maturin

Hot damn.

Perhaps the biggest missing feature in the combat so far is the widespread use of swivel guns and marine/topmen sharpshooters. I vaguely remember admin expressing disinterest in these elements of naval combat, and it is true that they were likely not often decisive as weapons. But I have dreamed up an idea for a small-arms based gameplay feature that I am quite enamored of. It serves two purposes. 1) Include the historically accurate and visually exciting employment of small arms. There will be the crackle of gunfire from the waist, quarterdeck and fighting tops during lulls between broadsides. 2) There will be a POTBS-style skill that can be activated to debuff the enemy. This will add complexity, unpredictability and tactical decisions to the gameplay but on a 100% REALISTIC BASIS. A non-magic skill. The feature suggestion is as follows. Swivel guns, marines in the waist and sharpshooters in the tops fire automatically on enemy vessels at close range, without input from the player. Basically, they just do small amounts of crew damage. It is cool to watch. However, the player also has a set of usable combat abilities that function as debuffs. The rationale behind these abilities is that the captain orders his sharpshooters to suddenly concentrate their fire on a designated target. This is in effect a debuff with a cooldown, whose effects last 30 seconds or so. This Suppression skill would have several variants: A) Suppress gunners. The reload rate of the enemy's quarterdeck and forecastle guns is penalized. B ) Suppress seamen. The enemy's yards turn much slower, even on auto-skipper. Setting and furling sail is much slower. This is what you do when a more maneuverable vessel is about to rake you, or if you want to screw up your opponent's combat tack. I think it would be a devastating, realism-based debuff and a blast to use. C) Suppress officers. Once officer skills are modeled, this could momentarily counteract their skill bonuses. At the moment, it could prevent the use of Focus commands for a certain period. D) Suppress sharpshooters. This protects you from the effects of the other three abilities, in a situation where a failed tack or sudden drop in maneuverability would be disastrous. Any thoughts?

AFAIK the sail damage effects are placeholders. Mast damage is already fully implemented and I believe I heard a hint about plans for damage to individual yards. I personally hope that the sailing model gets refined enough that we can set sails individually for prettiness. This level of detail would also allow things like cut sheets, braces and lifts. So basically you disable a single sail on the enemy's ship, or prevent the yard from bracing round. This could ruin maneuverability at a critical juncture. Yeah, but it was nonsense of course. Even if there's no real wind, sails are heavy and taut. Roundshot will punch through instantly and without any visual effect on the sail, like a bullet.

Arisu brings up a good point. Most of the rational reasons for dynamic morale change in battle are just 'double jeopardy,' punishing the people who are already losing. It will make the gameplay full of feedback loops and remove unpredictability. Even if the mechanics are reasonable and realistic.

I've been calling for that, and the devs reduced the sail speed by 30% in the most recent patch. So using yard controls instead of W/S is already a good tactic. However, it isn't entirely reliable because of oddities with ship behavior when sails are backed. Well, yes and no. Sails can be clewed up simply pulling on lines that run to the deck. The yard doesn't have to move an inch, so AFAIK it's even faster and easier than bracing around and spilling the wind. So although the animation ends up with the sail being furled, in my happy place I imagine it as clewed up (and the courses on the 'Frigate' currently do have that appearance).

That's the basic idea. So long as morale isn't turned into an alcohol-fueled resource that is "spent" by taking fire. Skill would need to be split in two categories, of course. Seamanship and combat. This would distinguish marines from seamen of all stripes. A merchantman is going to have a very small crew of excellent seamen. Likewise, a helpless fishing smack might be crewed by expert sailors. But that doesn't mean they will fight. A large warship will have hundreds of men who are there to fight, but are only trusted to pull on ropes from the deck. Seamanship can be represented as a straightforward skill level. But it doesn't help them fight, unless they've been blooded, and unless they have motivation. So you can have a seamanship stat and a combat veterancy stat, the latter of which gets dynamic bonuses according to the situation. Specifically, bonuses if prize money or national pride is at stake. And while I'm a big fan of skills, I also don't necessarily want to spent time staring at an RPG-style interface in this game. There's no reason all this stuff can't be under the hood, with only rough characteristics sketched for the players. And it's not like every crew member needs a stat, either. It could be an averaged-out attribute of entire crews or portions of them.

