I’m not a sailor at all my I just demo’d this for my dad who is. He had similar feedback

I need to sit down and do a sailing mechanics audit to find a good balance between arcade/realism, I think a beam reach is supposed to be faster than downwind. But my angle of attacks could be more accurate especially for upwind sailing?

Here’s currently how tinywind does it if anyone’s curious:

https://tinywind.io/wiki/sailing#point-of-sail

Have a look at these [1] polar diagrams for tall sailing ships. The radial distance from the center is the theoretical boat speed and the angle is the direction that the wind is hitting the boat, with zero on the nose and 180 from the stern. Each plotted line is the boat speed for a given wind speed. They show how the square-rigged ships can't sail upwind any closer than 55 degrees or so and are fastest on a broad reach (wind from just back of the side). You can also see how longer boats are generally faster, but a smaller boat with triangle sails ("Bermuda rigged") could easily get away from a big square-rigged ship by heading more upwind.

[1] https://forum.zegluj.net/download/file.php?id=23628&mode=vie...

In irons should be a slightly negative number, since the wind drags the boat backwards at that point. Plus it will force the player to tack back and forth, which is a fun part of sailing. I bet A.I. can tell you the angle the sail ought to render at too (unless non-moving sail was part of the cartoon aesthetic)