How to make skill matter? - Suggestions

[maturin]

I think ships have to be able to sink from raking fire. (If memory serves, that was done away with and never came back.) I'd say to treat bow and stern armor the same as broadside armor - if it's gone, you start taking on water.

This would allow a skilled player to eat broadsides on flanks while knocking people out via sterns. With one repair, a player would have to successfully stern rake 6 times to take out three ships - tough, but possible.

There has to be more than one valid tactic in the game.

[Powderhorn]

I don't disagree with you Maturin, but as things stand, one is better than none.

[Puchu]

To give 1 player the chance to win vs 2 lesser skilled equally geared ships, you would need one of 2 things:

 

1. A huge equalizer:

 

We used to have boarding to do that. You could take out one of the enemies while suffering minimal losses through boarding (But again, that was mostly done through gear advantage)

Other ideas could be: Massively crippeling raking fire or a morale system that would cause a ships crew to strike colours after getting raked devastatingly.

 

2. The game needs to be so hard to master, that as a noob you would just be basically doing nothing all fight. 

 

Ideas could be: Individual sail raising, no aiming aids, individual gun loading and so on. Basically if the ship does almost nothing by itself, then the more skilled player might be able to win vs someone who is just unable to do all the stuff needed in the necessary amount of time with the necessary precision. 

[Laik]

 

lets stop talking about timers for a while 

 

what else besides the timers?

An idea which I think did appear on the forums more than once.

 

Make ship sinking almost exclusively dependant on crew numbers and leaks. This means that ship sinks when there is not enough crew left to fix the leaks and pump water. So what's the point of armor then? When armor gets shot away the crew loss and gun loss from regular cannon fire should be devastating and much more leaks appear. This way you can actually sink a ship by removing most of his crew through raking fire and then creating leaks despite armor being present.

 

What this achieves? A gameplay that is more crew-focused than hp-focused. A skilled player, who can rake very well, can win against 2 players who are not as proficient at raking. While they shoot his hull, he can remove crew of at least one of them and virtually put him out of the fight (because he will need to fight both huge water intake and long reload). This way focus would switch from increasing volume of fire to 'quality' of fire with raking being the desirable firing solution (right now it's totally opposite). Proper rake is much more difficult to pull off (compared to hull bashing) and thus should be rewarded accordingly.

 

A thought which I had in my mind for a while which I can expand upon if it gathers interest. 

[Schuetzengel]

lock camera view to the helm

more complex sail model

harder aiming

[Malachi]

Get rid of modules completely and introduce proper trimming, so people can customise the sailing characteristics to their liking (within reason).

[akd]

Reduce mast HP and / or add chance of critical hits on masts. Make demasting more disabling (e.g. results in long rigging shock and maybe other penalties) and much slower to repair. To compensate, add more sail / mast repairs so overall "life" of sails and masts remain the same over the course of a battle (maybe put canvas repair on survival mode like leaks and leave the discreet repairs to masts). This would allow a player to achieve a major short-term advantage through skillful targeting of masts and rigging, but make targeting sails / masts / rigging less of a pure attrition game which tends to favor numbers and volume of fire. You would be able to disable one ship, but unless the advantage is pursued immediately, the opponent will have time to pull away and repair and rejoin the fight.

[CommodoreWesley]

I was going to make a different thread about this, but I guess I could bring it here...

 

You can't raise and lower nor turn your yard arms while you are in gunnery or survival mode.  In turn, your guns will not reload in survival or sailing mode.

 

Would change a few things, make changing your crew focus at the right time a lot more important, and less battles of constant turning.  

It is probably too extreme, but at least there does need to a more of a significant difference between the crew focus modes than there is currently. 

The main problem however is that it might penalize people in smaller ships more.

[mouse of war]

How about players that sail a ship that is below what their rank entitles them to getting a bonus on some fighting factors (possibly moral and gun firing rate?). This would reflect their greater 'skill' ( experience with that ship and crew) and also have the added benefit of reducing the overall trend upwards to SOLs

 

I for example, would much rather 'grind' my fighting capability in a frigate than grind up to a larger ship

[Laik]

Building on previous suggestion plus more.