Not even remotely what I said. Please. Read the thread. Although I suppose that's too much to ask if you're going to ignore the substantive part of just that one post. To reiterate: I envision morale as an out-of-battle characteristic that crews have, based on living conditions, treatment, success or hardship and officer qualities. But in battle, these factors are simply a modifier for the separate HP-like quantity of 'fighting spirit,' which is the willingness to take hits but keep resisting. In battle, the latter is used like a HP bar that causes the ship to surrender or become combat ineffective when depleted. But you don't have a unified measure where cannonballs gradually remove the points you got for increasing the booze ration. If you used out-of-battle morale like a HP bar for battles, every ship would be miserable after each action, and the whole balance of shipboard life would be thrown out of whack. Morale is sometimes used as a proxy for general combat effectiveness in games, but this only makes sense when the combatants are all equal. Sure, if you have two groups of professional soldiers, the ones that are more enthusiastic and trusting in their leaders should have an edge. But things aren't going to be equal. Morale is just a passing mood of a group of people. The will to sacrifice and resist is something that depends more on innate qualities of the men and the context of their struggle. A seasoned jack tar who has seen his share of action and tasted prize money will take more to break than a raw pressed hand. Privateersmen might fight bravely, but only if their opponent is a worthy prize. Merchant sailors will not give their lives to defend someone else's cargo. It doesn't matter how well-fed the fisherman is or how disgruntled the naval seaman is. The latter is going to outfight the former, because the former has no reason to fight. The idea of having morale as a single measure that works both in and out of combat makes me cringe. So I grab fifty urchins from the docks and get them all incredibly drunk. +100 morale! Now I take them into a fight with a superior warship. The seasoned enemy crew is annoyed at the lack of fresh vegetables, so I'm in luck. Each cannonball that hits the ship cancels out two bottles of rum until my crew's morale is back to base-level. But the poor depressed enemies are so sore about their vegetables that they give up their superior vessel to my tub full of clueless vagrants.

You're very much mistaken about the accessibility of the gameplay here. Try asking people who are already in the focus testing.

Morale needs to be a dual system, in-battle and out. Happiness vs hitpoints. I thought there was more of a consensus on this point. Because frankly, the idea that giving a crew rum and lots of sleep will make them fight more bravely is silly. If that were the case, I would crew my vessel with frat boys and conquer the world with the power of careless hedonism. Sure, a happy crew that isn't pissed off at the officers will fight better. But to repeat an earlier example, if I have a bunch of privateersmen who signed up to pick off fat prizes, they're not going to fight to the bitter end when the navy catches us. Not even if the naval crew is half-starving and my men have just spent three weeks on leave in Tahiti. The latter is simplicity itself, all numbers.

With some dampening factors such as slower leaks into already flooded decks and the increased buoyancy of more submerged hull.

Текст просто неоднозначный. Имели в виду что уничтожали боеспособность, не сами палубы. Ядры делают мелкие дырки (примерно 15 сентиметров), и двойные ядры будут отскакивать, больше чем пробить.

Already done.

But all surrendered ships were duly boarded. Unopposed. I wasn't envisioning or suggesting lots of boarding actions, just the formality of taking control of the enemy vessel. Until then, repair or flight is a possibility for them. The basic idea is sidestepping the dilemma of morale-based auto-surrender by making surrender a player (captain's) choice, while gun crews can still be shot into de-facto submission, leaving the ship near helpless. I'm not sure I understand the objection. Thirty captured ships is the most decisive result possible. The fleet that has ships combat-capable at the end of the battle gets to mop up. Winner takes all, unless they've been sloppy and let some of their victims slink away (this gives frigates an actual role in fleet battles!).

Rudder hits can be relegated to probability. The rudder itself is quite massive and can shrug off a lot of punishment. It's hits to the iron fittings, pintles, tiller and steering tackles that count, and such damage could theoretically occur whenever the stern or quarter is under fire. So if you had a rudder hitbox, you wouldn't be modeling reality anyways, and a resource-saving abstraction works just as well. As for the system itself, I doubt there is much to discuss. It's pretty much exactly what people want, I should think. How it's balanced and implemented is what matters now. Russian appears not to have a word for drifting, so I won't butcher the language by trying to make myself understood. This poster has a point. For most people, sinking ships fighting to the death is more dramatic and interesting than having combatants surrender and sit around the battlefield doing nothing. But it doesn't have to be that way. After all, once you've seen one ship sink, you've seen them all. They create an obstacle for a few moments and then are gone. And the gameplay devolves into a matter of who holds off death 10 seconds longer, giving them the chance to turn on survival mode and declare victory. Plus gamey DPS spikes with focused fire and all that. I envision something else: I want sinking to be uncommon not just for the sake of realism, but so that more interesting mechanics take over. Surrender should be a player action, but dispirited crews will stop fighting without the captain's say-so, rendering a vessel mostly helpless. I'm thinking only occasional gunfire, very low maneuverability and control responsiveness. So instead of sinking ships melting into watery oblivion in a fleet battle, instead you have unmanageable hulks drifting through the formations, causing their own sort of organizational havoc. These defeated players--whether formally surrendered or just incapacitated--can't do much to influence the battle. But they are still all potential prizes! So instead of ships that fight to the death and sink, you have ships taking knockout punches that require killing blows (boarding and capture). A defeated player can be waiting out the victory of his fleet, in which case he can limp to port for a refit. Or he can be trying to slip away before the soon-to-be victors start mopping up and collecting his vessel. The choice between these two actions will be agonizing and thrilling. Do you maximize your chances of survival and risk cowardly desertion from the field of victory? And if a disabled ship drifts out of battle, it can receive assistance from its fellows and re-enter the fray. This introduces so much more tactical logic, where you may want to disengage to revive some of your team.

