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A suggestion about sailing

mrmistophelees

mrmistophelees

Landlubber
Yarr!

I had this interesting (to me) idea when I woke up this morning (no, I don't eat, drink, and sleep POTC...). Apologies for the long post… <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/razz.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":razz" border="0" alt="razz.gif" />

I think it could help slow the beginning of the game down a little so that the player doesn't progress into end-game (huge ships) so quickly. Because I honestly thing that it's way too easy to capture big ships so early in the game and then have no challenge anymore. Also, this could provide an incentive to use officers later in the game because they will be required in order to efficiently sail your vessel.

My suggestion is that certain ship classes should require certain officers to be on board in order to sail efficiently, even if the player has all 10's in stats. Now, I'm not sure about all the ship classes and sizes in POTC, but here are some suggestions:

Small ships that are flush decked (don't have a quarterdeck) up to a certain class can be sailed with just the player alone at full efficiency, such as class 7 ships.

If the ship has a quarterdeck, or is a certain rank, then maybe a quartermaster or first mate is required in order to get maximum efficiency out of the ship (based on prevailing stats of course).

Bigger ships (and higher classes) will require perhaps two kinds of officer in order to attain maximum efficiency.

And the biggest ships will require all three officer slots filled in order to make the ship run in top form. I really wish that we could have more than 3 officers at a time, but thats life.

The way this could work is that for certain classes of ship, each officer (including the player) can only contribute a certain amount of efficiency to the ship (so basically, you limit what any ONE person can do for the ship).

a. For small ships, the player is enough to handle her and contributes 100% to efficiency. Stats are still a deciding factor because if the player has all 1's, he/she is still contributing 100% of those 1's to the action of the ship. If the player has all 10's, those 10's are contributing 100% to the ship.

b. In bigger class ships (I don't know the exact range of ships classes), lets say for classes 5 and 6, the player only can contribute 75% to the ship's action, and the player’s stats determine how much of that 75% you can contribute. In order to get 100% out of the ship, the player would need to hire a first mate or quartermaster who would provide the last 25% to the ship's efficiency.

c. Class 3 and 4 ships would require two officers contributing 25% each to the ship while the player can only contribute a maximum of 50% now.

d. Finally, if the player wants a frigate or ship of the line, they better have all three (or four) officer slots filled. But not just any officer will do. It is required to have certain officers for the smooth running of the ship. Toughs don't contribute to the action of the ship, they are more for protecting you on land and helping conquer enemy ships.

Now, I think the math gets a little complicated here perhaps. I can only suggest an outline for what to do. Obviously, the player is only available on the flag ship. So if you have a ship of the line in tow and you want that ship to function to its maximum ability, you will have to find 4 DIFFERENT officers that will contribute to what you want the ship to do. If you want it to be a fighting vessel, then put a first mate, quartermaster, gunner, and something else on. If you want it to sail well, then first mate, quartermaster, navigator, and something else; but no matter what, the officer roster has to include a First Mate (as acting captain) and a quartermaster (who helps run the ship overall and maintains discipline), because no matter how talented one person is, they can’t run a ship of the line or frigate by themselves. If it’s the flag ship we are talking about, then there is no need for the First Mate.
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In the end, I think this is just a plan to require the player to use officers in the sailing of ships. Reiterating my earlier justification, this I hope will serve two purposes:

1. It will slow the beginning of the game down a little in that the player won’t be sailing in the high classes so quickly until he/she can secure some officers to help sail it. In actuality, the player can still capture a ship of the line and sail it, but there will be SEVERE penalties to the efficiency of the ship since the player’s stats can only contribute to 25% of the ship’s overall ability.

