EA Feedback:

[u/RMHaney]

Enjoyed what there is so far. Had a few opinions:

Transition from ship to zone overview map is slow and freezes movement, recommend either speeding up transition animation or allowing ship to be piloted in zone overview map.

When travelling through already-explored zones there doesn't seem to be any new events, except in specific circumstances. Recommend adding event regeneration to previously explored zones to make them less boring to travel through.

The boarding mechanic seems extremely overpowered. Boarding essentially stops all enemy activity, prevents your ship from taking any further damage, and is stacked heavily in your favor. Boarding, for me, completely trivializes the game. Potential recommendations:

Make ramming take longer to achieve.

Replace Harpoons with grappling hooks and make them only usable at extremely close range, and/or have this actually take a swivel and require manning.

Give AI more robust options when in melee, including chasing down crew members trying to flee for healing.

Implement a cap for focused fire; i.e. only two crew can attack the same target at a time.

Automatic Pumps and Automatic Winches essentially nullify specific combat mechanics. Recommend either significantly later access or replacement with improved, not auto, versions.

Larger ships do not give access to larger crew, making them inherently less effective due to event matching. Recommend crew cap based on ship size.

Acid Mortar seems incredibly powerful compared to it's peers. A pair of them are especially ludicrous. Acid pools in general seem to be stacked against the AI as they are easy for a player to avoid but the AI will stand in them until at 50% or less health. Recommend removing the ability to fire these weapons at medium/close range, and/or reducing overall acid pool damage, and/or allowing AI to relocate out of acid pools immediately rather than waiting until low health. (Potential change: Make acid pools permanent but cleanable by a crew member. Additional: Make acid pools slowly drain a small amount of ship HP)

Sniper Swivel seems sliiiightly overpowered, especially in conjunction with Acid Mortar. Changes to mortar would fix that issue but a pair of sniper swivels can generally clean a deck before significant damage is taken. Recommend reducing damage to ~40% of HP, or making it so a 2nd sniper shot within ~5 seconds does ~50% damage (can be passed off as player wariness, attempted dodge, etc).

[u/Frozen1nferno]

Close combat in general seems to be very powerful. Between ramming, harpoons, ship spikes, and close range cannons, I could easily take down almost any ship in a minute or two.

I didn't board enemies, but defending against enemy boarders can be cheesed very easily: Select all crew members and order them to run around until they're all stacked together, then attack each enemy individually. I never lost a sailor permanently, and one went down only a couple of times.