Graping mechanics kills naval combat. Attention required

[admin]

I was in a Mercury, facing a Heavy Rattlesnake.  I am not surprised to be honest, I had the weather gauge and was heeling towards him, so he had a great angle for the shots. 

 

But when I fight NPC ships, like another frigate or any ship with guns on the weather deck.  I can grape off 12-20men per pass without much effort.    The issue is, if I keep doing passes like this, I can eventually take out the entire crew. 

 

 

Thats the problem with all open deck ships. Mercury, Niagara, Lynx. You can kill all crew with just one broadside on a heeling Lynx (even when using basic cutter). 

 

What is probably needed is Brace button

Click a button - your crew stops doing whatever it is doing (for 1 min) acting as a crew shock. But you receive a lot less crew damage. 

[Ragor]

Thats the problem with all open deck ships. Mercury, Niagara, Lynx. You can kill all crew with just one broadside on a heeling Lynx (even when using basic cutter). 

 

What is probably needed is Brace button

Click a button - your crew stops doing whatever it is doing (for 1 min) acting as a crew shock. But you receive a lot less crew damage. 

 

 

First time I dare to have an opinion on this heated topic.

 

Just for the record, I am on the side of the folks which suggested, that the first grape does more damage then 'as is at the moment', but the 2nd+ grape does significant less grape damage since the sailor-minions are prepared and in cover. Will be reset once the 'graper' has at least fired one regular salvo in between.

 

What about a 'duck & cover' order, which lowers grape damage but slows 'setting sails' down by for example 70% and loading cannons by 50%?

 

Thank you admin-dude.

Pretty close and fair enough.

[Henry d'Esterre Darby]

Thats the problem with all open deck ships. Mercury, Niagara, Lynx. You can kill all crew with just one broadside on a heeling Lynx (even when using basic cutter). 

 

What is probably needed is Brace button

Click a button - your crew stops doing whatever it is doing (for 1 min) acting as a crew shock. But you receive a lot less crew damage. 

 

I'd like to see it a toggle, with a warm-up/cool-down of a few seconds.  So the idea that you think the enemy is about to fire, you can click the toggle, after three seconds the crew is in brace "mode" - all other activities stop, then you untoggle brace mode and after three seconds (three is a random number here - adjust for balance) the crew goes back to reloading, sail trimming, pumping water, etc.

[admin]

  The Rattlesnake is still kind of "wonky" as in it is nearly immune to crew damage even when the hull is stripped away.

 

its fixed in dev version will be deployed in the content patch

[akd]

In reality Lineships did not even fire at frigates unless fired upon - even in heated engagements.. It was a honored tradition in all navies. And lineships sailed alone from time to time. (but mostly 3rd rates).

Frigate immunity was not nearly that universal. It was a generally (but IIRC, not always) honored convention that line ships in large fleet actions (i.e. Britain vs. France / Spain) would not fire on frigates or smaller vessels as long as they were only carrying out supporting tasks (communications, rescue) and not directly interfering in the battle.

There were many fleet actions that involved a mix of frigate and line ships both serving in the line of battle and of course all were fair game in those circumstances. And if an SoL came upon an enemy frigate outside of the context of a pure-SoL fleet action, it would not hesitate to run it down and destroy or take it. Quite a number of frigates were taken by SoLs.

[DeRuyter]

IRL grape will penetrate the thin topside barricades of most ships, unless the bulwarks there are very thick, as with Constitution and Niagara. Light vessels like the Rattlesnake (whose gundeck bulwarks are only 4' high in any case) would probably be penetrated by grape of a decent caliber all over.

 

Here are some good shots of the current Niagara's bulwarks - looks to be about 4' exclusive of hammock netting. Assuming of course that replica is accurate as to the dimensions:

 

http://www.superiortrails.com/duluth-tall-ships-tours.html

 

I would think that the Mercury would be similar if not a bit larger considering she was a sea going vs lake ship. Either way those gunners would certainly be couching down as much as possible when serving their pieces.

 

 

it was actually never performed for lowerdeck guns because of and  by the ware and tare issue  of the barrels

 

only upper decks would load grape

 

and often quarter deck guns would load grape + ball, especially if yardarm to yard arm fighting and boarding were anticipated.

