Ships and seafaring changes

Taraus

So much not the above.

If I can manage to swing two different ship types, fully tricked out, anyone can -- with time and dedication.

And I did the above two with no outside monetary effort, either. All IC. So, even if I am in the minority, I will have to voice a strong no to "upgrading" a current vessel. If you want it that bad, work for it.

Klendathu

I agree with @Shirszae, being able to buy a cheaper ship, then upgrade it, akin to artefact upgrades (same kind of monetary / time investment), may well allow people to own ships - buy a cheaper ship (2.5m), get the bug, upgrade the ship. Speaking from personal experience, as a high level, well-artefacted dragon, it's difficult to save up 5m gold, unless you have @Datrius repay a 3m sovereign loan, of course!

Anaria

I have quite a few things to say about these new changes. Almost all of them are positive. I have a few concerns regarding configuration that I think are pretty serious, but I'll hold off posting for awhile so as to really get a feel for how things are different now before I comment.

On the subject of the War Galley though... I kinda have to "lol" at this just a little bit. I don't think the chops change is going to suddenly make this class of ship the bees knees. I'm having a bloody difficult time coming up with a viable combat configuration to solo captain a strider now that weapons 4 is required just to be able to hurt things. Trying to solo captain a War Galley without ample amounts of helm is going to make you a big fat target. Although I guess you can out run everything now, so there is that.

The War Galley is really an organizational ship. It is meant to be the heavy hitter for a city navy. You aren't going to be able to efficiently work all those extra weapons by yourself, and if you are like most of us, you probably aren't going to have extra player crew members on a consistent basis. Or even frequently. Artanis might disagree but I maintain that the strider is still the more balanced choice for a crew of 1-3. Time will tell I suppose.

Tahquil

The sole advantage of a windcutter was its nimbleness. Sacrificing size, deck space, weapon capabilities, speed over straight oceans for agility in ducking and weaving through chops. I'll be interested if anyone has done the experimenting to see if this one advantage of windcutter over strider/galley is still there.

Oceana

A small clarification please for homeport: non-decay figureheads are destroyed, but non-decay resetting figureheads are not? 

Antonius

Klendathu said:

Speaking from personal experience, as a high level, well-artefacted dragon, it's difficult to save up 5m gold, unless you have @Datrius repay a 3m sovereign loan, of course!

If you were committed, 5 weeks of (what I'd consider pretty casual, but definitions are obviously going to vary) bashing would get you over 5 million gold. Unless you have impulse control issues that mean you keep spending gold on unnecessary shiny things that catch your fancy, there shouldn't be anything difficult about making that kind of gold as a high level, well-artefacted dragon.

Datrius

Antonius said:

Klendathu said:

Speaking from personal experience, as a high level, well-artefacted dragon, it's difficult to save up 5m gold, unless you have @Datrius repay a 3m sovereign loan, of course!

If you were committed, 5 weeks of (what I'd consider pretty casual, but definitions are obviously going to vary) bashing would get you over 5 million gold. Unless you have impulse control issues that mean you keep spending gold on unnecessary shiny things that catch your fancy, there shouldn't be anything difficult about making that kind of gold as a high level, well-artefacted dragon.

Gimme 200k and an hour, I'll have a ship. Give me 3 hours and I'll have a warship. No joke, I have crazy luck at the roulette.

Aereidhna

This is something I've been wondering for awhile - to make a figurehead nondecay AND resetting (I assume to the ship) do we need to email rather than going through the ic customising process? I had asked about non decaying a figurehead to some folks icly and they said (at the time) that resetting wasn't really necessary. Can someone go over for me how that works and affects the figurehead retaining power etc? Thank you so much, I feel kind of silly for not knowing this.

also I totally see both sides of the upgrade argument. As someone with two cutters who eventually wants a strider, if this chops thing really becomes an issue I'm going to make getting a strider a bigger priority (through ic gold saving nowadays) but the option to upgrade would be pretty helpful as well.

