Sail Damage

 I'm currently testing the new version, which should be ready this weekend.  The big feature added is sail damage.  Chain Shot ammunition is the ammo designed to damage sails.  The way it works is you fire into the enemy sails, and for Chain Shot the impact is detected.  Other ammo types simply pass through.  Sails get damaged from Chain Shot, but are fully functional still until they are destroyed.  Larger Chain Shot does more damage to sails than smaller ones.  I'll be adding this information to the Broadopedia.  

Once a sail is destroyed, it doesn't provide thrust when under sail power.  Currently this affects the max speed and sailing force as a percentage.  1 sail destroyed out of 10 means you have 90% of your sails still, so a 90% modifier.  5 out of 10 destroyed means 50% modifier, etc.  In the future I will be investigating changing this to a weighted system, where bigger sails have more of an impact than smaller sails, but that will not be the case today.  

How repairing sails works is with your same repair crew.  They apply work towards repair of 1 sail at a time.  Sails that are damaged, but not destroyed, will also be repairable.  Whether your repair crew first fixes leaks or sails is determined by a check box on the Repair tab which says Prioritize Rigging.  If checked, once all sails are repaired the crew moves on to working on leaks.  If unchecked, once all leaks are repaired the crew moves on to sails.  Once mast damage is added, masts will be repaired before sails.  Hull integrity will always be repaired last.  

In a later version I will be adding a window so you can see sail and mast damage in more detail.  Right now the output to the player will just be the number of destroyed sails in the Repair tab.  

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.  

Consumables!

Several new consumable items have finished being added to the game for the next update.  From now on you'll want to carry Medicine and Repair Timber in your cargo at all times.  They are used as follows.  

Medicine - If you lack Medicine in your cargo hold, then your medical crew's chance of healing an injured crew is cut in half.  When an injured crew is healed, this will consume 1 Medicine from your cargo hold.  

Repair Timber - Similar to Medicine, if you lack Repair Timber in your cargo hold, then your repair crew's repair efforts applied to leaks are cut in half.  When a leak is successfully repaired, this will consume 1 Repair Timber from your cargo hold.  

Separately, all live cargo items now consume resources.  The existing Drinking Water and Meal Ready to Eat are used, as well as new item Animal Feed.  This triggers every 5 minutes when you are away from port, at the same time that crew use resources, and in the same amount.  1 unit for each 5 items, rounded up.  

All land creatures use Drinking Water and Animal Feed.  All sea creatures, except whales, use just Animal Feed.  All human cargo, except slaves, use Drinking Water and Meal Ready to Eat.  Slaves are treated extremely poorly, so use Drinking Water and Animal Feed.  

If any of these consumables aren't available in sufficient quantities for the live cargo items, then 1 of each live cargo item which needed that consumable is destroyed.  If both consumables aren't available, then 2 will be destroyed.  

Helpful feedback

 I've received a lot of help from someone off the Unity forums testing the game (don't know if he wants a call out).  I've received very helpful feedback, and will be putting in a number of changes based on it.  

* Going to exaggerate the acceleration and turning speed differences between the small ships and the large - added to 0.8.19

* Change the mass of money items to be significantly lower, so you can move around more Po8 in a single shipment - added to 0.8.19

* Adding human models to the decks of ships with animations - TBD future version

* Changing how sailing crew works, they will no longer affect top speed of the ship, instead affecting how quickly changing the sail settings applies to the ship.  Currently changing sail settings is instant, but the plan is to make it apply slower when you have less than the maximum number of sailors assigned to the role - TBD future version

* Add a demand ransom mechanic, so a player can demand another player drop their cargo in exchange to not be attacked.  If cargo is dropped, but player is still attacked, there will be a hit to a new reputation value - TBD future version

* Make larger cities look bigger - TBD future version

* Add "animal feed" items which will be needed to keep live items, such as livestock, alive while in your ship cargo and away from a port.  This will work similarly to the current meals/water usage for crew.  If there isn't enough feed, there will be a percentage of the live items destroyed.  - TBD future version

* When high flooding in your ship occurs, a percentage of the items in your cargo will be destroyed - Not added yet, but should arrive in 0.8.19

* When fires get to large size, there will be a chance to destroy items in the cargo hold.  This will occur when a chance is calculated for the fire creating new leaks - Not added yet, but should arrive in 0.8.19

* Ships on the minimap will appear as grey color until you are close enough to see their HUD UI with the exception of trade company and squadron members (though trade companies aren't implemented yet) - Not added yet, but should arrive in 0.8.19

