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Comments
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
Seafaring requiring multiple people for combat is part of the charm of it. If I wanted to play a single player pirate game I'd just go play Assassin's Creed.
In regards to tangible rewards, I found much more enjoyment in asking for things like jokes or Stories just things that aren't tangible but are fun For both sides and don't require syncing the ship just because they don't have gold. Seafaring is pretty linear mechanically but you can make it more fun.
B - Agreed. Salvagesink is a douchebag maneuver. (I also dislike forceboarding, as it turns ship combat into PvP, which it 100% shouldn't. I support the idea of allowing you to crossplank without needing boarding perms, providing there's some mechanic in place that means its just allowing captain-to-captain interfacing, and not from getting turned into another avenue for 'lol we just swarmed your ship rolling 12 deep, gl')
C - Mechanically speaking, the current system is pretty okay for pirates. I'm unsure where you're getting your nine-times-out-of-ten figure, but that's just... wrong.
D - No, not sour grapes. Wavecall has several issues with it, the biggest of which is simply a ship chase often comes down to not who's the better captain sailing with the better crew, but rather, WHO WILL RUN OUT OF ENDURANCE FIRST.
E - Clearly you have never been chased by a wolf. Fighting on a windcutter IS possible - if they weren't meant to fight, they wouldn't be able to be armed. What needs to happen here is arm ammunition needs to be reworked (shit, even something as simple as allowing discs to be dipped), and/or, like Kinilan suggested a million years ago, give windcutters the option of having a ballista on deck.
F - Again, you use the term 'decent' piracy system, which carries the implication that the current one doesn't work.
There are a lot of mechanical issues with seafaring as it stands, and I'm looking forward to seeing the overhaul details as we get closer to our big changes. But saying that those mechanical issues somehow infringe on or make the current piracy system bad and/or not work and/or meaningless are just... untrue.
Also
MOAR SEAMONSTERS!!
eta also um while not technically a 'seafaring' change, what're the odds we could ever disembark at Traveller's Folly?
And on the subject of travel times, if you're set up with a barebons crew, follow the coast instead of taking a direct route and don't know at which lattitudes the winds change and use the prevailing winds to your advantage then ya, you're going to take a long time to get anywhere compared to people that know what they are doing.
A - Pirates are bullies, but players shouldn't be. The threat here is the loss of crew experience which can take months or years to acquire vs the loss of cargo which takes maybe a few hours to acquire. One is a threat given teeth by a bad game system, the other is a threat within the in-character context of the world and its economics.
The reason I say "nine times out of ten", which was admittedly a made up number, is because every single time I see this happen on the Mariner's Guild channel nobody gives in. I know I wouldn't. Besides which, it costs around 80k or so to salvage a windcutter on average. I don't know many people who would submit to a 50k demand from a pirate just to save 30k, but I am sure there are a lot of people who would submit to preserve months or years worth of crew xp, and the only times I hear about pirate boardings the threat is ALWAYS "submit or I will kill off your crew."
E - You and I have fought before you know. Maybe I shouldn't have said a windcutter can't fight. What I really should have said is, a windcutter can't deal damage. Not against a seastrider. Not in 1v1 ship combat. The arcanian arm simply can't dish it out fast enough to meaningfully hurt a seastrider that is both moving around, repairing and firing back. Those wardiscs are about as effective as spit wads.
Now, cutter vs cutter is a different story of course but we are speaking of rabbits and wolves.
I fully support giving cutters ballista. I think you'd see a lot more people stand and fight if that happened. Although, I wouldn't want to see this done as an excuse to neuter the ability to run away in a windcutter. Most captains who chose a windcutter do not want to engage in ship to ship combat, even were they properly armed. I feel that killing should be harder than running, if for no other reason than to keep the ratio of predators to prey at a reasonable level.
And yeah, most people pay nothing because they are in a clan or group that can help them salvage. My point wasn't to quibble over the average cost though, but to point out that whatever the cost happens to be, it's rarely high enough to make surrender the better choice without the aforementioned bashing threat. Although the seeming suggestion that salvage is vastly cheaper if you just use a closer port is misleading. That assumes you were very lucky about where you were sunk.
Also note that crewmates are not attackable, they are hidden yet shipmates are not. Ask your self why. You NEED crewmates to move your ship. You don't need shipmates. shipmates are int he open because they REPAIR YOUR SHIP. You can board someone's ship, kill their shipmates and esentially leave them crippled, Now the poM uses their loss as a threat. they are expensive to replace and take time to train. Weather or not the cost and time to train is fair is another matter sperate from the combat mechanics of seafaring.
