Build 14 Beta 1 Feedback

[salonikasurf]

Hi all,
I found the improvements fantastic. Generally agree with most of the above.

New sailing AI is great - I do get an onshore wind nearly everytime I go to sea - this becomes annoying after a while tacking out of port at around 1-2 knots churns up a lot of time. OK for realism but slows the game play. I generally go to worldmap in lieu of direct sail now.

During direct sail - encounters with floating objects etc seem to be less than before.

I always play at the highest difficulty level and the fights, land and sea, seem to be well balanced. Do have to save often but the rewards are better. better swords on opponents etc. I also enable good items from traders at the start - if you have enough money - you should always be able to buy good items. I don't play with cheats enabled so this helps a fair bit.

Level ups for player and officers are reasonable and balanced. the autoskills system works well. I put up the theft number at the start to 20 as not everyone you talk to should be a pickpocket - this seems to be a better balance - generally there is at least one pickpocket on each island / scene. when it was at the default value everyone seemed to be stealing.

With regard to the pirates and quest ships - their ships seem to be given way superior stats and performance when you encounter them than when you take the ship and use it yourself. This is mainly on speed and manouverability - I had a class 1 pirate ship that was faster and turned in half the distance as my light frigate!!! Makes the game interesting and is possibly something to do with the difficulty level. Sort of bypasses the realistic trend that has been happening.

I have found that nearing the end of the standard storyline the stores at Greenford, Oxbay, Grenada, Douwesen have little or no stock and the prices are extremely low ie. Gold at 5 coins each. cannot resuppply ships. This seems to be for the islands which I traded with most. Could be a glitch with the auto trade function as I get more food and rum than the store had on screen) Autotrade also is erratic - sometime it gives me less sailcloth and less planks than normal and otherimes doesn't give the normal amount of balls, grapes, chain. I now do most of the purchasing manually.

The end of the Standard storyline is still broken (broken again) - I meet Sir Henry Morgan and not Brin and there is no option for reward etc. Silehard is a problem again as well. Capturing the black pearl gets the video played of the sinking pearl over the ship transfer interface - all good afterwards though - the black pearl model is changed to the standard Pearl without the superior stats - making it a bit less important to capture it.

Dialogue with Danielle is also a bit of a problem in the last stages of the standard storyline if you talk to her too early on Cozumel she goes into the "after final" dialogue and this upsets restoring the reasearcher back on Oxbay lighthouse.

I would like to see the fix for the seige of Greenford in the standard storyline in the future but realize getting the other issues sorted may be a higher priority.

Some of the above will end up on the bug tracker in due course.

I have currently completed most of the side quests to the standard storyline- hopefully will do the last couple soon.

Overall a fantastic improvement once again. Hats off to all involved. Hoorah Hoorah hoorah. :2up

 

[carmenara]

their ships seem to be given way superior stats and performance when you encounter them than when you take the ship and use it yourself.

They're very comfortable with my new inertia settings, I notice. They can manage their rotational momentum very well and in good winds do wide orbits without losing energy (ie, speed) making assault missions on big ships terrifying. You can emulate that with a high sailing skill and the speed + maneuverability character feats. And of course some new tactics to match. Hint: Ships lose maneuverability when sails are damaged. Ditto if a mast collapses. That's how you soften up a surprisingly agile big ship.

This makes ships with large broadsides of light cannon devastating (caravelas for instance) as they can easily fire repeatedly into the enemy rigging in a single attack run.

 

[salonikasurf]

their ships seem to be given way superior stats and performance when you encounter them than when you take the ship and use it yourself.

They're very comfortable with my new inertia settings, I notice. They can manage their rotational momentum very well and in good winds do wide orbits without losing energy (ie, speed) making assault missions on big ships terrifying. You can emulate that with a high sailing skill and the speed + maneuverability character feats. And of course some new tactics to match. Hint: Ships lose maneuverability when sails are damaged. Ditto if a mast collapses. That's how you soften up a surprisingly agile big ship.

This makes ships with large broadsides of light cannon devastating (caravelas for instance) as they can easily fire repeatedly into the enemy rigging in a single attack run.

I did have the full 10 points on sailing and up to sea wolf on character abilities. I also like to use smaller faster ships and similar tactics as yourself - rigging first and then move in for capture whilst trying to keep out of range or in their arcs that they cannot fire. This is a bit hard when the opposition ship, as in the case above a class 1 manowar with 10.9 for speed and 50 for turning stats, can out run and out turn my frigate with 24 speed and 125 turn - no matter there are always other tactics to employ - this was a ship I encountered on a treasure hunt so they may be given better stats than the normal. Pirates generally that I have encountered on direct sail are only in up to class 4 ships and they perform pretty much as expected. Also, the Soverign also performed pretty true to a Class 1 as for speed and manouverability at Cozumel.

