Quick Notes On Battle Rating Changes

[WilliamTheIII]

Version: v0.5.3 rev .32710 BB4

Note: I do not have a lot of time on my hands so this is mainly just a quick run through of what I've noticed.

Note: Battle Ratings of ships have been changed some and so have several missions maximum BR. The 4th Rates used to have a BR of 160 but has been jacked up to 300.

Note: 3rd Rates have been mislabeled and will be changed to 4th Rates.

Intelligence: 2 Troop Transports should be enough to win the Intelligence battle meaning you can still bring in the 4th Rate. This is a major problem as of how easily the 4th Rate can shred through the 6th Rate Porcupine's and the 7th Rate Snow's.

Clash: The deployment screen info as well as the in-battle description both illustrate that there are two ships you have to fight. There is only one!

With Beaver Up: The deployment screen has two placement boxes. The lower BR one is closer to the enemy ships where the higher BR is near the top. However, in-game this is flipped so the better/more ships are spawned near the enemy whereas the worse/less ships are spawned at the back.

Scaling: From what we have derived, scaling used to be based on your overall fleet both in the battle and in your harbor (not including POI's). Because of the ability to capture 4th Rates, this patch was made. Essentially, they limited the missions the 4th Rates could be used on. This would mean that most missions would upscale to have at least one 4th Rate resulting in a very difficult battle. To fix this, scaling seems to have changed to only take into account the ships that you have on any given mission. One question I have about this, is like Snatch, is the only ship that matters is the highest rated and type or does the number of ships, their rates and types matter as well? Also, I only had time to test Harm Rum, is the max downscale relatively high to prevent players from only using 7th Rate Brig's on missions making them significantly easier? If this is the case, then aren't these lower rated ships essentially useless except for doing POI work, filling out your BR (unless they affect scaling), and fighting lower rated and typed enemy ships if there are any?

4th Rate: The patch notes said that the 4th Rate had an increased cost. Does this mean monetarily (the sell price has remained the same) or reputation cost (the rep cost seems to have gone down from 45 to 40)? On normal, it would appear that it is still possible to capture 4 4th Rates by the end of Chapter 3 which would give you an overwhelming advantage later on (I'd imagine). Though I have only completed half of Chapter 3 on hard, it seems like it will be even worse where you have the ability to capture 2 of them in Chapter 2 alone (I was unable to capture the 4th Rate in Hunter and Prey and not quite sure if it was a bug or intentional).

Maintenance: Maintenance cost while having a large fleet and army seems to vary quite a lot (-25k to -4k for me). A better breakdown for what is affecting the overall price would be nice as I am having trouble in understanding how the same force can have such varying prices. Also, I'd imagine maintenance cost could be used to help balance out the large amount of 4th Rates you can collect over the campaign so far? Maintenance is also quite exploitable it seems. As you have no reserves, you can artificially create one by placing your unused crews into it lowering the maintenance cost substantially. Though this might lower your average stats, I feel if you do things correctly the effect will be negligible. To counteract this, the maintenance cost could also charge the reserve units in of your fleet essentially stopping you from getting free money. 

Boarding: One thing I have noticed is that ships have marines on them rather than sailors (or both). This can be seen in the info tab in-game. In the harbor, it would be nice to see how many marines are on these ships, who is captaining them, do they use land stats, and the equipment they are using. When boarding, how are these units taken into account? I'd imagine that they fight better than the sailors but, how exactly does the game calculate these things when multiple units from the same ships are boarding? Also, are land marines different from ship marines? Are marines better at boarding in general over say grenadiers and fusiliers?

Thanks for all of the great work!

[ColonelHenry]

The BR reduction is for the worse imo. Ontario Express is literally unplayable on normal alone. Unplayable as in, I can't engage the enemy without risking losing 1 ship. I can't bring my 4th rate anymore, so I can only bring 2 frigates, both of whom guns combined wouldn't even equal that of the 4th rate the AI bring. How is this fair? They have 2 5th rates to begin with. And now, they want me to fight a 64guns ship of the line. Might as well tie my hands behind my back while playing. I mean, sure I can derp the AI and make them chase me instead of the transport, but I don't want to cheese the game, I want to play it.