2. It will make officers more useful later in the game because they are required if you want to be a terror on the high seas. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/wink.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink.gif" />
 
I haven't read this fully, but it sounds defenitly interesting. I agree with the idea that even a maxed out player with everything at level 10 should have a need for his officers. I have been thinking about that as well and I think it's very important for a future mod. I had the idea of limiting the number of skill points the player can get. For example: player can never have higher than 5 skill points on sailing, so he'll need an officer for the other five. This idea would work better if the skill points would range from 1-100 instead of from 1-10. I also think that each type of officer should be truly distinctive, so a cannonneer is not going to improve the sailing skills and a doctor is not going to make the firing of the cannons any more efficient.
 
I like the idea. I've often wondered why the documentation seems to imply that you need a first mate to sail a prize ship, but that's not required in the game; any officer will do.

Let me give it some thought and get back to you. Any other suggestions are welcome.

Hook
 
I would actually like this idea to be the beginning of making officers more unique (I've seen the idea rolling around in the forums here).

For instance, having a doctor as an officer is useless in terms of doctoring... although that doctor may become a great navigator or something with the right stat boosts.
However, with my idea above, if we can give usefulness to every officer, then the officer requirement idea becomes an interesting strategic element to the game.
Do you want your ship to be great at gunnery, or do you want it to be great at surviving attacks so that it can put bunches of still-living buccanears onto shore to storm a fortress? A doctor could help keep people living....

And of course you only have 4 spots for officers, so it's not necessarily an eash choice.
 
The officers we have now are boatswain, cannoneer, quartermaster, navigator and first mate. We also have carpenter, doctor and deck fighter, who have no specific functions.

There's no reason to limit ourselves to the number of officers in our party. It's good enough that the ship has the officer in the passenger list. We could write a function to go through the passenger list (ignoring captives, of course) and find the best stats from that group. In any case a companion ship won't have the officer party, only passengers.

The 3 officers who accompany you on shore and on boardings (unless you tell them to stay back) really shouldn't be your ship's officers. If you're going on boardings, you want 3 toughs with you, not a couple of quartermasters and a navigator. Same with land, except having a quartermaster helps with buying and selling goods and repairing your ship.

This might be a good time to give special abilities to the carpenter and doctor.

The necessary functions shouldn't be difficult to write, and they'd replace most instances of GetSummonSkilletc calls, so it would be easy enough to find where to use the new functions.

Basically, only the cannoneer would use full gunnery stats, only the navigator would use full sailing stats, etc. Perks could come from either the player or the officer.

We need to decide how to scale the skills and which ones to scale for the player so we don't mess up the game. Suggestions would be appreciated.

Hook
 
Update: The way to get officers onto a companion ship is by:

F2->Ship->Ship to ship transfer->Assign officers

So a companion ship only has 4 total slots.

We could still use the entire passenger list in our own ship, but a companion ship would be limited to 4 officers.

Hook
 
<!--quoteo(post=162732:date=Sep 21 2006, 08:46 AM:name=Pieter Boelen)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Pieter Boelen @ Sep 21 2006, 08:46 AM) [snapback]162732[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
For example: player can never have higher than 5 skill points on sailing, so he'll need an officer for the other five. This idea would work better if the skill points would range from 1-100 instead of from 1-10. I also think that each type of officer should be truly distinctive, so a cannonneer is not going to improve the sailing skills and a doctor is not going to make the firing of the cannons any more efficient.
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I think the captain (player) should be able to get a 10 in any of the skills, because the captain should be pretty good (or at least have the possibility to be good) at most jobs around the ship. However, if we limit the captains ability to increase the efficiency of the ship overall... like in a SotL the captain can only contribute to 25% of it's overall efficiency, then the need for other officers becomes appearent.


<!--quoteo(post=162751:date=Sep 21 2006, 09:29 AM:name=Hook)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Hook @ Sep 21 2006, 09:29 AM) [snapback]162751[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
There's no reason to limit ourselves to the number of officers in our party. It's good enough that the ship has the officer in the passenger list. We could write a function to go through the passenger list (ignoring captives, of course) and find the best stats from that group. In any case a companion ship won't have the officer party, only passengers.

