Mechanically, A zubmarine would fare fine in Boarding scenarios, but have different skill check limits due to cramped spaces, and likely you’d take hull damage if you were boarded as the enemy cut a hole to get in.
As for piracy and ship seizure:
I’ve been playing some of Sid Meier’s Pirates! lately to see how they handled all of this. Like everything in that game, it was handled loosely and with little regard for consequence or depth, but with a lot of fun and joviality.
So some stuff to avoid and borrow from Pirates! (still the best pirate game on the market to this day [AC: Black Flag wishes it were this good]) -
- [b]Gaining Letters of Marque from different factions is super easy, and switching targets has so little consequence their inclusion is negligible.
[/b]For those who don’t remember their Caribbean Pirate history (or general British/American Naval History, Letters of Marque were given by nations to captains of independent vessels so they could essentially legally pirate other ships, but only as long as they pirated enemies of the nation giving out the letter of Marque. This is in Pirates!, and if expanded piracy were to show up in Sunless Sea, some version of this should definitely be in the game if the player wants to privateer for either of the two major factions in the game: Fallen London or the Khanate.
That being said, the lack of penalty for "playing both sides" in Pirates! (where it’s really four sides) is frustrating. There’s really very little that harms the player for most of the time in the game if they’re just switching between attacking English ships or Spanish ships and turning back to requisite ports to gain rewards for doing so, even when they’re also attacking said faction.
Also, privateering would need to be separate from the normal Supremacy aspects of the game, because it’s far more incremental. If you just added privateering to the current supremacy system, you could theoretically just go around sinking Khanate War Trimereans for an hour and then head back to London for a parade as you’ve increased London’s supremacy 1000 points. So a smaller, more incremental system would have to be in place, where you could, say, raise your privateering level with London by 50 marks, and then turn in 25 of them to gain supremacy for London, or favors from the Admiralty, or you could turn in 25 Khanate privateering marks for reduced suspicion and favors to gain access to the Nephirite Quarter.
There also need to be counters of essentially, loathing and hate that you build up for these actions with the opposite side. Which would mean at the very least, that there would need to be counters for raising London’s suspicion for attacking London ships, but would hopefully be such that if you got to a certain level of privateering for one side, it would lock you out of officially doing so for the other side forever, unless you made a concerted effort to only attack their enemies for some time to come. Ideally, there could be an inclusion of some "Bad Endings" in the game where if you build up suspicion or hate high enough on a side, you could get arrested and thrown in Prison for the rest of your life by that faction (either New Newgate for London, or Wisdom for the Khanate). A prison lost captain would have to have the "Salvage" option on legacy greyed out, as there would be no salvage due to the vessel being impounded.
On top of this, a separate quality for piracy could be used to serve as an AI motivator for spawning and new behavior. If I build up enough favor with the Khanate, their ships shouldn’t open fire on me when I approach the Khanate. If I build up enough resentment with London, there should be London fleet ships spawning nearby that can and will open fire on me when I approach (with a possible new side entrance into the port for smuggling operations).
Finally on this point, there would also hopefully be a new faction to build favor with (and potentially supremacy for) - Gaider’s Mourn. With, ideally, a new ambition ending - Become a Pirate Lord of the low zees!
[b]- Boarding actions break vessel combat balance because they’re far easier to pull off than sinking tougher ships in a weaker ship.
[/b]One of the weaker aspects of Pirates! is the game balance on Boarding actions versus the naval combat. While the game really isn’t that hard overall, you could go up to the biggest, toughest warship and attack it, then win the boarding action incredibly easily if you’re good at the little QTE dueling system that they put in. Regardless of the fact that you’d be hopelessly outnumbered in terms of crew. Just - "Dodge - Parry - Thrust" and the captain’s done and the ship is yours. There was increased difficulty on this QTE based on relative crew strengths, but the mini-game was so simple that it was negligible in effect as a deterrent to boarding actions.
Ideally, there would be something of a repeatable storylet in place for boarding actions as I mentioned in this post. Point 2 if you want to skip a lot of other stuff (as it was in response to another topic, naturally).
One that would use numbers of crew as checks for the skill checks when boarding (and not simply be repeated Iron checks over and over) so that attempting to board a Glorious Dreadnaught in your steamer would be a suicide mission because there’s no way your 10 men wouldn’t be able to overpower their 30 or 40 unless you got extremely lucky.
Another issue would be - how does the player even trigger boarding actions?