Tecton

Oceana said:

A small clarification please for homeport: non-decay figureheads are destroyed, but non-decay resetting figureheads are not? 

Yes, all non-resetting ones are destroyed.

Tecton

Aereidhna said:

This is something I've been wondering for awhile - to make a figurehead nondecay AND resetting (I assume to the ship) do we need to email rather than going through the ic customising process? I had asked about non decaying a figurehead to some folks icly and they said (at the time) that resetting wasn't really necessary. Can someone go over for me how that works and affects the figurehead retaining power etc? Thank you so much, I feel kind of silly for not knowing this.

also I totally see both sides of the upgrade argument. As someone with two cutters who eventually wants a strider, if this chops thing really becomes an issue I'm going to make getting a strider a bigger priority (through ic gold saving nowadays) but the option to upgrade would be pretty helpful as well.

Yep, just email customisations@achaea.com, we'll get it sorted out for you!

Klendathu

Datrius said:

Antonius said:

Klendathu said:

Speaking from personal experience, as a high level, well-artefacted dragon, it's difficult to save up 5m gold, unless you have @Datrius repay a 3m sovereign loan, of course!

If you were committed, 5 weeks of (what I'd consider pretty casual, but definitions are obviously going to vary) bashing would get you over 5 million gold. Unless you have impulse control issues that mean you keep spending gold on unnecessary shiny things that catch your fancy, there shouldn't be anything difficult about making that kind of gold as a high level, well-artefacted dragon.

Gimme 200k and an hour, I'll have a ship. Give me 3 hours and I'll have a warship. No joke, I have crazy luck at the roulette.

I'm half a million down  

Krypton

Skye said:

Lorielan said:

@Greys Correct. Ammo cannot be pre-dipped and any enhancements made to ammunition will be removed should they be returned to the ship's stores (via unloading.)

So... only people with the weapons spec high enough will be able to load/dip? Well damn. This is inconvenient.

I don't see any changes?

Fireweapon is still Seafaring Weapons Level I, same as before.

Krypton

Oops. Missed edit period

I guess the question is: Are LOAD <weapon> WITH <ammo> DIPPED and LOAD <weapon> WITH <ammo> ENVENOMED WITH <venom> usable only by Weapons Rank V?

Eld

Krypton said:

Oops. Missed edit period

I guess the question is: Are LOAD <weapon> WITH <ammo> DIPPED and LOAD <weapon> WITH <ammo> ENVENOMED WITH <venom> usable only by Weapons Rank V?

Unless I'm missing something, if you could load dipped ammo without Weapons V, ammoenhance would be useless.

Greys

@Eld well thats how it used to be. What happens is generally I'd switch to weapons 5, dip a bunch of ammo then switch back.

Kinilan

What Greys said.

I like the ammo storage changes and when you can you DO want a rank V shooting because accuracy is shit but you'll still need to keep ammo out, on deck in chests, in your inv, whatever. Otherwise you'll NEED a rank 5 weapons for any sort of ship vs ship.

Ammo changes don't actually address the issue of having to keep so much ammo on you.

Shirszae

Perhaps that will come in one of the next changes.

Tecton

Kinilan said:

What Greys said.

I like the ammo storage changes and when you can you DO want a rank V shooting because accuracy is shit but you'll still need to keep ammo out, on deck in chests, in your inv, whatever. Otherwise you'll NEED a rank 5 weapons for any sort of ship vs ship.

Ammo changes don't actually address the issue of having to keep so much ammo on you.

Completely overhauling ship weapons will be in one of the next batches.

Melodie

That is both interesting and terrifying.

Eld

Greys said:

@Eld well thats how it used to be. What happens is generally I'd switch to weapons 5, dip a bunch of ammo then switch back.

Yes, I'm aware that that's how it used to be. I interpreted @Lorielan's comment, "Ammo cannot be pre-dipped and any enhancements made to ammunition will be removed should they be returned to the ship's stores (via unloading.)", to mean that that's no longer possible. So if it were possible to LOAD <weapon> DIPPED without rank 5 in weapons, there would be no reason to *ever* have weapons 5.