Take 3 POTBS players and you'll get 4 opinions on when FLS ruined the game.

The reasons for the firing smoke and huge dust impacts are performance and ease of shot-tracking, respectively. No game has every made blackpowder weapons smoky enough, because it kills framerates. The best we can hope for is probably an ultra smoke graphics options for high end PCs. I assume that the awful impact FX and watermelon-sized roundshot are similarly placeholders. Just remember to complain about them later, because everyone is used to them right now and they could sneak into release.

An alternative to auto surrender is that when your crew is combat ineffective, you no longer have sharpshooters or marines laying down fire, and your dumbass captain gets mowed down on the quarterdeck. Player character KO. So for the player the experience will be similar to sinking, and they will be keen to cut and run to avoid it.

What do you mean by 'control' and 'revolt?' I can understand not including TW-type auto-surrenders (I wouldn't want them either). But it will be a sink-or-board game if the gun crews don't flee into the hold or stop firing at low morale levels after taking casualties. What is your opinion on ships being essentially disabled through crew loss? They can still be sailed, but will only let off a few ragged shots every couple minutes. Is that taking too much control away from the player? The main thing is making sure that vessels in such a state can be easily captured, and not allow the butthurt captains to force a sinking.

On the Russian forum there was a post opposing morale features that I don't agree with, but it raised one good point. 'So if we are in an unwinnable fight we are going to get slapped with additional penalties?!' While most people seem to strongly believe that taking hits should lower morale (or fighting spirit, whatever), perhaps we should go easy on morale as a penalty. A frigate will lose against a ship of the line anyways, right? In this situation, I think that both gameplay and realism would be better served by using morale as a bonus. Historically, no crew of a lineship would ever submit to a disgraceful surrender against a frigate. So instead of a lucky/skillfull frigate sterncamping (I hope this tactic goes away entirely) and defeating a vulnerable lineship, the best he can do is disable the enemy and then stalk it, waiting for more heavily-armed backup. Personally, I think that this would create much more interesting gameplay, with this costly prize potentially being shuffled around the sea by two competing navies. The lineship would surrender to a fleet of frigates, so it's a question of who can get enough ships on station for a capture or a rescue. And you know that the stricken player's society mates would be rushing all their fast 74-gunners to the scene. So much more than a gank.

From what I've read, It's generally assumed by forumers that there would be a division of morale and 'fighting spirit.' So morale represents whether your crew is content with their working conditions and leadership generally. And that level of morale contributes to some sort of battle instance dynamic HP bar that determines how many hits your crew is willing to take and keep fighting. Ideally, there would be other factors and modifiers. So you could have the jolliest band of pirates ever to roam the straits of Madagascar, but once naval 12 pounders start beating down the bulwarks, they'd rather cut and run. Or a pissed-off naval crew that hasn't had decent fare or leave in weeks, yet will still fight tooth and nail rather than surrender. I don't especially feel the inclination to babysit all my officers and feed them compliments, and it's the collective spirit of gun crew and able seamen that should really count. But if you do model officer capabilities, I think it would be very realistic to make performance a combination of not just 'skill,' but motivation and inclination to work. So instead of somehow getting our officers to grind skills, it's more a question of keeping them active. No idea how you turn that into gameplay, though.

I suppose they could be passed off to the frigates as well. A rather inglorious duty, that.

That is probably dramatic license, although it's possible there are certain situations where you wouldn't want the boats towed. Possibly at Trafalgar they were already going three knots in the light airs and didn't want any more drag astern.

Or a simulation of them, it looks like. I've been thinking about boats. It's a huge complication because boats were towed astern when a ship cleared for action (you don't want an expensive shrapnel generator sitting in the waist). Having each ship in the game actually tow 3-6 boats would be an enormous pain in the ass. If the game gives us the chance to sail around while not in combat, then sticking them on deck would be nice.

It's quite difficult to get visual references for that, I've found. Throw some links if you have them.

I don't think anyone would deny that the player counts are too low in testing atm.