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Boarding + 'Determined Defender' suggestion


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17 minutes ago, Ruben van Woltering said:

Maybe allow boarding only for ships which where recently in rigging shock.

This is actually a interesting proposal.

Remember the focal point of the moment is sinking as fast as possible ( if a fast boarding will do it the better) - little motivation to capture ships, especially traders and prized cargo. Sink all.

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I have an easy solution. 

1) DD active when boarding prep. is at least 50 (as stated before many times). If you are not prepared you can not be a determined defender. Grappling should require more time, to start the boarding.

2) To solve boarding game. Give actions preparation time and make it visible. Hey you can not order your hundred man  and they can not act in a second. You order them to prepare, they get ready, you give order, they attack. This is at best 5 second action. 

You have choosen ATTACK. There is visual bar or circle. It starts filling up and requires 4-5 seconds to reach %100. So defender will see ATTACK is being prepared. Commands also uses from your overal prep. If you pressed attack 4 seconds before round ends, it should not be a good attack, defend also needs to charge up to be fully effective. So no more last second button clicking. 

Commanding an action, getting ready should cost action points, executing the command should coast more points. Cancelling command should take some time, costing some action points. 

So the game becomes, effectiveness of your mods and soldiers plus very importantly number of you men and the morale. Not the last second button clicker. 

This is just some idea, I have also purposed the deck card game style boarding before. 

So this boarding game has to change. After ui patch, we are expecting content including a new and better boarding mini game. 

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I hope that the boarding mechanics will change more fundamentally than just little tweaks to the rock, paper, scissors game.

The emotional pacing of combat in NA seems backwards it me.

Maneuvering, getting the weather gauge, timing a rake, etc... should be a cerebral, strategic endeaver,  but because each Captain has to aim the cannons themself, it is turned into a fast-paced, action packed first person shooter.

Boarding, by contrast, really should be a visual, visceral, fast-paced, action packed game of firing flintlocks and crossing swords. Instead, it is a downright tedious game of waiting 15 seconds, pressing a little rectangular button, and then waiting another 15 seconds.

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Determined Defender should be removed or changed significantly. It makes no sense to me that someone can simply choose not to be boarded with a simple perk.

A ship that is well outfit for boarding requires multiple slots for boarding upgrades as well as a significant portion of crew permanently set aside as marines. Also boarding preparation must be built up before actually engaging which requires nearly half the crew.

All this can be shrugged off by a perk that requires no crew, no preparation, and only one perk slot.

I think that determined defender should either:

  • require preparation similar to boarding
  • require a percentage of crew
  • or just be removed
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Agreed with Privateer and I am not a person that likes to board one bit, choosing to sink my targets with metal and fire. The determined defender perk is just too strong of a perk especially for how much it costs. It does need to be altered where it still helps in preventing rage boarding but is not a determining factor where it can prevent boarding as much as it currently does.

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Yesterday, i had a fight with and Endy attacking my fleet of indiamans, i could have boarded him if it wasn't for his determined defender perk. The perk is awesome for frigates because you do not have to care about being close and slow while manoeuvring. It is OP i have to agree. 

The perk is good, useful, maybe give it 3 points. Also make it so that you have to manually enable it like F10 brace. While it's enabled, there will be no gun reload.

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As long as we have a mechanic that magically allows ships to push you into the wind by delibaretly ramming you, I will use Determined Defender to avoid this stupid mechanic.

So Yes, I am using one broken mechanic to avoid another broken mechanic.

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Threads about the same subject were all merged into this one.

10. Redundant threads will be locked.

Please use search find information you want to discuss. A lot of threads on the same subject delay the development and wastes resources causing lots of good ideas to be lost. Please keep discussions regarding a topic to a single thread.

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well, what we should be getting is vastly reduced accuracy when shooting and vastly reduced effectiveness while repairing if the ship sails more than battle sails. No need a magical buff.

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32 minutes ago, Christendom said:

Yea so I can magically grow back masts several times in battle, repair my ship like new, revive dead crew members with rum....but yea boarding a demasted ship is unrealistic..