* Will show zone borders in game on the minimap - TBD future version

* Add new "Hull Integrity" feature, where as a ship receives hits, even if they don't penetrate, they chip away at hull integrity.  Hull integrity is then taken as a percentage between 0f and 1f, and multiplied against the ship's hull resistance value when hull penetration is calculated.  This will result in ships, especially ships with higher hull resistance, getting more vulnerable to incoming ordinance as fights run longer.  When your repair crew is not working on repairing a leak (or in the future, repairing a mast or sail), it will work on slowly repairing hull integrity.  A new hull upgrade item will be added which adds a bonus related to hull integrity.  Hull integrity will be added to the ship repair information, as well as the UI HUD above ships, so you can see your hull integrity as well as opponents.  Larger ammunition will reduce enemy hull integrity more than smaller ammunition.  - Not added yet, but will arrive in either 0.8.19 or 0.8.20

* Add cannabis item - Not added yet, but should arrive in 0.8.19

* Ship cargo close to full will reduce the acceleration, turn speed, and top speed of the ship - Not added yet, but should arrive in 0.8.19

* Add a new "Cabin Upgrade Slot" similar to the hull upgrade and equipment slots.  Items will be added which add various bonuses when fit to this slot.  All ships will have at least 1 Cabin Upgrade Slots, but larger ships will generally have more available, similar to the other upgrade slots.  - TBD future version

* Make many of the internal stats for each port visible to the player - TBD future version

* Add medicine items which are an expendable item needed for healing injured crew, lacking medicine will put a significant penalty on chance of healing injured crew - Not added yet, but will arrive in 0.8.19

* Make lumber item an expendable item needed for all ship repairs, lacking lumber will put a significant penalty on all repair efforts - Not added yet, but will arrive in 0.8.19

* Adjust the position of cannon cameras to reduce view obstructions - Not added yet, but will arrive in either 0.8.19 or 0.8.20

* Add new "auto" crew check box, which automatically allocates crew based on a quick crew allocation selected.  This will be optional, and automatically disabled if the player makes any manual crew adjustments - TBD future version

* Add multiple custom quick crew options, where the player sets their own crew role weights, and can quickly switch to them.  - TBD future version

* Add a UI while at sea where you can view the same information as in the Ship Maintenance window at port - TBD future version

* Reorganize the UI in the bottom left of the screen, so all 3 tabs of information are always visible, and remove the cargo from there (since it will be in the new ship maintenance like window) - TBD future version

* Add market related information about cities to the Route Planner - TBD future version

There's a bunch other other really good ideas I'm looking into too, but the above is a good list to commit to right now.  Thanks a lot for any help and suggestions!

Added Market Orders Feature

 But there is a problem....  

So now when you open a city's market, and navigate to any subcategory of items, the button at the top right will become active which allows you to create a market order.  The market order will either be a buy or a sell order depending on which view of the market you are looking at.  This part works fine.  Previously you could only buy/sell to existing orders, which were all either default orders or orders created by the city's supply/demand system.  

Unfortunately there was a serious design oversight in that you cannot actually create market orders for items which don't already have an existing order on the market for that same subcategory of items.  This oversight wasn't noticed until testing.  

So I decided to ship the current design as is, and for the next release there will be a new interface added to correct this issue.  

Additionally in 0.8.18, there were minor improvements to logging, performance, the music volume now is faster to respond to updates, and the Made With Unity logo has been added to the opening splash screen.  

One big improvement for me though is bug reports are now stored in their own dedicated log file.  When initially added, they were just logged with the regular log files, which can result in them getting lost in a sea of log entries unless specifically searching for them.  The way the regular logging system works is each day when the server cluster restarts, all existing logs copied to the archive and then wiped.  This makes it a pain to search for bug reports, as I have to go through the archive.  Now the dedicated bug report log keeps them all in one place, and they are exempt from the wiping.  

Steam Store page now up

The Steam Store page has now been approved and is up.  Add to your wishlist!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1061530/Broadside_Perilous_Waters/

New Screenshots

Route Planner

Added to 0.8.13 is the new Route Planner and Compass.  The Route Planner is accessible by a button in the upper right of the screen.  When open it shows a globe and your position, as well as the position of all other members in your squadron (squadron coming in 0.8.14).  You can then place waypoints on the globe to plan your navigation. 

