Boarding and DD Adjustment

[Raf Van Boom]

Can you make it so that stacking gunnery mods will let me 1 shoot a boarding ship?

[vazco]

16 hours ago, Slim McSauce said:

Let me make this short. I have a quick and easy solution to the current arcadey boarding meta that seems to throw of the rest of combat. To back up this claim I point to DD, a perk that aimed to provide the quickest possible fix to the silly rageboarding meta. The solution I provide is just a step beyond that in simpleness, but I think it will provide a substantial remedy that will hold well, much better than the current way, at least until boarding as a whole gets a revamp

 Here it is:

Make it so sails don't automatically drop when boarding is initiated. Allow sailing to continue after the ships are grappled together. That's pretty much it. Simple right? How does it affect gameplay?
For one it's unrealistic that you are forced to raise all your sails once someone boards you, that mechanic directly links to the biggest issue with boarding currently, that once you've been boarded, you're stuck there, frozen and unable to do anything besides play the boarding game.

My question, why is that limitation needed? A ship with perfectly good sails can still crawl away from the attacking ship, even dragging the ship behind it until the ropes give way. So why are we forced to raise our sails and take the boarding when realistically, there's no reason why you cant just keep sailing.

There lies the biggest issue with boardng, just as often it's used to halt the opponent to secure and easy kill from surrounding ships, or ram upwind and end any fight quickly with a boarding fitted ship. Now I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to use boarding effectively, I'm saying boarding is TOO effective, very unpractically so and it hurts combat. You can still board and halt a ship with less sailpower, this little change means you have to subdue your enemy before securing the board. Meaning you have to either chain their sails, drop their masts or physically surround them with other ships so they can't sail through.

That's it, tell me what you think or why you would/would not want this adjustment in boarding

That's actually an interesting suggestion. If it was introduced, maybe even DD could be removed.

[Sir Texas Sir]

DD should only be activat d if you have your board prep going since it reps having crew ready to repeal a boarding attack.

just like I think repairs should only happen while in battle sails or below.  This silly going full sails repairs and rage boarding with ships like the Requin shouldn’t happen.  Just like you need to slow down to board you should slow down to repair properly.  At worse full sails gives you only 50% of your repair. 

I would also like to test musket area around ships.  This should only be effective by number of muskets your ships carry based or with mods.  Make it only 50m range so it’s a danger to small ships side scraping and two ships that might be prepping to board one anouther.

[Hethwill]

2 hours ago, Sir Texas Sir said:

DD should only be activat d if you have your board prep going

This i agree, if we change the way DD works and additionally the weatherdeck guns of the boarding ships get locked from shooting - it is cramped by boarding crews.

I like to call the example of the 5 vs 75 i posted a while ago in the club, and in truth they get ready for the boarding and were freaking determined. They were going for the boarding, not the shooting.

So, as an example, a Privateer set on full boarding and turning the boarding on would be unable to shoot the guns. Or a Surprise would be able only to shoot the gun deck ( not the guns above ). A Agamemnon wouldl be able to shoot the 2 full gun decks but not the above guns.

There's a lot that can be done to pull it closer to odd reality possibilities.

But Determined Defender, as a concept, is a reality.

... maybe we need Morale to work through the battle and not only "visible" in the boarding....?

[Niagara]

I think that if we are able to set how many crew we assign to different tasks it would be a great idea to enable options like boarding or DD.

By set i meant that we can controll the numbers more precise then now.  Either with percentages or preset numbers and not just all that is not doing  anything else. 

But atm the penelties for being boarding fitted vs other options is unbalanced and some can be negated by stacking crew mods. But the mods overhaul might fix this..

And I still find ut funny that a single fish adds to your holdspace and affects speed but extra crew or lesser crew does not affect the ships total weight.