WIP Level of boarding enemies

[Grey Roger]

It took a lot of saving game whenever I'd beaten a group of bandits and even more loading of savegames when I didn't beat the next group. It's not an experience I intend to repeat!

More serious is the problem in which I tried to board a ship which should have been my inferior in all regards, with "Melee" skill 4 (boosted to 5 by an item, probably a ruby), a good sword and good armour, and still kept getting killed on the first deck. It should have been a walkover; in fact it was suicide. I'm doing better with boarding now I've got "Melee" skill up to 10 (by continuing a game under the 5th November install, I gave up on the 19th November one).

Please put enemies and levelling back the way they were. The game was fun at that time.

 

[Levis]

It took a lot of saving game whenever I'd beaten a group of bandits and even more loading of savegames when I didn't beat the next group. It's not an experience I intend to repeat!

More serious is the problem in which I tried to board a ship which should have been my inferior in all regards, with "Melee" skill 4 (boosted to 5 by an item, probably a ruby), a good sword and good armour, and still kept getting killed on the first deck. It should have been a walkover; in fact it was suicide. I'm doing better with boarding now I've got "Melee" skill up to 10 (by continuing a game under the 5th November install, I gave up on the 19th November one).

Please put enemies and levelling back the way they were. The game was fun at that time.

I actually haven't changed the level of boarding enemies (I did before (made them weaker), but changed that back already) ... but now they have perks and this is what makes them a lot more tougher ... In the past they didn't have that.
I will have a look into why they are so much stonger ...
You say the november 5th version was alright?
In there I actually changed the boarding level enemies but removed that to make the code easier to read and I didn't spot much of a difference. But that was on journeyman difficulty. I guess stock game makes it a lot harder on higher difficulty. so I could put this back to how it was in november 5th.

 

[Levis]

If I bring it back to how it used to it means the level of the boarding enemies will be dependend of the level of the ship. So it wont be player depended as it used to be in stock (and up before august). After that I made the change. but some people complained about them not being able to board higher tier ships early in game so I removed this again so they had a better chance. but this means all enemies are once again tied to the player level.

Personally I think it would be better to have it tied to the ship tier. Do you agree here?

Also do mind that navy ships have higher level enemies. I believe merchants are the easiest to take, after that pirates and navy is the hardest.

 

[Grey Roger]

I actually haven't changed the level of boarding enemies (I did before (made them weaker), but changed that back already) ... but now they have perks and this is what makes them a lot more tougher ... In the past they didn't have that.
I will have a look into why they are so much stonger ...
You say the november 5th version was alright?

No. November 5th is the version I'm playing and on which I had the problem with boarding. November 19th is the one which didn't give me any skill increase after defeating enemies in the Antigua cellar so I abandoned that one right away.

The ship which was causing me so much trouble was a tier 7 merchant. It should have been the easiest ship possible to take.

Dungeon bandits aren't as bad. As a result, I've got "Melee" up to 10 (including bonuses from items) and have been doing a bit better boarding.

You shouldn't be able to board a battleship if all you have is a sloop. But you should have a reasonable chance of defeating something slightly higher than your own ship, then you can work your way up through the tiers. In general, I agree that enemy strength should be linked to the ship tier, then it's up to you whether you pick on easy targets or choose to go for something tougher. Actually, I just want the game back the way it was when it was fun.

 

[Levis]

Actually, I just want the game back the way it was when it was fun.

You keep saying that and it starting to piss me off.
The old leveling system was really broken. There where about 5 different functions to give you the XP and some XP was neglected all together. Some skills you could only level in specific way. Also enemy NPC's where completly static. and and in the early game they where a challenge but soon they became a walk in the park. also none of the officers followed any of the leveling rules (if there where any) so you could find completly OP characters early ingame.

So what I did was to make sure everybody followed the same rules. When that was done we noticed the game was really unbalanced XP wise so I changed the XP progression to counter this.
I'm still open for tweaks etc because I know its not perfect either. but if everyone only says this is good or this is bad I can't change it.
The information like you think it should also be tied to the ship is good info and I can work with that.
Same with enemies you find in dungeons etc. If you only say they are to strong i can't fix it. I need to know your situation at that point. because maybe at another point it is right and there shouldn't be a lineair progression there but something else...

