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Comments
I don't think Kinilan covered this part so I'll chime in on the subject.
Ship weapons accuracy sucks even with full weaponry and aiming the weapons. He mentioned venoms and missing with the wardisks but he forgot to mention the atrocious amount of ammo you will go through and barely hit the opponent. That ammunition is extremely expensive when you consider the low accuracy percentage to just chase 1 ship to harbor. The only way to reliably hit the ship is to have them grappled. I've missed with them sitting next to me and not grappled in the past and all I could do was laugh.
I will say I haven't pirated or used ship weapons in some time, and yes, the ship ammo racks really do help amazingly, but that leaves yet another huge barrier to get into ship warfare.
We've caught ships that have wavecalled and we've chased ships to harbors, but the fact of the matter is they all can get away because weapons accuracy makes it so all that spidershot you're sending out misses.
My other issues with ships Kinilan covered.
One thing that I might like to see is forceboarding removed, since that is the easiest way to win ship battles, and replace it by allowing swashbucklers swing on ropes and cut sails. That is just a suggestion but I would like a bigger focus on the actual ship fighting and less on the PK aspect since its about SHIPS and we can fight on the mainland.
@DontarionDrakor for twitter boredom.
but if he's taped to a chair for a few months, won't he start yelling nonsensicals like "BOATS MADE OUT OF CHOCOLATE" and "MILKY OCEANS" or "FLYING OREOS MONSTERS!" ?
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
EYYYYY, WALK THE PLANK, YE FUCKIN HOSER.
Yeah see, the first time my ship was sunk by pirates. They raised my ship and killed it again, this does happen and it sucks. I don't think we lose anything by making it so salvage needs captains premission. It just prevents griefing.
Kinilan's vomit, interpreted as best as I could:
Help documentation needs to be looked at. There is a lot that is misleading and some stuff that is just plain wrong.
I'm ok with a change to forceboard as long as capturing a ship and attempting to strongarm the captain and crew is possible. Right now there is a nice balance between what it is worth to pay vs not paying pirates and what you lose when sunk. plus boarding is a way to take a ship out of the fight wothout sinking. If you could only sink with the offensive options currently available ship combat would be far less exciting I think.
Some sort of cooldown on sunk ships might also be something to consider. As it stands now you can pay at a harbour and the ship is back up on the day change so an hour wait at the most. Rehire any lost crew and asidw from a small morale hit and lower crew xp the ship is ready to go again. You can't really cripple a ship let alone an org for any length of time. Harbour salvage fees should be looked at. They scale up with the range of the wreck from the harbour but the costs should be less linear and more of a bell curve so you only pay more when really far out and a sort if looking for crew board I mentioned earlier would help with salvaging sunk ships.
If the Mariners Guild high clan isn't going to bother to fight the PoM, the clan should be repurposed into a sort of UUC type setup that doesn't have an outright ban on Mhaldorians and Ashtani so everyone has access to a sort of community help pool like the original seafarers clan during the seafaring beta period.
Instead of more ship types how about being able to modify your ship -- more speed for less turning rate, faster rowing for slower repairs, more hull health for fewer swashies, an extra weapon slot for a smaller vision range in the nest, better energy recharge on the figurehead for higher costing seaspells, ect. Or simply offer x number of improvements like traits that you can ise to modify a ship to suit you needs/style.
Remove the ship arena island and let us commission ship arena events AND RACES from any manned harbour as well as have buy in options for a prize pool or put up gold/credits/items as prizes.
Change fishing from a sit still and automate to having to nerd to sail around and trawl. People would need to be much more attentive and involved. Or just bring back bullkelp like monsters that crawl aboard and stat to attack you/your ship when you're sitting still for a long time. (These would need to be a way to differentiate between a ship sitting to fish and a ship sitting to dive though since diving is already an involved task.) Or just limit the areas you can fish in making fishers easier to find so they are forced to be attentive.
Oreos monsters made of yum.
Horable (what the fuck word was that?!) archers that take up swashbucklers slots that can pick off crew/damage players when a ship is grappled.
Instead of having someone drag you around to a few islands to attest a marque before you can learn seafaring (unless you just buy a ship and get a marque that way), how about a novice intro-like event where an npc like Maelstrom takes you out and explains the basics before a goblin shows up and stabs him on the belly.
Nobody has ever sailed past Ashtan Shallam or Targossas and not thought about being able to attack the city by sea. Mechanics to bombard a city with a harbour or raid it and attempt to carry the loot back to your home port could be interesting. Other cities could be attached to Thraasi or Shastaan or Tasur'ke mechanically. Or allow landlocked cities to build their own harbours connected not physically but through magic because fucking wizards.
Rum fountains. But not that shit rum from Zanzi!
Was it always meant to give an actual distance, or is that a recent (in the last 4 years) change? I haven't bothered with maps since 2010, but when I did I only ever saw the vague lines ("about at the limit", "not too far", etc.). I was always the captain, never helm.
Bearings always gave me the general lines, but I mostly cared about the direction anyway.
I'm 4 in watch and 4 in helm right now. If this is the reason I can't see shit on my maps, I'm glad to have an answer, but it's not one I'm at all pleased with.
I am, however, very pleased that Makarios gave me the 6 swashies that were lost in the latest time warp back (a lot of people got drydocked who weren't expecting it).
EDIT: missed those swarthy bastards.
