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Open world speed imbalances - please provide info


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Dear captains

Please provide examples of cases (ship vs ship) where a certain vessel cannot chase (gain on) another vessel properly despite the fact that it is faster in instance.

Example - Ship A has 14 speed, Ship B has 12 speed in instance at certain angle. Despite this fact Ship A cannot chase Ship B at the same angle in the open world (being for some reason slower)

We want to investigate those cases one by one and remove this imbalance. 

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In battle instance my rattle did 15.6 kn I could catch every Indiaman, lgv, traderbrig and trader snow easily and fast at ever angle. But in open world I struggled to keep up or it took me a lot of days at sea / ridiculous travel distances to close in at the same angles that were no problem in instance.

I know the rattle speed itself is ridiculous but it was necessary to catch traders. Otherwise the trader had to be AFK to actually tag him before he hugged a fort , AI fleet or just vanished in the next port.

It was even very hard sometimes impossible to catch a trader with perfect wind for the rattle between MT and Tortuga because the distance was to short.

Especially the lgv is very fast close hauled in OW while she was very slow in battle .

Edit: most of the time the traders weren't speed fit.(talking about wood or inbuilds can't say anything about mod)

Edited by z4ys
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41 minutes ago, z4ys said:

In battle instance my rattle did 15.6 kn I could catch every Indiaman, lgv, traderbrig and trader snow easily and fast at ever angle. But in open world I struggled to keep up or it took me a lot of days at sea / ridiculous travel distances to close in at the same angles that were no problem in instance.

I know the rattle speed itself is ridiculous but it was necessary to catch traders. Otherwise the trader had to be AFK to actually tag him before he hugged a fort , AI fleet or just vanished in the next port.

It was even very hard sometimes impossible to catch a trader with perfect wind for the rattle between MT and Tortuga because the distance was to short.

Especially the lgv is very fast close hauled in OW while she was very slow in battle .

Edit: most of the time the traders weren't speed fit.(talking about wood or inbuilds can't say anything about mod)

That specific LGV between MT and La Tortue was a Common ( green ) store one. Oak Speed IIRC. 

Chase on the OW was mostly at broad reach. Still being the best point of sail for the LGV, the Rattle managed to be faster in battle with no discussion whatsoever.

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48 minutes ago, admin said:

We want to investigate those cases one by one and remove this imbalance.

I've wanted to do this for the longest time.

Doing instance tests in a "scientific" manner is a cakewalk.

The OW speed readout is not dampened and the numbers change too quickly over small timespans, that makes recording numbers almost pointless for use in comparison graphs.

If there is some magic you can do to the readout to make it more human readable (in lack of a better term) I could serial produce graphs to snuff out these imbalances.

Alternatively:

The process of finding suitable ships, with similar woods, similar or no upgrades/perks/mods/guns and so on is an extremely tedious thing. Then you have to grab a buddy, sail alongside and observe speed diff. We're still in anecdotal country and errors in observation, wood, mods, perks, guns... can sneak up on us easily.

Maybe some bright minds can think of an adequate and effective way of getting this done? It's been at the back of my mind all this time but I've found no way of doing it properly.

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I'll jump back on the regular server to get my hunter top speeds.  Nearly all of the chases end up being broad reach, since it's 99% Indiamen, Trader Brigs, and LGV's... My main hunters were Cedar/Speed/Pirate Surprise with copper and Oak/Speed/Pirate Reno with copper.  I would regularly chase the traders from the mouth of the Tortue Channel all the way to Mortimer.  The Reno would EVENTUALLY catch them, but usually not before they got 9/10's of the way there and had the opportunity to glom on to the 34 huge AI fleets that cruise there.  The Surprise obviously was better if you could force them upwind.  However, once in the instance, I could catch them easily enough in the instance.  Now, I know for sure a few guys would run tricked out Indias with no guns, and thats fine.  

I guess the bottom line is:  Is the hull of a Oak Frigate faster than the hull of a fir Indiaman?  Is the bonuses for wood/speed too OP?

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6 minutes ago, Bart Smith said:

Why just not make same speeds proportion in battle and OW?

I believe because we have an OW speed hardcap while in instance we have none. But not 100% sure about that. (pls delete when mistaken)

Edited by z4ys
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23 minutes ago, jodgi said:

Maybe some bright minds can think of an adequate and effective way of getting this done? It's been at the back of my mind all this time but I've found no way of doing it properly.

maybe you could test relative speeds over distance in the OW, instead of trying to compare absolute speeds.  so start two ships same spot and have them travel same distance and compare travel time.  this should provide you with a data sample of something like "LGV is 1.2x faster than same frigate in OW".  Then you can compare to battle instance speeds which can be gotten in absolute, and you'd end up with something like "LGV is 0.8x slower then same frigate in battle instance".  The only tricky part will be changing OW wind and ensuring same distance traveled, would be easiest with 2 accounts and side-by-side computers.

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3 minutes ago, CatSwift said:

maybe you could test relative speeds over distance in the OW, instead of trying to compare absolute speeds.  so start two ships same spot and have them travel same distance and compare travel time.  this should provide you with a data sample of something like "LGV is 1.2x faster than same frigate in OW".  Then you can compare to battle instance speeds which can be gotten in absolute, and you'd end up with something like "LGV is 0.8x slower then same frigate in battle instance".  The only tricky part will be changing OW wind and ensuring same distance traveled, would be easiest with 2 accounts and side-by-side computers.

Yes, that would work. Ships and setups that we already suspect are off could be double checked this way. It does take some time and an available friend. We could still miss many speed bugs compared to the more systematical comparison of absolute hull speeds.

