destroyed to half of what they used to be, in that case it will take 3 turns.
Arc of fire and range Important to note about cannons is that they have a limited arc of fire and range.
A cannon's arc of fire is roughly triangular. For the first 5 tiles, a cannonball can only go in to a line. After that, the line increases by one on both sides and this goes on until the maximum reach of the type of cannonball you shot is reached. Explained in ASC art ;
..........XXXXXXXXX
.....XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
.....XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
..........XXXXXXXXXWith X being the places a cannon will be able to hit, and . it will not.
Cannons can shoot until up to a maximum as indicated in the ammo types section, though this will be very unaccurate fire. The closer to half the amount of the maximum tiles the enemy ship is, the more chance you have the cannonball will reach the ship and impact. Any closer and there is a larger chance the cannonball will fly over the ship, any further and there is a larger chance that the cannonball will end up in the water before the ship. An exception is the first 5 tiles. Chances that a cannonball misses if a ship is 5 tiles in front of it is minimal. Naturally, there is friendly fire, so watch out for friendlies! Friendly fire isn't.
Ammo Types Every cannon can shoot different types of ammo.
- Normal: The standard cannonball. This hurts on impact and has the regular 50 tile reach.
- Grapeshot: This anti-crew cannonball can only reach to 30 tiles but is far more devastating for crew members. In other words, this has a lot more chance to take out cannons, though it will rarely breach hulls. The largest advantage of this type of ammo is that when it impacts it "splits" in to three, so instead of hitting one tile it hits 3 adjacent tiles.
- Chainshot: This cannonball type is a lot more effective in destroying ship masts. When a normal or grapeshot ball hits a mast, it tends to either do minimal damage or miss a lot. Chainshots have a lot more chance to destroy the mast outright, limiting the speed of the ship and sometimes the mast even does enormous damage to the ship itself as it falls down. This cannonball type has a reach of 50 tiles but is a
lot more unaccurate than normal cannonballs and costs 2 shots instead of the regular 1.