This ties in with the new Compass feature.  The compass appears at the top of the screen, and not only shows cardinal directions, but also the next waypoint in your route, even if the next waypoint is located in a different zone.  The next waypoint also appears on the minimap when within range.  When you near a waypoint you'll be notified it has been reached, and the Compass automatically displays the next waypoint in your route. 

When the missions system is added (quests), it will integrate with the Route Planner, showing any mission destination. 

Food & Water

So in the last build the City Window has been entirely reworked.  It is now split between multiple windows, and makes a bit more sense.

Current development is on adding the food and water consumption feature.  Meals Ready to Eat and Water have been available items for a long time, are sold at every port, and you even start the game with some, but the crew currently don't use them.  In 0.8.12 the crew will need them though.

How this is expected to work, is while your ship is not in range of a port your crew will consume these food and water items at a rate of 1 ever 5 minutes for each 5 crew, rounded up.  So 5 crew will consume 1 food and 1 water, 6 crew will consume 2, 11 crew 3, etc.  When you are in range of a port this consumption is suspended (imagine the crew are going to shore and eating there, for example).

If you run out of either and the 5 minutes are up, a number of your crew will be injured.  As normal, your medical crew can treat them, but some of them may still die.  They are injured the same as injured crew from combat.

This will mean if you run out of supplies on a long voyage, you can run into some significant trouble.

When the Flotilla feature is eventually added, those ships will also consume the same supplies. 

Bug Reporting

The major feature being added to 0.8.10 is the ability to directly send bug reports while in the game.  To do so you click Menu then the Report Bug button.  This will be the most direct way of reporting an issue with the game. 

You'll be asked to explain the issue, such as a description and steps to reproduce.  Please be as descriptive as possible, as that will increase the likelihood the problem can be found and fixed.  If you don't know some of the information, that is fine too. 

Providing a Contact Email address is optional.  You probably won't be contacted, but it can be helpful if I have some questions about what you're reporting (such as if I'm unable to reproduce the reported problem).  Your contact email won't be used for any other purpose.  Yes we already ask for your email address when creating the account, but we don't want to contact you at that address for any reason other than related to your account, and many people sign up for games on email addresses they don't actually check that often. 

In addition there will be some other minor improvements, such as a bug fix for the recent resource gathering feature which prevented you from clicking on the same resource a second time, replacing the Sailing Quick Crew Button with a Gathering one, and some other minor performance improvements mostly on the server side. 

In the Future

The next major feature work is expected to be on the main City window.  I've gotten lots of complaints that it is unintuitive since it was added, and it has been planned to be replaced.  It will be broken up into several different windows.  There will be a window with primarily your city storage, one for outfitting your ship, one for managing all ships at the dock, and the Market window will be separated from all of them so you can move the Market window around freely. 

This will make the buttons on these windows make more sense, and free up some real estate for some new feature work coming later, specifically adding the option to change ship skins, finally name your ships (the feature is implemented everywhere for years except actually assigning the name doesn't currently work), some functionality specific to a new Missions feature (quests basically) where you'll carry specific people or items that are unique to that Mission.  Another similar feature I want to add is adding Lieutenants to your ships.  These will basically provide different bonuses to your ship, which increase with experience. 

After that I want to finally add the Trade Company feature, and expand the territory covered by the game.  The goal is to cover the West African coast and the North American east coast first, then expand out towards India and South America, and then finally to get to the starting positions for the 3 East Asian nations.  Last will be Australia and the west coast of the Americas (which I'm excited about as I live on the US west coast). 

Gunboat!

Currently adding the new Athens Class Gunboat!  Gunboats are small Corvette/Caravel sized vessels which have been fitted with a small number of over sized guns off a Ship of the Line.  The Athens Class, slightly smaller than a Baltimore, will be fitted two large cannons on each side, while still being fast and maneuverable like its small cousins.

The purpose of a Gunboat is to challenge much larger vessels with small relatively inexpensive craft.  Ideal when used in swarm tactics or augmenting additional firepower to a light fleet.  The Athens Class makes possible a fast moving fleet of small ships able to take on Ships of the Line and large Frigates.

The biggest vulnerability of the Athens Class is they are no more resistant to incoming ordinance than other ships of their size.  Use its small size and nimble nature to avoid shots rather than going toe to toe exchanging fire with large ships.  A lucky shot from a large ship may spell the end otherwise.  Fortunately they are very inexpensive compared to the large ships they are meant to take on.