 

I don't see a problem with the smaller ships and grape especially the merchant ships which don't have any protection on deck, however I think the shots are too accurate if someone is sending grape through gun ports of a large warship and killing entire gun crews (on a relatively undamaged ship). Also anti-personnal shot whether grape or canister had a very short effective range, something to remember when sailing a Lynx!

[Koltes]

What is probably needed is Brace button

Click a button - your crew stops doing whatever it is doing (for 1 min) acting as a crew shock. But you receive a lot less crew damage. 

 

This ^

 

Though switching crew for 1 minute from their immediate tasks (sails, cannons) is very harsh. You are replacing one punishment with another. Now your ship wont be crippled by lack of crew that has been graped, but it will be crippled by a very long cooldown. A whole minute is a lot of time to disable the ship in a middle of the fight. If you have to do it every time you are graped, then you are out of combat for good anyway. If you gonna do it only once, then it isn't really giving you any defensive tools against graping.

 

If you want to add cooldown, then why not add natural cooldown of the crew transfers that we already have in place. This will be logical, manageable by players and add more functionality to the combat.

 

Brace shouldn't be instant. Instead of cooldown function - crew would leave the deck in the same manner as crew transfer between jobs (sails, gunnery, repairs). Hiding should go with the same rate as crew transfer for other jobs. Meaning if you pushed B right before you've been graped there probably will be no protection as crew simply didnt have enough time to leave the deck. Pressing Brace 10-15 second prior taking shots would definitely help much more because good portion of the crew had time to hide. The damage to crew will be reduced to percentage of the crew that has been transferred to Bracing.

 

As per image below total crew count is 135. Captain has activated B (Brace) function and 60 crew members were transferred to bracing at the time when they were shot (55% of the total crew). Thus reduced damage done to the crew by 55%.

Like with Boarding there should never be a total crew transfer to Brace by default as someone still needs to be remain on sails, helm, gunnery, survival for the ship to operate.

However in extreme situations when crew has already been crippled severely captains should be able to switch off everything but Bracing thus transferring the entire remaining crew to defensive.

 

 

"Charismatic Boatswain" will be the upgrade to make Bracing faster. Nothing needs to be changed here.

 

Changes required - minimal.

Fighting content added - invaluable.

[maturin]

 

What is probably needed is Brace button

Click a button - your crew stops doing whatever it is doing (for 1 min) acting as a crew shock. But you receive a lot less crew damage.

The French were in the habit of lying down at their guns until after the first crushing close-range broadside that the British fired.

 

But I think the warm-up period should be considerable to avoid making raking fire irrelevant. Or maybe a Brace button could be implemented at the same time as making ball rakes more effective against guns (and masts!).

 

 

 

(Any chance you could comment on the feasibility of mast hitboxes being vulnerable from at gundeck-level? It gets proposed very often now.)

[Puchu]

It's already way better to focus armor than it is to focus crew atm. So why why why would you make raking and crew damage even less effective? 

I mean... you sacrifice a LOT for a good rake in an even duel. In group fights people alrdy tank with their stern a lot. So if you add something like brace to that, then raking will be completely gone. Which is a crazy thought since raking was THE way of killing a ship historically. 

 

A good 3rdrate captain can fend off 3 frigates on his own. If people are having trouble there, it is usually simply a skill level thing, where the frigate captain is just way better than the 3rdrate captain and in even ships the 3rdrate captain would have been slaugthered anyways, but he wouldnt have artificially felt much stronger in the first place. The farm advantage is decieving people. "harr im in a big ship, i need to win" no, it's more like "you need to be good to sail a big ship. if you are bad, then it gets even clearer the bigger ship you are in".

 

Maturim, i was allways for extended mast hitboxes. That would be amazing. 

 

Really, broadsidetrading like it is now so popular with carronades and the ridiculous damage and angles takes 0 skill to execute. Admin said that one of the goals of the penetration mechanic was to make ppl tank with their broadsides. Well, it turned out the other way, that ppl tank with their angled sterns. 