BTW I like the new inertia settings very much

 

[carmenara]

I do notice that. Some ship models require insanely high rotational acceleration and max yaw rate settings to be able to turn on a dime as they should (schooners have same turnrate as brigs I think but brigs have a far smaller turning circle which is intentional!). Others with a very low turnrate and low yaw acceleration are surprisingly agile or not as difficult to handle as their stats look. Let's just say the crew knows how to work the ship really well, or she has some tricks up her sleeve.

All in all, adds to personality.

 

[vaustein]

Blown away at first, then I began sailing and noticed some very irritating changes from alpha.

1) Cannot SailTo when ship is "too close". I *liked* being able to do this. It cuts down on time, is very handy, and helps to resolve sea battles faster.
2) Cannot sail against the wind. Again, freaking irritating! I know you want realism, but I want fun and convenience. My ship should be able to move against the wind a least a little.

Then I noticed something every *more* irritating: cannot fast travel to unvisited locations. Dammit, you've just taken a fun experience and made it tedious and boring. I want to be able to fast travel to every port while in Sea view and to every shop while on Land, just like in Alpha and in every previous release.

In trying to be clever or make the experience more "RPG-like", our excellent volunteer dev team have broken the Rule of Fun. *Please* tell me how to add these features back. Or, add them back yourselves and gate them with a menu option called "RPG Realism" or something. When you try to "enhance" the experience, take a minute to think about how you might alienate existing players.

 

[Thomas the Terror]

turn aracade mode on in the Advanced options tab.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

New sailing AI is great - I do get an onshore wind nearly everytime I go to sea - this becomes annoying after a while tacking out of port at around 1-2 knots churns up a lot of time. OK for realism but slows the game play. I generally go to worldmap in lieu of direct sail now.

Wind direction SHOULD be pretty much completely random, so that sounds like just plain bad luck.
I know what you mean though; the wind blowing into the port when you're trying to get out
is one of the reasons I used to not play with Realistic mode on.

But if you have a compass equipped, you'll get a log message ashore stating the wind direction and speed.
This was intentionally added to help you decide to put sail or not.
If you don't have favourable winds, you can spend the night in the tavern and hope it'll be better the next day.

During direct sail - encounters with floating objects etc seem to be less than before.

That's weird. We tweaked the distances so you get a chance to avoid logs of wood and mines,
but we did nothing with frequencies at all.

Level ups for player and officers are reasonable and balanced. the autoskills system works well. I put up the theft number at the start to 20 as not everyone you talk to should be a pickpocket - this seems to be a better balance - generally there is at least one pickpocket on each island / scene. when it was at the default value everyone seemed to be stealing.

I'm going to take that advice and set "NO_THEFT" to 20 as Build default.
Note, of course, that the chance of being pickpocketed is very much dependent on your luck skill.
In fact, I don't quite recall exactly how it's coded, but it might be
so that pickpocketing becomes VERY profitable and easy if you get up to 10 luck.
How easy is it to get up to such a high luck value with the Auto Skill System?
Here's the setting explanation from BuildSettings.h:

	// You can now pick pockets. But this is risky, and other thieves may pick YOUR pocket too.
// 0 - 60 : The higher this value the safer you are from pickpockets 
// Above 30 nobody picks YOUR pocket, above 60 you yourself get no chance to steal

With regard to the pirates and quest ships - their ships seem to be given way superior stats and performance when you encounter them than when you take the ship and use it yourself. This is mainly on speed and manouverability - I had a class 1 pirate ship that was faster and turned in half the distance as my light frigate!!! Makes the game interesting and is possibly something to do with the difficulty level. Sort of bypasses the realistic trend that has been happening.

I'm not all all sure on what the difficulty levels do exactly.
They certainly make randomly generated characters, such as bandits and ship captains, higher-level
and thus enemy ships would be manoeuvring better than on lower difficulty levels.

I'm not aware of any game cheating going on to increase the difficulty levels though.
As far as I know, if you capture a ship, she should handle the same way as when an NPC captained her.
Provided you have the same skills as the NPC captain, of course.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I have found that nearing the end of the standard storyline the stores at Greenford, Oxbay, Grenada, Douwesen have little or no stock and the prices are extremely low ie. Gold at 5 coins each. cannot resuppply ships. This seems to be for the islands which I traded with most. Could be a glitch with the auto trade function as I get more food and rum than the store had on screen) Autotrade also is erratic - sometime it gives me less sailcloth and less planks than normal and otherimes doesn't give the normal amount of balls, grapes, chain. I now do most of the purchasing manually.

