Crew focus - question

[admin]

Would like to hear your opinions on the feature we are implementing now for the first focus testing.

 

Captain of the ship can determine the area of focus for the crew. Currently there are three.

 

Crew focus

 

1) Sailing and Turning - most crew is on yards and focused on sails.

2) Cannons - most crew is at battle stations focused on aiming and reload

3) Survivability - most crew is saving the ship, plugging leaks, and working on pumps and getting water out.

 

Question: How would sailing and turning performance change if most of the crew is at cannons or fighting for survival of the ship?

[BungeeLemming]

when the crew is at stations there should be a high penaltie to lowering and hoisting more sails.

 

Handling to a certain degree is still possible. But every maneuver that requires to trim the sails will take long, too.

That may mean you can turn like 10 to 20 degrees to both sides like always and then begin to turn pretty slow.

Turning through the wind should "maybe" be totally impossible or result in a backward movement when sails are backing against the masts..

 

Those are my thoughts of it. After all its a game and you have to consider the penaltion and balance it so its not a game-killer..

 

Btw: there should be a delay when I send the crew to other stations. a few moments when they relocate to the guns or braces etc..

[McCullogh]

I think the answer to this question depends on other factors

 

1. How experienced is your crew?  the more experienced they are the less impact doing more things at once will have.

2. How healthy is your crew?  Full strength, you can probably fight and sail with little negative impact each other

3. How large is your crew?  Undermanned vs over manned...same as #2

4. How happy is your crew? same as #1

 

The model you suggest is similar to the one PotBS and its usable to for game play, the buffs/debuffs they have attached seem to work OK.

 

I do like the idea of sending crew for repairs...which depending on the level of damage could seriously impact the other 2 skills.

[BungeeLemming]

At first there would a factor like crew XP.. and then there is a huge problem I see personally it as gamebreaking when I have a ship I want to test and sail it to pvp and I come across an enemy who sails his ship for like months and has an expert crew. He will simply murder me with no big losses and I can look how I will come out of that mess..

 

You should propably make a thread concerning that issue..

I have no fuzzy feelings about that O_o

[Barberouge]

There shouldn't be one crew focus, but crew allocation. We could separate into minimum / undermanned / optimum / overmanned / maximum.

 

There was an optimal number of men for each cannon, usually 14 for a 36-pounder. Only one man at a time can clean the stock, put the power, put the cannonball etc... So sending more won't change the reload speed. If there aren't at least a few men, the cannon would take ages to be reloaded if even it could.

 

Then there should be other parameters that affect how fast the actions are performed, like morale, health, tiredness, officers skill. Experience might be tricky to balance though.

 

Cannons allocation should be separated into each battery. Survival should be separated into port/starboard. A fourth allocation type could be firing muskets or preparing a boarding. And the unallocated crew should be hiding somewhere.

 

 

 

A player should be able to quickly set a fixed number of crewmen in each allocation that he estimates as most important (right mouse button click ?), and spread the rest on what he estimates as still useful (left mouse button holded ?). Maybe something like selecting an allocation, holding the mouse button to choose a number, and dragging that number to another part.

 

Sailing performance is a more tough one because it depends on the game physics. More to come later.

[Barberouge]

Speaking about crew allocation gameplay, like it has been said in another thread: to avoid a click fest gameplay, the system shouldn't require to change the allocation too often. The system should make an allocation change being required to prepare for a maneuver, after a maneuver or after a shot.

 

Speaking about optimum/maximum, maybe this differentiation should be skipped at least in the beginning. The only situation where the differentiation might make sense, is in the sails allocation: the more men that pull a rope, the faster a sail would be hoisted. But if the maximum is the optimum, the system would be more simple.

[Barberouge]

Question: How would sailing and turning performance change if most of the crew is at cannons or fighting for survival of the ship?

 

As it is not a sailing simulator, gameplay should be looked at. That's a tough question because we don't know the physics. I guess there are acceleration, deceleration, turning deceleration, speed, turn rate acceleration, turn rate ? (those are some PotBS ship moving parameters).

The fact that the sails are automatically managed (the crew sets the best sails depending on the situation) doesn't help here, because the sailing performance depended on the crew allocated to specific sails. So let's have a look at history to begin with.

 

 

 

History and full realism

Turning basically didn't require to change any sail area if it wasn't a wear (turning with the wind) or a tack (turning through the wind), it only required sails adjustment. Wearing required a lot of sails adjusting and with strong wind, some sails lowering. Tacking required a lot of sails adjusting, lowering and backwinding the foresails.

Also decreasing the sail area to be faster was sometimes needed, because the ships lost speed when the list was too high.

