Firing a full broadside

Now that the majority of functionality for what you can do when docked at the cities has been implemented, as well as making market purchases, development is moving on to implementing additional ships and items into the game, implementing more combat mechanics, filling out NPC ship AI behavior, and gathering items in the game. 

Part of the updates to the combat mechanics is an alternate way to fire your ship's cannons.  The standard way of firing cannons is to select a side of your ship, aim the cannons, and press the space bar to fire an individual cannon.  You can hold down the space bar for continuous fire. 

Some ships have multiple gun decks on the port and starboard sides.  This allows for installing different guns on these decks.  All guns on a single deck need to be of the same type, and load the same ammunition, but multiple gun decks allows for varying your weaponry on the same side of the ship.  When firing using the space bar you manually switch between gun decks. 

The new "Full Broadside" button, available under the Guns status tab in the lower left of the screen, ignores most of that and automatically queues up all guns on the entire side of the ship to fire as fast as possible.  This has advantages and disadvantages compared to firing using the space bar.  Normally guns on a single deck are fired in sequence starting from the front of the ship and working their way to the rear.  When firing a full broadside, all guns are fired in a random order.  In addition, when firing by space bar you can continually adjust your aim for each shot.  In full broadside mode, the aim of all guns is set when you press the Full Broadside button and can't be adjusted again until all guns have fired. 

Those are some of the disadvantages, but on to the advantages.  Once you initiate a full broadside, you can switch to an alternate camera, either out to 3rd person or looking down another cannon sight.  You can even fire from a second side of the ship while your crew is still firing your broadside from the first side.  It is even possible to initiate what is called a double broadside, where you do a full broadside from both port and starboard simultaneously. 

Another large advantage is specifically for ships with multiple gun decks on the sides.  Gun decks are limited to a rate of fire, but when you have more than one gun deck firing at once, the overall rate of fire is increased.  If you have 3 gun decks firing at once, the effective time between shots is cut to 1/3 of normal. 

This all adds up to a way to effectively deal a fast volley of damage, most effective at close range due to limitations to your aim.