The 3 officers who accompany you on shore and on boardings (unless you tell them to stay back) really shouldn't be your ship's officers. If you're going on boardings, you want 3 toughs with you, not a couple of quartermasters and a navigator. Same with land, except having a quartermaster helps with buying and selling goods and repairing your ship.

Basically, only the cannoneer would use full gunnery stats, only the navigator would use full sailing stats, etc. Perks could come from either the player or the officer.

We need to decide how to scale the skills and which ones to scale for the player so we don't mess up the game. Suggestions would be appreciated.

Hook
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Would there be a way to change the interface so that the player could see more than 4 officers assigned to a ship? That would be ideal to having a more realistic and interesting sailing experience! But I don't know what is possible and what is not... <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/unsure.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":?" border="0" alt="unsure.gif" />

I totally agree that the captain shouldn't be bringing sailing officers ashore... it should be toughs and whoever has a high commerce skill.

One of the issues I was thinking is if an officer only has the ability to do one job (and I think that should be the case), what does the player do with all those extra skill and ability points? They are useless and I think would detract from the enjoyment of the game to have to keep putting in useless points in useless skills (since there are other officers to fill in the gap.)
My question in regards to this is, are we able to mod in new abilities? And can we change the skill system to 1-100 points? That would give the game more depth as well as preventing the problem of useless exp points.

@ Hook
I'm not sure what you mean when you say scale the skills.
 
Scale the skills: In other words, a player shows a 10 skill in sailing, but only half of that applies to his ship. For example, luck probably shouldn't be scaled at all.

There's no good reason to go to a 1-100 skill based system except that a certain other game does it this way. The amount of change needed in the game code would be outrageous. It would be easier to decide how many skill points to assign to a character for each character level. Right now you get 2 per level. This doesn't always have to be 2, which would be the major effect of having a 1-100 system.

Hook
 
I understand what you mean now, and I don't want to change lots of code to implement it.

Although, I can imagine the outcry if the player only gets one skill point per level, so I don't think that would be an ideal solution. What I'm trying to think of, is what can be done with points after the main skill set of a profession has been maxed (say gunnery for instance).

I think what we can do is to use some of the integrated mods to our advantage. Unfortunately, I don't have an intimate, or even vague picture of what is actually included in the Build mod, so my brainstorming is somthing like shooting in the dark.

One thing I thought of specifically for the player, is using the buildingset mod. We could perhaps create a new ability set with half a dozen abilities in it that all have to do with creating your own thriving community. One skill might let the player add more buildings into one location. Currently, the max buildings per location is set to 15, I believe because there were problems going over that. But we could drop that number to say 4, and have a skill that the player can invest in to increase that number eventually to 15.

An ability we could give to the quartermaster is something like "Cargo Reorganization," where the player could get an addition edge of speed in the ship by shifting the cargo intelligently (this made a big difference in real life!).

Before I go on, I would like to know what is involved in creating new abilities. Is it easy? Hard? I don't know anything about POTC modding, although I have modded other games.
 
<!--quoteo(post=162761:date=Sep 21 2006, 07:53 PM:name=Hook)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Hook @ Sep 21 2006, 07:53 PM) [snapback]162761[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
We could still use the entire passenger list in our own ship, but a companion ship would be limited to 4 officers.
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But those officers don't follow you ashore, so for the three assignable officers for your own ship, you choose officers who are good at fighting, but for companion ships you'd choose some navigators or something like that.