To this, I think there would be a new item added to the game, something for the auxiliary slot on your ship, that’s essentially some kind of connector to an enemy ship, or grappling hooks, and only for sale in Gaider’s Mourn. It could be like the Ratsender functions (supposedly anyway, because it’s broken), where you would have to equip it, then you could fire it off when you get in range of an enemy ship so you can hook onto them. Once hooked on to their ship, you could initiate a boarding action. Alternatively and more simply, it could be so that once equipped, all you have to do is ram into an enemy ship to start the storylet.
With that in mind, it should be assumed that all "Pirate" enemies would also have this piece of equipment, and their AI would have to be re-written so that they would prioritize using this in battle rather than attempting to battle it out for very long. Especially if there were checks in place where the AI checked to see what their crew size was relative to the player’s so that they would only try this when there were equivalent crew sizes, or the pirate vessel outnumbered you, otherwise they would try to run away and disengage from combat (they’re pirates after all, and quite cowardly). This would be good anyway, as it would add more AI variation to the game for the vessels - something that’s sorely needed.
[b]- Ship Capture can be VERY overpowering as an economic boon depending on how it’s implemented.
[/b]In Pirates!, ship capture works differently than the way it worked in the old version of SS - you actually captured a vessel, and put some crew on it and you formed a fleet. The fleet was useless for combat, as you still only fought one on one with ships, but they could be sold at ports, and more importantly, you could use them as extra cargo space to make trading more capable and a better money maker.
SS as I understand it, has you putting some crew on captured ships, then they sail the ship to a port of your choosing, and sell it off. Honestly, this is a really good solution to the problem of making captured ships OP economy wise. Especially since there’s a chance for the action to fail when the crewmen get lost or head off to the Iron Republic as mutineers.
It would be neat to create a Cargo fleet to be a super trader, but this is probably well beyond the abilities of the game looking at how it struggles with frame rate as it is. The only thing to make sure of here would be the price on vessels sold - you’d need to balance it so that it was worth taking the risk, but not SO great that the player could make a TON of money by just abusing weaker ships - like the Pirate Pinnacle - over and over.
[b]- For naval combat, more Weapon Orthogonality is better, and there needs to be a way to disable enemy vessels.
[/b]The biggest difference in the two games for combat is in terms of weapon design over all.
SS is very granular with little orthogonality. This means there are a lot of increments of damage on the guns you have, but relatively few types of guns that do different things. In SS you have ONE type of Deck gun, and ONE type of Aft gun, and both have a bunch of versions that just do more damage as you pay more to install them. Functionally, Deck and Aft guns are basically the same, they just have different firing arcs. If I had my druthers, I’d remove Aft guns entirely, and just allow the placement of Deck guns in the Aft Slot, since there’s little functional difference between them (also this would widen the arc of Aft guns so there would be a lateral "sweet spot" where a player could fire both their Deck and Aft guns at a target if they positioned themselves correctly, which would make Aft guns much more useful than they currently are and worth the investment for combat).
You have TWO types of Forward guns, and they’re specialized between doing more hull damage or doing more Life/Crew damage. Aside from the visual effects (and whether or not they use ammo), they’re basically the same type of gun as Deck guns, but with more range and a narrower arc.
None of these guns exhibit different effects on enemies except for specializing in damage output based on enemy or a trade in specializing in stagger chance or crew reduction. At this point in the game, neither stagger chance or crew reduction elements are implemented in a way so as to make them really noticeable or useful so they’re negligible elements. As the OP notes - trying to reduce enemy crews with specialized forward weapons to reduce crew is practically impossible because you do too much hull damage and usually sink them. Stagger is even less clear to its effects, as there is no indicator that you’ve successfully staggered an enemy.
The result is that there’s really only one Orthogonal "type" of gun in Sunless Sea, it just has a LOT of granularity.
Pirates! conversely, had little granularity, but three times the orthogonality.
Granularity wise, there was basically none. You increased your damage potential not by buying different and better guns, but just by buying or stealing more of them. The more cannons you had, the longer it took to load on a volley, but the more potential damage you could do.
Conversely though, they had three different types of damage through having different kinds of shot for the cannons. Each with VERY noticeable differences in effect.
- Standard cannon shot maximized hull damage (and thus enemy cannon damage potential as well), but did very little damage to crew or sails. It had the longest range.
- Chain shot maximized damage to enemy sails, but did relatively little damage to crew or hull, making it great to disable a ship’s movement in preparation for capture. You had to get closer to use this effectively, at medium range.