Being as fast as possible required constant sails adjustments, especially after turns (even small ones).

Each ship had its specific hull and rigging shapes, and their associated maneuverability depending on the sea and weather conditions. Managing the sails of one or another was very different. Most of the square-rigged ships were very difficult to tack and sometimes to wear aswell.

 

Sometimes tacking required to bear away to gain speed and then head back up for the turn.

 

 

 

What were the crew actions on sails ? I could see four: trim (sheet in/ease off), furl/unfurl, lower/hoist, reef (to mention the more simple ones). Let's say furling/unfurling is part of lowering/hoisting. When were those three actions performed ?

 

Sailing straight: a sailing boat never goes straight, the helmsman had to change the rudder depending on the ship, the sea and the wind changes.

 

Sailing at set course: if there was a perfect sails adjustment at given weather conditions, finding this adjustment required skill and time. It required trimming mostly. But if the wind (direction or strenght) changed, it required reefing and lowering/hoisting aswell. Changing the speed required all three actions.

 

Turning (from running to close-hauled): if taking wind from a side instead of the rear made the ship list too much , it could be dangerous for the rigging or could decrease the best speed. Then reefing or lowering the sails was needed. But trimming was the most performed action. With big ships, changing the sails during a turn was sometimes needed to make that turn easier.

 

Wearing: with a big ship, wearing required to prepare the sails for the maneuver. If the wind was strong, some sails were lowered before the maneuver and hoisted after. A lot of trimming on all the rigging was needed.

 

Tacking: with every ship, that maneuver was the most demanding. It required constant and well-timed trimming, lowering, back-winding and hoisting.

 

 

 

Realism feeling and gameplay

 

As it is not a fully realistic sailing simulator, the square-rigged ships we will sail would be like having a diesel. In reality a bad wave, a gust, a mistake during important maneuvers (tacking or wearing) just made the ship unmaneuverable, the rudder not responding and the ship staying upwind or drifting for minutes. Those ships were bricks.

So we consider that individual sail management (that appear on the screen but a player can't have effect on) doesn't directly affect the physics. The players actions are the amount of speed wanted (speed bar) and the rudder (rudder bar).

 

We saw that to get a sailing system that gives some realism feeling, sailing and turning performance for a given ship should change depending on crew allocation, officers skill, point of sail and weather conditions. So it's difficult to propose curves as simple as for reloading.

 

 

 

The curves aren't precise, they just show the possible effects that could be applied. Maybe tracking whether a ship passes its close-hauled angle, 180° or 0° should be required to apply some effects (such as for example rigging damage when the sail area is too high for the wind strength, or time limited sailing performance drop).

 

Once again, optimum/maximum could be skipped for simplification.

 

Turn Rate Acceleration should receive some lack of crew effects aswell. I'm not sure about Turn Rates.

 

Also whether specific effects should be applied at different points of sail (to simulate tacks and wears) depends on the physics. If an effect which is applied independently from the point of sail gives the feeling that crew lacking maneuvers lead to enough slowness, there is no need to add specific point of sail effects.

 

Pirate crews need more rum rations, but they can take more ofc

[Barberouge]

This picture illustrates the crew allocation schematics:

 

 

The "Fixed" amount represents where the player wants his crew to be when there isn't enough for all parts (right mouse button hold and set ?).

 

The "Current" amount represents where the player wants his crew to be when there is more than enough. He can drag available crew amounts from a part to another (left mouse button hold, set and drag ?).

 

A frigate vs frigate would be more about setting the "Fixed" amounts and focusing on the maneuvers. A SoL vs SoL would be more about dragging the required amount to focus on reload or to prepare for important maneuvers.

 

EDIT: added the Injured and Dead informations.

[admin]

This is very useful Barberouge. Will discuss with the team

[Barberouge]

What would happen if there wouldn't be enough crew to fulfill all the "Fixed" parts ? A simple priority system could be created: clicking on a name means that this part has a higher priority. If there isn't enough crew for all the "Fixed Priority", more precise priority numbers could be chosen. That would be a preparation for when there would be very few crew left.

 

 

Also (from another thread),

Likewise, and off-topic, I would also rather speed was not a UI readout but should be judged by experience.  Otherwise, people could just angle their ship to get the most speed out of the wind simply by watching until the readout hits the max.  This would take all the skill out of sailing.

 

Sailing should be an art and not a numbers game.

The theorical close-hauled angle could be known, but the real close-hauled angle could depend on the wind steadiness, the sea state and the helmsman skill. Skilled helmsmen could actually make quite a big difference when closing on the wind. If the player can't set a precise point of sail angle (no numbers), then luffing would be a bet: the more a player heads up, the more the ship gains on windward - up to the point where the sails flap and the ship takes a speed drop.

