AI officer ideas

[Tingyun]

@Levis since you mentioned AI officers would not be hard to implement now, it seemed to make sense to open a brainstorming topic to discuss how they might work.

Assuming they will function like companion ship officers, 3 slots max contributing all Edit: role defined skills and perks, I would recommend the following as an initial outline of a system.

1) All AI captains get decent sailing and leadership skills, and access to the needed perks. (For example, the navy captain should be granted access to the sailing perk line, and maybe remove some of the top level gunnery perks he currently gets, he can't himself be in with the cannon crews).

2) AI captains get officers according to ship tier. 1 officer at tier 7, 2 officers at tier 6, 3 officers at tier 5 and above. The player will likely get more even earlier.

3) However, officer levels should be much lower than captain level. So a tier 5 navy captain is an average of level (8-5)*7 multiplied by .95 (on average) and then add 10, or level 30 on average. His officer should be much less than that, maybe in the 10-20 range. I'd say officer level should be about 50% of the captains rank after adjustment for captain type, randomized.

4) To cover needed skills, the three useful officer types to the AI are: gunner, boatswain, and Doctor (which I'll change to firstmate in my experiment with transferring ship defense perks from doctor to firstmate). With that group of officers, every skill and needed perk for sea warfare is covered:

Leadership, sailing: captain
Accuracy, cannon: gunner
Grappling: boatswain
Defense: doctor

5) Fencing, luck, repair, and commerce are the remaining skills. Combat oriented captains can have fencing, and commerce oriented on will have that, they don't need officers for it. If we want the AI to have repair, we can assisn some amount to the captains themselves, though it seems a much lower priority give the game mechanics, not sure it would matter.

6) Which officers come fist, second, and third can be dependent on captain type. I think all captains should eventually get all officers, even the merchant. The merchant captain will generally be lower level anyway, and so will his officers, but even a merchant would probably have someone around with ok competence at using the guns and managing he deck crews. And he doesn't need a quartermaster, he handles commerce himself.

Just an initial outline of a possible system to start the discussion off.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I think the main additional difficulty to figure out here is: Where does the player get to SEE these officers?
By the time boarding is completed, would they all have been killed in the fight?
What if some of them aren't? Can you hire them? Take them as prisoner? How?

Assuming they will function like companion ship officers, 3 slots max contributing all skills and perks

Companion ship officers contribute only as per their officer type, so not quite all skills and perks.
But that fits in exactly with the remainder of your post anyway.

 

[Tingyun]

Pieter, indeed, a mistake of wording on my part, I meant for their particular role. Thank you for correcting, I'll edit accordingly.

Yes, it does have to be addressed. If they were just added but disappeared on ship capture, it would basically be in effect the system I implemented in my rebalanced captain experiment, as it would just be a means of getting captains the needed skills and perks. It would provide a means of doing away with the large salary multipliers I put in place to prevent players from easily affording to hire my super captains, but I think those are realistic anyway (a former captain isn't going to be hired for a Bosun's wage, he has other options to be paid better).

I think Levis plans to implement hiring the officers, and making them appear in boarding combat, which would actually be a HUGE improvement over what I have going on in the experiment. But it will require a lot of steps probably, including replicating some version of the surrendered captain dialogue logic to determine if they are hireable.

However, even if they are invisible and disappear after boarding, it would be a wonderful improvement over the current system in the base mod. As I've said elsewhere, the sea combat game currently is the equivalent of easy mode, granting even swashbuckler players the kind of statistical cheats that most games reserve for their learner levels. That's why I did the changes I did in the experiment, but if officers can be added by Levis, they will be a MUCH better means of solving that problem long term, because it offers opportunities to expand it later.

In summary, I would say that this is currently the single most pressing game balance issue in the base mod, and if Levis does this, even in the most basic version with no interaction with the officers after battle, he will have solved it and made sea warfare what it should be. I am excited about it!

 

[Levis]

Okay my ideas.

