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° usually throws your broadside into the sea. Angling is not absolute protection, though: at point-blank range guns bite through steeper angles than 45°, by a margin that depends on the gun.
• 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.

How thick a target actually is

The August 2026 update put fixed side-armour thicknesses on the rates, which gives you something solid to reason from rather than a vague sense that bigger ships are tougher:

Note how gentle the slope is. A first rate is not four times the wall a sixth rate is — it is under a third thicker. The enormous practical gap between shooting at a Lynx and shooting at a Victory comes from her guns, her crew and how much punishment she can absorb, not from armour you cannot get through. Woods and armour-thickness modules move these figures; the base is what the rate gives you.

The three ranges that matter

Penetration now leans much harder on distance, and the model is built around three named thresholds rather than one smooth curve. For any given gun:

• Maximum effective range — the farthest you can still get through a plain target: no armour modules fitted, no angle held.
• Medium threshold — where you can still get through a target that has either three blue armour-thickness modules or a 45° angle. One or the other.
• Close range — where you can get through a target that has both: three blue armour modules and a 45° angle.

So a modded, well-angled ship doesn’t become invulnerable — she pulls the range at which you can hurt her a long way in, and the answer is to close rather than to keep firing hopefully from where you are. And there is a floor to how much angling saves anyone: at point-blank, guns bite through angles steeper than 45°, by up to another ten degrees depending on the gun.

The gaps between those thresholds are wide. Taking the 42-pounders as the developers’ worked example, as of the August 2026 build: long guns run out to about 1,500 m plain, 950 m against one defence, 400 m against both; medium guns 900 / 550 / 300 m; carronades 550 / 425 / 300 m. Every calibre has its own set of three, and they are tuning values that will move — but the shape holds. Notice that carronades lose the least going from plain to defended: they were already a knife-fight gun, so armour and angle take less away from them than from a long gun trying to work at distance.

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. It is most devastating fired across his sails when they are spread broadside to you. Chain now carries at any range: the August 2026 update reworked how its damage falls off with distance, deliberately so that a long-gun ship can strip a chaser’s rig from beyond his reach. That single change put kiting back on the table — see Gunnery & Aiming.
• 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, on the order of a fifth more as of the 2026 build. The doubled load leaves the muzzle slower, so penetration drops and your accuracy suffers, and the shots bounce more easily — only worth it when you are close and his armour is already soft.
• Double charge — extra powder that drives the ball harder: more penetration (around a fifth more, as of the 2026 build), a touch more range, and tighter accuracy, at a slight cost to raw damage. It is the answer to thick, “tanky” hulls and the best ammunition for knocking masts down — and it reaches farther than double shot, so you can work the masts from distance rather than only up close.

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.

The gun families, and what each is for

Ammunition is one choice; the guns that fire it are another, made in port and much harder to undo. The families divide by how they trade range against weight of shot:

• Medium guns — the balanced default. Respectable range, solid damage, and after the August 2026 rebalance the strongest raw output of the lot for their weight. If you have no particular plan, these are the guns to have.
• Long guns — reach. They keep their penetration far beyond where a medium gun has given up, which is what makes them the tool for fighting at a distance you choose. They give up damage per minute to get it, though the same update narrowed that gap.
• Carronades — a heavy ball thrown a short way. Brutal inside their range and close to useless outside it. The gun of a captain who intends to be alongside.
• The premium types — Navy Long Guns, Blomefields, Congreves, Obusiers. Each buys an edge in one of the directions above for a higher price. Navy Longs behave as long guns with better numbers; Obusiers are carronade-natured.

The August 2026 update moved all of them, and not evenly. Every family gained damage output, but the mediums, carronades and the premium types gained roughly twice what the long guns did — so long guns did not become better all-rounders, they stayed specialists whose speciality is reach.

Two changes matter more than the raw numbers. Long guns became genuine rig-killers: their damage to masts and sails rose sharply, to about what a medium gun does, so a long-gun ship no longer has to close to take a rig apart — and with chain now carrying at any range, that is the pairing that makes kiting work. Going the other way, Congreves lost rig damage, so if you were using them to dismast, that is no longer what they are for.

Long and Navy Long guns also had their spread reshaped rather than simply tightened: they now scatter a little wider from side to side but noticeably less in elevation. That is a real change in what they are good at. A tighter vertical spread means more shots land where you aimed in height — on the waterline, or up in the rigging — while the wider horizontal spread makes it harder to walk a concentrated group of hits along one stretch of planking. Long guns got better at the two shots that decide fights and slightly worse at grinding down a single side.

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:

How likely a hit is to start one is not fixed. Since the August 2026 update a ship in poor condition catches fire more readily than a fresh one — the more her armour has been beaten in, the higher the chance each shot sets something burning. So fire is less a random misfortune than a hazard that grows as a fight goes badly, and a ship you have already worked over is the one most likely to light up.

• 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 — and since the August 2026 update long guns are as good at the job as mediums, while Congreves are worse at it than they were. 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.

The August 2026 update tied those last two together in a way worth understanding, because it changes how fights end. Splinter damage now scales with the state of the hull it comes off: the more beaten-in a ship’s planking, the more men each hit kills. That closes a loop. Take hull damage and you lose crew faster; lose crew and you sail, shoot and repair worse; do all three worse and you take more hull damage still. A ship that falls behind in a duel now falls behind at an accelerating rate, which is why the old advice to break off early is better advice than it used to be — and why finishing a wounded enemy is easier than the damage bars suggest.

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.

Criticals that bite into a ship’s structure — the frame under the planking — used to land with a heavy multiplier behind them. The August 2026 update cut that multiplier back appreciably, so a lucky structural critical no longer takes the chunk out of a hull it once did. Fights are decided a little more by sustained accurate fire and a little less by a fortunate hit.