Kinilan said:

What Greys said.

I like the ammo storage changes and when you can you DO want a rank V shooting because accuracy is shit but you'll still need to keep ammo out, on deck in chests, in your inv, whatever. Otherwise you'll NEED a rank 5 weapons for any sort of ship vs ship.

Ammo changes don't actually address the issue of having to keep so much ammo on you.

But if you can only load weapons from ship stores, as seems to be the case, and ammo loses any enhancements on being stored, what reason is there to carry any on deck, in inv, etc, unless you want more ammo on hand than you have storage space for? Based on the announce and what's been said in this thread, it seems that you'll need rank 5 weapons to use enhanced ammo, full stop, since there's no way to store or transfer enhanced ammo without losing the enhancement. Am I missing something?

Skye

the overhaul is only half done by the looks of things, and Tecton did say there will be a weapons overhaul so let's see what happens next.

Kinilan

I've spent 12 straight hours looking for another = inside a field of colours and squiggles and shit and you expect me to be patient?!

Ruth

Just tried going through the new chops at SoSP. Barring sea conditions, it took me roughly 1 minute on row+sails to get through the bulk of the chops without changing the directions of the ship.

Kek.

Anaria

Actually the concerns I alluded too in my prior post had to do with now needing the weapons spec. It really throws things out of wack in terms of sensible seafaring configurations. There are dozens of ways this could be easily fixed though, with a few small adjustments to where things are within the various seafaring skill trees, and I am content to wait and see what is coming.

I just hope the intention here isn't to make combat require more than one player on a ship to be practical. Having extra people to fire weapons for you and perform other tasks was already a pretty big advantage, and it would place a serious limiting factor on something that is already pretty seriously limited.

Tecton

Anaria said:

Actually the concerns I alluded too in my prior post had to do with now needing the weapons spec. It really throws things out of wack in terms of sensible seafaring configurations. There are dozens of ways this could be easily fixed though, with a few small adjustments to where things are within the various seafaring skill trees, and I am content to wait and see what is coming.

I just hope the intention here isn't to make combat require more than one player on a ship to be practical. Having extra people to fire weapons for you and perform other tasks was already a pretty big advantage, and it would place a serious limiting factor on something that is already pretty seriously limited.

We're going to be shuffling a lot of the specs around, moving more of the core sailing abilities into the main skill, then having the specialisations have fewer abilities overall, but also providing some nice active and passive boosts. The goal is to make solo sailing (at least on smaller vessels) easier, but having a crew of skilled hands is definitely going to give you a distinct advantage in many activities on the seas.

Sarathai

 @Tecton can you give any sort of timeline to when you'll be moving the specs? (Something like "the next week or two" is plenty.) I'd just like to know for reasons of when I'll want to look at changing my specialisation layout (i.e. if it's urgent or not, and if you'll do it all at once, or take it one or two specialisations at a time).

Greys

@Anaria To me part of the appeal of naval combat was how you need to work as a team. I mean sure you can do it solo but its going to be a lot weaker than as a group. 

@Tecton Any chance the deckhand tutor can get relocated someplace less distant? I mean its really hard compared to the rest that are either on Sapience or a <10min trip away.

Tahquil

Since chop mazes are no longer a thing it's less hard!

Skye

@Tecton are you going to make all my dreams come true and delete forceboarding? 

Aerek

Hopefully the grapple mechanics will improve, and we'll be able to "forceboard" via crossplank after catching and grappling a target. I absolutely hope boarding actions stay a thing, but I think it should be a more involved process than firing a magical teleporter disc and hopping back and forth. Granted, that means ship weapon accuracy and/or damage needs a shot in the ass, so it's actually possible to catch and immobilize a target, and so ship-to-ship combat isn't most easily decided by a boarding action. But if that can happen, sure, kill forceboarding.