About Man O' War: Corsair for Keyrock:
Sailing and Combat:
The devs make the distinction that this is a naval action game, not a naval simulation. As a result gameplay is simplified similar to how Freelancer did not have you manually adjust each maneuvering thruster to allow for space dogfights. WASD controls, with W unfurling sails and S gathering them back up - unless you are using oars or steam engines or treadmills or warpstone reactors or magic - sails can be set on half-mast and different ships are better or worse at catching favorable wind in their sails.
A red arrow helps you aim your cannons - right click to aim, mousewheel to adjust distance, left click to fire. Simple enough and it works. In this it is a bit simpler than Pirates! if I remember correctly, as you don't really adjust vertical only horizontal while aiming (though most experienced captain will keep in mind that cannon balls will not fly in a straight line and magically disappear off screen, and use this knowledge to hit the enemy ship just below the waterline).
Come up alongside an enemy ship and hit spacebar to board them. You can jump from one ship to the other, use melee and ranged weapons. Melee has a normal and a strong attack as well as a block (left click / hold left mouse button / right mouse button). To stop the melee from getting too crowded (and probably performance from dropping) only a specific number of combatants are spawned for each side at a time, with more crew members joining in to replace the fallen. Boarding and town raids are not ideal, but it works. I am known for boarding a lot - so while combat here is rather basic, it can't be all that bad . But melee combat, and actual walking in ports instead of having a menu screen with options, were a community request during Early Access, and added from scratch by the devs during the last half year or so. As such, early access players are positive;y biased when judging this system - how many devs add completely new gameplay to their game because players asked for it?
You can have up to six allied ships under your command, but not under your direct control - you can order them to attack specific targets, stay at long range, stay at short rage, board, flee etc, but you can't swap over to an allied ship and play as that.
Game modes:
The game has a Human Campaign, a Khorne Chaos Campaign, and a Custom Battle Skirmish mode.
The human campaign currently starts the player as an independent captain, though alternate national starts (Bretonnia, Empire and possibly others) are being worked on. You start at the port of Norden in the Sea of Claws, the captain of a "Corsair" (Bretonnian design - ship of the line). Difficulty level affects your starting gold and I think the cost of repairs. The game has some quests, but mostly it allows you to freely roam the Old World, from Kislev to Tilea, and do your thing. The various empires and city states will give quests and missions, and you can gain reputation with all of them. They will also fight each other, make peace with each other (more rarely).
Non-human races currently have no ports, though orcs will, if they control an area, build floating docks out of shipwrecks and flotsam.
In the human campaign you'll be fighting the factions you want to fight, do quests for the (human) factions you don't want to fight, trade, hunt sea monsters, hire allied ships (including elves and dwarves), and sail around.
The chaos campaign (currently only Khorne), has you leading a fleet of raiders, with the number of starting ships in your fleet depending on difficulty level. This is more of a survival mode. While the game does not prohibit you from trading (it does lock you out of questing for other factions), all ports are hostile, and your real aim is to raze as many ports, and sink as many enemy fleets as possible. Every success racks up favor with the chaos gods. Favor can be traded in at the shrine (fancy name for the favor trading in menu ), where you can petition (read exchange favor for) new crew, upgrades for your ship, and new ships for your fleet. Mind you, the Gods are fickle and every time you spend favor, the cost of things increases. Eventually you may have enough favor to attempt to ascend to daemonhood in the ashes of a razed port. Well, you have the choice to attempt this in every port you raze, but unless you have accumulated a ton of favor, the gods will probably kill you.
In the chaos campaign you plunder and pillage until you run out of favor with the dark gods.
The custom battles will most likely also include the planned multiplayer aspect. Here you decide on a point limit, then build a fleet of up to six ships, with upgrades, wizards etc, then battle it out with an opposing fleet(s). They are the only way to currently play all factions. They also allow you some freedom to try out things like my "hunt for red orktober" where I played with a single dwarven nautilus against an orc fleet - loads of fun.
Is it fun?
For me? Yes, absolutely. Yes, the graphics are not AAA, and yes, there still are bugs. I also understand that people who are really into sailing/naval games may want something more realistic. But I also did not play X3, but played Freelancer instead. I drove around Vice City, Steelport and even Defiance instead of some driving/racing game. What this game has to offer is all the good stuff that comes with the IP: a large world, strange, weird, magical, or outright wacky ships, wizards, sea monsters, and griffon riding knights dueling with wyvern riding orcs overhead.
I understand were some of the people who were disappointed with the game are coming from (somewhere over there apparently). The game needs some work, some improvements. But on the one hand I trust these devs more than any to work on those things, on the other the fun bits outweigh the problems for me tenfold.
"Melkathi, you are usually more excited about games!" Actually, I usually write these posts before I am into the triple digits of playtime. Here I just know pretty much all there is to know. For the past year the email address I mailed most frequent were the man o war devs for the bug reports Here is my EA steam review: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198007554934/recommended/344240/
Started on Expeditions: Viking Gameplay is good so far - combat is mostly like the old game, though so far the battlefields have been roomier. Haven't gotten far yet but liking it so far.