MisterGone
Posts: 139
2/25/2015
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So right now it seems like there's a bit of a . . . semi-bit of exploitative gaming of the system going on with experienced players and crew.
Namely, that since more crew means more supply consumption, especially as players upgrade to larger ships there is an increasing need to not fully staff your vessel. Players are encouraged by this mechanic to keep their crew numbers hovering around the 51%-70% crew range, but never to attempt to max it out on say a frigate or a Dreadnought with the sole reason to attempt this being risk reduction guarding against potential crew loss on a voyage.
The player wants to avoid getting below 50% crew so they can keep their ship running at max speed, but the increased supply costs get very burdensome on larger vessels, both in the consumption (and thus cost) and in the amount of supplies they need to carry with them to keep feeding them, reducing their ability to haul cargo for trade or other purposes.
Without some kind of benefit to hitting Max Crew, the risk reduction for having it is relatively minimal on your average voyage.
So I propose two things:
1) There should be some kind of benefit to getting Max Crew - likely in the form of a quality the player gains like "Fully Manned" that confers some specific benefit.
2) That the "Having a cook aboard" quality does something to reduce supply consumption relative to the max crew size of a vessel. Something like a "Meal Efficiency" bonus that is like 0.1% x Max Crew size - so on the base steamer you get a 1% decrease in hunger rise, but on the Dreadnought you get a 4% decrease in hunger size (that's on the low end of the speculative scale, but the high end where say the bonus increases because you complete a chef's personal storyline, it could go up to a 0.25 bonus, so you get a 2.5% decrease on a steamer and a 9% decrease on a Dreadnought) - but only triggers if the crew is at least 70% manned. The logic being that the cook is preparing larger meals for the crew (relative to the potential size of it) and having a trained officer in the role rather than having some crewman do it gives a bonus to the task.
The second part of this is mostly because it seems like, aside from their standard officer bonuses, the "having a cook aboard" quality is only minimally used in the game. From what I can tell, all it does is allow for players to prepare strange catches into more palatable meals to feed the crew should they run out of supplies. This is useful, but it's not super common and very chancy in application - they have to both run out of supplies AND have strange catches on board. It becomes more common later in the game, but will almost never occur
This only bothers me because I read in another thread that the "Having a Doctor Aboard" quality is currently not fully-implemented, as Doctors are supposed to be able to let the player use certain items (like Solace fruit) to heal wounds they may gain. Which makes me wonder what the "Cook Aboard" quality might also be missing functionality on, or what it could potentially be capable of doing.
But that leaves many questions:
What would be a suitable bonus for having Max Crew? You're losing out on supply costs and cargo space, so what should you gain in return?
There are lots of potentials here: increased ship speed? Increased Fuel Efficiency? Increased rate of Target Acquisition? Some small bonus to all three (Like +100 speed, +5% efficiency, +5% acquisition rate)?
Should cooks have increased functionality related to their "Cook aboard quality"? Or is it fine as is?
More fundamentally: Is the guarding against crew loss potential enough of a benefit to gain max crew as is? I.E. should this concept of Max Crew benefit be disregarded?
Eager to hear other player's thoughts.
edited by MisterGone on 2/25/2015
--
If you'd ever like to enjoy a good round of pugilism or discussing the higher mysteries, Reginald Drownheart may be the dapper gentleman for you!
http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Reginald~Drownheart~
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SporksAreGoodForYou
Posts: 291
2/25/2015
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I like number 2. Cooks should reduce supply needs, no question.
While we're on it, First Officers should allow you to plot a course, and have a little arrow on the edge of the map to where you're heading, so you don't have to keep going to the map.
And gunners should increase reload speed.
Also! Engineers should increase (slightly), the chance success when your engine goes boom.
As for crew themselves, yes. There should be a balance. If you want to run with less supply demand (less crew), then you should go slower/shoot slower. Actually, scratch that. Increase the top speed with max crew. Don't slow things down even more.
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Alexis Kennedy
Posts: 1374
2/27/2015
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Whenever someone starts quoting naval history, I'm always surprised that they think we weren't capable of spending the fifteen minutes on Wikipedia necessary to find out some of this stuff. :-)
Back in 2013, we looked at standard ship dimensions from 1800 to 1950, crew numbers, hold capacity, range. We spent a good deal of time in the Royal Maritime Museum, just down the road. We looked at maximum and minimum likely sizes of ship, tried to scale ships and buildings, weapons ranges (distance as a stat flitted in and out of the design of old-style combat). We went halfway mad trying to work out how to make a crate visible without zooming in, but also without having crates, ships and houses all weirdly disproportionate sizes.
Then we threw most of it out, because it made the numbers confusing and the scale deranged and the game feel like it was trying, and failing, to be a hardcore grognard sim. The ship dimensions are still vaguely ballpark for steamships in terms of Unity's internal 'meters' measurement, but vessels turn on their axis, jellyfish travel faster than steamships, a stoker is indistinguishable from a gunner, whirlpools can destroy iron-hulled ships, silk and coke are stored in the same hold space, bonfires are the size of corvettes. We use 'frigate' and 'corvette' and 'dreadnaught' with promiscuous disregard for period, because everyone understands what those are from other games. Although in a nod to the obvious ahistoricity of pre-naming HMS Dreadnought, we spelt it differently and added an in-game explanation.