---

To remind everyone why absolute OW speeds is hard-mode:

55ea4c766e18fd5c5d50b162ef290daf.gif (Recorded at 30 fps)

You can work out min, max, average, median and type number (?). Even if I go full autism on that I suspect the error margin would ruin it. It's also prohibitively time consuming.

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My bermuda cedar / pirate refit reno with gold studding sales was outrun in OW by a surprise the other day going pretty much going 0 - 30 off the wind.  In the battle instance I can get it up to 17.1 knts.  With the wind the reno on paper has a better sailing profile.

It feels like the ship attributes that effect it in the battle instance don't translate into OW, but this is just anecdotal.  

 

Edit - thx for the reminder hodo.    Copper Plating - Speed Trim - Studding Sails    all gold as mods.

Edited by Christendom
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On live a while back when we where hunting out side of Little River there was a LVG with a Wappen in fleet.  I was in a Trinc (might of had a renom in fleet) and another player had a Renom, we where being taggers for our bigger ships but was returning from some crew/repair ups and the big ships where in a fight we didn't need to be in.   We had cross wind to chase the LVG and I would never had tried to do so until I noticed the Wappen in it's fleet.  Knowing that thing is slow as hell and not the best wind we figured we go for it.   Well he out ran both us.   I'm sorry I been notice some ships seem not to effect OW speed when in fleets.  This needs to be checked.  With that Wappen in it's fleet and going that wind we should of been able to tagged it before it got into port.  We had all ready planed to just hit the Wappen's sales and blow past it chasing the LVG, but we where never able to get close enough to do so  (with the small circle and long tag timer currently).

We have had normal LVG"s out run speed fit ships many times on the open world.  I think it's time the trader OW speed boost they seem to have go by by.  I get not all mods should effect OW but when your in in a ship that should and will out run them in battle can't even keep up OW there is a problem.

I think the new tag timer and circle will help a bit with this, but they seems to still be out running folks, but I'm going to bet some of these guys getting out run are not in speed built ships either.

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4 hours ago, z4ys said:

I believe because we have an OW speed hardcap while in instance we have none. But not 100% sure about that. (pls delete when mistaken)

Well OW speed hardcap can be changed (or removed) to proportional speed of ship from instance - its logical and need to be addressed. Since its affecting badly gameplay like people noticed here in previous posts.

Edited by Bart Smith
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4 hours ago, z4ys said:

I believe because we have an OW speed hardcap while in instance we have none. But not 100% sure about that. (pls delete when mistaken)

Wasn´t it like 15 knots hard limit in instances?

@testing

Why don´t you give us access to all ships, if you want us to test these things? A few aren´t buildable and the others would take way too much work to build (on a test server that could be wiped anytime).

I´m pretty sure you devs have dev tools and are able to spawn any ship/item you like, so go ahead and test them or give us redeemables to test them.

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29 minutes ago, jodgi said:

If mirroring instance and OW speeds perfectly was simple it would already be so and they wouldn't ask us to look for discrepancies, keep that in mind.

Im not deep into programming and tech side of game engine but i saying what is logical for me. If ships speeds are not equal in instances and OW - something is wrong here and could be good if devs fix it before game release.. That my opinion.

Edited by Bart Smith
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10 minutes ago, Bart Smith said:

Im not deep into programming and tech side of game engine but i saying what is logical for me. If ships speeds are not equal in instances and OW - something is wrong here. That my opinion.

Well, it's obvious they aren't upwind. Should they be? Probably not else we'd never get anywhere. To my mind this makes it an odd question for admin to ask - if there's a relationship between, say, 10 degrees OW performance and 10 degrees battle performance then it's eluded me, that's for sure. Or possibly 10 degress OW is meant to match something like 30 degrees in battle; this sounds more plausible but, even so, it doesn't feel like this is it either.

I'll maybe try measuring it on a couple of ships, but it seems a right chore when the devs should be able to look it up in code and data tables.

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One thing is for sure. All ships are faster close hauled in OW than in instance. And that is because of gameplay reasons. People complained that they didn't want to crawl into a port for hours because of bad wind.

The question is how is the OW performance calculated and does this calculation discriminate some kind of ships.

It is a while ago that I hunted sols in frigates so info can be outdated but I always thought that the OW close hauled ability of SoLs was to equal to the ones of frigates. Ofc the frigate caught the SoL but the time it took was so long that I felt no real difference. That's why I think there might be a scaling problem.

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You can't really get data this way. It will create a mess. You are relying on someones post to fine tune your game? Really. 

Why don't you code a system where you will be able to place 2 ships and test each angle at max speed. Let system test each angle and record data. This will give you quick database and show you what needs fixing. I know there are 100s of combinations now, but I think it's doable. 

Important key elements

-Record distance increase/decrease between 2 ships at max speed and at 0 to 100 throttle. 

-Record distance increase when ship is turning and firing then turn back. How big is the gap + how long it will take to regain and close that distance loss again. 

This is how it should look:

-Select ship A

-Select ship B

-Select speed preset - Straight line max speed, straight line battle sails, straight line, dead slow etc..

-Select angles: All or 90, 180 etc... (single angle)

-Switch Angle timer - every 1 minute/every 2,3,4...etc.. will shift the angle.

-Commands (turn and fire after 2 mins at max speed, back to chase)

- Select Data - Distance from Ship A to Ship B, Record time after each command etc..

Come one guys. You need this to fine tune games like this. Same thing for resources, guns etc..

 

Edited by Ned Low
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