<!--quoteo(post=162776:date=Sep 21 2006, 08:27 PM:name=Mr Mistophelees)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Mr Mistophelees @ Sep 21 2006, 08:27 PM) [snapback]162776[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
I think the captain (player) should be able to get a 10 in any of the skills, because the captain should be pretty good (or at least have the possibility to be good) at most jobs around the ship. However, if we limit the captains ability to increase the efficiency of the ship overall... like in a SotL the captain can only contribute to 25% of it's overall efficiency, then the need for other officers becomes appearent.
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That is a good idea, yes. Not sure which idea is the best though. But we're still in the brainstorming phase, so that doesn't matter. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/icon_mrgreen1.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":cheeky" border="0" alt="icon_mrgreen1.gif" />

I once had the idea of making a sort of "party skill number". The party skill number would range from 1-100. But the character's person skills would range only from 1-10. So with only a captain with level 10 sailing, the party skill would be 10. But if that captain would hire a navigator with ALSO 10 sailing points, the party skill number would be 20 and so on. The party skill number would be the accumulated skills of ALL officers aboard the ship. The party skill number is the number that is applied to the on-sea part of the game. We can then also implement your idea, so that there is a minimum party skill number that is required for certain ships. The bigger the ship, the larger the required party skill nuber to sail it effectively. That way, if the party skill number for sailing is 40 for a corvette, the player can only contribute 25% efficiency and he'll need three other officers with 10 sailing skill points.

We could make it so thatcertain types of officers CAN'T get certain skills. For example: A cannonneer can't get any sailing skill points. However, if that is done, the problem of "useless skill points" becomes even worse. Perhaps you could "donate" useless skill points to other characters? But that doesn't make much sense, does it? Increasing the range of the skills from 1-10 to 1-100 would also make quite a difference.

As for new abilties: That is quite a good idea. Adding new abilties isn't very hard. You add it to the INTERFACE\perks code, then use these abilities somewhere in the game code. However, how are we going to make it so that certain officers can get certain abilties and certain other abilties are not available to certain officer types? It should be possible, but how?

However, I haven't got the slightest idea how to add new skills. It might be possible, but would be a whole lot harder.

It would also be possible to add new features available from officers to the Enc_Officer_dialog.c file. These features would be initiated by the player talking to the officer. It can be made so that these features only become available if the officer has a minimum skill level, or if the officer is of the required type or if the officer has a required ability.

Something that should also be done is to have ALL officers walking around the deck of your ship and not just the ones in your current party. That way you could talk to the cannonneer on the cannon deck, talk with the boatswain in the crew's quarters or talk with your navigator in your cabin.

I think we are naming several very good ideas here. If we do some further brainstorming, we should be able to get some good ideas which we can use to GREATLY enhance Build 14. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/w00t.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":woot" border="0" alt="w00t.gif" />
 
Pieter, if you're talking about simply removing the cap on the number of skill points you can have in any one skill, I remember reading a comment in the code, I don't remember where, that suggested that if this number was above 10 the game would blow up in a spectacular manner.

Hook
 
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I once had the idea of making a sort of "party skill number". The party skill number would range from 1-100. But the character's person skills would range only from 1-10. So with only a captain with level 10 sailing, the party skill would be 10. But if that captain would hire a navigator with ALSO 10 sailing points, the party skill number would be 20 and so on. The party skill number would be the accumulated skills of ALL officers aboard the ship. The party skill number is the number that is applied to the on-sea part of the game. We can then also implement your idea, so that there is a minimum party skill number that is required for certain ships. The bigger the ship, the larger the required party skill nuber to sail it effectively. That way, if the party skill number for sailing is 40 for a corvette, the player can only contribute 25% efficiency and he'll need three other officers with 10 sailing skill points.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

That is a great idea I think! That would also perhaps solve the problem of usless skill points as well, because the more skill points that you can pump into your officers no matter what they are, the better your ship will sail. That sounds pretty good to me, and if we then make a minimum for larger ships, that will force the player to hire the approrpiate amount of officers.

Getting into some fine detail, I just thought of a slight problem. If we do something like the group skill points, the player may still be able to sail a ship with 4 doctors or somthing silly.
So, if we can somehow break up the group skill points into their component parts, i.e. sailing, gunning, etc, then we can arbitrarily state that this corvette requires 20 sailing group points, 15 gunnery points, 10 defense points, etc. Then the player is going to have to choose the right kind of officers to sail it properly. Of course, with the open-ended nature of this game, the player can still sail it with 2 doctors and a carpenter... but with some severe penalties.