Captains will still be diverse. So a pirate captain will be better in grappling while a merchant captain might not have so many sailing skills at all etc.
First of all there will be a check to see if the captain is able to sail the ship at all for leadership. if this is not the case a first mate will be added which will get a level which is X% of the captain level. If now the leadership requirement is met it the script will go on. If not it will increase the XP for leadership untill the required leadership level it met.
Now the same will be done for sailing, and a navigator will be added if needed.

Now there will be a calculation to determine how many officers a captain will have. This will be depending on how many decks a ship will have. For each (boarding)deck the ship has a officer will be added.
If the number of officers allowed hasn't be reached a random officer will be created untill this number is reached. The way the officer type is determined I still need to look at but probably it will also depend on the captain type and I'm thinking of giving them preferd officertypes etc. So a pirate will have more master at arms while a merchant will more likely have a quartermaster.

For now the officers will just be added to the ship and contribute theire skills and perks to the ship. Eventually I want the officers to appear on the boarding decks so you can fight with them, and maybe if the ship surrenders they will be there too.
Also if we are going to implement the damage taken by officers during battle this could also be applied to these officers.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

First of all there will be a check to see if the captain is able to sail the ship at all for leadership. if this is not the case a first mate will be added which will get a level which is X% of the captain level.

That can either be a solution to the "captain cannot command his own ship", or it could make things more complicated.
I'm not sure which of the two it would be....

If there is an "increase level until Leadership and Sailing skill allow the captain to command his ship" functionality anyway, you might as well just always call that on the captain.
Right?

 

[Tingyun]

Levis, does that mean AI ships can have more than 3 slots of functional officers? I had thought they would be limited in that respect the same as companion ships are, if they can have more officers than 3 contributing, then that does indeed open up possibilities.

I'm all for captain diversity, especially if more than 3 officers can work--However, a rework of current assignments will still be in order (i.e. Navy captains should not be terrible at sailing, that should be one of their best traits).

Also, I think while some diversity is good, it is easy to make too much of it. For example, pirates should not be alone in being great at boarding. Navy ships LOVED taking prizes for example. Basically, the differences should be tightened, with general competence as the rule.

Moreover, officer type should not be too dependent on captain type. For example, merchants should get some kind of gunner/bosun officers, perhaps with lowered skills, but that will usually be taken care of anyway by merchant captains being lower level than others, with an appropriate level reducing function.

And pirates should be given a gunner/doctor/whatever else they need for skills etc before they start filling up their limited deck small ships with master at arms. Master at arms is basically a fighter, that's modeled in the crew already.

Basically, I think the number one guiding rule should be: captains need access to the full range of perks/skills through themselves and officers, just as the player has, with diversity present but moderate. Flavorful assignments like master at arms for pirate and quartermaster for merchant should be made only after the skills they need are served (but are awesome if both ends can be achieved).

The end being he player has to outsmart the AI at sea, rather than win through hidden large statistical advantages. Then we add difficulty modifiers to the captain and officer generation, so that the player DOES have a statistical advantage on lower levels, but maybe the AI captains get skills and perks faster at the higher levels.

 

[Levis]

Nope NPC ships have the same rules applied to them concerning contribution. But just as you NPC captains can have more then 3 passengers. Just not all of them will contribute

 

[Tingyun]

Nice! Did I mention how much I am looking forward to everything you are working on Levis?

 

[Levis]

That can either be a solution to the "captain cannot command his own ship", or it could make things more complicated.
I'm not sure which of the two it would be....

If there is an "increase level until Leadership and Sailing skill allow the captain to command his ship" functionality anyway, you might as well just always call that on the captain.
Right?

because it raises the level of the captain which raises the level of the boarding enemies .

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Levis, does that mean AI ships can have more than 3 slots of functional officers? I had thought they would be limited in that respect the same as companion ships are, if they can have more officers than 3 contributing, then that does indeed open up possibilities.

The only(!) reason for that limitation is that there is no "Officer/Passenger Transfer" INTERFACE that supports more than 3 officers.
But there is nothing in the actual game code preventing it.

Just not all of them will contribute

There is nothing preventing them from all contributing either.
Though of course if they have two Carpenters contributing Repair, only the highest one counts.
That's the same as for the player, of course.

because it raises the level of the captain which raises the level of the boarding enemies .

