Ammo & Damage Model

Gunnery & Aiming is how you put a broadside on target. This page is what the broadside does once it lands — why one shot punches a hole and the next bounces off harmlessly, what each kind of ammunition is for, and the three different ways a ship actually dies. Understand the damage model and your ammunition choices stop being guesswork: you will know, before you fire, whether you are about to sink the enemy, slow him, or waste a reload.

How a ship is built to be broken

A ship’s hull is not one health bar. It is layers, and where you damage them decides whether the ship floats:

• Side planking — the outer armour, with a separate health bar for the port side, the starboard side, and the bow and stern. This is the wall your shot has to get through first.
• Structure — the ship’s internal skeleton, sitting between the two sides. You generally can’t hurt it until the planking in front of it is beaten down — or until you fire past the planking by raking the bow or stern.

A ship sinks from gunfire when one side’s planking is gone and the structure behind it is destroyed. So the standard kill is a grind: hammer one broadside’s worth of planking off, then pour shot through the breach into the structure. The status panel shows all of this — the side life bars with the structure between them, plus bow and stern — and you can read the same picture on the enemy by pointing your camera or spyglass at him. Watch which of his sides is the weakest and keep working it.

Penetration, armour, and bounces

Every gun fires with a penetration value, and every stretch of hull has an armour thickness. If the shot’s penetration beats the thickness it bites into the planking and does damage; if it doesn’t, the ball simply bounces off and is wasted. Three things move that contest:

• Range. Penetration falls the farther a ball flies. Long guns hold their punch out to great distances; carronades hit ferociously up close but lose penetration fast and are near-useless at long range. Match your gun to your range — or close the distance to bring your penetration back up.
• Hull angle. A hull turned toward your guns presents thicker effective armour, so shots glance off. This is the single most important defensive trick in the game — and it works against you too, which is why firing on an enemy angled at 45° throws your broadside into the sea.
• Ammunition. Double charge adds penetration; double shot removes it (see below). The wood a ship is built from also changes how thick and how resistant its planking is.

The five shot types, and what they break

Each ammunition is a different tool. The wrong one bounces, splashes, or chips at the wrong layer; the right one ends fights.

• Ball (round shot) — the all-purpose default. Solid iron that drives into hull and masts, with only minor effect on sails and crew. It keeps its penetration at range better than anything else, so it is your bread-and-butter from first contact to the killing blow.
• Chain — anti-rigging. Each length of chain can tear through several sails at once, bleeding the enemy’s speed away. Its range is short, and it is most devastating fired across his sails when they are spread broadside to you.
• Grape — anti-crew. A spray of small shot that slaughters sailors, but only once that side’s armour is thin or gone — against fresh planking it does little. Very short range; a finishing-and-boarding ammunition, not an opener.
• Double shot — two balls per gun for heavier hull damage at close range. The doubled load leaves the muzzle slower, so penetration drops and the shots bounce more easily — only worth it when you are close and his armour is already soft.
• Double charge — extra powder for roughly 20% more penetration at a slight cost to damage. It is the answer to thick, “tanky” hulls and the best ammunition for knocking masts down. Short range only.

Remember the gun limits from Gunnery: carronades can’t load double shot or double charge, and the smallest 2-pounders fire ball alone. Because reloading is slow, you commit to an ammunition before the moment arrives, not during it.

Hull damage and leaks

Where on the hull a ball lands changes what it ruins. The same broadside can grind armour, butcher crew, or sink a ship outright depending on elevation and angle:

• Square-on, mid-hull — maximum planking and structure damage. This is how you grind a side down toward the sinking condition above.
• High on the hull — trades hull damage for crew kills and tears up the upper works.
• At the waterline — opens leaks.

Leaks are their own kill condition. Holes punched at or below the waterline let water flood in, and enough flooding will sink a ship whose planking and structure are still intact. On the status panel leaks below the surface show in red — those are the dangerous ones, actively taking on water. A ship riding low from flooding is fighting a second battle against the sea, and a captain who can’t get the pumps ahead of the water loses it. (How to fight back — heeling the wounded side clear of the water, slowing down, repairing pumps — lives in Ship Protection & Repairs.)

Fire and explosions

Fire is the third way a ship dies, and the most dramatic. Hits can set a ship alight; once it is burning, part of the crew automatically drops everything to fight the flames. From there it goes one of two ways:

• If enough crew are firefighting and no fresh shots keep feeding it, the fire burns out after a while and the ship is saved.
• If the crew can’t keep up — or an enemy keeps hitting the burning ship to reignite it — the fire grows, chewing through structure and sails until it reaches fire shock: the entire crew is frozen, able only to steer, and the ship is moments from blowing up.

An explosion is not a tidy death: it damages every ship nearby, friend and foe alike. That cuts both ways. Pouring fire into a burning enemy who is well clear of his friends can tip him into the blast; but a burning enemy alongside you is a threat — pull away, drop to battle sails to protect your rig, and brace ([F10]) to limit how much the blast guts your crew. A desperate captain can even turn off survival to scuttle on purpose, exploding into whatever is close enough to hurt.

Masts, sails, and crew

Not every target is the hull. The “soft” systems decide mobility and tempo:

• Sails carry their own health, and a tattered rig is a slow rig. Chain is the specialist here, but ball degrades sails a little too. A slowed enemy can’t run, can’t hold his angle, and can’t dictate the range — which is why sail damage so often decides who controls the fight.
• Masts can be shot down entirely. Lose a mast and you lose the sail it carried and a chunk of speed; lose enough and you are a sitting target. Double charge and chain on the masts are the dismasting tools. Masts are also slow and conditional to repair, so a dismasting often sticks for the rest of the battle.
• Crew are attrition, and they bleed more easily than the old guides suggest. Grape, raking fire, and high broadsides are the dedicated crew-killers, but any hit that strikes planking now sends splinters into the crew — so a captain pounding your hull is thinning your sailors at the same time, whether he means to or not. Carronades and obusiers throw especially vicious splinters. And there is no longer any safety in a small crew: a ship’s company can be wiped out entirely by grape and splinter damage, where it once tailed off as numbers fell. Crew is what loads your guns, trims your sails, and fights your fires, so bleeding it slows everything the enemy does at once. How crew is divided across those jobs is covered in Crew Management.

Critical hits and shocks

Beyond the steady grind, individual hits can land a critical that briefly cripples a specific system — you will see these flagged on the ship status panel, on you and on the enemy:

• Rudder damaged or destroyed — steering goes sluggish or fails. A rudder-shot enemy can’t hold his angle; protect your own and you keep your manoeuvres.
• Pump damaged or destroyed — cripples his ability to clear flooding, which turns leaks from a nuisance into a death sentence.
• Magazine damage — a hit to the powder store, the kind of critical that can have catastrophic consequences.
• Crew shock — the crew freezes for a few seconds, doing nothing.
• Reload shock — the guns stop reloading for a few seconds. A well-timed heavy broadside can buy you a free volley while his guns are stunned.
• Rigging shock — sail settings lock for a few seconds, so he can’t adjust trim to escape or turn.

These windows are short, but a coordinated team can chain them — one ship’s broadside staggering the enemy’s reload or rigging while the others land the killing fire.