[WilliamTheIII]

I just played it twice with and without a 5th Rate. Both times I won without losing a single ship whilst retreating the convoy (and yes I did kill their ships). Neither time was I upscaled to a 4th Rate on normal. I haven't payed this mission on hard since the chapter was released so perhaps you are seeing differently? For some advice on fighting, aiming at the waterline is a great way to reduce the armor, avoid grape as its kind of ineffective and round seems to do more morale damage, and chaining the mast to slow down the enemy. Essentially out positioning and and manual aim will allow you to win fights against a far superior opponent. 

[ColonelHenry]

No, I know how to fight so it isn't the problem. The problem is that the friggin 4th rate that I see has more guns than both of my ships combined. That's broken. Yes I can win but why bother playing when all you do is cheese the enemy into chasing you instead of the transport? Again, the 4th rate will take out 1/4 of my ship's armor in one single good broadside, how is that fair?

Edited December 10, 2019 by ColonelHenry

[WilliamTheIII]

A: I intentionally stopped the transports so I can win the fights

B: Are you having to fight a 4th Rate on the current patch with 6th Rates? I could only force an upscale when bringing several 5th Rates both of which were capable of taking down the 4th Rate. On hard, I didn't have any 5th Rates to test it however, from previous experience and loading the battle with a similar comp, scaling seems to work very similarly.

[ColonelHenry]

How do you fight a 4th rate when there are 2 other 5 rates on you? Yea I brought a Diane and a Hermione. But the thing is, I could barely damage the 4th rate unless I can get broadsides into the back. But the thing is, no matter how careful you are, you can't tank more than 3-4 broadside from the 4th rate. They will screw you over.

[ColonelHenry]

Hold on, but currently there are no 4th rate in the game? All of the 64 guns are 3rd rate?

[ColonelHenry]

Also, @WilliamTheIII, No I do not think the land marines can even board ships to begin with. I tried to capture the 3rd rate in firework using my transport ship armed with 310 marines armed with land pattern musket w/ bayonets. They all died while only taking with them 250 out of 500 crews from the 3rd rate (I had the transport ship to be commanded by a high boarding stat captain). I failed like 10 times with no result. So I made a 6th rate Cerebus into a made-shift boarding vessel with no guns: 300 men, best boarding officer I had, sea rifles w/ bayonets. They held their own against the 500 crews despite being outnumbered, I had the transport ship with 310 marines to help with the boarding, all 310 are out of action (I retained about 150 after the battle but still) before the Cerebus get below 200 crews. And the rest of the 3rd crews were killed easily by those 200. So, with this, you should never use land units to board ship, ever.

[WilliamTheIII]

31 minutes ago, ColonelHenry said:

Hold on, but currently there are no 4th rate in the game? All of the 64 guns are 3rd rate?

In discord, someone made a detailed post on how the 3rd Rates are actually 4th Rates. The devs said that they are mislabeled which is why I'm calling them 4th Rates.

12 hours ago, ColonelHenry said:

How do you fight a 4th rate when there are 2 other 5 rates on you?

Carefully, you just need to always keep the 4th out of range and have one ship focus it while the rest deal with the 5th's. Use a lot of chain and staying at max range will help deflect shells. Also why are you upscaling the battle to make things harder on yourself? If you bring only one 5th rates, you will only see 3 enemy 5th rates which makes things significantly easier.

[doublebuck]

I can attest to the fact that I don't use transport ships to directly board a ship anymore for every time I did that and for an example my transport ship had 300 marines on it along with the crew, and I tried boarding a war ship I don't remember the type but it had a sailor's crew of about 120 and to my surprise within a minute I not only lost the ship but also the 300 marines.  Are you telling me marines suck in sea battles?  Or do they not participate in boarding they just stand around watching while the 120 sailors beats up my little crew?  It was shocking to see the 120 ship of sailors beat up my crew and 300 marines in seconds while they then deploy a little boat to capture my transport and that is why I don't use transports that way. I have used a transport ship to dump out the marines so they can reinforce my war ship that is boarding an enemy ship when it's depleted enough the marines can join onto my war ship to continue the boarding and that worked out in that case.

[ColonelHenry]

@WilliamTheIII At what range are you talking about, the 4th rate I see can pretty much pen me at most ranges that my guns could actually fire. Chains have lower range than the normal shell as well. Do you have a vid demonstrating this strategy? My currently strategy is just luring the ship to sail against the wind and then have someone blast a broadside up their ass, and then use a boarding ship to take care of the demoralized crew.

Edited December 10, 2019 by ColonelHenry