Planned Feature Include Cannon Weight and Number in Cargo Capacity

[Hylie Pistof]

Capsizing after a battle would be a harsh lesson, but it would get players to save more often.

 

[Grey Roger]

There will also need to be a check on NPC ships to make sure they're not overloaded. You don't want to board an enemy ship, it surrenders, you leave its crew and cargo where they are, and that's when the game realises the ship is overloaded and capsizes...

Yesterday that was speculation. Today it is reality - well, the overloaded enemy ship is, the code to capsize it hasn't been added yet, which is why you get to see this:


It's a naval cutter which I'd just captured. It's overloaded despite having zero cargo aboard. And if you think that's bad, you ought to see Atropos, the ship which you receive at the end of the "Hornblower" storyline and which now comes with a full cargo hold containing negative several hundred units of food and rum.

The "realistic" cargo mod is presumably supposed to give ships cargo capacities according to the estimated volume of their cargo holds. If crew and cannons are going to be factored in, perhaps additional cargo space also needs to be added to account for where the crew and cannons are stored.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

It's a naval cutter which I'd just captured. It's overloaded despite having zero cargo aboard. And if you think that's bad, you ought to see Atropos, the ship which you receive at the end of the "Hornblower" storyline and which now comes with a full cargo hold containing negative several hundred units of food and rum.

The "realistic" cargo mod is presumably supposed to give ships cargo capacities according to the estimated volume of their cargo holds. If crew and cannons are going to be factored in, perhaps additional cargo space also needs to be added to account for where the crew and cannons are stored.

Ouch! If that happens even for ships without cargo and/or based on the simple "auto buy" used for GiveShip2Character, indeed very likely the capacity of the ships should be further increased.
@J Norrington, are you around to have a look into that?

One thing that might also help is to make crew not count for "1 unit of weight", because that might be a bit excessive.

 

[Grey Roger]

What is a unit of weight in the game? A ton? A hundredweight?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I do not quite know; I was hoping @J Norrington or @Hylie Pistof might be able to shine some light on that.
Personally I would wish it to be kg or metric tons, but I know it is definitely not that.
In any case, it is whatever is displayed in that screenshot from your previous post and at the moment each crewmembers counts for one.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

The weight used is cwt or hundredweight. It would seem we should use the long hundredweight which is 112 pounds. That is 8 stone or 50.8 kilograms.

This is going to get really messy really fast as a 1 cwt or 112 pound man is very light and an 18 pound cannonball weighs 2 cwt or 224 pounds.

 

[Grey Roger]

That's what I thought. Average human weight is about 120lb - 180lb, depending on sex and nationality, so on average one crewman weighs more like 1.5 cwt, and you could probably save quite a lot of weight by hiring exclusively female crew.

An 18 pound cannonball weighs 18 pounds. That's the definition. Other types of ammo may weigh different amounts, but literally a cannon's calibre was defined by the weight of iron ball which it could fire, so an 18 pound cannon fires balls which weigh 18 pounds.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Well I made it to port and visited a shipyard where I bought 4 lb cannons and the ball weight didn't change.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Balls are balls as far as the game is concerned.
As much as i know it is unrealistic too, one size fits all.
Alternative would be too add lots of different goods for different calibre balls.
And allow you to use only the correct ones for your cannons. You couldn't use balls from wrongly equipped ships either.
Talk about making a complicated thing even more crazy complex.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

So....how many 224 lb cannons are in the game? Basically every single item will need to be looked at. For instance gunpowder is 20 cwt and 18 lb cannons need 120 cwt per shot or 13,440 lbs per shot! I don't pretend to understand what Akella was thinking when they set it up this way, nor why no one has noticed this before.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

You guys can figure out the numbers.
Or we decide it is not worth it and stick to the Beta 3.4 system.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

It will have to be done sooner or later for no other reason than to get ready for the HOO system. But it is not an immediate issue. I am curious about what Akella was thinking when they set it up like that tho.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Simple=easy=practical. That is certainly logic I can relate to.
Make stuff more complicated than you can handle and you set yourself up for failure.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Adding different calibre Cannon balls as goods is not an option right now as far as I'm concerned.
Let's take it one step at a time.

Few thoughts:

Cargo capacity for ships does not correlate with this new system, causing many mismatches.
This is to be taken care of if we want to take this any further.

I need a sensible value for crew weight.

One thought is to throw historical accuracy out the window and calculate the space required for a default Auto Buy.
All ships must be able to fit that at the very least. Cargo ships can get extra capacity on top of that.
It may be possible to automate this in ships_init.c but that would require further development on my part.

Capsizing for overweight ships is to be added.
This should not be too hard for me, but since overweight ships are common now, this is bound to cause problems.

It must be prevented to go overweight by hiring crew or installing cannons by not allowing you to add more than can fit.

This here is quite a large project and I am only willing to support this if it is not me having to do it all by myself.
So who cares about this being done at all? And who would go as far being willing to put in time and effort on this?

In other words, who is willing to work together on making this happen? @J Norrington, are you still around?