<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->We could make it so thatcertain types of officers CAN'T get certain skills. For example: A cannonneer can't get any sailing skill points. However, if that is done, the problem of "useless skill points" becomes even worse. Perhaps you could "donate" useless skill points to other characters? But that doesn't make much sense, does it? Increasing the range of the skills from 1-10 to 1-100 would also make quite a difference.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
As Hook stated, changing the core game to deal with 1-100 could require massive overhaul of all the code, and that might not be so desirable. However, your group skills idea may negate the problem of useless skills because every skill point helps no matter where it is.
However (assume using the group skills idea), to help guide the player into using the right officers to sail a ship instead of 4 doctors of level 40 that have 10's in almost everything (thereby giving the amount of points that would be necessary to sail), we could use new perks that make it worthwhile to have the right officers.


<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->As for new abilties: That is quite a good idea. Adding new abilties isn't very hard. You add it to the INTERFACE\perks code, then use these abilities somewhere in the game code. However, how are we going to make it so that certain officers can get certain abilties and certain other abilties are not available to certain officer types? It should be possible, but how?
However, I haven't got the slightest idea how to add new skills. It might be possible, but would be a whole lot harder.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It looks like in the INTERFACE\officer.c file there are particular game titles given to each kind of officer in the code, and therefore we can just add a bool variable that allows a certain perk to be choosen by a certain kind of officer right?
Then, perhaps we can change the perk list interface to be more organized. In the code I saw, the perk list IS organized into navigation perks, gunnery perks, close combat perks, etc. We can change the in-game interface to reflect that as well I hope. Then the player won't be confused as to what perks this officer or that officer can choose. The officer in question might be a navigator, and there will be a list of navigator perks labeled clearly to choose from. And if the officer is a gunner, the player can TRY to choose a navigation perk, but the "OK" button will be greyed out and the definition of the perk will state only certain officers can grab this perk. There will be some overlap of course... not ONLY navigators can choose some navigation skills, but only the navigator can choose all of them, and the best (unlocked) ones.

I can't imagine what new skills we might add that wouldn't seem usless in the game context. I think Akella pretty much made skills of everything relevent. I would rather focus on new perks for everyone, and it seems that is much easier anyway.


<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->It would also be possible to add new features available from officers to the Enc_Officer_dialog.c file. These features would be initiated by the player talking to the officer. It can be made so that these features only become available if the officer has a minimum skill level, or if the officer is of the required type or if the officer has a required ability.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I am aware that the buildingset mod already does that, and I have gone through that code myself changing values and stuff so I'm pretty familiar with it.

Something I just thought of... just as a hypothetical example of this, is we could have new kinds of problems for the captain to deal with. Every ship, with months of sailing, is going to lose some sailing speed because of a barnacle-encrusted keel. So, we could write some code so that after 6 months of sailing, one of the officers could approach the captain and initiate a conversation saying that he thinks the ship is not sailing as well as it ought to, and that we probably need to get the vessel careened. He could suggest going into port to do so, or if we had a good carpenter, we could do it ourselves. The cleaning would give the player back the 10% or so sailing speed that he had lost in the last 6 months.

Another fascinating idea I just had was for the Boatswain, since he's the one who traditionaly takes care of discipline and punishment. We could have the captain initiate conversation with him in the crew's quarters or wherever and there would be an option to "Train the hands." The training would take 1 day, and the player would see a little message at the top that the crew have received XX experience points. Once the crew reaches a certain amount of exp points, the game would notify the player that the ship has increased efficiency by 5% or something. This training could even be interactive, such that maybe we could have a somewhat transparent ship to fight with as practice for the crew. I guess this also means that we could add exp points to the crew after every real battle as well....
And we could have it so that the training is broken up into several fields. If you have a navigator, he can train the hands at sailing. The gunner can train gunnery, and so on. This could develop more appreciation for the crew, who really are just numbers in this game unfortunately.