 

The only way to make me get behind anything that further reduces crew damage is if the brace button would also stop shooting untill i can turn in and go for a repositioning or a 2nd rake.

[Cmdr RideZ]

Grapes need a nerf for sure.

 

I think crew should understand to brace automatically, and not stand in a formation.  I do not like the brace button idea that much to be honest.  Some basic things should be automatic.  Add a possibility to stop reloading specific decks, load different ammo per deck, in case you want more micromanagement.

 

If half from the crew has been already killed, change to kill more should have been decreased.

 

Grapes remove skill, spamming works.  Maneuvering has less meaning.  This is the main reason why I do not like the grapes personally.

 

I would personally go with...

Chains & Grapes are disabling.

Balls are deciding.

 

 

Stern tanking.  This is not all "that" bad.  The ships are faster and more maneuverable.  So to counter this the stern damage should not be the end.  So basically everyone should be able to take some stern hits, so that it is in balance.

[Hethwill]

Ran a test, 2 surprises versus a cherubim. Only used grape along the broadsides of the frigate aiming straight at the gun ports and timing the broadsides with full armour. Was a average of 20 per broadside. Battle ended really fast. Once he was down to 160 the frigate couldn't anymore keep up with the rate of fire. The last 22 men provided to be very tricky to kill.

[DragonfireActual]

A duck and cover toggle that as others have said is perfect and as said,takes so many seconds to reach full effect and then so many seconds to return crew to what they were originally doing minus the crew lost. I think a fixed/or instant response/recover time either way is too unrealistic and as also proposed,the Boatswain having an effect on this response time,it actually makes the Boatswain a very valuable upgrade to add to one's ship. Makes one really think about their setup.

Edited October 4, 2016 by DragonfireActual

[Hethwill]

A brace option sounds really odd tbh.

 

Would be more interesting to have the hitboxes dynamic, both in density of crew count and mass occupied, as crew moves around, that is if they aren't already.

[KrakkenSmacken]

We believe morale has no place in naval action. Player should be able to fight until he wants to stop. Systems making such decisions will make a lot of mistakes and impossible to tune until some other systems are taken out. 

 

For example. Warning shot from a 74 will force your light frigate to surrender, just because system thinks your morale dropped due to a presence of the overwhelming force and low probability of victory ignoring player skill and situation. Impossible to tune and if you tune those systems they will end up with morale having no effect on anything. 

 

Morale will work well in a grand admiral type of game where player commands a grand fleet and has no effect on anything except for general direction of squadrons (but squadrons decide everything else based on unit stats and RNG). 

 

At this point I personally just mentally rearrange the words to consider the current casualty system as including morale, especially with the med kits that "replace" crew at sea.

 

When a cannon crew gets grapped, as OP is complaining about, it loses 4 crew. In my head that is 0-1 dead, 0-3 injured, and the rest in permanent shock.

 

Functionally moral would/could work the same way as completely de-crewing a ship with grape.  

 

Same ship loss, same point in the battle where the player loses the ability to prevent ship loss, same state, (your ship is captured), etc.  

 

It probably just feels better for the players to think they fought to the last man, which is good enough reason to keep things as they are in the game, if the devs are considering that crew loss includes death/injury/demoralization in the part of the design that they keep to themselves.

 

Hell, even one sentence in the "what is crew loss" description would do.  

"Crew loss is when a member of your crew is permanently unable to fight. This can be from death, Injury or demoralization.  Medical kits will restore crew from injury or demoralization." (This would/could kinda require a limit on now many crew could be replaced by kit.)

 

That would be enough for me.

 

EDIT: (Post Ewok's like) Thinking more about this, it would consider making the mechanic like this.  

 

Split crew into the three groups as they are injured.

 

When you capture a ship, it has the injured and demoralized, a percentage of which you can convince "press" into service.

When you escape losing your ship with very low crew, the demoralized crew restore, and health kits restore the injured.

When in a fight, the officer can restore demoralized like a repair action, maybe requires a rum ration or something.

When out of a fight doctors restore crew at a specific rate on the OW.

The dead need to be replaced at port.

Edited October 4, 2016 by KrakkenSmacken