It's already been said by Sarapis in another thread that forceboard is probabbly going to go or be reworked and that stances is pretty much agreed upon by everyone that involves themselves in ship combat. it's going to change and you won't have to worry about having ALL your shipmates killed off.
What you shouldn't expect to change is the dangerous nature of seafaring. That is the core of what makes seafaring so fun. It is dangerous out there, there are no laws and chances are nobody is going to come save you. It is up to you and the rest of your player crew to deal with or run from whatever shows up on the horrizon and if you're not prepared there is nobody to blame but yourself.
I really don't think I have called for the removal of piracy at any point in this discussion.
- With sharp, crackling tones, Kyrra tells you, "The ladies must love you immensely."
- (Eleusian Ranger Techs): Savira says, "Most of the hard stuff seem to have this built in code like: If adventurer_hitting_me = "Sarathai" then send("terminate and selfdestruct")."
- Makarios says, "Serve well and perish."
- Xaden says, "Xaden confirmed scrub 2017."
Citadels are tied to their own factions and it would be like having a NPC ship from random landwalker city come and attack you. Those cities are help accountable for the ship actions but have no direct control over them. I dare say as well that the Triton cities have enough shit going on at the moment they haven't the time to be messy around with landwalkers (which is the tale told of why they haven't been as obvious and why Neraeos had to turn his full attention to the seas).
Sea monsters I could go for because they aren't held accountable to any faction and they really don't give a shit what flag you fly.
I hope that's when you're talking about.
There was talk a few months ago about the addition of "drones" things you could summon that would run away from you like a ship would and you could poractice chasing them down, the chase is a huge part of ship combat, but like all things seafaring it was prbabbly shelved.
For those of you that don't know, the faster your ship is moving, the rougher the seas, the farther away you are from your target the harder it is to hit. And there are other factors as well that all combine to make weapon accuracy a joke but the key is, ideally, you are right beside your target and neither ship is moving. Now you can't grapple a moving ship. But there are two ways to stop a moving ship, well three, but running someone into the shore isn't really an option. The first is to get beside them and use whirlpool but that is aaaalllll the way up in helm and nobody uses helm because all the good shit is in watch and command, wavecall, shipwarning, shield, cloak and scythe. The other option is to get in front of your target and stop your ship to force them to a stop. Neither of these things are easy if your target has any sense or skill. you have to manage your speed, predict where they are turning, watch your target's speed, be aware of your lattitude and account for wind changes, watch for changes ins ea condition which change how much speed you get from rowing and some other considerations. You have to get inside their head and figure out where they are going to go and get there before them all while raining holy hell down around them in the form of darts and spider-shot. chasing, and running away are really the core gameplay of ship combat.
And that is why wavecall, and the stacked nature of the watch and command specs, and the unbalanced nature of the defensive abilities are so god damn terrible. With no coldown on wavecall people can just spam it and jump a huge distance, in most cases right to a harbour. Chase over. The only counteer to wavecall is wavecall
Then you've got cloak which can only be removed with weapons, flares AND the ability to fire weaopons, and oh ya you need shipwarning otherwise they can cloak and wavecall and you've got NFI where they have gone. One ability that you need 2 pieces of equipment (well more, you're going to need a lot of flares) and two abilities one of which is at the SAME RANK as the one you're dealing with. But at least cloak has small cooldown when it is stripped. Saddly you can't use cloak to sort of muddle your approach because firing a flare to decloak a nearby ship decloaks you as well. The ability is entierly defensive in nature but you have to take it AND shipwarning just to deal with it.
Then there is shield which doesn't drop from movement if you're already moving, can only be stripped by an ability of the same rank, from CLOSE range. Which ties back to wavecall, enemy at close range? wavecall a bit forward. Oh, and it has no cooldown or a third party message. so you can just keep putting shield up and the person chasing you has nfi if it's up or down unless they bring it down themselves. But guess what scythe will fire even if the shiled is down, costing you figurehead energy and because of the balance cost you can't scythe then fire anywhere near fast enough to get past a shield. One person with one ability shuts down a whole crew.
Worst of all you ahve jink, developed for races because of how terrible the starting lines are, which lets you slide around another ship or whirlpool and keep on going. No way to stop, Period. someone has jink you will never grapple them. Thank fuck it is in helm and nobody takes helm because command and shipwarning have SO MANY defensive options.
The chase is great fun, wavecall and bad skill design + a GTFO button ruins it.
Also, fuck chops.
