Okay, so it feels fast. Overworld movement feels really fast, it feels like I'm at the wrong scale for that map size / ship size. Getting into engagements at first was a little unintuitive (the sonar system?), but was easy enough to get used to. (coloring or tinting the ranges would help too, it's hard to tell how close one should be.

The combat does feel a bit fast and claustrophobic. Maybe it's because we're frigates and PTs. I kept wanting to zoom out more, but that said the sprites seem to already be suffering, they have lost most of their detail at the current scale. If I go into one of the upgrade screens, I can distinctly see all the guns, but when I go into battle, it's squint-fest, and I can't see where guns or torpedo tubes or anything of importance is on a ship. So I can't tell where enemy or friendly guns are aiming, how fast my guns turn, etc. I think I got my engines disabled once? Or was that a bug? One of my sidekicks ran into me about the same time as I was taking damage when it happened.

Engines can get damages, which reduces movement alot. You need to repair in port:)

Yeah speed should probably be reduced across the board for the game (both combat and map-travel). About the sprites: they are actually much bigger (as you can see in info-screen or the inventory) and scaled down for the combat. To have more range (less claustrophobic) I agree I need to indeed zoom out more, buth then the sprites get even smaller!

Maybe the view ("camera") could move with the mouse cursor (the flagship doesnt need to be in the center of the screen all the time)? This could give me more visible range while not making sprites even smaller...

And I can have a full-size view of the flagship in a separate window, to more easily see the guns. But the lines already show the current rotation and range of all guns though...

I kept wanting to zoom out more,

i too recall the combat screen being kind of small, but i wanted to give it another go before i commented on it.

I think I got my engines disabled once? Or was that a bug?

don't think its a bug, i think that's how i died in my second engagement. they knocked out my engines and swarmed be. wasn't paying close enough attention at the start of the battle.

, how fast my guns turn,

if you watch the projected line of fire, you can tell the turret turn rate. but you have to almost turn 180 to notice it, as the guns traverse rather quickly. so quickly that rate of traversal usually has no effect on combat. you lose maybe one or twp shots traversing to a new target on the opposite horizon. other than that it traverses so fast it never affects game play.

I agree I need to indeed zoom out more, but then the sprites get even smaller!

this is a fundamental problem of naval war games. ship are small, the ocean is big, and ranges are long. you can either accept that, or change it by:

1. making the ships bigger. the USS new jersey is 888 feet long. it can fire 24 miles. the shells take one and a half minutes in flight at long range. so it can fire a shell 142 times the length of the ship. now say your sprite is 1 cm in length on the screen. that 1 cm long ship can shoot 1.42 meters! my monitor is big, but its not 1.42 meters tall. these are the kinds of scales your dealing with. now, shrink that 1.42 meters down to fit on my 27" diagonal, and you divide by 5 lets say. now your ship sprite is only 2mm long, and can shoot the full height of the monitor. well 2mm is kinda small. so kick it up to 2cm. sure, it now looks like its 8880 feet long, but it doesn't really affect anything except collisions. and the AI should be avoiding collisions anyway. so bigger ships might work.

2. make the ocean smaller. just keep the ships really close, everything is always in range, and graphics can match up with collisions. its an option, probably not that great though....

3. cut the range. cut the range of weapons by an order of magnitude your 1 cm long battleship can now shoot 14.7 cm, which should fit rather nicely on a larger monitor. only things over half a monitor away will be out of range of the big guns.

in the end, the difficulty is that you're trying to model what is the "to scale" equivalent of 2 1cm long ships up to 1.5 meters apart shooting at each other. a map you can scroll and zoom is one possibility.

in your particular case, cutting range by a factor of 10 or so, combined with ships at maybe 2x size could work. and just pretend ships are 2x size for collision purposes, its should be good enough.

Yeah, I can see where my guns aim via the HUD, but I can't see where my opponents guns are, or where they are aiming. I can't make intelligent decisions about where to aim, since I can't pick out any details of the ships at all, I can't make decisions about where to position myself in regards to the other ship, as I don't know where it's guns are placed.

For the camera, I'd try to have it be mildly intelligent, and frame it around both the mouse cursor and and the direction and speed at which my ship is traveling. If I'm moving fast, move the camera so that I can see ahead of the ship, but also move the camera towards where my aim point is. If I'm moving slow, you don't need to move the camera as far ahead, etc. (Sort of similar to how the good platformers do it, except you also need to take into play the mouse position) You might also want to zoom in/out depending on mouse cursor distance from the ship, but that may or may not work as well.

Overworld, I think part of what it is, is the interface for moving, having momentum, etc, feels weird at that large of a scale. I'm curious what the turn radius of the ship is in miles, same with it's momentum / deceleration.

The ranges are not realistic for gameplay purposes, but larger caliber guns have sligthly longer range.

Slower turn rates are coming up! (both ships and turrets).

Yeah some kind of intelligent cam would be good. I tried zooming before but didnt feel right.

The idea of having momentum and turn radius on the overhead map is to make it more fun to travel. The real map is HUGE and cities and ships will not be as dense as in this tech demo.

Maybe on a large map it won't be as weird. I think making the scale of the player's ship match the other ships might help as well, as it looked gigantic compared to everything else. Might event shrink it to an icon like the other ships.

New version! :)

-Slower turrets and ships

-Double the range of guns and camera is moveable with mouse (kind make it smoother since you control firing range with mouse as well)

-AI tries to keep distance better (still bad AI so I disabled collision for now)

-More abstract movement on the map and icon shown instead of ship

-Controls are customizable (F1)

-More help and better colors and ui-fixes overall

Also added more ships:

ctrl+1 early-game battle-test

I'll try to take a peek some time this weekend.