Wind & Points of Sail

Every ship in Naval Action runs on the wind and nothing else. How fast you move — and often whether you catch your prey or slip away from a hunter — comes down to one thing: the angle between your hull and the wind. Reading that angle is the first real skill of the age of sail, and the rest of the game gets easier once it becomes instinct.

The points of sail

A “point of sail” is simply your heading measured against the direction the wind is blowing from. Imagine the wind arriving from straight ahead and work your way around:

• The no-go zone (in irons). Pointed almost into the wind, your sails stop pulling. Linger here and you coast to a halt and begin drifting backward. Treat it as a wedge to steer around, never to push through.
• Close-hauled. As near the wind as your rig can hold while still driving forward. It is slow going and you slip sideways, but it is how you claw your way upwind.
• Beam reach. The wind comes across your side. Fast and stable for most hulls.
• Broad reach. The wind arrives over your quarter, behind the beam. For most warships this is the sweet spot — your quickest heading.
• Running. The wind dead astern. It feels like it should be fastest, but for a square-rigged ship it usually isn’t.

Reading your ship’s polar

Every hull has a different speed at every angle, and the game shows this as a polar diagram — think of it as a speedometer that changes with your heading. Veteran captains carry their ship’s polar in their head, so they always know which way to turn to gain on a chase or open distance from one.

Which way your ship leans depends on its rig:

• Square-rigged ships (brigs, frigates, ships of the line) are strongest off the wind — reaches and downwind.
• Fore-and-aft rigged ships (cutters, schooners, xebecs) point far higher into the wind and are quicker upwind.

Knowing which camp your ship belongs to tells you, before a shot is fired, whether you want to fight upwind or downwind.

Setting and trimming sail

Sail is set in steps — stop, slow, half, battle, full — and more canvas means more drive, though each extra sail adds a little less than the one before. A ship also needs time to gather speed, so think a few seconds ahead of where you are. Taking sail in again is slow, roughly twice as long as setting it, so when you need to shed speed in a hurry you usually leave the sail set and work the yards instead — angling them to spill the wind, or even to help swing the bow.

Turning through the wind: tacking and wearing

To reverse direction you have to cross the wind, and there are two ways to do it.

• Tacking swings your bow through the no-go zone. It is quick and costs little ground — but it is also where captains come to grief. Lose too much speed crossing the zone and you stall in irons, dead in the water and drifting astern. Fore-and-aft ships can often tack on the rudder alone if they carry enough speed in; square-riggers must throw the yards over to haul the bow around before their square sails bleed off the last of their way.
• Wearing turns the stern through the wind instead. It is a wider, slower arc that gives up more ground — but it never risks getting stuck. In a heavy square-rigger with no urgency, wearing is the safe choice.

Heel and leeway: the wind pushes sideways too

Not all of the wind’s force becomes forward motion. Some of it heels you over, leaning the masts; pile on too much sail with too little stability and a tender ship can roll dangerously far. Heel also tilts your guns — a help when you are reaching for a distant target up to windward, a hindrance when you are trying to strike something low and close to leeward.

The rest of that sideways push becomes leeway: your hull crabs slightly downwind, so your real track over the water sits a little below where your bow is pointed. Big, slow ships make the most leeway, and it bites hardest when you are beating upwind near a lee shore. The fix is simple — aim a touch higher into the wind than the course you actually want.

Using the wind against an enemy

Whoever holds the upwind side — the weather gage — holds the initiative: they decide when to close and when to break off, while the downwind ship can only react. That advantage is often won before the fighting starts, at the battle-entry wind gate, where the side you enter on sets your opening position. As a rough rule, when both ships are square-rigged the upwind captain has the edge; between two fore-and-aft ships it flips to the downwind one.

There is more to it once cannons, heel, and wind shadows come into play — see Battle Sails & Wind Shadows and Types of Battles.

Get the angles into your bones — where your ship is fastest, where it stalls, and which side of the wind you want — and every other skill in the game has firmer ground to stand on.