I remember one time I was trying to sail past Ulangi when a ship (I can't remember who, but I think it was Mhaldorian) kept trying to chase me down. Neither of us was very good, but because I kept up quick and sudden turns with the WC, I was able to evade the grapple and eventually they gave up.
Chops are pretty annoying. The best tip I heard for dealing with them was to make a trigger to color the background of ^ black so you can actually tell how the chops are positioned and how you need to move through them.
Yea, that one!
I'm also not opposed to the idea of having some kind of massive arm/onager fired shot break shield with 80-100% accuracy in addition to wavescythe, but I don't want to remove it entirely because it's pretty damn helpful in PvE. The obvious benefit to this would be that anybody with the ability to fire a weapon could break a shield, the (slight) downside is that unless you fire it with the ballista (wouldn't make much sense) you could time it out so that you always fire the breaking shot right before a dart and pretty much render shield useless.
As for stopping a ship, I don't really have any good ideas on that. I've never really had a major problem with it.
While I'm here, you know what grinds my gears?
I'd also like to have a few more SPPs (not enough to get every skill, obviously) to spend at transcendent because ideally, a crew of 3-5 is a comfortable number, but that almost always means that unless your crew is perfectly varied and only serves as your crew, you're missing out on some fun variations of ship combat.
I also hate the fact that I have to unmeld, let a helmsman meld, use whirlpool, get him to move, and remeld just to use whirlpool. Yes, I could spec helm instead of watch or command, but then I'd have to do the same thing for cloak, wavecall, or barrier.
Wavecall I'd love to see reworked into a turning ability. Either a controlled turn where you select the new heading or a random one, so you're heading east and then you wavecall south and your new heading, while maintaining speed is south. and again, with a cooldown and a hefty one at that so people aren't doing 180's every 5-10 seconds. In both instances it would still serve a defensive purpose and a controlled turn could be used offensively.
I would very much miss being able to jump right in front of a fool going in a straight line though. those long range, easy to land jumps always seem to just shatter the other captain's will to run.
Specs in general are screwy and you're right about people speced just to serve you. It puts a huge burden on you as a player because now you're responsible for giving them the ability to use and enjoy seafaring. In some cases it is easy to respec on your own but shit like deckhand? Naw son, Ill take you north ONCE and after that fuck you. I'd rather see all the basic stuff in general seafaing, command, mast, shipscan (low level low detail not rank 5 full detail) and fireweapon and then have the rest of the abilities reworked, changed, removed, added and put into tiers and you could have say 4 tier 1s and 3 tierl 2s 2 tier 3s and 1 tier 4 or however many. or you pick froma list like traits and have some that are mutually exclusive. so you couldn't take shield with cloak or shipwarning or whirlpool with hull or sail maint. Then you allow any crewmember with the right abilities to call on the figurehead energy from anywhere on the ship so that the more crew you have the more options there are for you. Maybe require multiple people to activate abilities like cataclysm vibe or a chorale. So having more crew really matters for offence and deffence.
And you won't understand the cause of your grief...
...But you'll always follow the voices beneath.
I also agree with what Kinilan said in that it becomes very rough when you are responsible as captain for other players fun on board a ship. It's not just hauling them around to specialists though (although that is a major pain), it's little things like the challenges of casually roleplaying on board a moving ship due the spam. Player crew members spend a lot of time just standing around until they are needed.
Right now, you can spec up purely defensive skills and plaugh at the pirate chasing you (if you know how to use them. If you don't, it's your own fault for getting yourself sunk) all day.
What we'd like is to not hamstring other sailors that want to sail solo because we need specific specialisations in a 3-5 person group.
If I have rank 5 command, 4 watch, 3 weapons, and then piddly in whatever, I have to find someone with rank 5 deckhand, which is rare because most sailors don't want to waste their precious SPPs on a skill that has inferior abilities for solo-sailing. The same goes for helm. There are some fun skills in that spec, but we can't ever use them- offensively or defensively, because everyone wants their defensive stack so that they can continue to solo-sail.
So in the end, it's not the solo-captains that get hamstrung, it's the captains who like ship combat that suffer because we have to find people willing to sit for the sometimes stupid amount of time it takes to find a ship (somewhat alleviated by that special flare), as well as those willing to spec a certain way. (Although, if we're determined, we'll just go out with whatever we can get and hope for the best)
ETA: There is no need to completely demolish the defensive capabilities of ships, but there is also a huge disparity between offense and defense for ships. Escaping a pirate or privateer should require some thought and strategy, not just wavecall/shield until you run out of endurance/power and the same should be required to be on the offensive.