Gunnery & Aiming

Sailing gets you into the fight; gunnery is how you win it. A frigate that handles beautifully will still lose to one that picks the right ammunition, waits for the enemy hull to square up, and lands one heavy broadside on the waterline. The golden rule of Naval Action gunnery is exactly that: one good volley beats two bad ones. This page is how you make your volleys count. If your ship won’t go where you point it yet, read Manual Sailing first — aiming a broadside is half steering the hull that carries it.

The aiming view

In open battle your guns won’t fire from the normal sailing camera. To aim, look toward the side you want to shoot from and right-click: the camera drops into the aiming view, sighting down that battery. Right-click again to return to the normal view and keep your eyes on the wider fight. You will spend a battle flicking between the two.

In the aiming view, two things on screen do all the work:

• The dispersion area — a shaded oval showing where your shot will actually scatter. Guns are not laser-accurate; each one falls somewhere inside that spread, and the oval grows with range. Close the distance and the oval tightens until nearly every ball finds the hull.
• The elevation bar — a small red marker showing how high the guns are laid. Move your aim up and the shot climbs into the rigging and upper hull; bring it down and it walks toward the waterline. Where you put that bar is the whole difference between tearing sails and opening leaks.

Choosing a battery and loading it

Your guns are grouped into four batteries, each selected with a number key:

• [1] — the port (left) broadside
• [2] — the starboard (right) broadside
• [3] — the stern chasers (rear-facing guns)
• [4] — the bow chasers (forward-facing guns)

Pick a battery, then press an ammunition key to load it. So to put grape into the starboard broadside you press [2] then [3]. The point of selecting batteries separately is that you can load each one differently — chain in the bow chasers for a runner ahead of you, ball in the broadside for whoever comes alongside.

Loading takes time, and a half-loaded gun fires nothing. Decide your ammunition before you need it, not when the enemy is already in your sights; switching ammo mid-reload throws away the shells already going down the barrels. Keep cold blood, as the old guides put it.

Ammunition types

Five kinds of shot, each loaded with the keys [1]–[5] after you select a battery. What you load decides what your broadside does:

• [1] Ball (round shot) — the default. Solid iron that damages hull and masts and does a little to sails and crew. This is what your guns carry at the start of a fight and what they fall back to when fancier ammunition runs out. When in doubt, ball.
• [2] Chain — slashes through rigging and sails to slow the enemy down. Best fired when his sails are spread broadside to you — a single chain can cut several sails at once — but its range is short, so close in before you loose it.
• [3] Grape — a cloud of small shot that shreds crew. It only bites once that side’s armour is thin or already gone, and its range is very short, so it is a knife-fight ammunition: hull the enemy down first, then rake him with grape up close.
• [4] Double shot — two balls per gun for extra hull damage at short range. The heavier load leaves the muzzle slower, so penetration drops and shots bounce more easily off armour — strictly a close-range tool.
• [5] Double charge — extra powder for roughly 20% more penetration, at a slight cost to raw damage. It is the answer to thick-sided, “tanky” ships and the best ammunition for knocking masts down. Short range only.

Firing: tracking shots, broadsides, convergence

Once you are in the aiming view with loaded guns, you have two ways to fire:

• Tracking shot — [Spacebar] fires one gun at a time. Use it to range the target: watch where the single splash lands and adjust your elevation before you commit. It is also how you pick off a precise target gun by gun.
• Full broadside — left-click fires the whole battery at once. This is your knockout punch — the concentrated volley you have been setting up.

Two settings shape how that broadside lands. Convergence, cycled with [R], sets the distance at which your guns’ aim crosses:

• 100 m and 250 m — the guns angle inward to concentrate on a point that far away. Match it to your actual range and the whole broadside lands in one spot.
• Water — the guns converge at whatever distance your elevation bar is set to, letting you walk the convergence point in and out by aim alone.
• Parallel — the guns fire straight out, never crossing. Useful when you are very close and right alongside, so converging would waste shots past the target.

Firing order, cycled with [V], sets the sequence the guns go off in — from the bow back, from the stern forward, or in random order. Firing bow-to-stern or stern-to-forward lets you walk the fall of shot along a target as it passes; random spreads the timing.

Where to aim on the enemy

The angle you catch the enemy at matters as much as the ammunition. The same broadside can devastate a ship or splash harmlessly into the sea depending on where it lands:

• Side-on (broadside to broadside) — when the enemy hull is square to your guns, almost every ball strikes planking and drives damage into the hull. This is the bread-and-butter killing shot.
• Raking (across bow or stern) — firing down the length of the ship. A rake butchers crew, dismounts cannons, and can punch straight into the ship’s internal structure without having to grind through the side armour first. It is the great equaliser when you are in the smaller ship — cross an enemy’s stern and a single rake can decide the fight.
• Hull angled at 45° — the worst shot you can take. Balls glance off the sloped armour and bury themselves in the water. Hold your fire and wait for the hull to square up rather than waste a loaded broadside.

And elevation decides what your hits do once they land:

• Aim high on the hull to kill crew and chew up the upper works, for less damage to the hull itself.
• Aim at the waterline to open leaks. Enough leaks will sink a ship outright, even one whose armour and structure are otherwise intact — flooding does the job the guns couldn’t.
• Aim for the masts — usually with double charge or chain — to dismast him and take away his speed and the wind that drives it.

Picking the moment

Patience is a weapon. Spreading constant fire at a target keeps your guns empty when the good shot finally appears; a captain who waits, loaded, for the enemy to square up will out-damage one who fires at every fleeting angle. Hold for the volley that counts.

How you apply that depends on which way the fight is running:

• If you are chasing a fleeing ship, you have to land damage before the battle timer lets him escape. Put ball into his stern, or — once you are close enough to read his name — chain into his sails to slow him so you can close the rest of the way.
• If you are running, there is no shame in breaking off. Don’t fire if a quiet timer is about to set you free — every shot you take can reset the clock that keeps you trapped. If you are hit and the timer resets anyway, answer with chain into his topmasts and sails to take his speed and widen the gap.

Managing the guns mid-fight

Sometimes you want only part of your armament firing. If your decks carry different guns — long guns below, carronades above — their ranges differ, and at long range the carronades only waste shot. You can shut individual decks down:

• [F1]–[F4] toggle each deck of the active broadside on or off, top deck downward. A deck switched off finishes loading but holds its fire until you switch it back on — handy for saving scarce ammunition or firing only the guns that can actually reach.
• [F5] pulls the crew off the entire broadside. The guns already loaded can still fire, but they won’t reload — freeing those hands for sailing, repairs, or boarding.

That last point is the real constraint on your gunnery: guns need crew to load them. Gunnery is one of the crew focuses (managed with [7]), competing with sailing, survival, and boarding for the hands you have. Run short on the gunnery focus and your broadsides reload slowly and partially — you fire seven guns where you wanted twenty. Balancing crew across those jobs is its own skill; see Crew Management.

Focus fire in a group

When you fight alongside clanmates, the single biggest force-multiplier costs nothing: everyone shoots the same target. Three ships each hammering a different enemy spread their damage thin and sink no one; the same three concentrating on one hull put it under in a fraction of the time, then move to the next. Call a target, sink it together, repeat. A divided broadside is a wasted one.