<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Something that should also be done is to have ALL officers walking around the deck of your ship and not just the ones in your current party. That way you could talk to the cannonneer on the cannon deck, talk with the boatswain in the crew's quarters or talk with your navigator in your cabin.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Great idea, especially in light of my suggestions above that would make the player want to talk to all of the officers as some point. However, the problem I'm seeing is if the player has lots of officers, like more than 15 or 20, and they are sailing a small ship. It could get too crowded even to move!
On the other hand, by the time the player has that many officers, they are probably also sailing bigger ships as well. So this is just a <i>caveat</i>.

<!--quoteo(post=162924:date=Sep 22 2006, 06:34 AM:name=Hook)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Hook @ Sep 22 2006, 06:34 AM) [snapback]162924[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> Pieter, if you're talking about simply removing the cap on the number of skill points you can have in any one skill, I remember reading a comment in the code, I don't remember where, that suggested that if this number was above 10 the game would blow up in a spectacular manner.

Hook
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<img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/razz.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":razz" border="0" alt="razz.gif" />
 
<!--quoteo(post=162924:date=Sep 22 2006, 04:34 PM:name=Hook)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Hook @ Sep 22 2006, 04:34 PM) [snapback]162924[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
Pieter, if you're talking about simply removing the cap on the number of skill points you can have in any one skill, I remember reading a comment in the code, I don't remember where, that suggested that if this number was above 10 the game would blow up in a spectacular manner.
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I was never suggesting to REMOVE the skill cap. Just to increase it. But it would be better if we could keep the skill cap as-is. If there are any hardcoded places where the skills are used, then we can't increase the skill cap. Because if we increase the skill cap, we must also make sure that every instance where the skills are used is changed as well.

To Mr Mistophelees: EXCELLENT ideas all around! <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/w00t.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":woot" border="0" alt="w00t.gif" />

I think we should limit the skills and perks that an officer can get. So a doctor can never get cannoneer skills and so on. I also agree that the party skill limit for each ship should be set per skill. So if the party skill for sailing is 40, you must have 3 navigators with 10 skill points in addition to your own skill points. It makes no sense to have a doctor improve the sailing party skill.

<!--quoteo(post=162958:date=Sep 22 2006, 07:06 PM:name=Mr Mistophelees)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Mr Mistophelees @ Sep 22 2006, 07:06 PM) [snapback]162958[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
Great idea, especially in light of my suggestions above that would make the player want to talk to all of the officers as some point. However, the problem I'm seeing is if the player has lots of officers, like more than 15 or 20, and they are sailing a small ship. It could get too crowded even to move!
On the other hand, by the time the player has that many officers, they are probably also sailing bigger ships as well. So this is just a <i>caveat</i>.
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What about we limit the amount of passengers you can take with you based on the size of the ship? So if you sail a Tartana you can take 2 officers with you at most. And you can't take prisoners either, because there is no room.
 
<!--quoteo(post=163094:date=Sep 23 2006, 02:33 AM:name=Pieter Boelen)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Pieter Boelen @ Sep 23 2006, 02:33 AM) [snapback]163094[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
I think we should limit the skills and perks that an officer can get. So a doctor can never get cannoneer skills and so on. I also agree that the party skill limit for each ship should be set per skill. So if the party skill for sailing is 40, you must have 3 navigators with 10 skill points in addition to your own skill points. It makes no sense to have a doctor improve the sailing party skill.
...
What about we limit the amount of passengers you can take with you based on the size of the ship? So if you sail a Tartana you can take 2 officers with you at most. And you can't take prisoners either, because there is no room. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Are you assuming then that we will eventually be using all the passengers as party members as Hook suggested that we could? Because otherwise, requiring 3 navigators to sail a ship means that the ship won't have any other ability aside from what the captain can give it right? Other than that, I agree that a doctor should not improve the sailing aspect of a ship.

