Officers

 I've started working on the back end for the ship Officers feature.  The primary reason being that I've been intending to add it for a while, and UI changes need to be made to the Ship Maintenance window to support Cabin Upgrades, so it would be best to do that at the same time as the changes needed for Officers.  I'm going to get all the back end work done for both additions first, and the last step will be the UI and other client side changes.  So I don't expect to have either feature ready in the next update, but in some near future update.  

Enough on that, here's how Officers will work

Ships will have a number of Officer slots available.  To fill one of those slots you will recruit a new Officer.  You'll name the officer, and choose the officer's first specialty.  Officers provide a bonus to your ship based on their specialties.  Currently the planned specialties are as below, though I will add more.  

Watch Captain - Increase spotting distance
Sailing Master - Setting sail position speed bonus
Steward - Reduce food/water usage of crew
Surgeon - Medical crew bonus
Gunner - Bonus to repair effort required to fix leaks you cause
Carpenter - Repair speed bonus for leaks and hull integrity
Coxswain - Rowing speed bonus
Marine - Bonus to effectiveness of Marines used for boarding operations
Armorer - Bonus for handheld firearms

Doing the activity related to the specialty will increase the Officer's XP in that specialty.  Once the XP goes up enough, it will result in the Officer's level in that specialty increasing.  The Officer's level in a specialty starts at 1, and goes up to 5.  A 2% bonus is applied for each level.  So at level 5 you receive a 10% bonus.  Once reaching level 5, you can add an additional specialty to the Officer.  An Officer can have as many specialties as are available.  

Larger ships with multiple Officer slots can have Officers with the same specialty.  The bonus for all Officers with the same specialty is added up, but capped at 15% total.  

When your ship is sunk or captured, the Officers go down with the ship.  So a highly trained Officer becomes a loss you can't easily replace.  You will be able to transfer Officers between docked ships.  

On the Marine and Armorer specialties, eventually ship boarding will be added to the game.  At that time a new cargo item "Marine" will be added.  They will be soldiers dedicated to performing and repelling ship boarding operations, and will have greater effectiveness than your regular crew.  The Marine specialty will provide an additional bonus to these Marines.  The Armorer bonus will help specifically with the use of firearms for boarding (boarding will also involve bladed weapons though), but there will also be a feature where your crew uses firearms automatically at nearby enemy ships outside of boarding.  

So I've started the process of working on this.  I think it will spice up the ship customization a bit.  

Adding Hull Integrity Feature

Currently working on adding the new Hull Integrity feature.  How combat currently works is when a cannonball hits your ship, a comparison is made between the ammo's penetration value and your hull resistance.  When penetration is higher than hull resistance, chance to penetrate is also higher, and when penetration is lower than hull resistance then chance to penetrate is again lower.  This mechanic is explained in more detail in previous posts.  

What matters here, is you can get into a situation where you beat on an enemy seemingly forever with low chance to penetrate.  The Hull Integrity feature helps this.  Whenever you are hit, this hit will reduce your hull integrity value, whether penetrated or not.  So every hit now causes some damage.  Hull integrity is then taken as a percentage, on a scale of 0 to 1, and multiplied against hull resistance for penetration calculations.  

This means ships which have high hull resistance can eventually get beaten down by weaker opponents given enough damage to hull integrity.  Larger ammunition will generally deal more damage to hull integrity than smaller ammunition.  So in fleet battles a large ship can open fire on an enemy first, reducing its hull integrity, then smaller ships can join in with higher effectiveness, even if the first large ship didn't cause any leaks.  

As far as repairing hull integrity, whenever your repair crew aren't repairing leaks, or in the future sails and masts, they will apply their repair effort to hull integrity.  

Another cause of hull integrity damage is large fires.  Currently they can cause leaks, but now they will also damage hull integrity.  

Explosive ammunition, while not yet in the game, now are redesigned.  They now will be a low penetration but high hull integrity damage focused ammunition type.  The planned Ironclad ship has also been refocused, making it a high hull resistance and high hull integrity ship.  Explosive ammunition will be all but required to take it down.