Jump to content

Uskazd

Making boarding more attractive

Recommended Posts

For a pirate game there is no real incentive to board another ship. The main reason is that there's no need to: you can get everything from a ship by sinking and the only way to get to boarding is by sinking all other ships.

I suggest the following to make boarding a ship more useful then just sinking:

 

1. Lower the time it takes to capture a ship when it's in open water.

When you're sailing in the open water it usually takes a decent amount of time to get back on your ship when the beds have been destroyed. I suggest that capturing a ship in open water after destroying all the beds and killing all players and crew on it should take roughly 1-10 minutes max (longer time for bigger ships). After that time the ship is yours to do with as you please.

 

2. Shrink the content of containers after sinking ships.

When a ship goes down, delete a percentage of the resources in its storage containers. It needs to be a decent amount of stuff that gets destroyed so players want to keep the ship floating while not being too punishing. I would suggest 25% as this would still keep it a viable amount for scavengers to dive sunken ships while rewarding players that are able to capture a ship without sinking it.

Example: 1000 gold in the resource box becomes 750 gold after the ship has lost all health

 

3. Capturable NPC pirate ships with melee crew.

If you promote the capturing of ships and allow NPC pirate ships to be captured people will probably be less angry/irritated about losing their previous ship and/or high shipyard prices to build a larger ship from scratch. Instead of building a new ship they can just capture one from the NPC's. The larger the pirate ship, the more melee NPC's you have to fight before you can claim it. It can also follow the same principle of the sloop you can get from the freeport: NPC ships have lower stats then the ones build from shipyards.

Maybe the new ship system can be used for pirate ships since I think modules are less stressing on the performence. If players want to own a ship of the old system they either make it themselves or try to capture one from another player.

 

4. Better boarding equipment

It can already be difficult to get on your own ship sometimes, so getting from one ship to another needs to be made easier. One suggestion would be to, as ships get close enough and the boarding order is giver a wide plank appears in that can be used to move between the top decks of the ships. This plank can be walked regardeless of it's verticallyty

Example: A sloop attacking a brigantine will spawn a plank that functions like a wide ladder, while a schooner attacking a brigantine will spawn a more ramp-like wide plank

Adding in some kind of harpoon to attach and pull your ship to the other one could also help both with boarding and moving large amounts of ships around.

 

5. Boarding AI

So, AI can already fight, but updating the AI so that when they better equiped to handle boarding would help in streamlining the process. When set to boarding they attack or defend against every enemy on the target ship. When every enemy is killed, the AI returns back to their original ship (as long as it's still connected).

The ability to retreat the AI back onto the original ship mid-combat.

Also adding in the option to send your NPC's with grappling hooks to do a pass-over-boarding so they can fight one ship while you focus on another one.

 

Maybe 6. Lower non-human tames health regen rate when on a ship

This one can be controversial. Tames are some of the most powerful things you can have in the game and they can easily destroy an entire crew by soaking damage. Boosting the damage of weapons will only increase the arms race that's going. By lowering the regen rate for tames on ships they can still deal ans soak a lot of damage, but they're more limited in how long they can keep that up.

 

Bonus idea: A way to surrender

Ok, so I haven't tought out how this would work in depth, but it would be interesting if a player can give the signal to surrender. When surrendered the ship, allied players and crew cannot move, fire or take damage for +-30 minutes and all storage containers are unlocked during this period.

Edited by Uskazd

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

And maybe make ships harder to sink?

 

Instead of being able to blow the planks easily off other ships, have diminishing return on cannon balls hitting the hull planks. If it's faster to take out the masts with chain shot, rake the deck with grapeshot, then board than it is to simply sink the boat, then you would see more boarding action.

Another option might be adding "morale" to the NPC crewmen. (To go with the harder to sink hulls). The crews wouldn't always be willing to fight to the death and might stop working. Now to counter that you could have buffs to morale that include captain skills, options to pay crews higher, certain food items (and drink) and maybe even fancy clothing/armor for them to wear.

Because a crew that's paid the minimum and lives off berries probably won't wanna go down with the ship.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×
×
  • Create New...