Battle HUD

When a battle starts, the cluttered menus of port and open world drop away and the screen goes quiet on purpose — the designers want your attention on the fight, not on hunting through windows. What’s left is a tight HUD tucked into the corners: your ship’s condition top-left, your target top-right, a clock in the middle, and a couple of maps and lists you call up as needed. A few tools have no on-screen button at all and live only on the keyboard. This page explains how to read all of it; the tactics it informs — aiming, the damage model, boarding — are in the combat section.

Your ship’s status

Top-left is the most important panel on the screen: the live state of your own ship. Your hull is protected on four sides — each side’s planking has its own life bar — with the ship’s structure shown between them, and the bow and stern planking displayed as well. The structure is the ship’s real health: planking can be battered away, but you sink when a side has been breached and the structure behind it is gone. Reading this panel tells you where you’re being hurt and whether you can afford to keep that side toward the enemy.

Two more things sit here. Leaks show as markers, and the red ones are below the waterline — those are the dangerous ones, because flooding can sink you on its own even if your planking and structure are holding. And the panel shows how many of your guns are still in action; lose some and a hull repair brings them back. The mechanics of armour, leaks and repairs are covered in Ship Protection & Repairs.

Damage & shock icons

Below the main status, a row of icons flags special trouble. A damaged system shows yellow and a destroyed one shows red, and they cover the things that can cripple you independently of your hull: a damaged or wrecked rudder (you can’t steer well), your pump (you can’t fight flooding), and magazine damage. Then there are the shocks — short, temporary states where something stops working: crew shock (the crew freezes for a few seconds), reload shock (the guns stop reloading), rigging shock (you can’t change sail), and fire, the worst, which can spread to an explosion. Learning these icons at a glance is what lets you react — a rudder hit means break off, a fire means fight it now.

Crew assignment

Your crew is one pool split across sailing, gunnery, survival and boarding, and the HUD shows where they are. The key idea is that it’s a trade-off: there are only so many hands, and pushing them toward one job pulls them off another. Sailing is the baseline; turning other tasks off frees crew back to the sails. Gunnery isn’t a protected job, so you can pull crew off the guns when you need speed or damage control. Survival ramps up automatically when you take fire or start flooding — and turning it off deliberately is how a captain scuttles a ship rather than let it be captured. Boarding draws crew from the other jobs to build up your boarding preparation before you commit. The full art of juggling them is in Crew Management; here, just know the readout shows your current split and therefore what you’ve given up.

The target panel

Top-right is the panel for the other ship — whichever one you’re looking at or aiming toward. It follows your camera and sight, switching from ship to ship as you turn, and the name at the top is colour-coded: red for an enemy, white for a friend. It mirrors much of your own status — the four sides, structure, bow and stern — and adds a few things that tell you how dangerous that ship is right now: how many guns it has loaded on each side, its sail state, its crew, and the same damage and shock icons. A target with both broadsides loaded is a ship to respect; one mid-reload is a window to take it.

Mini-map & battle map

Two maps serve different purposes. The always-on mini-map shows your immediate surroundings for quick situational awareness — friendly ships in white, your own ship filled white, enemies in red (the colours can be changed for colour-blindness in settings). The battle map is the bigger tactical picture: not the Caribbean chart, but a detailed layout of every ship’s position and state within this instance. A Details option adds small bars for each ship’s hull, sails and crew, and clicking a ship shows its full status. If you have fleet ships, the battle map is also where you command them — click one and you can order it to follow, stop, retreat, aim for the hull, demast, fire freely, or hold fire. Use the mini-map to stay alive moment to moment and the battle map to plan the next minute.

Timer & leaving a battle

Top-center are two lines that are always present. One is the battle timer, counting down the maximum time the instance can run. The other is your leave status, which reads as cannot-leave, cannot-leave-yet with a countdown, or can-leave. You generally can’t simply quit a fight on demand — you have to disengage cleanly, breaking contact for a stretch before the game lets you sail out, which is what that countdown is tracking. And at the very top, after you fire, a broadside result line reports what that volley did — how much hit the hull, how much tore sails, how many of the enemy crew it put down — useful feedback for whether your ammo and aim are working. When and how you can disengage ties into Types of Battles.

The player list

Calling up the player list shows everyone in the battle and how they’re doing: each player’s state — still fighting, sunk, captured or escaped — along with the kills and assists they’ve earned. Along the bottom it totals the remaining Battle Rating on each side, which is the quickest read on who’s actually winning: BR is the measure of fighting strength still afloat, so watching one side’s total fall tells you the fight is turning even before the last ship goes down.