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General Seafaring Ideas and New Ship Commands
New Ship Commands and Changes: [General Seafaring]
SHIP EXPEL ALL or SHIP EXPEL (name of adventurer) - This is a much needed command that would allow the captain of the ship to get help from the port authorities to remove characters that have logged off aboard the ship or in a ship's cabin expansion. This command can only be performed while the ship is docked at a mainland port. People who were logged off on the ship and expelled will simply log back in at the port at which the command was issued.SHIP CREW ABANDON SHIP - The crew of the ship will attempt to token back to port exactly as they would if the ship were sinking. This command requires a confirmation.
SHIP CREW RETURN - Members of the crew that have already used tokens to leave the ship will use the same shipreturn ability adventurer's use to return to the vessel. Crew members will no longer automatically return to the ship the moment it is salvaged to prevent the abuses by people who salvage only to re-sink and ruin crew xp. This also allows a captain who has ordered the crew to abandon ship to recall them even if the ship is not sunk.
SHIP CREW SET TOKEN FOR [crewmates, shipmates or swashbucklers] [on/off] - This command allows the captain to designate which hands stay with a ship when an abandon ship order is given. For example, a captain may only wish the crewmates and shipmates to token off while the swashbucklers stay and fight (it's their job after all!).
SHIP CREW TOKEN STATUS - Shows the current status of which crew types will token and which won't. For example: Crewmates: ON Shipmates: ON Swashbucklers: OFF.
SHIP MAP LIST - Should include accurate longitude/latitude coordinates for the seamark, to make sightings taken with the Mariner's Sextant somewhat meaningful.
SHIP TRANSFER CARGO [number of units] [type of cargo] to [destination ship abbreviation] - Allow one ship located in the same port to transfer cargo to another if: 1. Both ships are captained by the same person OR 2. The captain of the receiving ship uses the SHIP CARGO AUTHORIZE command (see below).
SHIP CARGO AUTHORIZE [name of adventurer] - Grants another captain permission to transfer cargo to (but not from) the ship of the captain granting the permission.
SHIP CARGO AUTHORIZE LIST - List those authorized to transfer cargo to the ship.
SHIP CARGO AUTHORIZE REMOVE [all or name of adventurer] - Removes the ability to transfer cargo to a ship.
SHIP ENABLE/DISABLE TRUNK - Enables or disables the captain's trunk, allowing swashbucklers to enter the ship's cabin in the event they are needed while keeping them out the rest of the time. A disabled trunk appears open, an enabled trunk appears closed.
TOUCH FIGUREHEAD - Should show the presence of a Notic Amulet as well as any active notic effects the ship is currently under.
FISHTOTAL - Shows the total number of fish you have and their total weight, without having to go through the spammy fishlist command to get there.
AMMOCOUNT - Shows an easy at-a-glance breakdown of your ammo without having to sort through the inventory command. For example: 101 Ballista Darts. 226 Spider Shot. 172 Blue Flares. 12 Green Flares 1005 Ballista Dart's coated in dragon's tears.
Flag Colourization Should Affect Ship Highlight - Change the highlight colour of other ships on the wilderness map to match the colour of their chosen flag. This would GREATLY reduce the scope of confusion during crowded battles and make it easier to keep track of who is who. It may be necessary to make the colour blue be a slightly darker shade of purple for the purposes of highlighting. A ship without a flag would appear as the colour that is currently used for all other ships right now. Flags created through customization (such as unique pirate flags) could have a unique default colour for the purposes of highlighting.
Boarding Planks Should Not Be Pseudo-Magical Portals - A boarding plank should be usable only as long as the target ship is adjacent to the ship using the plank. Meaning it cannot be fired at range and an established plank "breaks" if for any reason either ship moves one or more ocean squares away.
Add Secure Trading For Mayan Crowns - Mayan crowns are an item often traded for credits. A command should be put into the game to allow them to be safely exchanged for credits or gold. For example: Transfer 1 Mayan Crown to <person> for <x> credits/gold
8
Comments
idea'd this a while ago (about six months ago)
by the desc, that seems like it'd only be doable in man-made harbours, and theoretically abuseable if someone expels someone in say, Zanzibaar or Zaphar to annoy them.
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
2-4: Why? They'll all use tokens when the ship sinks and the failure rate is part of the cost of a ship being sunk. This just looks like something people would spam while getting shot at to avoid any real loss.