 

I do not see the relationship between having masts and being boarded. In game the only difference having masts and sails makes is that you can keep your speed above the 3.5kts required to board. In reality boarding could probably have been done at higher speeds as long as the relative speeds were similar. But having no masts does not make the defender less determined and in fact would probably free up more crew to defend against boarding as they would not need to tend sails, assuming of course that they did not lose too many crew in the demasting.

If you have demasted a ship you should have plenty of time to decrew him to make DD ineffective.

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Curiously enough, in his 1782 treatise on the subject of naval tactics, John Clerk sorely neglects the very effective tactic of ramming your bow into another ship under full sail in order to push them windward and get them down to the 2kts required to board. One would think he would have dedicated half the book to that, and the other half to the art of mast-sniping. It makes you wonder, "did he even sail?"

It seems to me that DD is silly, but no sillier than the rest of the boarding mechanics. If there are going to be magic missiles in the game, why not have magic shield spells to counter them?

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4 hours ago, Archaos said:

I do not see the relationship between having masts and being boarded. In game the only difference having masts and sails makes is that you can keep your speed above the 3.5kts required to board. In reality boarding could probably have been done at higher speeds as long as the relative speeds were similar. But having no masts does not make the defender less determined and in fact would probably free up more crew to defend against boarding as they would not need to tend sails, assuming of course that they did not lose too many crew in the demasting.

If you have demasted a ship you should have plenty of time to decrew him to make DD ineffective.

When you demast a ship the crew goes into shock, disorganization, and screams loudly, maybe this could open a 1 minute window to make determined defender ineffective? After the initial shock window, perhaps you are right and crew could (in theory) be more determined. 

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2 hours ago, Palatinose said:

Out of curiosity: could any historically versed user confirm this?

A better historian than I might correct me on this, but I sincerely doubt there are any accounts of boarding that include the speeds of the ships. 18th century ships were not equipped with the precision speedometers we are accustomed to in Naval Action. They had chip logs, which were pieces of wood cast overboard and attached lines with knots tied at regular intervals. A sailor would count the knots that were payed out over a period of time accounted by use of a sandglass.

Needless to say, this involved process would only be accurate at all if the ship were kept on course for the duration, and would be impractical to use in a pitched battle while maneuvering to board an enemy. Additionally, the crew might have had other priorities than determining their speed at the time.

We can infer that grappling was accomplished at a variety of speeds though. The first and most obvious inference is that if bringing the enemies speed down was a challenge that boarders had to overcome, there would be some account of it, and of the techniques used to reduce an enemies speed to a point where boarding would be possible.

There are also accounts such as the 1779 battle of the HMS Serapis and USS Bonhomme Richard, in which Captain John Paul Jones tethered his ship to Serapis as a counter to the smaller ship's superior maneuverability and gunpower. If he had to reduce the Serapis to 2 knots before lashing the ships together, then lashing the ships together would not be an effective way to reduce her maneuverability, since it would be a moot point if he had to effectively reduce her maneuverability in order to reduce her maneuverability.

Further, in 1799, the USS Chesapeake was heeling enough that she could only hit the rigging of the Shannon, when she lost maneuverability and became entangled with the other ship, and was subsequently boarded. The only way she would be heeling that much is if she was under enough sail to be going more than 2 knots.

 

Edited by Juan Navarre
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Historical accounts aside, I can't think of any mechanism that would prevent ships with similar velocities from grappling because of their speed through the water.

The leeward ship would presumably be able to cast grappling hooks from further away due to height advantage of the increased heel. Other than that, what else would STW or SOG affect with regard to casting grappling hooks? 

Edited by Juan Navarre
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2 hours ago, Palatinose said:

Out of curiosity: could any historically versed user confirm this?

I do not know if that was the case historically, but I do know that it is easy to transfer people across if both ships have matched speeds. As part of the lifeboat coxswain certificate we had to match speeds between two lifeboats to transfer an injured person across. I have also done a cargo transfer of 20 tonne lifts from my vessel to a pipelaying barge that was under tow doing 6 knots through the Singapore straits. Modern navy ships also regularly replenish at sea while still maintaining a good speed. So I could easily imaging two sailing ships where the faster one comes alongside matches speed and grapples, once they are grappled together they will both be at same speed and boarding is not dependent on what speed they are doing.

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