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A well thought out system Brigand and i like alot of the points. I'm not particularly in favor of auto surrenders by the crew but I think you suggest a mechanic that offers a good middle ground and removes the sense of control loss I feel when talking about auto surrenders. In your scenario I maintain control by doing the required grinding of NPC ships in order to keep my crew loyalty up. I'm not particularly in favor of grinds but a grind in this case could insure that crews across the player base will have a wide range of loyalty to their Captains. I'd of course prefer a way for that to happen without the grind. (this assumes I'm not good enough to beat everyone on the high seas that I meet.)

 

Morality... still not sold on this one. My concern is that as you begin to loose the match there will be no turning it around as the negative morale compounds and could practically be impossible to turn a fight. I think I would be less opposed to it if the morale always returned to its starting point. To illustrate: call the starting point 0, when you do something impressive your crew morale jumps up and buffs your performance based on what focus your in but after a certain amount of time, say, 10 seconds, it returns to its 0 line. When you do something bad like miss a broadside, the opposite happens but also returns to 0 after a number of seconds. This way, morale shadows the fluctuations that would obviously be occurring in a well disciplined crew.

 

Now, there would still be a way to link the loyalty auto surrender function with something like morale but I"m not sure what to do about it. Ill have to think on it. I just don't want a mechanic that makes it very difficult for someone to recover from a loss of morale.

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(...)

My concern is that as you begin to loose the match there will be no turning it around as the negative morale compounds and could practically be impossible to turn a fight. I think I would be less opposed to it if the morale always returned to its starting point. To illustrate: call the starting point 0, when you do something impressive your crew morale jumps up and buffs your performance based on what focus your in but after a certain amount of time, say, 10 seconds, it returns to its 0 line. When you do something bad like miss a broadside, the opposite happens but also returns to 0 after a number of seconds. This way, morale shadows the fluctuations that would obviously be occurring in a well disciplined crew.

(...)

 

I've added a new paragraph clarifying my intentions for how morale should work. Moral is separate from winning or loosing a battle. What you describe with morale returning to its starting point is not far off from what I intend. Only I would not have it automatically return, instead I would let the event swing it around.

 

Also, morale should not be influenced by morale. In other words, a low morale score should not increase the chances that morale will stay low. Or, in immersive terms: a crew with low morale has low expections, so exceeding those expectations is easier than if they had a high morale score.

 

~Brigand

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I like most of what Brigand wrote.  Particulary about auto surrender for low moral crews and the link to the officers and crew skills.  For me moral and training are interlinked. 

 

I want Captains to think about these things before combat or be at a disadvantage.   I could easily see a well trained and motivated crew being better gunners, sailers and pumpers as this has a histrocial basis, as this was significantly shown in practice.  A good historical example is HMS Shannon Vs USS Chesapeake.  The crew of HMS Shannon had been honed into an instrument of precision for weeks prior to the battle. 

 

I propose:

 

Moral/training reductions from: Lossing your ship, Lossing key crew/officers, to many crew, poor pay, poor discipline, poor watch routine, poor diet and hygenie leading to disease.

 

Moral/training improvements from: Recruit experienced able seamen, recruit better officers, training/experience (Survival/Gunnery/Speed), good diet, good pay, good discipline, good watch routine, good hygenie (Just look at the benefits to the RN from Jervis's reforms on this). 

 

benefits of high moral/training could be slightly higher (but capped) reload times, slighly quicker speed, turning, closer grouping of shot.  Alternativley, lower morale crews task speed could be reduced a little. 

 

I think moral reductions would need hard caps to prevent silliness from having a bad day.

 

I don't think morale should change in combat.  This should be fixed as it just punishes the underdog.  While possibly realistic, its not a very fun and will be a frustrating game mechanic.  Managing morale in combat would feel like the 'magical' abilities in PotBS/WoW, etc... 

 

Admittiedly this is a bit off topic, but I really think training and morale are too interlinked to seperate.

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I think it should only affect the Reloading,Sail Setting and Survival parts of the game.No increase in Weapon Power,just a better set of gun Crews.This could be based on the differences between the amount of Damage Caused v the amount of Damage received thus giving you a "Morale" bonus for the next Battle.So the better you "fight " your Ship,the more morale Points you get.these could be split over the 3 aforementioned areas,so you dont just have one Bonus.

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