5: Mps are a great crutch for nw players but you can navigate perfectly in Achaea with dead reckoning. It's a skill you can develop as a player.
6-9: This would ruin ship trades in so many ways. Do the first leg of the better trades multiple times then continue on, by the end you've got eough goods to complete multiple deals on multiple ships at once. Or stockpiling all your goods on a ship that never leaves harbour so the risk of losing cargo is almost eliminated. BOOOOOOOO.
10: Sounds good to me
11: Notia is batshit insane. You can figure out what the amulet is done through experience but dealing with her shouldn't be so clear cut. Amulets really should show though
12: There are scripts for that. Also deepsea fishing is a shitty mechanic and only promotes AFK abuse. change plz!
13: In my experience you either don't have enough ammo or you have so much there is no need to keep track of it. But there really should be some sort of ship rift type thing for that crap.
14: Sounds good to me
15: Stopping a moving ship is very hard, you can't grapple a moving ship. Boarding is admitadly shitty offensive mechanic that changes ship Vs ship into regular PvP but it's currently the only counter to the MOUNTAIN of unbalanced defensive mechanics in ship vs ship combat. Stuff like this shouldn't really be addressed until ships and seafaring as a whole get a review. Whis is happening right after multi-class, right @Sarapis ...right?
16: Sounds good to me.
Results of disembowel testing | Knight limb counter | GMCP AB files
Shields are delete.
Rowing and Sailing but not moving bug fixed.
Access to strongboxes.
Gold Costs to repair weapons and ship fees not absurd compared to sailing rewards.
More crown trades.
Delete dice.
Make captain's hat have some -effect-
Delete Mariners.
* Retooling grapple so people can escape regrappling without using wavecall. Either a cooldown or some defence. I would suggest some positive to balance this such as perhaps being able to fire a grappling hook with the ballista so you can grapple a moving vessel?
* I don't see why you need permissions to cross the plank. It should be a legitimate alternative way to board a hostile vessel. I mean it in theory is more realistic than the magical teleporter deck.
* The harbour slots are often a real sense of frustration. Zaphar being number one on my list in that regard. I can understand having limited size with the harbours that have no docking perms but c'mon I think our harbour fees should be going to some reinvesting.
*With the surge in hunting rewards, what you get from deepsea diving is now relatively diminished never mind the fact that to find the keys you will still need to fight the tougher denizens. I can accept this with fishing as its no low-risk activity but diving is not.
*On the note of ships having different colours on the wilderness map based on their flag, I would find it useful if there different classes of ships had different symbols.
*Having captain permissions work like boarding and crew permissions. Having to add and remove people individually is such a headache for org ships.
*Can we get rid of the clearly worthless trades like the one for 65k gold or 5 bound credits? I mean these trades take 1-2 days to run, use around 48-56k gold in cargo then 3-8k in port fees depending on the routes and traits.
*It would be interesting if the harbors would be able to buy and sell the trade cargo perhaps as an alternative to the suggestion to be able to transfer cargo between ships.
Even though I benefited greatly from it during the Fair since walking all the way to Meropis just to top up carts was a pain without a pebble, I have to say overall that this is one thing that seriously needs to be redone.
Tokens should only be usable while your ship is on the water, not docked in harbour. Shipreturning to a vessel that's not on mainland should come with a cost to either your own end/wp (same as tokening) or your figurehead's energy. Supposing your figurehead drops below a certain level, you become unable to shipreturn because attempting to tether yourself to the ship, or your link to it is too weak to sustain such an action. Or something like that. Either way you're forced to take the ship out of harbour and risk the pirates and sea monsters like the rest of us big boys and girls.
Once you make it no longer a viable shortcut to an offshore bashing ground, you'll see the harbour spaces open up.
If they did choose to restrict shipreturn, I'd hope they make it so that shipreturning to a ship on a harbour needs some figurehead power, but returning to a ship on sea needs none. Also no silly limits or minimum figurehead power required on it. Having to hire someone's ship just to return to your own would be freaking annoying.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
Remove that "loophole" and you might free up some harbor space, but you'll also reduce the overall sailing population, because as someone who participates heavily in IG orgs, feels obligated to help newbs and other players, and who has shit to do in real life, I don't have the time to set aside 1-3 hours just because I want to visit an island for a quick bashing trip or comm shop run.
Plus, it feels like ships have only proliferated over time. Pretty much everyone I know owns/captains their own at this point, so a hard-capped number of harbor slots just doesn't seem like an interesting or sustainable mechanic.