Additionally coming in 0.8.9, already implemented is the new Christopher Class Heavy Cog.  This new ship is ideal for beginning captains, as it is an improvement over the Bremen Class Cog in practically every way, is pretty inexpensive, and has low skill requirements.

Fishing

Finally got around to adding the fishing mechanic.  Fish appear as a natural resource, and are depicted on the minimap as a turquoise circle.  When you approach the fish they can be seen swimming around in the water.

To collect the fish you go to the top right Resources tab and give them a click (same place you click on item drops).  This will open the Gathering window, which will tell you how many fish are available to gather.  Click on the Gather button to start catching the fish.  Make sure you assign crew to the Gathering role in the lower left Crew tab, or you won't catch any fish.  You're reminded of this in the instructions on the Gathering window. There will not be a quick crew button for assigning crew to the Gathering role, so you'll have to manually assign them.  EDIT: After testing of the feature on the live server since its release, it was decided to replace the Sailing Quick Crew button with a Gathering Quick Crew button for 0.8.10.

As you catch fish you'll get an event alert with how many you caught (an event alert is the kind of message you see when you're hit with a cannonball), and you'll see them appear in your cargo hold assuming you have enough space available.  Once all the fish have been caught the resource will disappear.  Pretty simple.  You're then free to sell them at markets, and eventually you'll be able to craft them into fish meat or other products.

To start with there will be Salmon and Great White Shark spawns.  More will be coming later.  This will all come in 0.8.8 which will be pushed to Steam in the next few days.  In addition 0.8.8 comes with some minor bug fixes, a rebalance to the Stone Cannonballs, and all new characters immediately have the skills to sail at least a Latina Class Caravel.

Edit: Also adding Bass fish spawns at launch now.  In addition, the Fishing and Advanced Fishing skills now apply a 10% speed boost to catching fish per level.  Broadopedia has been updated to state this.

Fire!

Ship Fire Mechanic

For 0.8.7 I'm now almost done with implementing the ship fire mechanic.  Primarily fires are started by shooting ships with the Heated Shot ammunition type, which was added in the current 0.8.6 build.  Similar to creating a leak on impact or injuring crew, the chance of creating a fire is based on the stats of the ammunition fired.  Larger heated shot have a higher chance of causing a fire, but even the smallest has a pretty good chance.  Some other ammunition types also have a very small chance of starting a fire as well.

A ship can have up to 3 fires at the same time.  A fire at the bow, midship, or the stern.  To fight fires you assign crew to the firefighting role, which functions similarly to the other damage control roles.  work is applied to fighting a fire every few seconds automatically.  Similar to fixing leaks, your crew focuses on fighting 1 fire at a time, working on them in the order that they appear.  Fire pumps can be installed in your ship's equipment slots to improve the efficiency of your crew fighting fires (competing currently with the bilge pump equipment, which is used for improving efficiency of pumping out water from leaks)

While leaks start at a specific size, where larger leaks take more crew effort to fix than smaller ones, fires instead all start off small.  Fires though grow in size, requiring more crew effort to put them out.  This means that while your crew is fighting the first fire, if a second fire is started it will grow in size unchecked until the first fire is put out.  You will find it is important to quickly put out fires. 

Fires randomly spawn additional damage to your ship, with worse damage the larger the fire.  At launch of the feature with 0.8.7 this will be limited to spawning new ship leaks, but it is planned to also destroy equipment and cannons installed in the ship when that feature is eventually implemented.  It is not yet decided if fires will result in crew injuries, but that is a possibility as well in the future.

Your ship will only have up to 1 fire for each of the 3 locations, so unlike leaks you can't get inundated with large numbers of fires (beyond the 3).  The player will be able to see the fire and smoke at the correct location of the fire, both for your own ship and other ships in the game.  These fire and smoke effects grow in size with the intensity and seriousness of the fire, so will be a good visual indicator.

So this should look cool and add a bit more depth to the combat in Broadside: Perilous Waters.  Have fun with it.

Lots of small improvements

The last few months have focused on nice to have and quality of life added features, bug fixes, some visual improvements, and overall polish of the game.  Going forward for the next few months will be more of the same.  Adding somewhat minor features which make the game a more rich environment, add to the complexity of the gameplay, polish menus and the combat system, and fix any important bugs. 

In the next release (0.8.6) currently there are fixes checked in for a major bug with ship flooding and a minor bug with the teleport feature.  More known bugs are being targeted for this release, as well as some additional feature development.  Specifically the bug where on ships with multiple side gun decks sometimes when you switch decks it switches back to the previous deck is the next to be worked on (this was looked at over a year ago and unfortunately not correctly fixed). 

