How do you play POTCO?

[Edward Edgemenace]

Originally Posted by Sven Niscadae

As far as I know, my better half still uses the arrow keys, clicks on the weapon buttons to do special abilities, and doesn't use the right-click mouse look at all. She actually does sail looking at the rear end of the ship all of the time. Not sure how she does it, but I know it'd drive me bonkers.

Your better half, may be on to something you can learn from. I truly hate the mouse, as a human/computer interface. So, I avoided it as long as possible...the first time I actually needed to pan the view while sailing, was in the boss battle (to see when the first three bridges fire.) All other sailing in the game (including SvS) can be done using the compass only. Better, in fact, since the compass is the only thing that accurately reflects what the game server sees. But the compass view only works, if the "standard" view is set to the "aft view" of the ship. If you pan the camera, the compass gets thwacked with the view, so you no longer know if you can hit, nor can you estimate if your gunners still have a shot. The down-side in SvS, is that you can sometimes miss when your opponent starts their open fire or take cover. For the relatively few opponents where that matters, I have sometimes panned the camera...always pressing the up arrow as soon as I can, to re-orient the compass and the main view. When the view is normalized, I can very accurately tell what enemies on compass are in range, for broadsides, as well as my gunners. (Different for each ship type, of course, but only slightly.)