Other stuff:
- I agree that ship ammo is ludicrous to manage. An expansion to SHIP STORES to include ammo seems most elegant to me.
- I think a way to transfer cargo is a good thing. Let it be done on the open sea and you could complete trades off piracy alone. Maybe I'm not imagining all the abuses, but since you need separate ships to complete multiple trades, I don't think it would open up any abuses that technically don't exist already.
- Current Forceboarding is OP, but Kinilan's right that it's the only way to win at the moment. I'm sure it could/would be toned down if ship combat was overhauled.
- I'd love it if flags mattered. Feels like a really untapped mechanic.
- Agree that CROSS PLANK shouldn't require boarding perms. Should be a "poor man's" Forceboard, unless Forceboard is changed/removed.
Mind you, that's only if I was unable to token/gare/etc off the island, thereby forcing me to make the full round trip if I wanted to get back to the mainland. 20 minutes one-way is acceptable to me, given the nature of islands and sailing in general, but mandatory round trips for anywhere but the closest and most convenient islands would just ensure that I never went there. I think sailing is neat, but would chafe at mandatory round trips for the same reason I chafe at hour-long raids. It's fun for a little while, but I have other shit I'd like to be doing.
http://forums.achaea.com/discussion/2401/the-big-ship-thread/p1
I can go on and on about all the bad crap in seafaring.
The cost of a ship, lessons, credits, gold and time invested do not match up with the rewards of most islands. Meropis was worth it but you walk there now.
Trades are dull, complicated and mostly unrewarding.
Ships, equipment, crew, ammo and opperating costs are prohibitively expensive and keep most people out of ship fights.
War galleys are useless. They aren't war ships they are cargo ships.
You don't need a crew to sail. you need a crew to man weapons.
Ship vs ship battles come down to dps. Whoever shoots the most weapons the fastest wins. No real skill or tactics are required beyond get close and hit them.
One person with the right specs can shut down a whole crew of attackers because defensive abilities are stacked within two specs. There is never a reason to fight when you can shield+cloak+wavecall by yourself. If your attacker doesn't have wavecall you win. If they have wavecall they need to fire a flare before they can drop your shield, the ability to drop a shield is in the same spec, at the same rank as shield and you need to be very VERY close to scythe the shield. don't worry though because evn if they do scythe the shiled you can trigger it to recast, it has no cooldown.
It was supposed to be a group activity, but there is neither a need nor a reason to sail in a group unless you're crazy person with nothing better to do.
Fuck chops. Chops are the sort of shit Hittler died trying to prevent.
Deepsea fishing all but encourages afk abuse.
Chainshot is pointless in the face of spider-shot. Wardiscs can be envenomed but you're never going to fire a weapon fast enough for that to matter, let alone HIT someone on deck.
Misfires the cause weapon damage that lead to a higher rate of misfires and weapon damage from enemy attacks create a negative feedback loop that can let the RNG decide a battle for you, not that any real skill is required because...
Ship vs ship fights where both sides can't/won't forceboard come down to whoever fires the most weapons the fastest. DPS wins, period.
Most people that actually sail around do so skeleton crews and no weapons and why should they do anything else when it's so easy to run away. Everyone else leaves their ship somewhere to bash/hide/farm comms shops.
tl;dr
Ship combat needs a complete overhaul into something the promotes and rewards group play.
Costs to own and operate a ship need to come down, the barrier to entry is too high.
Islands need to be worth the time getting to and from them.
FUCK CHOPS
I'm sorry, I don't know how to make the forum break up your post into multiple quotes so that I can comment on the points I wish to comment on. Therefore, Kinilan's comments will appear in bold italics with mine in regular text.
Trades are dull, complicated and mostly unrewarding.
I agree. Most of the ship trade deals are not worth the time, investment and risk to complete. There are really only about two or three that people actually do, and one or two others that people do once or twice in their seafaring career. The rest are dead weight that seem to exist only to stop people with too many ships from benefiting too much, mostly at the expense of the rest of us. This aspect of the system should be addressed and would be worthy of its own forum thread.
Ships, equipment, crew, ammo and opperating costs are prohibitively expensive and keep most people out of ship fights.
I both agree and disagree. On the one hand, ships and ship equipment should be expensive. It is an important gold-sink for the game and it also makes being a captain of your own ship something special. Ships have the potential to make a decent per hour income for those who use them to fish and an extremely good income for those who own a lot of them and use them for the aforementioned lucrative trade deals. They are an important part of the Achaean economy, and they are something that should be earned.
