How damage works

Cannon accuracy decides whether a ball hits. This page covers what it does when it lands.

One hit, three kinds of damage

Every ball that hits carries the damage value of the cannon that fired it (see the cannon pages). That is then split three ways at once: into the crew, the masts, and the hull. Your shot type decides how much goes where:

Shot	Mostly hurts	Use it to
Round shot	Hull armor and structure	Sink ships
Bar and chain shot	Masts and sails	Slow a ship down so she cannot run or turn
Grape and canister	Crew	Slow her reloading and soften her up for boarding

No shot is pure. Round shot still kills a few sailors and clips some rigging; chain shot still scratches the hull. Shot also changes strength with distance, which is why anti-crew shot is devastating up close and feeble far away.

Hull: armor first, then structure

Which side you hit depends only on where you are relative to the target: her bow, her stern, her port side or her starboard side. Each has its own armor hit points, shown on the ship page.

1. Soak. Intact armor takes a flat amount off every hit, the soaks number on the ship page. A brig’s side soaks 4, so a 17-damage ball from a 4-pounder loses nearly a quarter of its punch while a 119-damage ball from a 24-pounder hardly notices. The soak shrinks as that side’s armor is shot away.
2. Absorb. Fresh armor absorbs the whole hit. As a side is worn down it absorbs less and less, down to a quarter when it is gone, and the rest leaks through into structure.
3. Structure. This is the ship’s real life bar. When it reaches zero, she sinks.

Even the feeblest hit always does at least 1 point of armor damage.

What to take from this:

• Keep hitting the same side. A worn side soaks less and leaks more, so your shots get more effective as you go. Spreading damage across both of her sides wastes it.
• Turn your fresh side toward the enemy. When one side is badly worn, showing the other gives you full soak and full absorb again.
• Bow and stern armor is thin. Look at any ship page: the stern usually has a quarter of the side’s armor and half the soak. A rake, a broadside into the bow or stern, gets into her structure far faster. It also means she cannot fire back, because her broadside guns cannot bear on you.
• Small guns struggle against big ships because the flat soak eats a bigger share of a small ball.

Losing guns

Damage to a side’s armor can knock out guns on that side, and structure damage can knock out guns anywhere. A side with no armor left will typically be down to a little under half its guns. Another reason to turn a fresh side to the enemy: that is where your working guns are.

Masts, sails and speed

Sail shots do not pick out a particular mast. The game chooses one based on where you are firing from:

Firing from	Bowsprit	Foremast	Mainmast	Mizzenmast
Ahead of her (bow)	65%	20%	10%	5%
Astern of her	5%	10%	20%	65%
Off her side	20%	30%	30%	20%

Masts she does not have, or has already lost, drop out and the rest share the chance.

What matters for speed is her total mast health, all masts added together:

speed = (1 - sail damage squared) x how much sail is set

The squaring is the important part. Sail damage starts gentle and gets brutal:

Masts lost overall	Top speed remaining
10%	99%
25%	94%
50%	75%
75%	44%
90%	19%

So a few volleys of chain will not catch a runner. You need to commit to it. Once she is past half, every further volley bites hard.

Crew

Crew are a separate pool, shown on the ship page. Losing crew slows your reloading and your repairs, and leaves fewer hands to fight when you are boarded. As a crew thins out, the survivors get harder to hit: the last handful of men are very hard to kill with cannon fire alone, so grape will not finish a ship off by itself. That is what boarding is for.

Repairs

Repair skills and consumables put points back into hull, sails or guns. How fast you repair depends on how much healthy crew you have left, so a ship that has been swept with grape repairs slowly. Crew are recovered separately and are not fixed by hull repairs.

Quick tips

• Round shot to sink, chain to catch, grape to board. Switch as the fight changes.
• Pick one of her sides and stay on it.
• Rake whenever you can, and never let yourself be raked.
• Rotate your own damaged side away before it is gone; you keep more guns that way.
• Against a faster ship, start on her sails early. It takes time to pay off.