Indeed it would. Is that a problem though?

 

[Levis]

Your right, every passenger contributes to the ship indeed .

And @Pieter Boelen we want the captain level to be tied to the class of the ship, I prefer to keep the captain level the same after we generated it so it keeps the code easy to read etc. If you are missing skills you can just have an officer to fill in the gap. Also it would create interesting situations if at one point officers can die during sea battles. you could cripple a ship by killig the navigator. If the ship now doesn't have enough sailing skills anymore I believe it wont go anywhere .

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I suppose that is fair. Indeed I think after I rewrote some stuff a while back, the player now also can use officers to be allowed access to higher ship Tiers.
Makes sense to apply that same logic to the NPCs.

 

[Tingyun]

Technically, given the logic of the captain roles, and the formula for generating their level, if the skill importances are set realistically then all of the regular captain/privateer/navy captain/pirate should almost never have too low a leadership and sailing to command their ship. I mean, at tier 6 is the first time you need a 2 or above, and tier 6 guys of those varieties are going to be pulling in levels 15-25 mostly, with their rank bonuses. They are going to get to 2 in those skills.

Basically, if we model most captains to be halfway competent with some skill importance in sailing and leadership, then the only way it would come up is:

If we decide to make merchant captains have 0 skill importance there or something very low, since they get only small rank bonuses. And I'm not sure that's sensible, if they were pure commerce, they would be a shopkeeper, not a captain.

Basically, I think some captains should be GREAT at leadership and sailing (navy, pirate (he is elected after all)), some should be very good (privateer,) some should be pretty good (regular captain) and some should at least know which end of the ship is starboard (merchant).

Given the relation to tier size and level, as long as we go for basic competence plus moderate diversity, they won't often be too low for their tier. They gain 7 levels on average per upgrade in tier, and they start at around 13 base level plus officer type bonus when they only need 2s in those skills....

 

[Levis]

I agree captains should be somewhat competend, but I do like them to have different specializations. And for example a merchant captain imo should have the highest importance for commerce. But leadership could be pretty high also. But his sailing shouldn't be that higher, after all he will probably be a fat gentleman who spend most of his time behind a desk counting his money

 

[Tingyun]

100% agreed! I am wondering about this, if you give him a tier 4 ship to command, then that fat gentleman will be around level 30 based on the formula, a very high level indeed! And he only needs a 4 in sailing to be able to command that ship, won't he get that at even low skill importance, like 2?

I ran some tests on this when I was creating my experiment, and I repurposed the tavern hire officer dialogue to give me the various captains so I could watch their skills. I think what I observed is that at high level even the very low importance ones ended up getting pretty high.

Meaning, I think if the lazy money grabber is a 2 in sailing importance, he will basically always end up with the minimum of sailing, he won't be good at it, but it will be enough to command his ship, because ship requirements go up slow, and captain level goes up very fast.

Basically I just think the case of not being able to command a ship will not be an issue after all, even if they are crappy.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

But his sailing shouldn't be that higher, after all he will probably be a fat gentleman who spend most of his time behind a desk counting his money

I'm sorry, but NOT 100% agreed. If a merchant captain isn't at least moderately competent at sailing, how did he become captain in the first place?
You don't become a good merchant captain by being good at commerce. The ACTUAL "fat gentlemen" sitting behind their desks ashore cover that part of the job!
The captain's job is to get the ship safely (and cheaply) from A to B and back, e.g. Navigate the ship. It is not his business to be conducting much actual business.

Spoiler

Or are you trying to bring TOO MUCH realism into this? *COUGH, COUGH*

(That's me being EXTREMELY sarcastic about my previous job.... )

 

[Tingyun]

Eh, now I'm convinced the other way. I lack the courage of my convictions.

For my experiment I think I made merchant captains one of the best at sailing, figuring that is their only primary trait actually beyond commerce.

Anyway, I am still convinced that the "captain is too unskilled for his ship" issue is a relic of them having 0 skill importances. We set those things anywhere above 2, and it won't come up, so I don't think we need to introduce specific code to deal with it.