currently, flensing weapons don’t really serve their purpose wll at all when it comes to taking on ships. pretty much every time they can be used, you’ll destroy the ship long before your flensing attacks reduce the enemy crew low enough to board.honestly the mechanic is just incredibly unbalanced, and it’s a shame. I don’t think adding harpoons as a torpedo-like weapon would work though - it’s better to decrease the "regular" damage dealt by flensing guns and increase the life/crew damage significantly, to make it at all viable. Thoughts from other players? Developers?
Yep, i agree, an increase in crew damge and a decrease in hull damage (live damage could remain the same) could do the trick.
edited by Frenzgyn on 2/11/2015
Well, isn’t part of the problem that crew damage isn’t applied until the hull drops below 50%?
Why isn’t it? Is there a game-design reason for that?
I’d love the ability to perform some actual piracy or boarding actions.
Ideally, it would be cool to have something akin to Pirates! Gold for the Genesis. You crash into an enemy ship and swordfight the captain. Your and the enemy crew is merely a timer that counts down as the two crews slaughter each other. Slay the enemy captain to win and claim their ship/cargo.
Since that seems unrealistic, merely changing the stats of flensing weapons so they affect crew more accurately would be great. I noticed an option (in Gaider’s Mourn I think?) to “collect your ill-gotten gains.” Is this from capturing a ship after killing off the crew? I’ve never been able to unlock this option.
You are correct. If you are able to successfully capture a ship, you can collect your reward for it from Gaider’s Mourne. However, as long as the flensing is not fixed, this option would remain unlocked.
[quote=ThePolishSausage]I’d love the ability to perform some actual piracy or boarding actions.
Ideally, it would be cool to have something akin to Pirates! Gold for the Genesis. You crash into an enemy ship and swordfight the captain. Your and the enemy crew is merely a timer that counts down as the two crews slaughter each other. Slay the enemy captain to win and claim their ship/cargo.
Since that seems unrealistic, merely changing the stats of flensing weapons so they affect crew more accurately would be great. I noticed an option (in Gaider’s Mourn I think?) to "collect your ill-gotten gains." Is this from capturing a ship after killing off the crew? I’ve never been able to unlock this option.[/quote]
I think the game design reasons are:
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It doesn’t work that way for your ship, which makes sense because if every ping from a pinnace and nick from a zee-bat killed one of your crew you’d go through them really quickly! But it feels right for you to start losing crew once your ship’s in bad shape.
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NPC ships are handled the same way yours is unless there’s a compelling reason to do it differently.
I’m definitely in favor of ship-to-ship collisions resulting in a "Fierce sailor-to-sailor combat!" storylet, though. Plus weapons that are more effective at de-crewing ships without sinking 'em.
I see. That makes sense.
I agree that ship-to-ship collision, or something very similar to it, would be a good trigger for boarding/hand-to-hand combat, whether that’s done in storylet form or somehow worked out on the realtime interface.
Boarding would be amazing, however it would be implemented.
While normal damage only causing crew damage below 50% (for everyone) makes sense, maybe flensing weapons should be an exception? I don’t know if any enemies currently have flensing attacks, but having that affect the player as well doesn’t seem like it would be especially terrible.
Either way, does Iron increase crew damage currently? I don’t think it does, and if it doesn’t, that’s a problem since that means higher Iron would make this harder/impossible even if it was possible to begin with. Having a toggle available to make Iron decrease flensing hull damage rather than increase would make some sense from the standpoint of being able to intentionally aim to hit crew rather than places that would cause significant damage to the ship if you were skilled enough, but I’m not sure that would add enough to the game to make it worth the effort. Just having Iron scale crew damage as well, at least for flensing weapons, is probably a better option.
The numbers or mechanics definitely need work for this to be feasible though - most of the flensing weapons have a crew:hull damage ratio of 1:6, while one is 1:4 - with crew damage only working below half hull, that means that even with no Iron bonus at all those weapons can kill about 1 crew per 12 or 8 hull points a ship has before the ship blows up, and the lowest crew value relative to hull I know of is a 1:10 ratio. So if killing all crew before a ship blows up is currently possible under any circumstances, it’s cutting it very close, and certainly isn’t possible with all the flensing weapons. Has anyone managed to pull it off with low Iron and lucky low damage rolls?