As far as feature development, ship fires, selecting ammunition types at sea, and adding the Heated Shot ammunition type, are the next features being worked on.  When that is done additional resource types and resource gathering will be added, specifically fishing.  0.8.6 will be released at some point during these features being added. 

After that, focus will switch back to the City UI, which while I thought it was somewhat innovative, play testers have reported it to be an initially confusing interface.  I'm going to experiment with switching the listing and moving of items to a drag and drop interface and replace tables of items with icons of items. 

Additionally the ship outfitting and customization part of the City UI (basically the current left size of the window) will be broken out into its own window.  Naming of ships will finally be added (the back end has supported it for a long time, but the UI interface for it was not implemented correctly).  Some additional ship customization features will also be added, such as Lieutenants assigned to ships which can be trained and provide ship bonuses. 

This is all in preparation for the start of actually promoting the game, raising awareness, and a eventually a possible crowd funding campaign to support eventual marketing and finishing its development. 

Texturing

Some experimental texturing.  This is Norway, how does it look?

Improved Smoothness

A problem with Broadside: Perilous Waters has been the smoothness of the client side movement of objects, such as ships and cannonballs.  When I replaced Unet with the in house JCGNetwork system, I wrote a script called JCGNetworkTransform, which basically fills the role of Unet's NetworkTransform.  Essentially it syncs the position of an object from the server to the client. 

Now the NetworkTransform component from Unet was poorly documented, buggy, and overall didn't work very well.  JCGNetworkTransform was marginally better originally but would result in jittery motion especially for objects at high speed.  It has several modes, but the one I primarily used I called SmoothRB.  It would sync the current position, rotation, physics velocity, and angular velocity.  The client would apply the two physics values and apply the position and rotation over time between receiving new updates. 

In theory it seemed like it would work well, but the result was updates from the server don't come in at an exactly regular rate, and it was difficult to smoothly transition between the last position and the new position while the client was applying its own physics simulation.  I worked around this issue at the time by maxing out the send rate to match the server side 25 FPS.  But this just shrunk the problem instead of eliminating it, and created a new problem where the maximum number of players per server would be lower. 

Now I've written a new simple Interpolate mode.  It works by maintaining a queue of incoming position/rotation updates on the client and tries to keep to a specific target count in the queue.  Currently the queue target is just 1 so it is more responsive, but sometimes I may want to target a higher queue.  A higher queue count would reduce the chance that the client attempts to move the object but the next update hasn't yet arrives, at the expense of being further behind the position on the server. 

So now the server in these updates sends the current time, and the client can then interpolate between the last update and the current update being processed for the same amount of time the server took between those updates.  If the client gets behind replaying these updates it ever so slightly increases the speed it processes them in order to catch up over time, and if it gets ahead it either pauses or slightly slows down the movement.  All physics simulation on the client side is now disabled when in Interpolate mode. 

This has resulted in a much smoother movement of object movements, both ships and cannonballs, than before.  I'm still tuning the system, but it is looking good.  I've also increased the server side FPS and physics updates from 25 FPS to 32 FPS, and reduced the position update frequency from 25 FPS to 16 FPS.  The former was done to address an issue with very fast moving cannonballs from long guns flying through the smallest ships at close range without registering a hit.  Originally it was set so low to help with a CPU usage problem on the server side, but other improvements to address this over the past few months have allowed a little more head room to raise this back up again a bit. 

Hope you found this at all interesting.  This stuff will be included in 0.8.1. 

0.8.0 Releasing today!

Big update with 0.8.0!  All of Europe is now ready, the world is on fire with a war centered around France, the Ottoman Empire is hostile to most of Europe, and there are now two Galley class ships which can use oars to go directly into the wind!

Very excited, as the game is coming along quite nicely. 

Adding Galley Classes

The next release will be 0.8.0, and with it will come the Galley.  This is a type of ship with an alternative form of propulsion, specifically oar power.  All galley type ships will have sails, but sail power is not the primary means of moving most of these ships.  You'll be able to get to high speeds, even directly into the wind, using oars. 

These ships will have very large crew compliments, and relatively small cargo.  When food/water becomes required to feed your crew this will make them not ideal for long journeys.  What they are ideal for are fast attacks near coastlines, especially inside inland seas.  Their large crews will also help when the boarding mechanic is eventually added to the game.