Dinner for Admiral - Medium difficulty experience

[PinkyDK]

Bought the game yesterday - it's great so far and looking good...

I do hope the development has plenty time for improving the instructions on game mechanics and giving me as a player more guidance through the missions.
I'd love for the instructions/mission description to be very clear from the start so I dont have to start a battle and then restarting it with a proper setup only because it's the only way to get an idea of what is required for me...

Dinner for Admiral battle made me think a lot about the scaling - I like the constant challenge, but sometimes I'm afraid to get punished for making a good battle result either from luck or hard work ...
Anyway here is an example from the very first selectable mission I played after the initial battle.

I brought the 18 Gun HMS Ferret with 120 sailors and a 12 Gun HMS Alert with 64 sailors for my attempt at winning "Dinner with Admiral" on medium difficulty and it felt like "hard level".
I did have the option to keep a 26 Gun Prize from the previous battle but I left it as a Prize for a future addition because of price and wanting to follow the story at least the first battle.
Also I was afraid to escalate the difficulty even from having it in the harbour...

Since this was the first mission I decided to go with the story about having these only a brig and a sloop so I picked these 2 ships and didn't want to purchase a bigger ship yet.
I faced (besides the Walpole) 2 x 18 Gun Spaniards...
Obviously depending on the AI it's possible to win a good victory, but I think 2 x 18 gun ships was a little difficult for my medium settings thinking I had less cannons and during the game had to donate some crew for taking control of the Walpole.

I ended up donating 30 sailors from the Alert rather early on since the sloop was pretty useless with 3" cannons only - luckily the 16 remaining sailors managed to grab the attention from the un-important enemy ship and drag him away while Ferret managed to gain a slightl edge on the "San Juan Bautista" and eventually winning a boarding action...

PinkyDK

TL:DR - I like the game - The naval battle "Dinner with Admiral" was a little harder than I expected...

 

[WilliamTheIII]

The game does seem harder than UGCW is however, like with UGCW, once you figured out what you are doing the game not only becomes manageable but quite easy. In the beginning, focus on capturing ships and by the time you want to start blowing things up, use manual aim to great effect. When using round, the waterline is by far the best place to shoot allowing "worse" ships to out trade larger and higher starred troops on hard. Make sure to switch up with chain as you can't damage already damaged sails. Finally, though I still am quite terrible myself with grape, it does seem that lowering the armor and aiming for the wheelhouse are the best places for fire. The meta for land seems to be the opposite of that in UGCW where charging is your friend. The strategy we developed over in the discord was to fire a volley and then charge at them. The idea here is that the ai will be able to fire at you no matter what so you might as well shoot them as well and charge while reloading. (depending on the enemy unit size and your own, more than one troop may be needed. In fact, 2 units does usually seem the best). Another thing, land condition seems to drain at a much slower rate and your units recharge while walking so don't be afraid to run. These are just a few tips off the top of my head and I hope they help.

[SweatyPenguin]

The game features dynamic scaling, same as UGCW, so what the AI brings to the battle will be based on your own forces. I support this feature, because the campaign can quite lengthy and somewhere along the way you'd tip scales long enough to make the rest of it an absolute steamroll. It's not the most immersive thing in the world, but I think it is neccessary.

My particular input to the situation you describe is you simply brought far too few men. I did not play the battle with that particular set up myself sadly, I initially did make use of the captured Sloops-of-War only to realize I hated how they handled (They have a tendency to capsize in rough seas, I don't know if this is intentional or not). On another playthrough I simply sent them off and bought a 6th rate instead. This still had me facing off the brigs and for a Cerberus class mounting 9pds they were an absolute non-issue. But if I were forced to make do with the ships you had, I would have topped them up on crew first thing. Since you are given the weather gauge from the start, Alert can board Walpole quick as possible, with little the AI can do about it, (well there is quite a lot it could, but it does not) and after that overwhelming one of the ships as you are tasked should be doable, not easy I dont think, but doable. Depending on the time you have another boarding action I think would guarantee the job done, though perhaps not very efficiently.

I do aggree however, more information on the deployment screen would be welcome, in UGCW you could have rough estimates on the enemy troop numbers, I wouldn't be against having a similar thing in this game too.

[PinkyDK]

Sweaty - I could not load more sailors on the ships. Also the reason I felt this mission was too hard for it's difficulty is mostly thinking about new players...

When players buy this game they get dropped into the first battle. Then they pretty much get left alone in the mission map... I played with the brig and the sloop and got paired up against bigger ships with same manpower. Either the game should instruct me to purchase a bigger ship to reach the wanted difficulty level or I should have an advanced tutorial of ship hitboxes and "best procedure" for sinking a ship, blowing away sails, killing sailors etc.

It's not because I can't figure it out myself - but I would want every new player (12, 16, 27, 84 years old - shouldn't matter) to get a good experience even if they're brand new to a game like this. Luckily the game is still in development so with enough time this can go from a brilliant game for experienced players to being a brilliant game for anyone.

Many options are available including more advanced tutorials, better introductions during at least the first few missions and perhaps even my favorite: combine it with a few more introduction missions with low risc and low pay.

PinkyDK

[WilliamTheIII]

I disagree that the best strategy is to buy a better ship. Normally I won’t buy any until Chapter 3 (maybe a troop transport) as the Diana is quite strong until you get the Endymion. Though having quite a significant edge up from having been apart of Alpha since the beginning and being a veteran of UGCW, when not touching the game in several months and then jumping right into the campaign I noticed I sucked quite a bit. However, by half way through I had reestablished my bearings and was able to finish the chapter on that save. Only later did I go back and min max everything. Myself and another are probably going to attempt to make a wiki or something explaining a lot of the mechanics and I’ll probably release a tutorial for the ea release which hopefully will make things easier.

going back to Dinner, the Ferret and Alert fully loaded with max crew should be plenty to capture both the 6th rates and the Walpole granted with heavy casualties. Of course, using the Richmond to capture the ships in the intro makes things easier as well. I’d recommend more or less playing all of Chapter 2 with a captured 6th rate in the intro so you can have enough rep for the 4th rate (40 rep last time I looked which was a few patches ago) by fireworks or hunter if you are on hard (need a 5th rate to get the early 4th from hunter).