[BullpupBarrie]

Would like to hear your opinions on the feature we are implementing now for the first focus testing.

 

Captain of the ship can determine the area of focus for the crew. Currently there are three.

 

Crew focus

 

1) Sailing and Turning - most crew is on yards and focused on sails.

2) Cannons - most crew is at battle stations focused on aiming and reload

3) Survivability - most crew is saving the ship, plugging leaks, and working on pumps and getting water out.

 

Question: How would sailing and turning performance change if most of the crew is at cannons or fighting for survival of the ship?

I like the overall simplicity of this, and Barberouge's "simple priority system".

 

To answer the original question, I would suggest if most of the crew is at the guns just limit the amount the ship can turn without putting more crew to the sails.  Tacking (and wearing) I guess would be completely out of the question too.

 

....The theorical close-hauled angle could be known, but the real close-hauled angle could depend on the wind steadiness, the sea state and the helmsman skill. Skilled helmsmen could actually make quite a big difference when closing on the wind. If the player can't set a precise point of sail angle (no numbers), then luffing would be a bet: the more a player heads up, the more the ship gains on windward - up to the point where the sails flap and the ship takes a speed drop.

Yes, this is what I'm driving at too.  The player should find out they're trying to sail too close to the wind by graphical and sound effects showing them the flapping sails and the drop off in speed.

[PIerrick de Badas]

i Don't think there is more to add after barberouge discussion about crew focus biut i would like to introduce the idea of "particular crewmen"

Like in manhy pirate game you may add few "special crewmen" into the ship like carpenter/sailer/gun instructor and other that may work as in World of tank with a special amount on xp.

The xp would not concern all the crew but the "specials men" on your ship. With 100% xp, you may (as in wot) choose a special ability for your crew member.

 

For example on a slopp/

You got

1 captain

1 carpenter

1 boarding expert

 

With 100xp the carptenter repairs the ship twice faster as he can repair with 0% xp. With 100% xp you can make him learn some special ability that may give you more advantage into the battle.

This crew would just be fixed for this ship or this kind of ship but may have to learn again their ability if changing ship.

 

(Exactly the same WOT system but balance for your kind of game)

[admin]

i Don't think there is more to add after barberouge discussion about crew focus biut i would like to introduce the idea of "particular crewmen"

Like in manhy pirate game you may add few "special crewmen" into the ship like carpenter/sailer/gun instructor and other that may work as in World of tank with a special amount on xp.

The xp would not concern all the crew but the "specials men" on your ship. With 100% xp, you may (as in wot) choose a special ability for your crew member.

 

For example on a slopp/

You got

1 captain

1 carpenter

1 boarding expert

 

With 100xp the carptenter repairs the ship twice faster as he can repair with 0% xp. With 100% xp you can make him learn some special ability that may give you more advantage into the battle.

This crew would just be fixed for this ship or this kind of ship but may have to learn again their ability if changing ship.

 

(Exactly the same WOT system but balance for your kind of game)

 

Just wanted to mention that crew focus is of course independent from the officers. You will also have officers on your ship that will fulfill various roles. Like Boatswain, First leutenant, Master surgeon etc.. 

[PIerrick de Badas]

ok, nice

[McCullogh]

I love where this is going.  

 

Instead of the magical skills of PotBS, such as knowing that applying magical skill A (focus fire) before everyone else applies magical skill B (URR) will sink an opponent....I love the idea of actually managing a ship and it might even take some actual understanding of sailing/fighting.

 

as we say  /tiphat

[Marion van Ghent]

Forgive the necroposting, but this thread was linked from a related and contain much good discussion to which I'd like to add just a little info for nuance's sake.

 

When dealing with the effects of crew allocation/focus on handling, gunnery, and damage control, it's very important to make a distinction between naval and merchant crews.

 

Naval ships were generally well-manned, even over-manned: enough crew was provided, in theory and approximately, to fully man one broadside in addition to tending all sails. So unless a significant number of casualties have occurred, there should not be a significant trade-off between firing qualities and handling. It's primarily when crew is below strength -- or need to be pulled from the sails to man the pumps -- that manoeuverability will suffer. And generally speaking naval captains would tend to sacrifice manoeuverability, rather than gunnery, for damage control. (To oversimplify greatly, gunners = trained specialists, able seamen = general workers; you don't put your specialists to work on maintenance unless you have to  )

 

The situation is quite different on merchant ships. Here, crew is generally kept to a bare minimum, and you don't have more-or-less dedicated gun crews. Good old Gunner Jack can haul a line as well as aim a gun, but he can't be doing both at once! And he can do neither if he's stuck amidships pumping the bilge, so as captain you'd better make up your mind what you want him to do.

