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Planned Feature Improve Effectiveness of Grenades

Grey Roger

Grey Roger

Sea Dog
Staff member
Administrator
Storm Modder
Grenades are of limited use against any but the weakest enemies. Even in earlier versions, before enemies were made more powerful, if I'm walking along the Barbados canyon and see a bunch of bandits hiding behind a rock, I stop before I get close enough to trigger them to charge, lob a grenade, it does a little damage to them, then they charge and my party wipes them out because we have good swords and armour. Damage from a direct hit from a grenade, let alone from just being in the blast radius, is minimal compared to a decent swipe from one of the better swords.

So if you're relying on grenades to deal with new improved enemies, you're going to be in a lot of trouble...
 
Grenades are good for weakening many enemies at once as they are an area weapon. Also, when you are outnumbered 2-3 to one and some of them have maybe 700HP every little bit helps. It is normal for me to use a dozen grenades at a time. The stinkpot is also very useful there.

I use a different strategy in that canyon. I walk up until I can see the one furthest back behind the rock and lob an ether bottle there. 2 down. Then another ether bottle for the 3rd. Walk over and get free points while killing them. The next 2 groups usually take one ether bottle each.

Coming back the other way, from town doesn't work like that and is much more difficult.
 
If you guys think grenades aren't powerful enough anymore, it is easy enough to increase their damage value.
 
Pieter Boelen said:
If you guys think grenades aren't powerful enough anymore, it is easy enough to increase their damage value.
Click to expand...
Hmmm maybe an idea for after Beta 4 to have a perk which increases damage for AOE weapons.
 
Levis said:
Hmmm maybe an idea for after Beta 4 to have a perk which increases damage for AOE weapons.
Click to expand...
If it is a general game balancing thing, then we shouldn't need to rely on perks to fix it.
I did do rebalancing of the pistols before, but didn't include the special weapons other than the Blunderbuss at the time.

Of course grenades are tricky. They're a common, low level item and appear early in the game.
They should ideally not be ridiculously overpowered there. But if they're OK there, then later in the game they would seem about as effective as throwing stones.
Maybe I can double-check the ranged attack code and make sure it applies a percentage of damage, rather than an absolute value.
 
Pieter Boelen said:
Maybe I can double-check the ranged attack code and make sure it applies a percentage of damage, rather than an absolute value.
Click to expand...
Quick check suggests that my idea there isn't all that simple.
It uses the regular LAi_ApplyCharacterFireDamage function, but seems to scale the damage for a character depending on the distance between the blast and that character.
The total damage to be done is then based on the stats of the weapon.
All makes perfect sense, except for the part where a grenade is either overpowered in the early game or underpowered in the late game.

Would we need multiple levels of grenades to offset the effect of enemies becoming stronger as the game progresses?
Personally, if we are going to do anything with this at all, my preference would be to figure out a way to NOT have enemies get so much stronger as the game progresses.
Just like the ships generated at sea don't take into account the player level anymore, why should the characters ashore?
Of course that would make for quite a substantial change and possibly a controversial one. But it does make realistic sense and may be worth an experiment.
At some point in the future. I'd consider it low priority for now. But we can think it through in advance, of course. :yes
 
Grenades are generally underpowered. They only kill with the first blast up to level 7 or so. By level 20 they are mostly useless unless the enemy is bunched up and not moving, like two groups fighting each other while I grenade them from a distance.

In the main storyline where you have to kill 7 French soldiers before you can steal the French frigate at Speightstown I normally use 18-24 grenades while running away. To fight them is certain death.
 
So they could definitely do with having their damage value increased?
How much would make sense? Twice as much? Three times?
 
I'd say make the damage (skill)level depended.
So if you have a high cannon (and/or melee) skill the damage is higher. This will make the damage go up troughout the game.
And later we could add a perk which boosts the damage even more (for example normally you get 10 extra damage per skill level, with this perk its 20).
The precise number I leave to you :p.

Btw I do think cannon skill would be the best for this.
 
That doesn't work well with the system as it currently is, because that is based on a min and max level of damage for the item.
Doing anything else will require some proper figuring out with lots of added development time.
Right now I can't spare that time.
 
Different types of grenade might make more sense. That's how melee and pistol damage increases with level; you're able to get better weapons which can do significant harm to higher level enemies, unlike the little cutlass or sabre which you get early in the game.
 
Grey Roger said:
Different types of grenade might make more sense. That's how melee and pistol damage increases with level; you're able to get better weapons which can do significant harm to higher level enemies, unlike the little cutlass or sabre which you get early in the game.
Click to expand...
Very true. That is definitely the most straight-forward solution, apart from just blindly upping the damage values for the normal grenade.

How many would we need? How should that work for balancing? Would we want them to use different texture files? And who is going to do it?
Maybe @Jack Rackham would have some input here as he is pretty much our resident expert on "Special Weapons" these days. :cheeky
 
How's this? Fuse section made from rope, main section made from cast iron ("rohr.tga" might not look pretty on cannons but it makes for a nice texture for a cast iron grenade). Light the ropey bit, then be somewhere else when it burns down...

(Ideally I'd prefer a thinner fuse but creating a whole new model is beyond me, so this is just a retextured version of the stock grenade.)

grenade1.jpg
 
I don't have much to say as I hardly have time to play this game anymore but I can fix something for you.

Different types of grenades sounds fun. Say 3 grenades in all. Different level + sound + effect + damage + picture + model.
I could play around with that if you give me some suggestions of how much more damage you think
would be ok for the 2 better grenades.
 
Jack Rackham said:
I don't have much to say as I hardly have time to play this game anymore but I can fix something for you.
Click to expand...
Same here; haven't had the chance to play the game in years.
I'm sincerely hoping that come Christmas when Beta 4 has been released, I will actually get round to doing that at long last.

Jack Rackham said:
Different types of grenades sounds fun. Say 3 grenades in all. Different level + sound + effect + damage + picture + model.
I could play around with that if you give me some suggestions of how much more damage you think
would be ok for the 2 better grenades.
Click to expand...
Sounds awesome to me!

For balancing, I think the main thing to know is the maximum character level that you generally encounter in the game.
I think @Levis balanced the skills to max out around 50, so I'd say take that 50, calculate the HP such a character would have (used to be a linear correlation), then divide that by 3.
Then you get three items with minlevels 1, 20 and 40, for example.

Their damage would depend on the normal HP a character would have at that minlevel.
The lowest level one could have a large spread, so that SOME times you may do a lot of damage with a low-level grenade, but not all the time.
While for a higher-level one you'd be guaranteed to do more consistent damage and higher damage too. For a price, of course.
 
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