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Get rid of these god damn muskets already.

I have seen this around the forums in a couple places and really liked the idea and thought it should be floated here. Give the marines a use outside of boarding, have them be able to shoot from the deck of your ship at enemy ships and crew if you get within 50 meters or so. Maybe a new crew priority option to man extra muskets or swivel guns to give a bigger bonus. I think this would give a new depth to marines and boarding crew that would make for interesting dynamics.

Fellow Generals, between battles I was ordered by our President Lincoln to report to Washington for a special assignment of rifle analysis. He wants all his Generals to read and interpret and use the results in this topic. Long live the Union.

I've given this more than a little thought. My thoughts are predicated on two assumptions; that crew kills are determined by shot striking hit boxes designated for crew, and that crew hit boxes are flagged on or off depending on how men are distributed to tasks. If these assumptions are wrong this should still be adaptable. First, we need to add a few crew hit boxes into the rigging at fighting tops and various other bits of rigging, which are enabled when men are either sailing or set to boarding, to mark the location of either crew aloft in the rigging or marines in said fighting tops. Treacherous French sharpshooters will enjoy these cowardly postings, I am sure. Second, points around the ship need to be designated as musketry origins. Spots on the forecastle, quarterdeck, weather deck, possibly gun ports below, and our now-crewed fighting tops aloft. These musketry origins will have an orientation and a maximum angle from center. A musket on the gunwale may be oriented 90 degrees off the beam with a 90 degree maximum angle, creating a half-sphere of possible shots to starboard (90 degrees left plus 90 degrees right equal 180), but excluding firing to anything left of it. Meanwhile a musket in the fighting top may have a 0 orientation and a 180 degree maximum angle, allowing our sharpshooter to fire anywhere he pleases. Not all possible positions for a musket-firing crewman need be simulated, just a dozen or so for small ships, and perhaps as many as fifty or a hundred for a 1st rate. Next, we need to enable or disable the musket points based on if Boarding Prep is flagged as enabled or disabled. If a captain enables Boarding Prep, his crew rushes to their musket points and starts firing. Of course, marines are always in Boarding Prep, but unless boarding prep is enabled, they hold their fire. There is thus a new level of play in that you can tell your enemy has gone into boarding prep, and your enemy may attempt to surprise you by staying out of musket range until he's fully prepared to board. Speaking of which, we will only need to fire when in range. Until an enemy ship has closed to within X meters, the musket simulation idles. Fifty or a hundred meters from an enemy ship, the simulation moves to the next step. Within range and with crew active in boarding prep, the crew opens fire. We need to have points operating randomly to reduce the computational overhead of plotting every musket's reload and possible shots simultaneously. We also need to have musket points firing only when they have a possible target. To accomplish this, musket points are numbered for their ship, selected as a random number, and perform a distance check from their point to a crew hitbox on an enemy ship. Only distance on the X-Y plane is calculated for simplicity and to prevent the fighting tops from being too high aloft to fire. If a musket point is in range of enemy crew hitboxes, it proceeds to the next step. Otherwise the program returns to the random number generator to select another musket point. This process continues until a musket point responds as being within range of enemy crew hitboxes. In range of enemy crew hitboxes, the musket point performs a raycast to determine if the closest hitbox is inside of its field of fire (the orientation and maximum angle from earlier). This raycast ignores the various objects, including friendly ships or obstructions. It simply checks if the musket can point at the target. For fighting tops, this will be almost always true. For more restricted musket points along the sides of the ship, they may determine they are close enough to a ship, but that ship is on the wrong side of their field of fire. If the raycast determines the ​closest ​hitbox is out of its field, it then checks the farthest hitbox (within the range check of X meters). This second raycast will be useful if one enemy ship is closer than an enemy ship on the opposite side, allowing muskets on that opposite side to fire at the more distant enemy, rather than all musketry checks passing or failing on the closest enemy, or firing at the bow of a ship when the closer stern isn't in the field of fire, as might happen when your T is crossed. Should both raycast checks fail, the shot from that musket point is canceled, and moved back to the RNG to pick a new musket point. When a raycast is successful, the shot is fired. This is an individual musket ball able to kill one crewman, originating from musket point, and directed along the raycast to the center of the target crew hitbox. The individual musket ball is simply a raycast with added deviation to account for inaccuracy. Given a shot with say five degrees of inaccuracy, we have a chance of hitting gunwales, masts, crew hitboxes