The crew mechanic was designed to have an easy-to-understand trade-off between extra supply cost and safety, and a critical threshold you could watch for. In very early versions, the % crewed fed directly into your weapon cooldown speeds and your ship speed, and the result was that there was frantic pressure to top up your crew the whole time, and no interesting decision about crew numbers to make. FWIW A 75% cutoff (3/4 speed, I think) made it into an internal build just before RUBY, but we didn't like the extra angle on the resource juggling for a gradation we didn't really notice and we took it out.
It's great - I mean non-sarcastically exciting, fascinating, gratifying, useful! - to watch y'all argue about whether that decision was right in game design terms or not. But I want to make it clear that realism was last on our list, so that people can sleep more easily tonight.
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Alexis Kennedy
Posts: 1374
2/27/2015
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Gregg Johnson wrote:
make the 'zee feel lonelier and to make each crew member's life (and inevitable death) matter more. "One is a tragedy, a million is a statistic"--and, unfortunately, so is a hundred
This was part of our thinking. Honestly, it bothers me still that Officers aren't modelled as Crew, so although you're sailing your ship alone (which itself is preposterously unrealistic, but narratively delicious) you still get those five portraits up the top. As late as STEEL, we had a task in the list to fold the Officers into Crew and add a risk of them dying in battle, but in the end we couldn't make the faff and frustration worth it.
Here's a reposted Qt3 Geryk piece on where realism falls down (among other things, not all of which I agree with, but as usual for Geryk it's a good read). http://www.wargamespace.com/2014/05/05/geryk-analysis-odium-vs-shadow-watch/
Night all! I'm serious about it being rewarding to see people chewing over this stuff - thanks for caring!
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Jascob
Posts: 40
2/27/2015
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Gregg Johnson wrote:
The HMS Dreadnought is not the basis for the Dreadnaught. The graphics and the time frame both point to it being the equivalent of a Royal Sovereign-class battleship.
That's a tough sell, imo; Apart from the marked similarities in the name, Sunless Sea's Dreadnaught and HMS Dreadnought have identical gun placements, i.e., one forward gun, two wing guns, and two aft guns separated by a structure; and they have similar funnel placement, i.e., two funnels, one behind the other, on the center line. HMS Royal Soverign (the 1891 version), by contrast, had only two main gun emplacements, one forward and one aft, and two funnels that were placed side-by-side off the center line. So, graphically speaking, the argument that the Dreadnaught was visually influenced by HMS Dreadnought is more persuasive.
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MisterGone
Posts: 139
2/26/2015
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SporksAreGoodForYou wrote:
I like number 2. Cooks should reduce supply needs, no question.
While we're on it, First Officers should allow you to plot a course, and have a little arrow on the edge of the map to where you're heading, so you don't have to keep going to the map.
And gunners should increase reload speed.
Also! Engineers should increase (slightly), the chance success when your engine goes boom.
As for crew themselves, yes. There should be a balance. If you want to run with less supply demand (less crew), then you should go slower/shoot slower. Actually, scratch that. Increase the top speed with max crew. Don't slow things down even more.
Actually, after I wrote all of that I was thinking about the other officer applications that seem a bit under utilized compared to the (eventual) implementation of the "Doctor Aboard" and the potential expansion of the "Cook Aboard" statuses.
Engineers are pretty much fine as is - mostly. Of the three in the game, two convey benefits directly related to your engines (in either fuel efficiency or increased power). The Magician is a pretty unique case as he does neither, but he's also obviously not originally an engineer, and has a very unique skillset to make up for it (the whole "Banishing the Darkness" ability). The only idea I have for making it so that having an "Engineer Aboard" quality conveys a benefit would be to decrease the challenge rating on skill checks if your engines catch fire, like you mention.
First Officers are trickier though. Yeah, the Sigil-Ridden Navigator is a navigator, so some type of navigation ability makes sense for him, but the Carnelian Exile? She's fairly vague at the moment as to what she brings to the table. Are all 1st Officers supposed to be navigators? Or are they sort of the Colonel Tigh to the player's Captain Adama (for those who watched Battlestar Galactica that will make sense)? The person in charge of taking heat and enforcing discipline amongst the ranks to make sure the Captain isn't as hated.
A navigation ability would be nice though. Being able to set a waypoint on the map screen, then having a little indicator on the edge of the screen when you're sailing would be a handy feature to implement, and it would make a lot of sense if that was tied into having a 1st Officer aboard.
Gunnery Chiefs, they're the trickiest. Raising target acquisition is the obvious benefit with the mechanics currently in the game, but you mention reloading, something I think should be in the game but currently isn't. It's one of those extra wrinkles that could be added to the combat system that I think would add more complexity to it which would make it a lot more interesting, and it would make sense. If anyone's looked at the pictures of 1890's battleships (like this one of the Battleship Indiana), Deck guns were HUGE, especially relative to the size of the vessels themselves. We're talking giant cannons that fired shells in 12" -13" diameter barrels. The process of reloading them would be something that had to take a lot of coordination and effort.