However I do fully agree about ammo and crew. Ammunition is insanely over priced considering just how much of it you need to be carrying to be combat ready. Sinking another ship is extremely difficult 1v1. You can fire at any enemy ship all day and if they are repairing well, burn through your ammo like kindling in a fire. It is also worth mentioning that given the relative rarity of ship combat, you are likely to drop 300k on ammo reserves that are just going to decay before you see any action anyway.
As for crew, the prohibition here is not their gold cost. The problem is they take so long to "ferment" and become experienced. Losing them is crippling, and going into battle without an experienced crew is a sizable disadvantage. Which leads to my next comment:
2-4: Why? They'll all use tokens when the ship sinks and the failure rate is part of the cost of a ship being sunk. This just looks like something people would spam while getting shot at to avoid any real loss.
Because the current piracy tactic of boarding a ship and demanding gold by using the threat of murdering an experienced crew is terrible for the game. Achaea needs a proper piracy system where cargo can be plundered and sold off. It does not need this level of bullying, which serves only to drive people away from the oceans and makes it absolutely the best choice to always run from a fight rather than risk being boarded.
It is likewise utterly unacceptable to salvage ships and sink them over and over just to exhaust the token stores to exploit the fact that the crew returns immediately when the ship is raised.
The current system is bad for the pirates too. The pirates should be able to plunder cargo and have that be meaningful. Nine times out of ten the person they are threatening won't give them any gold to make their efforts worth while, meaning there is very little valid in-game reason to engage in this sort of behavior. Simply put, it's bad for everyone.
Deepsea fishing all but encourages afk abuse.
I respectfully disagree. The playerbase itself polices this.
As someone who spends a lot of time deepsea fishing, I know from personal experience that regardless of how remote a location I think I've chosen, there is always a sizable chance that I will encounter another ship. Many times that ship is hostile.
Many players will fire on an unresponsive stationary ship, even if they wouldn't attack that ship under other circumstances. In fact, I know of people who practically make a career out of it.
Going afk on a ship at sea is pretty much a death sentence. It is a free meal for any predator that happens along.
Running away is too easy. Wavecall/Cloak/Windboost/Shield is too powerful, etc. (paraphrasing because you say words to this affect in too many places)
I often see complaints on the forums that wavecall is too powerful. I feel like most of these are, at least to a degree, sour grapes. What never gets brought up is that wavecalling with a larger ship is vastly more resource taxing than doing so with a windcutter.
Which in my opinion is exactly as it should be. Windcutters are rabbits, seastriders are wolves. Rabbits need to be fast, wolves need to be cunning.
Windcutters really aren't meant to fight. They therefore need to be able to run and hide. Cloak is easy enough to counter and windboost is rarely enough by itself to out pace a strider. The two biggest advantages of the cutter is that it can be cheaply wavecalled while in the open sea and that it can turn circles around a strider in the chops.
I do feel that Wavecall should announce the direction of the wave to all ships within visual range however.
I will also say that I strongly dislike shields... for all the reasons you listed and because it is hard to sail with any battle configuration that makes dealing with them worth the sacrifices you have to make in more important areas. Besides, its really no fun to have Command 5 only to be the crews "designated shield person".
Chainshot is pointless in the face of spider-shot. Wardiscs can be envenomed but you're never going to fire a weapon fast enough for that to matter, let alone HIT someone on deck.
Agree 100%. This needs to be looked at.
6-9: This would ruin ship trades in so many ways. Do the first leg of the better trades multiple times then continue on, by the end you've got eough goods to complete multiple deals on multiple ships at once. Or stockpiling all your goods on a ship that never leaves harbour so the risk of losing cargo is almost eliminated. BOOOOOOOO.
Um... so what? As things currently stand, you end up with a surplus of goods you can't use or sell. It is a monumental pain to calculate around those surpluses and hardly worth the bother of doing so. People only do a few of the trades anyway, and stockpile those surpluses whether they want to or not.
People always accept the good trade deals with all of their ships. What difference does it actually make if they collect goods before or after accepting the deals? They still have to collect the goods. They still have to sail to the ports. They still have to pay the fees.
Allowing people to transfer cargo opens up the possibility of traders selling their surplus cargo to other captains via the market. It would also be a very necessary first step for any decent piracy system...
Not likely, but possible, so I just want it on the record.
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."