Two questions re: ships

I have been playing the last few days and now that the game is officially released I have two questions. I wanted to wait until today in case there were last minute patches:

  1. What does &quotship weight&quot do? As far as I can tell it doesn’t affect ship speed. Does it do anything? If not, why is it included?

  2. There are patch notes saying things like &quotprize ship value increased&quot and notes about capturing ships. Apparently if you reduce the crew to 0 you can board and capture prize ships. However, current mechanics as far as I can tell actually make this impossible because you will destroy the enemy ship WAY before you reduce the crew near 0. IS this broken? Will it be fixed? I want to pirate ships so if its going to be fixed I will wait to play a bit.

It does affect ship speed, just not to a very noticeable extent. It’s easier to notice if you go straight from the default steamer to, say, the Dreadnought.

Just musing aloud, it might be possible to capture a ship currently if you had a decent deck gun, the weakest flensing gun you could get your hands on, as little Iron as possible, and a lot of patience. You’d use both guns to bring the ship’s hull to 50%, then you’d switch to the weak flensing gun only.

Anyway, if you look around the forum, we’ve had a few discussions about this. No official response yet, however.

Thanks. It doesn’t seem like you should have to deliberately gimp your Iron stat and choose the weakest gun possible to be able to capture ships. I hope they patch it.