I think the game economy might be a slight li'l bit messed up.
Your buying/selling influences it, but it doesn't seem to easily restore itself.
And what with prices changing WHILE you buy, I think something could definitly use some tweaking here.
There is a Bug Tracker issue on the pricing change somewhere; can you find that one and add this observation to it please?

The end of the Standard storyline is still broken (broken again) - I meet Sir Henry Morgan and not Brin and there is no option for reward etc. Silehard is a problem again as well. Capturing the black pearl gets the video played of the sinking pearl over the ship transfer interface - all good afterwards though - the black pearl model is changed to the standard Pearl without the superior stats - making it a bit less important to capture it.

Henry Morgan actually IS Brin. He's just renamed as part of the historical governor names mod.
This should not break the story in any way, though it might not make sense storywise.
If you do think it doesn't make sense, please say so and I'll prevent this name-change from happening in the Standard storyline.

Christofor Manuel De Alencar, governor of Puerto Rico, is also being renamed to Juan Francisco Medina.
He IS being used in stock game quests, so since you're playing the sidequests anyway,
could you please check if there is any erroneous name references going on?
I *think* all governor-name references in stock game files actually refer to the character ID and then apply that character's name,
so if that is the case, then in dialogs, he SHOULD get the new name too. But I'm not sure, so I'd like someone to check.

This same effect might be going on in other storylines as well, since many governors are renamed for historical realism,
but the various dialogs might still be referring to their original names.

Also, for storyline logic purposes, in the Jack Sparrow storyline, I prevented the name-change from Brin to Sir Henry Moore.

I would like to see the fix for the seige of Greenford in the standard storyline in the future but realize getting the other issues sorted may be a higher priority.

Same here. But that doesn't require a storyline fix per se; it requires the Capture Colonies mod to be fixed and finished.
That's quite a big project that I haven't been able to convince Pirate_KK to work on yet.

Some of the above will end up on the bug tracker in due course.

Thanks very much.

I do notice that. Some ship models require insanely high rotational acceleration and max yaw rate settings to be able to turn on a dime as they should (schooners have same turnrate as brigs I think but brigs have a far smaller turning circle which is intentional!). Others with a very low turnrate and low yaw acceleration are surprisingly agile or not as difficult to handle as their stats look. Let's just say the crew knows how to work the ship really well, or she has some tricks up her sleeve.

Could the ingame turn radius not depend on ship's speed and the various inertia values?
I know in real life, ship speed definitly influences turning radius.
So maybe a slow ship might have a larger turning radius than a fast ship with the same turnrate value?

 

[zorglub]

turn aracade mode on in the Advanced options tab.

Exactly. Vaustein, this is exactly why we're having two different modes in the game, realistic and arcade. If you want to sail against the wind - don't play in realistic mode!

 

[vaustein]

turn aracade mode on in the Advanced options tab.

Exactly. Vaustein, this is exactly why we're having two different modes in the game, realistic and arcade. If you want to sail against the wind - don't play in realistic mode!

No, that did not work. When I sail into the wind, my ship still drifts backwards instead of moving forwards. (I even started a new game.) And, that doesn't address the other two larger problems: can't SailTo if 'too close", and can't fast travel to shops not yet visited.

 

[vaustein]

turn aracade mode on in the Advanced options tab.

Exactly. Vaustein, this is exactly why we're having two different modes in the game, realistic and arcade. If you want to sail against the wind - don't play in realistic mode!

No, that did not work. When I sail into the wind, my ship still drifts backwards instead of moving forwards. (I even started a new game.) And, that doesn't address the other two larger problems: can't SailTo if 'too close", and can't fast travel to shops not yet visited.

OH, you mean enable Arcade Mode from config.exe. OK, I did that, and that fixes all the issues I mentioned. Thanks! Sorry about the mix-up. ;-)

 

[morgan terror]

the reason for a decrease in directsail encounters is that they get skipped when you have the game sped up. it would be more convenient if they always happen at XX:30, since you could turn the speed-up off to get the encounter. an actual fix would be preferable, obviously.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

In trying to be clever or make the experience more "RPG-like", our excellent volunteer dev team have broken the Rule of Fun. *Please* tell me how to add these features back. Or, add them back yourselves and gate them with a menu option called "RPG Realism" or something. When you try to "enhance" the experience, take a minute to think about how you might alienate existing players.

As Thomas says, that is exactly what we aready did. Just switch the game to Arcade mode and everything will be back to normal.
It's not under "Advanced Options" though. It's under "Options" > "Realism Options".
Need to start a new game for the change to take effect.

We set Realistic Game Mode on by default because we're trying to force players to use it and give us feedback.
However, we also very much understand there will be many players who don't like those modifications.