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Good point. This all started with J Norrington's mod which is still very much a WIP and has since snowballed. I am willing to playtest but because of allergies I can not SEE to do any coding. Someone else has to do that.

I would like to see the weights of various items rationalized tho. But the current system doesn't make any sense at all. At the least just setting shot and powder to 1 cwt each would be a big step forward and would give all ships more cargo space.

 

[J Norrington]

@Pieter Boelen: Yes I'm still here and still working had a lot of extra work this week due to the Long Beach Grand Prix now that it's over hopefully I'll have some time this week to continue working.

As far as crew weight I agree with @Grey Roger anywhere between 1.5 cwt or 2cwt you could use 2cwt considering a crewman brought a small chest on board as well as his hammock.

You could throw historical accuracy out the window but you'd still need to come up with a system to replace it regardless as I mentioned previously I'm all to happy work on a different system if it fits better for the game.

@Hylie Pistof: Snowballed is correct which is why I wanted to leave the cannons out of it the first time lol. Getting the cannon weight code to work properly is going to be a lot of work which is why I recruited a friend with more coding experience than myself help me work on it as the work is starting to pile up.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

@Pieter Boelen: Yes I'm still here and still working had a lot of extra work this week due to the Long Beach Grand Prix now that it's over hopefully I'll have some time this week to continue working.

Good to see you around again, mate!

As far as crew weight I agree with @Grey Roger anywhere between 1.5 cwt or 2cwt you could use 2cwt considering a crewman brought a small chest on board as well as his hammock.

So that would make the crew heavier than they are now? I would have expected the opposite.

You could throw historical accuracy out the window but you'd still need to come up with a system to replace it regardless as I mentioned previously I'm all to happy work on a different system if it fits better for the game.

My idea would be to calculate the cargo capacity for all ships based on the following:
- Number of cannons X weight of default calibre
- Maximum number of crew X defined crew weight
- Weight taken by an "Auto Buy" on default settings (possibly give different ships different default values for "number of days for supplies", instead of having this hard-coded as 30 days)
- Extra free cargo capacity as defined per ship in ships_init.c

That would give us high enough values to fit in all cannons and crew.
Additionally, a "number of days" setting for each ship would allow smaller ships to get smaller cargo space and automatically buy less supplies (if you use that function).
This would also make the cargo capacity defined in ships_init.c directly proportional to the trading capacity. For example, navy ships could have this set to 0, but could have a high number of days defined.

If we are really clever about this, we could get the game to calculate these values for us on game start. That would require a bit of figuring out, but I do think it can be done.
That would also mean that if people change the weight of cargo or cannons, the capacities in the game would automatically change along with it.

@Hylie Pistof: Snowballed is correct which is why I wanted to leave the cannons out of it the first time lol. Getting the cannon weight code to work properly is going to be a lot of work which is why I recruited a friend with more coding experience than myself help me work on it as the work is starting to pile up.

I know we can figure out how to do this; that is not the problem.
And it can easily be split into small steps so that the amount of work does not become insurmountable and can be spread out over a longer period of time.
I'm certainly willing to give the support you need; I'm just not willing to it by myself. And it'll take a while. But that is OK, since we don't actually have an deadlines.

The current system isn't broken and changing it is quite a lot of work one way or another.
So I figure that if we are going to redo the cargo capacities, we might as well do it as well as we can in such a way that we won't have to do all this again.
I know we can do it. It just takes some time and effort. The main question is: Should we do it?

 

[J Norrington]

@Grey Roger:

It's a naval cutter which I'd just captured. It's overloaded despite having zero cargo aboard. And if you think that's bad, you ought to see Atropos, the ship which you receive at the end of the "Hornblower" storyline and which now comes with a full cargo hold containing negative several hundred units of food and rum.

Are you using my mod for the cutter screenshot earlier? Was it a specific storyline? because the cutter should have around 2700 space not 285 might be an error or something if so my apologies I'll go through the hornblower storyline and check for errors.

 

[Hylie Pistof]

Ah, you are back! We have seen a pattern over the last 5 years that someone will show up and make a big mod, then disappear before it is quite done. This leaves us going WTF just happened? So we are really glad to have you here working on this.

Yes, 2 cwt sounds ok for crew but shot and especially powder really needs to be cut back. Then the other goods needs to be looked at.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

@Grey Roger:

Are you using my mod for the cutter screenshot earlier? Was it a specific storyline? because the cutter should have around 2700 space not 285 might be an error or something if so my apologies I'll go through the hornblower storyline and check for errors.

It could also be because no new game was started. I don't think I enforced that just yet.
So then he may have the Beta 3.4 numbers with cannons and crew added on top.

Yes, 2 cwt sounds ok for crew but shot and especially powder really needs to be cut back. Then the other goods needs to be looked at.

Might make the work harder, though. But if we indeed decide to auto-calculate the capacities, we can easily tweak the numbers for accuracy once the system is operational.

We have seen a pattern over the last 5 years that someone will show up and make a big mod, then disappear before it is quite done. This leaves us going WTF just happened? So we are really glad to have you here working on this.

Yep, very much so!