Chasing and sinking other ships (from compasses) is currently clunky at
best. You need to spam 'compass' like there's no tomorrow, get quite
close, scan for the name and manage to pursue or initiate combat with
the ship somehow before it is out of range again. The ship names are
long and hard to type as are the basic commands.

The hardest part is obtaining the initial name and you basically have to
trigger 'compass' from ship movement and either 'ship scan 10' from a
small enough distance or grab the ship name from scan with a trigger so
you can pursue fast enough. Historically there have been some
improvements towards fixing things pretty much everyone has to trigger
in the MUD side, which IMO should be the way to go in general (jester's
trivia -> party prots, protter trigs -> show effects, round_pss and
round_scan, round numbers etc).

As a simple improvement to this, I propose there should be a compass
holder of some sort on the helm where you can insert the compass you are
chasing and its information (the 'compass' command) would be shown after
each ship round of movement automatically by the mud instead of having
to rely on triggers.

Also if it's not too flowery, the 'ship scan x' command could also
somehow enumerate the ships seen so you could just type in 'pursue 1'
instead of 'pursue draendalarslovechild666'. These "aliases" would stay
in effect until the next 'ship scan'.

TBH there are quite a few other usability problems with ships as well
but I think these two are by far the two worst offenders.


Woocca