 

De-masting currently:

Clearly the most efficient default approach to a fight. Enemy needs to respond with the same or the fight will end inconclusively at best (because the de-masting side can always sail away due to having sail-dmg advantage). Countering with chain-shot isn’t efficient either due to cannonball range being clearly superior (plus chainshot can be defended against and ball does damage to sails also). This leads to ‘de-masting’ duels at ranges often exceeding 800 meters which is extremely boring for both sides.

 

How to prevent this kind of gameplay while keeping de-masting an important part of the game as well as adding the skill aspect to it?

Make extremely steep damage fall-off from cannonball versus masts. Cannon balls should only do non-negligable damage to masts at range lower than effective chain-shot range. What this means? Demasting is still present in the game (no changes to mast hp) and is still the only efficient way of making a ship completely stop. However, now de-masting as the default tactics is not risk-free anymore because you need to be in the range where you can suffer both burst-dmg to sail through chain, or effective damage to hull. But, both chain and hull dmg can be countered by showing bow and proper use of yards/depower. Therefore, a skilled player who wants to commit to de-masting can still succeed, yet he will need to accept a decisive outcome, one way or another. To prevent gimping de-masting a reinforced masts module should be severely nerfed (maybe to 30%, with accompanying penalties to yard turning and sail setting).

 

‘Crew-sinking’

Change focus from sinking through armor removal to sinking through loss of crew and pump coupled with leaks exclusively. A ship sinks when it gets more leaks than the crew can fix in time. Importance of armor changes, from basically hp-bar, to a ‘crew protection’. When armor gets shot away, crew casualties and gun loss become massive. What this achieves?

1. Preserves hull-bashing as it is now with almost no change. If you shoot hull long enough, a ship will sink, you just need to shoot it couple more times after armor goes down to 0 to remove crew (should be easy even with ball).
2. Makes it possible to actually sink ship by focusing crew. First you remove crew and afterwards you shoot at the waterline to create red leaks. This is the skill-aspect that could be the equalizer in a 1vs2 situation. And shooting at the waterline actually becomes useful (and adds to the importance of the weather gauge), because right now it’s preferable to shoot at the gundeck due to gun/crew loss and damage is the same.
3. Quality of fire vs quantity of fire. Raking becomes the desirable firing solution. However, sufficient amount of firepower focused on broadside is still effective when unable to rake. Therefore shooting bigger target (broadside) is easier and can be done consistently, but takes longer to win. Shooting small, moving target (stern) requires proper positioning and broadside being properly-rolled in at the right angle, which makes it difficult, is appropriately rewarded.
4. Hopefully in the future we will get some sort of importance attached to crew which would mean that ships which get their armor shot away don’t sink, but strike colors to preserve their crew. Something for the history nazis.
5. Last but not least. All mechanics required to achieve this are already in the game. Removing (or greatly reducing) structural leaks, making red leaks even more deadly, increasing importance of crew on water pumping and crew loss at 0 armor.

 

 

Additional ways of increasing skill-cap without gimping the game’s accessibility:

1. Removing information about enemy guns being reloaded. Paying attention to when and how many guns the enemy has fired actually pays off and gives opportunity for some neat tricks like firing top-deck only to trick enemy into thinking it was entire broadside.
2. Giving ability to ‘focus’ reload on one side. While at full complement reloading both sides should be relatively easy.  However as the crew is killed, reload should suffer greatly (as it is now). Having ability to tell the guncrews to man only one side to boost it’s reload at the expense of another would be useful.
3. View from deck-only. While I personally am not a fan of it, it clearly would considerably incrase the  importance of situational awareness and make it one of the game-winning traits.

[Red Jack Walker]

I like almost all your suggestions, except for point 3 (View from deck only). After EA we hopefully will have something like 2000-3000 players or more, and I think it is wrong to force so many players to play from a fixed view. For sure it will make the game more immersive and skill-based for a few players, but also more difficult and less appealing for many. So let's keep it as an in game option.

