Skill-based, Exciting and Realistic Boarding Initiation

[maturin]

In the current build, we board enemy ships using the Death Star's tractor beam invisible grappling hooks.

 

Ever wonder how they did it in real life? Here is what Boudriot has to say about it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-pwrC9JR7ahVGUzbHdWeGxuWXc/view?usp=sharing

 

TLDR: The best method of boarding is to cut across the enemy's bow, and let him get his bowsprit tangled in your shrouds.

 

What follows is my suggestion for implementing this boarding technique in the game. I realize that it would be difficult to code and balance, but the result would be very interesting and demand considerable skill from the attacker.

 

In short:

• The existing Grapple buttons remains, but it only works when ships are actually touching, and moving at > 4 knots. It doesn't actually pull ships around, it just makes them stick. 80 preparation points required.
• My proposed boarding system relies on new colliders that should be added to the bowsprit and shrouds of ships.
• When the bowsprit collider of ship A intersects the shroud colliders of ship B, there is a chance that the colliders will become stuck together. Say, every 2 seconds of contact, there is a 30% chance of entanglement. Once the bowsprit is entangled in the shrouds, boarding can be initiated if either ship has 30 preparation points.
• If ship A rams ship B hard enough to break the bowsprit, entanglement will not occur. (This is unrealistic, but necessary to discourage crazy rageboarding.)

 

Colliders for shrouds:

 

 

 

Bowsprit collider (1) entangled with shroud collider (2):

 

 

Note: For our purposes it doesn't matter whether Pavel rammed the Surprise with intent to board, or Surprise let Pavel blunder into him. What matters is that they are stuck together now, and whoever has Preparation can board.

 

The above picture proves that the system can work when SoLs board frigates. For boarding actions between frigates and smaller craft, use of the heavily-nerfed Grapple system would be required. But this is fine, because small vessels should be unable to make themselves pests by boarding huge battleships. And if the SoL wants to board a light vessel, it can always obliterate its sails.

 

And as a fun bonus, the shroud colliders can be used as hitboxes for chainshot! Damaging them would threaten the lower masts.

[TommyShelby]

+1! 
 

[Young]

very good !

[OlavDeng2]

I like this idea, would make things a lot more fun and less of the bullshit boarding when you are 30m away and going 6 knots and they board you :/

[Ronan]

Definitely support. Being able to pull a 5000 ton warship around like a raft is abit silly.

[admin]

Definitely support. Being able to pull a 5000 ton warship around like a raft is abit silly.

 

Victory is 3500 tons

 

 

it is not pushed like a raft + remember times are kind of game related. Brig tacks in 1-2 mins, in reality it is 5-10-20 mins.

 

USS Constitution during the famous chase was pulled by three boats 

[marecek05]

100% support behind this skill based idea...

[admin]

Entanglement existed in the early version of the game - ships were stuck until the end of the battle.

It was fun for the winner + creates unrealistic disentanglement. It is impossible to unstuck ships without some clowney ship jumping ruining the visuals (thats how physx works).

 

In addition to that having so many extra physical colliders (50 potentially unique bowsprits, and 150 potentially unique shrouds as we have a lot of different vessels) will force us to reduce the number of ships per battle. It will only be possible in 3-5 years once Moore's law does its thing a couple of times more. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law)

 

So the choice is simple: large battles (e.g. port battles) or realistic entanglement. Or significantly limit the number of vessels stripping all those age of sail beauties away from the game and leaving only standard ships - lets say one standard ship per rate simplifying the complexity. 

 

+ We see a double standard here.

First you guys request that repeat boarding should not happen, then you support proper realistic entanglement for boarding that creates guaranteed repeat boarding. 

[marecek05]

Entanglement existed in the early version of the game - ships were stuck until the end of the battle.

It was fun for the winner + creates unrealistic disentanglement. It is impossible to unstuck ships without some clowney ship jumping ruining the visuals (thats how physx works).

 

In addition to that having so many extra physical colliders (50 bowsprits, and 150 shrouds) will force us to reduce the number of ships per battle. It will only be possible in 3-5 years once Moore's law does its thing a couple of times more. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law)

 

+ We see a double standard here.

First you guys request that repeat boarding should not happen, then you support proper realistic entanglement for boarding that creates guaranteed repeat boarding. 

 

The technical impossibility is definitely an argument here. In regards to the double standard, in my "I hate boarding post", I proposed both as applicable, in order to chose the better. Not both at once...

[Ronan]

I wasn't talking about the Victory, I was talking about the santi, which is 4950 tons.

[maturin]

This is the 'simulator' proposal, pointing out how it could be done most authentically. Of course adjustments would be required, if it is technically feasible at all.
 

 

First you guys request that repeat boarding should not happen, then you support proper realistic entanglement for boarding that creates guaranteed repeat boarding.

 

It wouldn't need to guarantee repeat boarding. You guys put a Disengage command in boarding. Most player interpreted this as meaning that the ships completely separate. So of course the entanglement colliders would deactivate for 10-20 seconds, long enough for the ships to drift apart under the sail that remained set throughout the process.

 

 

I can't answer for the performance drain of adding colliders. I imagine that such hitboxes can be disabled by default, only activating on ships that are in Boarding Focus, and on ships located less than 50 meters from them. That would mean no performance hit in Trafalgar battles, until boarding actually started.

[admin]

 

I can't answer for the performance drain of adding colliders. I imagine that such hitboxes can be disabled by default, only activating on ships that are in Boarding Focus, and on ships located less than 50 meters from them. That would mean no performance hit in Trafalgar battles, until boarding actually started.

 

It does not matter if they are disabled or enabled. They are either there, or not there. Having them on 0 (false) - you still have them in the system. Having them on/off actually increases the numbers. Because now you will have to transmit 2 numbers instead of 1 from each player on all other 49 players. Adding distance makes it even worse - now you have to calculate and transmit distances for all combinations of players. 

 

answer: no  In the single player game some day, when we won't need to worry about hacking and can keep everything on the client.

 

ps. visibility calculations in WOT consume 30-35% of server capacity.

[NorthernWolves]

Is there a way to at least reduce the knots at which boarding can be initiated? 4-6 knots is way too fast. Can you require it to have the hulls touching at least as well?

 

The repeat boarding is happening because of the OP boarding modules, as I reported recently, we are capping 4-5 ships each, same sized ships or larger each, without graping or reducing HP.