Ammo upkeep is such an annoying expense even if you don't plan on piracy. If you sail out without any intention of attacking another ship, planning only to visit an island or maybe do some diving, but you want to be prepared to defend yourself, you'll need enough ammo to sink a ship. This might require, what, 50-60 ballista darts and a couple dozen of the shot types? (not wardiscs cos they're useless) But ammo is expensive, and has a relatively fast decay time, so you often end up just watching stacks of it decay. It feels like a wasteful, preventative expense that you never actually need until the one time you do. I'm sure this also plays into that issue where most people don't bother preparing their ship to fight, many wind cutters don't even have weapons, so they're going to sail away every time. Yeah ammo is a goldsink, but ships are already full to the brim with other upkeep and upgrade costs.
Forceboarding changes Seafaring from its own activity, where an encounter is determined by who can best sail, command, and battle with their ship, to a PK variant where people who can't PK well or have less invested in PK (levels, skills, arties) are at a big disadvantage. I understand why people don't like it, and I argued against it myself when it was first implemented. But I agree that without the ability to get face to face with someone, and parlay, predatory interactions lose a lot of depth.If ship encounters or even PVE seamonster battles were more frequent, this would feel less wasteful.
Maybe ships could have some sort of 'rift' system for ammo, that you use to load them up, and draw from when reloading? You could easily change the weapon rack ship arties to feed into the ship ammo rift. Bonus: this would cut down on items in the game.
Related: having to repair and maintain ship weapons all the time, to prevent them from breaking and decaying, super sucks.
This could be really awesome. I don't think it's as necessary as establishing a baseline for balance in ship combat. And it could break that balance. But this type of upgrade system could be fantastic.
yes
Fishing, fishing, fishing.
Deepsea fishing is boring. It's a gold faucet - perform the activity and you're guaranteed X gold/hour, with no limitation on who can perform it or how often, like there is with quests or bashing - and its payouts have been nerfed over and over for that reason. The flawed mechanics of fishing require automation for success, due to the precise timing required. Once you've automated nibble/jerk, it's so easy to automate the entire thing, sit there watching your script work, and turn yourself into a gold farmer, which requires admin monitoring and intervention. It's a deeply passive activity.
The one good thing about deepsea fishing is that it puts warm bodies on the ocean for pirates to target.
I would really like to see deepsea fishing removed. Replace it with something like harpooning: an active activity requiring a crew, involving sailing around trying to harpoon stormwhales or deepscourge crabs or firelight anglers. Give it big payouts, but make it draining on ship crew endurance as a limitation, so it's more of a short and sweet activity than the endless hours of fishing. Make harpoonable animals inhabit specific, seasonal locations, eg. whales in the Sapphire Sea in summer, whelks in the Sea of Screamed Prayers in winter, so pirates and ocean-hugging eco-terrorists can come in and up the danger, and harpooners can equip themselves to fight back.
yes pls. I think this could be really fun: ships able to bombard cities from the sea, and plunder harbours for commodities; cities able to fight back with harbour-mounted weapons, lighthouse lasers of doom, etc, and salvage resources from sunken wrecks. Achaea badly needs more and better org vs org mechanics than city raids, Icons, shrines, and CTFs. Of course, because this game has three coastal cities (Ashtan, Mhaldor, Targ) while the other three are far inland, it doesn't easily work. Either the coastal cities are more vulnerable (bad), or the inland cities are stuck running out to defend less-defensible proxy villages (also bad). But if you could find a way, this would be a great org vs org activity, a great Seafaring activity, and would make fleets and navies instantly relevant to cities.
I'm all for the monsters coming back. Back when Lihin was wandering around (Right after Babel woke up and Eris left), I faced off against a sea hag with another Eleusian on board her ship. We were able to kill it, but it was really close. Pretty sure whichever volunteer was running Lihin at the time was keeping an eye on our hull health and helped us out a bit. (Yeah, first one to kill a Sea Hag, right here.)
Adding a bit of PvE into seafaring would entice more people I think. Having it grant XP for both you and the crew would be a nice touch. It would also bring more people to the weaponry specialization outside of pirates, so that they could more easily fend off the monsters, or prepare the ships to do so. A while back, @Jules put out a call over Mariner's for a weaponsmaster. After about 10 minutes I finally answered her and @Sunny to do the repairs they needed done. Heck, even the Snowhunter's arm thrower was destroyed before I got to it. I don't mind being the only weaponsmaster, means I do more business repairing and improving the things, but it piles up with the other things I do, like run the Silver Oak in Eleusis. (Shameless self advert)
Battletech-style ship design.
Weapon accuracy definitely needs some improvements regardless of how ammo is handled on ships, although I must say the idea of having ammo crates in the hold (or somewhere else) does sound intriguing.
As for the wind discussion... wind should definitely stay, but would it be possible to make it more dynamic? Like, having it change directions during the day if you're close enough to the coast? Just to bounce that idea around.
Not to re-open the subject, but the way shipreturn is being spoken of here is like it's the golden key to a vast and wonderous bashing heaven. It's not. There are only a couple islands where bashing is even worth it and they're regularly hunted out, just like all the mainland hunting spots.
If somebody really wants to spend 2.5 million gold and 250-something credits to trans seafaring so that they can sail out for a few hours and park in a harbour and then once in a while check if an average hunting spot it already cleared or not, I don't see what's the OP situation. Especially since they've now got to spend another 5 crowns for a bronze token or use up half their endurance on the way back.
Currently, yes. But in Sarapis post, he said harbours will have unlimited capacity as a quality of life issue. So this won't be an issue when changes be coming 'round the mountain garden.
The islands should have better hunting, better questing, better something to make them worth the cost of sailing back and forth, but they can't, because shipreturn bypasses that extra cost. If shipreturn couldn't be used as quick travel to islands, then they could be made more worthwhile, and chances are they also wouldn't be hunted out as much because they'd be harder to reach.