Edited January 9, 2016 by Captain Foster

[Ian2492]

Again.

What is the reason to keep 5 min. timers?

Why avoid the obvious positives of 1 min. timers?

 

I posted an alternative to the timers altogether here: http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/8211-suggestion-to-replace-battle-timer/

 

 

No rolling broadside

 

 

This would only be acceptable if manual shooting with spacebar would allow you to shoot at a decent speed, and multiple decks at once.

In real life it was simple to tell your crew to fire in the ship only when it's in front of the gun, for example when you're raking. Right now the rolling broadside's effectively is entirely dependent on the speed of your ship, which makes no sense.

Alternatively, they could add a broadside mode that is dependent on the speed of your ship, so that guns only fire when they reach the point where the first gun fired.

[Powderhorn]

Laik, I largely agree with your ideas, and the "making crew matter somehow to encourage striking colors" would be accomplished via having crew gain ranks (landsman, ordinary seaman, able seaman) as suggested in the proposal in my signature.

[jodgi]

I hope ya'll can appreciate what a gudpoast Laik just made. The most complete analysis of high level play I've seen here in a long time.

I've been thinking about a thing to make rakes devastating without interfering with linefighting.

Demasting by raking fire.

The triangular shapes are suggested hitboxes for the masts below the deck, they don't have to be triangular, I just picked that shape for max novelty impact. The red sternfacing side represent a vulnerable armor area, or an area with few hitpoints, depending on how programming works. The two black sides facing stem would be thick armor or high HP, depending on programming.

Fire from beam.

The intention is to leave beam fire unchanged, even with these new hitboxes. Shot 1 either ricochets due to bad angle or is eaten up by a ridiculously large HP pool. Shot 2 has to hit an extremely small target surface, it could be made to just bounce off. At these angles balls can be observed bouncing off even weak/thin surfaces in the game right now. I have been told that big balls bouncing off little ships still do damage, the devs would know if this is the case and poses a problem for my intention of keeping beam fire as is.

Fire from the stern sector.

Shot 3 has a relatively large and weak surface area to hit and raking fire would be expected to connect with and penetrate the hitboxes for the masts below deck. From there we can balance the HP pool of the red surfaces to enable demasting from however many or few rakes we wish.

[maturin]

Now THERE's an idea.

 

The triangular hitbox thing is silly, but the bottom line is that mast hitboxes really do need to extend below the deck.

 

The armor classes of the lower masts can be tuned in such a way that they are vulnerable to raking fire from the stern. Not because of any hitbox shenanigans, but because damaging them requires high velocity shot. Sending a ball through the stern accomplishes this, but penetrating the broadside or shooting double does not.

 

As a result we would see masts falling in close quarters combat, most often from raking.

[akd]

Do we really need to resort to fakery and undoing the complex, physics-based system for terminal damage that we have in place rather then improving it?

Masts are round. It is absurd to make them more prone to ricochets from a particular direction, and raking fire is already more efficient at achieving mast damage. I do think, however, that their hitboxes should be extended below the deck so that raking firing into the hull can also wound masts. Also, rather than ricochets versus penetrations based on angle, there could be a sound argument made that there should be a bonus to HP reduction with hits to sails and masts from low angle raking fire (e.g. +/- 30* off bow or stern) because the 3D models do not fully account for all the various rigging components that ball or chain would have the potential to pass through. Also, "flashing" battle sails on and off should be made less efficient.

I agree with Laik that current system pushes all players toward demast or lose, but it is because hull life > mast life. Yes, one solution would be to increase mast "armor" and overall HP until they perfectly match eachother, but (in addition to resulting in physical absurdity) that actually reduces tactical variety and removes demasting as a strategy for a smaller ship to pursue against larger ships. The better solution is to extend the life of sails and masts through repairs, but repairs that aren't instant, such that demasting isn't a pure attrition game, but a way to gain a temporary advantage.

