I don’t like Determine Defender. It ‘s: “take this skill and dictate the boarders your playstyle.”
I think Boarding should be more implemented in the See fight action to make it more interesting instead of just give the people an option deny it. I’d like to see following changes. Especially I like to solve problems with realism ;)
First of all make graping effective against unprotected crew on the deck. Weather deck Gun crew, Sailing crew and boarding crew. So people can defend against a boarding attack with grape. A ship in full boarding preparation has a bunch of unprotected crew on the deck. The Potential crew lose without boarding prep should be no problem half the sailing crew should be on Sails and the other half on deck so the potential crew loss is more or less negligible.
Example: Sailingcrew Trincomalee 135 half of them 67 on deck. A perfect graping over the whole deck by potential lose rate of 25% would be around 16 crew member. Realistic an OK.
I’d also recommend that the Sailing crew required is reduced by the amount of set sail (Half Sails half crew or something like that). So you could further reduce your potential lose against this deck graping and it would make more sense to reduce sails in Battle, like it was in reality.
Implement Muskets into the sea fight.
There should be a button to Man musket positions in the sea fight. On short ranges about 30m they’ll shoot to unprotected crew on deck. An elevation bonus would be great. This will make pushing with smaller ships much harder. The whole pushing process will cause losses on both sides. With the elevation bonus a bigger defender will be in favor. And it helps against stupid situations where small ships stay below ship guns and continuously shoot.
Implement a pulling timer for boarding
If you stretch the time which is needed to pull the ships together there will be more time to react. Forbid the pulling ship to use canons to favor the defender. And implement skills/upgrades for the defender to further increase the pull time (another bonus on Boarding Axes?). Maybe allow boarding only for ships which where recently in rigging shock.
Determine Defender could look like that in the future
50 Morale bonus when get boarded
Bonus against boarding attacks
Summaries: Just try to get out of the paper, Scissors, Stone into a skill based boarding. More fun for everyone.