Advanced damage control system.

[rgreat]

Decided it worth a separate thread.

I want an advanced damage control system.

Trying to keep your ships afloat and still able to fight was perhaps the most interesting part of old Great Naval Battles series games.

You could manually control fire-fighting, flood-fighting, counter-flooding and system repair. 

You have limited damage control teams you can assign to do work, and several pumps, you can assign to pump out (or pump in) seawater.

If your magazine flooded you lose ability to fire guns assigned to it.

If your boiler room or engine room is flooded it will be damaged or even destroyed and you lose some power and speed. But you can fix bulkheads in compartment, pump out water, and with considerable effort repair damaged room, restoring that power.

Similarly most compartments damage affect something so you must decide for yourself priorities of damage control.

And of cause all it can be done automatically by the AI.

Why not add something like that into this game?

Edited January 19, 2020 by rgreat

[disc]

Sounds like an cool idea.

This is implemented to a very limited degree. Damaging certain compartments will cause criticals to the engines, for example, and the ship can auto-repair at least some cases. But certainly there is no counterflooding, and the pumping system is pretty ridiculous. I would also like to see disablement of gun turrets with magazine flooding or fires. I don't think there are any temporary criticals to guns, either, which I think would be nice.

I don't know about the manual system, might be too much micro-managing, but I suppose it's not unreasonable.

[roachbeef]

Feel it's unnecessary. You'll be controlling dozens of ships as an admiral, not a captain. It will get too unwieldy very quickly for a system most players will never be able to use due to an insane amount of multitasking. The only fair and sensible (IRL crews will start damage control to the best of their abilities even if the flagship doesn't tell them to) option would be to make the auto-repair as good as the manual repair, which sort of voids the whole point of an extra game system. Maybe a spinoff Ultimate Captain series could have this sytem. 

[rgreat]

20 hours ago, roachbeef said:

You'll be controlling dozens of ships as an admiral, not a captain. It will get too unwieldy very quickly

You could only manage your flagship, or the ship you value enough.

Or not micromanage anything at all, and let AI do it all automatically.

Automatic damage control should be good enough to keep it that way if you not want do it yourself for some reason.

Like AI control for formations we have currently. Sometimes i use it, sometimes not.

Edited January 21, 2020 by rgreat

[Skeksis]

Very first alpha impressions was that we (some of us) wanted more to do in combat since there is a reasonable amount of time just watching the battle, downtime that could be address. Also we have a “pause” button to issue orders.

Therefore I am all for some micromanaging as long as there auto options for those who don’t. Even as admirals of a fleet I would still like to manage ‘capital’ ships and there fire, flood and machinery damage control, even just something as simple like 'damage priorities' for crew. 

OP, keep “Advanced Damage Control” ideas alive and promote them for as long as possible, it would be great to have! 🙂

Edited January 21, 2020 by Skeksis

[arkhangelsk]

12 hours ago, roachbeef said:

Feel it's unnecessary. You'll be controlling dozens of ships as an admiral, not a captain. It will get too unwieldy very quickly for a system most players will never be able to use due to an insane amount of multitasking. The only fair and sensible (IRL crews will start damage control to the best of their abilities even if the flagship doesn't tell them to) option would be to make the auto-repair as good as the manual repair, which sort of voids the whole point of an extra game system. Maybe a spinoff Ultimate Captain series could have this sytem. 

You get to control "dozens" of ships in Great Naval Battles, so that isn't necessarily a pain. Besides, there are likely to be many scenarios where you control one ship, or a few. Third, a lot of the time the brunt is being borne by one or two of your ships rather than all of them being peppered at once, so you can focus your attention on those bearing the brunt.

[Steeltrap]

As I've said elsewhere, I thought "GNB North Atlantic: '39-'43" had the best damage control system for any naval game I've ever played, and that was released 30 years ago this year.

The unfortunate truth, however, is complexity is the enemy of "AI".

What I mean is the game suffered from a problem that the AI's damage control skills weren't up to the challenge and thus lost ships it ought not have.

At the same time if you make it too simple there's little point in it being there.

Ironically, if the AI were perfect with damage control (which theoretically ought to be close to achievable) then the system potentially would disadvantage the player, assuming there were situations where a poor decision would mean the loss of a ship.

Which leads to the last problem.

You need a default AI option for your OWN ships so you don't have to jump around to every DD to tell them to do the obvious thing that needs doing. If the AI is any good, what's the role of the player? It's an inevitable consequence of having close to infallible damage control AI that the smart thing to do would be never to interfere yourself. In one sense that's how it should be; Admirals don't command a ship's crew, the Captain does.

In which case, much as I loved the system, is there really a point to it? I'd say there is IF the AI is pretty bad at using it effectively. Which means it's just another way the AI is going to lose to the player.

Do we want the game to have another thing that makes it easier for us or for which the devs "cheat" to give our enemies a boost? I hate it when the latter is done, especially when it's lazy as hell such as Total War games do it.

What I think we all DO agree on is the current system is entirely inadequate, but we also know the devs are well aware of it. I'm inclined to reserve judgement until we have a better picture of just what the devs intend to be closer to the finished system.

Certainly interesting to think about.

Edited January 21, 2020 by Steeltrap

[Skeksis]

On 1/21/2020 at 10:15 PM, Steeltrap said:

The unfortunate truth, however, is complexity is the enemy of "AI".

AI damage could be very simple, say if auto-repair is assigned at the time of impact/damage, it would only take a few milliseconds of application e.g. fire: if repair available then cell fire timer is reduced by control damage fire reduction value, very simple, not very taxing.

In any case programming or resources is not the important factor here, what is important is the player interaction in the battle scene, not enough of this and there's a danger of the battle becoming unstimulating. Can you honestly say that you don’t speed up battles?

As for the user interface, by clicking a cell to reduce that damage timer by x amount is not complicated, nor is assigning/clicking cells/machinery to re-health, as above for players AI.

I'm supportive so as to add more depth and gameplay into battles and one of the ways the game can do this is with damage control interactions.

 

Edited January 22, 2020 by Skeksis