In any case, thanks for your report. It very clearly illustrates that we DO need to keep that Arcade game mode.
So we'll make sure Arcade Game Mode remains completely available for players with different preferences.

We tried to put the "Realistic Game Mode on by default" message in as many places where people might notice it,
but it's really hard to get people to actually read information on the game.
I'm hoping that it'll be better once we've got the "Features of the Build Mod" project completed.
That will include a full overview of all the important aspects of the Build and should take away most of the confusion.
Provided that we can actually convince people to look at it.

i know, i was just stating observations here.

Which is definitly appreciated. In fact, it's observations like this that we really need,
because we might need to change various Build-default values to make the game more balanced.
Please provide more feedback on this when you have and and if you change the value for your own liking
and find a value that's better than the original, please let us know and we can use that as default instead.

every item, or at least the weapons, display the quantity you gave in your inventory/another number, presumably a maximum amount. this is mostly 8. it might be only the case in stores, i don't quite remember. is that maybe the maximum amount a store will buy?

I take it you're refering to the item trader interface, right?
There's two numbers, the first is the number of items you have and the second the number of items the merchant has.
It's just a little help to show you how much you could sell or buy.
There's no limits on anything, other than the logical limits of you not being able to buy more than the trader has
or you not being able to sell what you don't have.

the mentioning of a tutorial option in the main menu has given me an idea:

how about adding a new main quest, which IS a tutorial? it wouldn't be very long, but it would remove the problem of main quests lacking a tutorial, and it could be made as big as neccesary, possibly in the form of a naval training drill and territorial water patrol.

That actualy doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. And very doable too if we can find someone to work on it.
Then we can also remove the tutorial from the Standard storyline so you can get straight to the story without having to skip anything.
And a tutorial quest can also serve as an overview of Build features so new players immediately get to see what's added.

I suppose we should wait with this until after the "Features of the Build Mod" project is complete,
because at that point we'll better be able to decide what really does need to be covered in a tutorial and what is overkill.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

We are working on a full feature list for the modpack that will explain everything you need to know.
Amongst others, this should help reduce confusion on how certain mods work (eg. the Officer System)
and on available toggles and what they do (Arcade/Realistic Mode).
We can also discuss ideas on a Tutorial Storyline there.

Please visit the thread and join in the effort.
The more help we get, the sooner it will be done and the better the end result will be!
http://forum.piratesahoy.net//features-of-the-build-mod-t15438.html

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Well, you want feedback, so.......

With build 13 completely broken, I decided to try build 14. Where are all of the characters you could choose from? There is one character and one ship. The only thing I could change to suit me is the controls. I couldn't even change the sails. What is it with the true or false settings? How do you change them? It is insanely difficult at the start. I was getting attacked while still in port. The forts seem to be ineffective now. After more than a dozen sinkings I managed to get away and start the game. The 3d sailing seems much better than before. You can actually go somewhere now. Before the only way to get anywhere was with the world map. It seems most fights happen at night during a storm. You have to run up a wave, look around, aim, and fire before sliding back down into the hole. Not easy. And that is when the graphics go crazy. All these fractal patterns radiate out of the center of the screen, making it hard to see.

On land things are much better. I can sometimes survive a fight now that I'm up to level 7. There are lots more locations to explore and more variety. I've found 3 brothels so far. On land is the only place to make any money too. The Lugger can't carry enough cargo to pay the bills, much less upgrade. I'm hoping to get strong enough to start a quest soon. In the meantime there is lots of exploring to do.

 

[morgan terror]

fractal patterns? you mean this?

seems to happen with lots of ships around.

 

[Bartolomeu o Portugues]

Indeed, it often happens when there is some fog.

 

[morgan terror]

now that you mention it, yes.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Ayup. Similar to that but worse. I hope you can find a cure for it.

 

[mjh623]

Yep, that's the one. I experience it at random in every ship I have been in and in any type of weather. Pieter asked me in another thread about my swordfighting issues. I am currently playing the original main quest on the next-to-easiest level, I have a score of 6 in melee and use the lieutenant's (sp?) sword in "fine" condition. I don't know if the enemies have more hp now, or what but it takes 2 to 3 hits to kill me and 10 to 12 to kill them. And despite a decent block score on my weapon, I am still taking all sorts of damage while blocking. Also, the enemies seem much faster now. Where you used to be able to block and counter, now as often as not there is another attack coming in quicker than my counter is hitting home. In a single fight, one on one with a captain for example, I usually prevail, but when going from dual to dual to dual on deck, rarely. With careful timing I used to be able to handle 3 or 4 opponents at a time. Now, it is cause for great rejoicing if I survive two!