we didn't intend to fire on, or even friendly crew hitboxes. Plotting the actual shot will also give the proper advantage to a taller ship or a shot from the fighting tops, as shot falling down on the enemy deck has a much higher chance of hitting a crew hitbox than attempting to shoot through gun ports. All of these calculations occur server-side. Client side, clients are merely informed that they have lost a crewman and which musket point on the enemy ship should render a puff of smoke and a retort. The result is a robust simulation of musketry occurring where it belongs, the battle server, while server-to-client traffic is only marginally raised. There is no need to inform clients of any details of the shot, unless effects beyond gunsmoke are requested. Hearing musket balls patter against my hull may be nice, and watching little black dots fly is entertaining with grapeshot, but given the volume of fire I expect it would be expensive. Speaking of volume of fire; the rate of fire will be determined as a function of how many muskets your ship has, if you have enough boarding mode crew to fire all of those muskets, and what percentage of your crew is marines. Lets presume you have 100 crew, no marines, and 20 muskets. You open fire with boarding prep active. As crew move into boarding prep, the number of muskets in use increases until 20 crew are in boarding prep, when all muskets are now being used. Each musket fired by a crewman has a base firing rate of once every thirty seconds. Twenty muskets, firing once every thirty seconds, comes to 40 shots a minute, or one shot every 1. 5 seconds. The musket simulation attempts to fire a musket point every 1.5 seconds in this situation, graphically there is a puff of smoke every 1.5 seconds, and depending on the luck of the shot raycast, the enemy crew starts whittling down. Now lets say you have gold marines, and 50% of your crew is marines (IIRC). A marine can reload and fire a musket much faster than an untrained crewman, and gold marines almost certainly reload faster than grey marines. Accordingly the fire rate is increased by the marine crew percentage, 50% for gold, less for less expensive marines, but peaking at one shot every fifteen seconds per musket. This creates a blistering 80 shots a minute from the 20 muskets. But wait! The number of muskets has increased as well! We have to add the additional however many muskets to the rate of fire calculation. The fire bonus from your marine percentage will continue down to the last man as well; the simulation need not track how many marines are manning muskets to how many crew are manning muskets. It is presumed either the marines will be prioritized with the musket distribution, or the crew will have received some drill themselves if the captain had planned to perform boarding enough to invest in marines. However heavy casualties will still reduce the rate of fire as the total number of active muskets falls, or if muskets are lost under the bloodied bodies. So what is the result of all this? Going gunwale to gunwale and exchanging musket fire will now be a useful way to gauge the enemy's ability to repel your boarding, and make point-blank fighting much bloodier. No longer can you exchange broadsides into each other's hulls and coolly calculate who will win by who's losing armor faster. You will now be exposed to his fighting tops and muskets on the gun deck, and will suffer casualties among your weather deck gun crews and sailors. It is now very, very clear when someone has a gold marine boarding setup, if they leave their crew in active boarding prep mode. It may be desirable to not tip your hand by keeping boarding prep disabled while approaching and keep your marines from firing. A ship that hasn't fired its muskets either has no-one on hand to fire muskets because the captain intends to focus on gunnery, or has a marine build he intends to conceal. Once you begin firing muskets, you tip your hand as to your marine and musket levels and your enemy can react. There's a possibility for trickery in this mechanic. It is also possible for a ship disabling a gun side to use all their needless extra crew in Boarding Prep with Extra Muskets and Pistols, giving the appearance of having marines but still maintaining full manpower for gunnery and sailing otherwise. It is also possible to defend your Gros Ventre or other trade ship with your crew in boarding prep and firing muskets, and one of these ships with full musketry builds will be dangerous to pull alongside in a lower-hulled vessel. Barricades can also have a new bonus; a flat 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25 percent chance to cancel a raycast musket ball hitting a crewman, as your crew enjoys extra small-arms cover. With the right build, muskets could be an effective defense for an otherwise unarmed trade ship! The actual boarding minigame will lose some of its importance. A close quarters fight may be determined entirely by hauling alongside and unloading muskets into the enemy. The captain who finds himself running alongside a boarding-modded enemy will no longer simply keep his speed up and negate his adversary. He will also find that if he cannot break away, then he needs to force a boarding and hope for better swordsmanship than musketry. Or pray to the gods of grapeshot. All of this was posted elsewhere in the wrong forum under a related discussion, so do pardon the double post. I don't want to take over someone else's thread.

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