The problem as Hook stated it however, is that we can't use the entire passenger list for our crew on our other ships.. they are still limited to 4 per ship. That could make our fleet pretty much impotent if it requires 4 navigators just to sail one of them with no room left for a gunner or quartermaster.

The limit of how many officers you can have based on your ship is a very interesting one! In the early game, that makes the player's choice of officer extremely important. I do see one downside to it... and maybe it's not a downside afterall. But, if the player can't stockpile officers in preparation for obtaining a larger and more powerful ship, then when the player does get a bigger ship, they will have an extemely difficult time handling it until they can hit enough ports to hire some more officers.
Maybe thats not a problem afterall since the player can just sail to different islands on the world map, avoiding encounters until they get enough officers. And the issue does seem realistic anyway. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/par-ty.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":cheers" border="0" alt="par-ty.gif" />
 
Perhaps the skill limits for companion ships can be set lower than for the player's ship?

I do think that all officers aboard the ship should be used instead of just the selectable four. The selected four will follow you ashore, but the others will also help in sailing the ship.
 
Limiting the skills for the companion ships would be a good compromise. However, do the companion ships have a special place in the code? Because if we are setting skill limits on every ship in the game, it would probably be changed in the ship definition. And if we do that, we have to be careful that we don't change the requirements for the enemy AI as well.

Of course, none of this may affect the AI anyway... since to my knowledge (which is very little I'll admit), they don't use officers anyway.
 
In that case we should set the skill limits to only operate for the player. But enemies will indeed be a problem. Enemies would never be able to get a party skill higher than 10, so that's not fair and a bit of a cheat for the player. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/unsure.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":?" border="0" alt="unsure.gif" />
 
<img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/par-ty.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":cheers" border="0" alt="par-ty.gif" /> Cheers, Mistophelees! There are definitely some good ideas swirling around here. I do like the idea of only getting one skill point with every level up. Would it then be possible to gain the ability point on every other level up?
 
We can limit the abilities and skill points per level any way you like. The code for it is fairly simple. And enemies can still be generated the original way, with all the points and perks.

It should also be easy enough to limit the officer restrictions to just the player character and his companion ships. They're generally easy to identify.

It might be easier to design this thing if we think about the highest level first, then get into the details. What are we trying to accomplish?

1. Player will need specialized officers to get full skill effects on larger ships.

2. Only specialized officers will give full skill points in their specialties.

Go from there.

Hook
 
Considering that the game is intended to be open-ended, do we really want to add a Class system? I mean, "your class is gunner so you can't learn carpentry" doesn't make much sense. Sure, it's more logical for gunners to develop their primary skill first, but it shouldn't stop them from diversifying. You spend enough time on that darned boat, you might pick up all kinds of skills. That was a weakness of the early computer RPG's - character class could prevent you from doing otherwise obvious things. Let's not go there.

Also, skills should not be cumulative. I mean, you can only do so much with officer's skill. The best skill of the group should be tops for the group, no matter what. What kind of math is "I am a decent gunner, and he is a decent gunner, so together we're a great gunner"????? It could be a good idea to require more officers for larger ships, but cumulative skills is not the way to do it. Even if it was a good idea, there's a logical hole in that real ships could operate entirely on NCO's, except for maybe navigation. They only really need one good officer, if everything else is working.

Might make officers influence crew morale. The larger the crew, the more officers would be needed to maintain the appearance of order. A severe officer shortage would make it harder to keep the crew together when you start taking fire or run out of food or something. That would be logical, and would get the desired "you need more help" feeling, without creating any huge holes in the plot.

This is good brainstorming, but let's make sure we want to go there. There could be side effects.
 
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