I agree entirely that crew must be made to matter more.

[Powderhorn]

Fantastic idea.  I will say, in this mythical 3v1, I just had a fight with four Danes - A Trinc, a Cerb, a Frigate, and a Pickle.  I was in a Fir built Trinc.  Their entire focus was my masts (which were re-enforced) and then my crew, whereas mine was their hulls.

 

While they did ultimately capture me after the (third?  fourth?) boarding, their Trinc was sank, their Frigate was a broadside away from being sunk (alas, no masts left), and their Cerberus couldn't aim for poop.  So I guess I will say that it IS possible to smoke people that have far more confidence than skill as things stand, and if they had just a tiny bit more confidence than skill, I may have sunk the lot of them.

[Laik]

I agree with Laik that current system pushes all players toward demast or lose, but it is because hull life > mast life. 

 

I don't think tweaks to mast or hull hp alone can ever create balance in the long run. One approach will always be superior and it will just be a never-ending loof of buff/nerf. Hence my point about effective range being of more importance than hp itself. And even with less hull hp going for masts is still the safer approach because you leave yourself an opportunity to disenge, should you need it, and you deny the same to your enemy. With mast hp>hull hp people will just stay at bigger distances for longer. 

[jodgi]

Now THERE's an idea.

 

The triangular hitbox thing is silly, but the bottom line is that mast hitboxes really do need to extend below the deck.

 

The armor classes of the lower masts can be tuned in such a way that they are vulnerable to raking fire from the stern. Not because of any hitbox shenanigans, but because damaging them requires high velocity shot. Sending a ball through the stern accomplishes this, but penetrating the broadside or shooting double does not.

 

As a result we would see masts falling in close quarters combat, most often from raking.

 

 

Do we really need to resort to fakery and undoing the complex, physics-based system for terminal damage that we have in place rather then improving it?

Masts are round. It is absurd to make them more prone to ricochets from a particular direction

I think you guys would be offended at the level of fakery already in game. I bet most of the hitboxes are already blocky. I do not mind at all. With all the balls flying from a sol broadside and the server has to handle up to 50 such broadsides possibly simultaneously, they have to do some creative stuff to optimize and simplify those calculations. I they have round hitboxes in the game now, I'd just take my hat off and salute them. Just imagine my triangles to be squares if that makes it easier.

Remember the outcry from the linefighters when they lost guns linearly (well, kinda) with ball hits to the hitboxes? That's why I put in a gamey mast protection from the sides. Imagine what would happen if the bobs start losing masts when their side armor is down and receive several lucky hits to any shape mast hitboxes below deck? It could get uglier than the gunloss outcry...

In any case, this is just a throw-it-out-there idea that the devs would know how to properly and economically implement if they like it and think it viable.

I don't pretend to understand everything.

[akd]

I don't think tweaks to mast or hull hp alone can ever create balance in the long run. One approach will always be superior and it will just be a never-ending loof of buff/nerf. Hence my point about effective range being of more importance than hp itself. And even with less hull hp going for masts is still the safer approach because you leave yourself an opportunity to disenge, should you need it, and you deny the same to your enemy. With mast hp>hull hp people will just stay at bigger distances for longer. 

 

How it worked in reality given two equivalent ships with equivalent crews if one ship went for masts and the other for the hull:

 

-ship with masts concentrated on would steadily lose maneuverability, but not fighting power.  There was a % chance, but no guarantee, that they would suffer catastrophic mast / rigging damage that would quickly and completely disable their ability to maneuver.  In either case the loss would be temporary and could be recovered from or partially recovered from if the opponent did not press the advantage (or use it as a window to escape).

 

-ship with hull concentrated on would suffer steady crew and gun loss, leading to eventual loss of fighting power that could not be recovered.

 

If time and distance allow you to recover sails and masts but not hull and crew, then it is less of a no brainer to concentrate on masts and sails because you cannot solely play an attrition game that gives you a permanent advantage.  Of course finding the right balance between more vulnerable masts, but with greater capacity to recover would be tricky.