Lie it seems like if you shoot a ship down to half health and then switch over to only using flensing salvos (which notably can be a lot harder in itself) you should probably capture the ship intact.
The trick is figure out what balance lets you do that.
[quote=WormApotheote]Lie it seems like if you shoot a ship down to half health and then switch over to only using flensing salvos (which notably can be a lot harder in itself) you should probably capture the ship intact.
The trick is figure out what balance lets you do that.[/quote]
I have tried finding a way using the current mechanics to do this but right now, you can’t keep saves on merciful mode while playing a captain in unforgiving mode – if you load any previous saves on the game, they overwrite the Unforgiving Mode save and you loose the captain forever.
If I could access my old captain, I’d retire him, have his Scion put all his inheritance into a Corvette or Frigate (but keep a minimum Iron stat) arm it with Flensing weapons and try to reduce an opposing vessels crew to zero.
Has anyone managed to do this? I know some testers managed it by editing game files, but with the game as is, I don’t know if it’s possible…
You could get around the auto-overwrite by manually backing up and labeling copies of your savefiles in a separate folder, then restoring as needed.
Also to clarify, I mean it seems like from a design perspective you should. I don’t know whether it’s actually the case right now.
(Though if you’re going to be editing game files, obvious things to try would be, eg, doubling the crew damage and halving the hull damage of flensing weapons)
Fact the game is in full release now and every pirate thread has no confirmation… I suspect this is the way it’ll be.
I think that it would be awesome to occasionally encounter other merchant craft. The ability to turn pirate yourself would be an added benefit, but frankly, the option to just trade, talk, or even buy supplies from a friendly or potentially-friendly ship would be pretty cool. You wouldn’t even need to change the game much - just add some of these semi-friendly ships, and if you want to turn pirate, all you have to do is beat them up and take their stuff.
I think the game design reasons are:
-
It doesn’t work that way for your ship, which makes sense because if every ping from a pinnace and nick from a zee-bat killed one of your crew you’d go through them really quickly! But it feels right for you to start losing crew once your ship’s in bad shape.
-
NPC ships are handled the same way yours is unless there’s a compelling reason to do it differently.
I’m definitely in favor of ship-to-ship collisions resulting in a "Fierce sailor-to-sailor combat!" storylet, though. Plus weapons that are more effective at de-crewing ships without sinking 'em.[/quote]
Yeah, honestly, I think the "solution" is that if ships ram each other, they should go into a boarding-action minigame with mechanics similar to the old, early-beta combat. Probably too late to develop and add that now though.
I think the game design reasons are:
-
It doesn’t work that way for your ship, which makes sense because if every ping from a pinnace and nick from a zee-bat killed one of your crew you’d go through them really quickly! But it feels right for you to start losing crew once your ship’s in bad shape.
-
NPC ships are handled the same way yours is unless there’s a compelling reason to do it differently.
I’m definitely in favor of ship-to-ship collisions resulting in a "Fierce sailor-to-sailor combat!" storylet, though. Plus weapons that are more effective at de-crewing ships without sinking 'em.[/quote]
Yeah, honestly, I think the "solution" is that if ships ram each other, they should go into a boarding-action minigame with mechanics similar to the old, early-beta combat. Probably too late to develop and add that now though.[/quote]
A simple storylet might suffice. The iron challenge would simply depend on (Your crew) minus (their crew). The more outnumbered the opposing crew is, the easier the challenge… failure would indicate that the boarding action is repelled (with possible losses).
Spoiler-ish re irrepressible cannoneer storylet:
I think that the MM should only do crew damage and monster damage like some cold war microwave weapon. Then it would live up to it’s superweapon status without being overpowered.
I have no idea how to conceal text. None whatsoever.
[li]
[ spoiler ] [ /spoiler ], without the spaces.