 

Note that the mechanic for this nuance is no different between the two classes of ship: a Navy frigate that's lost 2/3 its men has the same allocation problems a West Indiaman at nominal crew, and when the pirates capture that Indiaman and cram it to the gunwales with men, its captain might as well be running a fully-manned frigate (as far as crew allocation is concerned).

[maturin]

Hmmn, Marion makes a good point.

 

However, crew focus is one point where I would perhaps recommend 'over-modeling' crew focus for gameplay purposes. We want captains to have to make hard decisions when they want to repair shot-holes or rigging. We also want to give them the flexibility of sacrificing gunnery for maneuverability or speed, which would be useful in some situations.

 

Raising yards, furling and reefing sail (if the last two are in the game) will happen VERY slowly unless you 'call up the watch.' And that definitely would mean taking men from the guns. On auto-skipper, I could see a high turning deceleration for a crew that's not focused on sailing, because you have a limited number of men trying to trim the braces and sheets with every course change, and they can't get to everything all at once.

 

Here's another idea: Making crew focus commands have a longish warmup time that is dependent on crew skill and overall discipline. After all, the men can't change their tasks instantly, but a tightly-run ship will prove a more versatile adversary because the captain can quickly shift focuses. Bearing down swiftly on a sailing focus, only to switch to guns at the last second, etc.

 

The basic three-focus feature is a sound one, it seems we all agree. More detail and control could be nice if it turns out playable.

 

 

 

Here's a point I'm not clear on: Do square-riggers need a whole watch on deck in order to tack? Or perhaps you only need a lot of men if you are tacking with lots of sails set, in which case tacking without a sailing focus would require you to clew up t'gallants and go about under topsails.

 

And Marion, weren't gun crews mostly made up of seaman (or their less-skilled comrades)? Never been totally clear on that point, besides there being only one official gunner, and Lieutenants to control divisions.

[tater]

How would any sailing ship "be like a diesel" as suggested in Barberouge's post above?

 

Regarding crew, it seems like there should be a base allocation of "at quarters." The crew allocations should be historically available in terms of what % of the crew is aloft when a ship beats to quarters vs manning guns.

 

The guns have a normal crew level based upon what size they are, and the ship would nominally man one side as I understand it (they just switch sides as needed). The remaining crew are spread between other functions. That at least gives a lower limit assuming guns are manned (as they would in any but the most dire combat situation, I imagine).

 

From Padfield, he says in the late 17th century, a 42 lber had 7-8 crew, 32 and 24 lbers guns had 5-6 crew, so that a 1st rate would have 428 men to man the guns, 30 to carry powder, and 10 filling cartridges in the magazine.10 for the surgeon's gang, 8 for the carpenter's gang, 5 for the purser, 100 for "small shot", 120 for sails, and 50 sharp shooters. Note that the men are indeed per gun, not one side only, but in any normal engagement, the numbers per gun would effectively double as the crews on opposite guns cooperate with each other to man one gun. So in that case, gunnery  nominally occupies almost 470 men, making the ratio of gun crew to sail handlers 4:1.

 

Having more accurate data would give nominal levels for the time period in question. this is overall crew levels, as well, so the 120 men are in watches, I'm not sure adding too many more would actually improve sail handling, as at a certain point they start getting in each other's way, I think.

[maturin]

He means that in the game the rudder will steer the ship steadily and uniformly along in straight lines.

If you've ever steered a sailboat, you know that that's very far from reality, and that the reality itself would be monstrously complex to model.

 

How would any sailing ship "be like a diesel" as suggested in Barberouge's post above?

 

 

[tater]

He means that in the game the rudder will steer the ship steadily and uniformly along in straight lines.

If you've ever steered a sailboat, you know that that's very far from reality, and that the reality itself would be monstrously complex to model.

OK, I didn't get that in context. Seems like the a matrix of skills for all the crew might be interesting. Aloft skill, gunnery skill, helmsmanship, etc. Good guy at the helm, you make better way (the details being entirely abstracted in "helm skill").

 

I'm against any "leveling" past whatever the value of skills are, frankly. For a given ship and crew, having skills means that with hundreds of crews, no two ships will behave identically in the same class. They'll average out close, but the crews are random… I like that.

[Chustler]

I think as long as it is not magic...and perhaps not an instant effect, then we have something good.  I like the idea of sliders to set crew ratios, but I would want to be able to preset keys to issue those commands quickly.  No clickfest was said earlier, and I agree.