If there were a reloading mechanic, then different gunnery chiefs could totally make the mechanic alterations to how it works in all sorts of fun ways. Maybe the Irrepressible Cannoneer can load two different shots immediately, but the 3rd shots on the cannons take twice as long. It'd make him better for strong opening volleys in a combat, trying to end things quickly, but worse at extended conflicts. The Adventuress might be more steadfast, and just reduce reloading time all around. A potential new Gunnery chief could be specialized at reloading torpedoes and Flensing weapons, but worse with cannons. There's a lot of possibilities if reloading were a thing in the game.
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If you'd ever like to enjoy a good round of pugilism or discussing the higher mysteries, Reginald Drownheart may be the dapper gentleman for you!
http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Reginald~Drownheart~
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Gregg Johnson
Posts: 263
2/27/2015
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*sigh* The forums ate my WoT so I'll just cover the main points:
Something that appears, at first glance, to be unrealistic, is not an exploit. An exploit breaks the game in some fashion. This is not an exploit.
The HMS Dreadnought is not the basis for the Dreadnaught. The graphics and the time frame both point to it being the equivalent of a Royal Sovereign-class battleship.
The HMS Dreadnought's crew complement of 700 was not its maximum crew. It could carry at least up to 810, probably more, but it's very difficult to find anything specific here. Ships regularly leave port with more than their listed complement, so that is clearly not the most it can carry. Therefore, Sunless Sea ships should have room for additional zailors beyond "fully manned".
How many more? Well, the German SMS Seydlitz' normal complement was about 1070, but in the battle of Jutland it was carrying 1425 crew members. If we were to equate the Seydlitz's fully manned 1000 with the Dreadnaught's fully manned 25*, this extra ~400 men on the Seydlitz would be an extra 10 on the Dreadnaught, i.e. we could pack in about 35 crew for the same ratio. Of course, the Seydlitz and the Battle of Jutland are long after our period of concern, but you still have ships in that era leaving port with 20-50 crew over their standard complement. True, these extra crew would not just be sitting around in their bunks, but they also aren't going to meaningfully enhance the ship's functioning over that standard complement.
Unfortunately, these ratios that you hinted at, and I spelled out, are meaningless. Sunless Sea simplifies the number of crew required, presumably to make the 'zee feel lonelier and to make each crew member's life (and inevitable death) matter more. "One is a tragedy, a million is a statistic"--and, unfortunately, so is a hundred. Even worse, your last crew member is explicitly one person: you. So, we can't really argue based on ratios how many extra crew should be possible over the standard complement. The same gameplay concerns that reduced those complements must also determine what optimally manned is. 50% is probably not the best choice, but neither is 100%.
In that regard, I'm fine with:
* Adding some benefit for 75% filled quarters--speed, aiming, repairs, etc.
* Better yet, giving Weapons and advanced Equipment an additional crew requirement to operate at peak efficiency.
* Cooks affecting supply consumption to make larger crew less onerous.
I am absolutely *not* fine with giving any benefit to 100% filled quarters, unless it be a result of using all of the best, most crew-intensive equipment rather than fiat.
* Supply consumption is identical in the range between 19 and 25.
edited by Olorin on 2/27/2015
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lady ciel
Posts: 2548
2/25/2015
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I don't like running with a full crew for a different reason. The random SAY event to pick up a new crew member, most of the time that gives Salts attention that can be spent to upgrade stats in another SAY event. If it doesn't give Salts attention you get a +1 to veils and the chance of a good or bad outcome after zailing around for a while.
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ciel
Sorry RL means I am not a very active player at the moment. No social actions unless you are prepared to wait and definitely no sparring or other mult-action things.
No Calling Cards or boxed cats please. Will take dupes on the affluent photographers. Other social invitations welcome. Parabolan Kittens usually available, send me an in-game social action saying you want one and I will get one to you as soon as possible.
storynexus name - reveurciel
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Shadow
Posts: 49
2/25/2015
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Personally, I'd make it so that the ship performs better across the board past the half crew threshold, all the way to full crew. Significant increases when fully manned compared to the half crew, because the downside of maintaining a large crew is just as considerable.
Everything from ship speed and fuel efficiency to target acquisition and even weapon damage, representing larger and better coordinated specialist teams.
Smaller vessels with smaller crew requirements would suffer less from being undermanned, but at the same time gain less from having a full crew. Larger ships, on the other hand, would suffer the lack of crewmen to a greater extent, but also benefit from bigger bonuses as they approach maximum crew.
Of course, this would all be balanced. It's not that a fully-manned Dreadnought would necessarily zip past a Corvette, but ideally a properly crewed large warship would maintain respectable speeds, be able to stay at zee longer than smaller ships (with reasonable stores for its size), and display much greater combat performance beyond what a couple extra weapon mounts imply.
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In Her Enduring Majesty's Service
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