[maturin]

 

I think you guys would be offended at the level of fakery already in game. I bet most of the hitboxes are already blocky. I do not mind at all. With all the balls flying from a sol broadside and the server has to handle up to 50 such broadsides possibly simultaneously, they have to do some creative stuff to optimize and simplify those calculations. I they have round hitboxes in the game now, I'd just take my hat off and salute them. Just imagine my triangles to be squares if that makes it easier.

I'm pretty sure mast hitboxes or round or at least many-sided.

 

You can see balls glancing off the sides, which wouldn't happen if they were square. The hitboxes are very honest; we've seen pictures. The fakery is elsewhere.

[jodgi]

I'm pretty sure mast hitboxes or round or at least many-sided.

 

You can see balls glancing off the sides, which wouldn't happen if they were square. The hitboxes are very honest; we've seen pictures. The fakery is elsewhere.

Color me impressed, then.

[Ian2492]

You can see balls glancing off the sides, which wouldn't happen if they were square. 

 

I have no clue about the actual hitboxes but I'd just like to point out that it's possible to have a ricochet on a square mast, possibly even easier than on a round one.

Edited January 9, 2016 by Ian2492

[Mr. Doran]

Reduce mast HP and / or add chance of critical hits on masts. Make demasting more disabling (e.g. results in long rigging shock and maybe other penalties) and much slower to repair. To compensate, add more sail / mast repairs so overall "life" of sails and masts remain the same over the course of a battle (maybe put canvas repair on survival mode like leaks and leave the discreet repairs to masts). This would allow a player to achieve a major short-term advantage through skillful targeting of masts and rigging, but make targeting sails / masts / rigging less of a pure attrition game which tends to favor numbers and volume of fire. You would be able to disable one ship, but unless the advantage is pursued immediately, the opponent will have time to pull away and repair and rejoin the fight.

 

Random crits on masts are only fun for one party in the exchange... please never add random mast crits. Nerf the ridiculous "Reinforced Mast" module; there should be no module that provides a 100% bonus to anything. It is absurd to expect anyone to have to land 18 rounds of ball (on average) to fall a mast considering anyone with any kind of understanding of the game is using and or even abusing this module until the next wipe. The maximum buff it should give is 40-50%.  

 

But how about those timers after all.... as you know skill does not really matter when you can just hyper flood any instance to win OS combat. 

[tatannn]

about making skill more important than the ship i will submit my idea below:

 

1)make well aimed shot very devasting

-lot of leaks

-hit magazine -> boom

-decrease stern grape shot effectiveness and increase side grape shot effectiveness. when hit a canon hitbox for example or the the top bridge

 

 

2)make boarding more dynamic:

- more damage to crew in all attack option

- decrease round time from 16s to 10s

 

3) Critical hits are Criticals:

-Crew/riging/reloadings ... shock time increase from 30s to 60s

-Fire damage hull even if it's a small one

-Urgent repair time increase from 7.5 min to 10 mins

 

4) Possibility to sink a ship even if it still have some armor

Currently it's almost impossible to sink a ship due to leaks if the ship still have armor

-make time to plugs leaks more important  ( a ship under heavy fire unable to plug more leaks that ennemies makes )

-more leaks underwater when aimed at waterline.

 

5) harder sailing model /map

-more max speed differences between ships

-wind strenght changing during battle

-make turning longer/harder

lower wind strenght will lead to make your position far more important than currently

-shallow water in ballte near land, land to hide/reload/repair ...

 

 

 

all may lead to increase the skill dependant.

when use a repair, well aimed shots, "quick boarding", raking very devastating

 

 

For wind strengh i just watch a french website about wind statitic near Guadeloupe.

 

http://fr.windfinder.com/windstatistics/lesser_antilles

 

the mean wind strenght is between 10 and 16 knots. and no ship can sail faster than the wind. so ships may be slower in game

 

ps: sorry for bad english statments, mistakes

Edited January 10, 2016 by tatannn