-Grape shot maximized crew damage, but did very little damage (relatively) to sails or hull, making it the second element for preparing for a boarding action (in theory anyway, since QTE familiarity had a much larger effect on this). You had to get really close to use this effectively too.
If ship capture is going to be a bigger part of the game, the big thing I’d do is nominate some new, genuinely different types of guns to be in the game that mimicked these effects. Where there was so little (to even none) hull damage, but either a LOT of stagger or a LOT of crew damage. Ideally with very different range increments, so that the player has to get closer to more effectively use them (but their warmup time is reduced as a result of their shorter ranges).
While on this topic, I’d say the game could also do well with some super long range, high powered "sniper" cannons that would be very effective at ship destruction at greater ranges, but would have a blind spot up close where they couldn’t shoot close up. Possibly even as an auxiliary item - extended barrels, where it increased the range you could fire with the addition of a blind spot up close. But this would just be to improve combat variation in general.
Of course, another way to gain these effects of increased orthogonality without completely adding twenty new cannon types would be to simply steal from the best, and adopt the system from Pirates! by including different ammo types for the deck and aft cannons (Flensing Weapons and Torpedo Launchers use different kinds of ammo already), which could effectively function as modifiers on both range and damage type in combat.
I could see four types of ammo working quite well for this effect, and these being added to the in-combat toolbar so the player can switch between them at will:
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Standard Cannon Shells - The player always has an infinite amount of these, but the options there so they can switch to them. When switching back to Standard shells, it takes two seconds to apply the effect. They do the normal effects of damage on Deck and Aft cannons.
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Flak Shells - These explode while traveling through the air to their target, and rain fragments of metal everywhere. Effectively, switching to these shells reduces Hull damage by 95%, reduces life damage by 25% (flak would be worse at taking on most of the sea monsters in the game but still more effective than hulls, though flying enemies might have a particular weakness to this if you look at how hunters go Quail or Duck hunting with shells that spread lots of pellets around) reduces Stagger Damage by 50% and raises Crew Damage by 100% of the value of a cannon. It also reduces the range of the cannon by 50% (since they explode half way to the target) and reduces target acquisition time by 40% because it takes less time to target an enemy up close. You could buy these in Carrow’s Naval Exchange for 15 Echo a shell, or Gaider’s Mourn for 20, and it takes four seconds to switch to them.
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Shriek Shells - Shells filled with barrels of Primordial shrieks, that cause immense disruption and confusion when they make contact with the enemy as the screams are released in a wave of horrible sound. These reduce Hull and Life damage by 75%, reduce Crew Damage by 50%, and raise stagger time by 150% as the screams cause mass disruption to an enemy hit by them. On Zee monsters it has a high chances of having them trigger a dive to get away from the noise. Range and firing time acquisition are reduced by 25% since the shells are heavier to contain the weight of the shrieks, and you could buy them in Caminus Yards for 25 Echoes each. It would take 4 seconds to switch to them and raise terror by 5 when you do, because these are scary in of themselves.
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Customized Longshot Shells - Ornately made by expert engineers for your particular cannons, these shells are designed for longer range and higher impact. Raises Hull and Life damage by 25%, as well as increasing maximum range on your deck guns by 20%, while not affecting other stats. However, they cost 120 Echoes per shell, and can only be found in the Nephirite Quarter in Khan’s Heart, by a shop that requires the player have less than 5 Khanate Suspicion. Takes 4 seconds to switch to them.
Different ammo types like this would allow for the different kinds of effects needed to effectively begin piracy and privateering (though those Longshot shells are just for fun I guess), and would certainly be easier to implement as combat items that modify cannons than introducing a whole new cannon system to the game.
[b]- A way to implement small, procedurally generated, pirating targets organically.
[/b]One of the subtler features of Pirates! lay in the romancing aspect of the game. You could romance a governor’s daughter through a dancing mini-game (or speak to wenches in bars) and they’d give you good pirating info. What this normally did was that they’d whisper in your ear that a particularly good ship for raiding was about to leave port, and go from X Location to Y location. This generated a small sandbox "mission" on the sailing map, so that ship would then appear and move from point A to point B, which the player could ignore or take advantage of at their pleasure.
This is just a great idea. I don’t know how or where it could be implemented in SS for fuller piracy, but man, if there’s to be good piracy in the game, it would be great to have something like this. Especially since it helps bring just another touch of life to the sea.
edited by MisterGone on 3/5/2015