So please if you have any complaints about the system try to explain them well so I can make changes if I think the complaints are valid.

Do note that we tried to extend the gameplay also. because the storylines keep getting longer and it's not fun if you max out halfway trough a storyline. I don't mind if you max out 1 certain skill pretty quick because thats your choice to do so. but getting maxed out completly halfway trough a story would be very bad.
So the system is set up for you to max out round level 50. If you want all perks you need to be level 100. So effectivly it's not possible for you to get all perks. This is where officers come in play.
Eventually after BETA4 I'm going to try to have the captains also have officers like some kind of minibosses on the decks. After you've beaten all the enemies the officer will challenge you (1 to 1) and then you can contiue. Or something like that. I haven't completly decided yet on how to do that, but I think it would be nice.

 

[Talisman]

You keep saying that and it starting to piss me off.

@Levis - you should not worry too much about the opinions of the few people who are playing the game & posting on the forums.

There are far to few people playing Beta 4 at the moment for any reasonable judgement to be made on the new Levelling system. Since each individual can only express their own opinions.

What you should do is just fix any bugs that cause the system to break ( i.e. the game to crash ) - and leave the new levelling system unchanged until after Beta 4 has been publically released.

After the public release of Beta 4 - you will hopefully get more people giving feedback on the new system and then you can decide what if any changes should be made.

Basically what I am saying is we need more feedback from more people - otherwise we will keep changing things because a couple of people say they don't like it ( they are entitled to their opinions) - and more bugs will get introduced and Beta 4 will never get a public release.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Basically what I am saying is we need more feedback from more people - otherwise we will keep changing things because a couple of people say they don't like it ( they are entitled to their opinions) - and more bugs will get introduced and Beta 4 will never get a public release.

Ah, definite real risk there! We don't want to be doing that....

I do think the feedback from the players we've currently got is very valuable though.
We wouldn't want to make a public release that immediately pisses everyone off after the incredible amount of hard work we've all been putting into it.

That being said, often in order to make things better, you have to break things first.
Just going by my Nations Relations rewrite, that was also BADLY messed up before, but apart from false flags not working, I don't think anyone really cared.
But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it IS much better now.
Took quite a lot of finding and fixing unexpected issues though and even now there's still room for improvement.

As long as the new systems are being improved on, it is a continuous process to actually get it to the level we want.

 

[Talisman]

As long as the new systems are being improved on, it is a continuous process to actually get it to the level we want.

But at some point you have to say. Let's pause for a moment & have a public release of Beta 4 - to get more feedback so you can tell if you are heading in the right direction, before putting in even more time and effort into things.

Since some of the changes are significant changes to the how the basic/background game world works.

There are not enough people playing the game and commenting on the forums to cover all the different game play possibilities that are available in the game ( Naval gameplay, Pirate gameplay, Smuggler gameplay, Merchant gameplay, Quest gameplay, Free play, to name a few) .

And players tend to stick with the parts of the game that interest them the most and give them the most enjoyment. So the way the changes affect some parts of the game are only being checked, if an individual is interested in that part of the game, which means that large parts of the game are probably not currently being checked/tested, because there is nobody on the forums who enjoys playing those parts and has the time to do it.

If this was a commercial project/game - the company would probably spread the content over four or five games - possibly more.

What commercial game producer would give a player a choice of 7 Main Stories of significant length, and a virtually Free Play World - Answer - None.

 

[Levis]

What commercial game producer would give a player a choice of 7 Main Stories of significant length, and a virtually Free Play World

Bioware probably would .

 

[Grey Roger]

The old leveling system was really broken. There where about 5 different functions to give you the XP and some XP was neglected all together. Some skills you could only level in specific way. Also enemy NPC's where completly static. and and in the early game they where a challenge but soon they became a walk in the park.

This was not my experience. I found it moderately hard right at the start (everyone was weak, including me); then it got harder but not impossible (enemies got good swords and higher skills); then it became a bit easier (I got good swords and higher skills, plus officers had now built up some Melee skill and I'd equipped them, so they could take some of the pressure off me); then it became harder (enemies continued to get extra HP's so that even the best swords didn't take them down as quickly).

The information like you think it should also be tied to the ship is good info and I can work with that.
Same with enemies you find in dungeons etc. If you only say they are to strong i can't fix it. I need to know your situation at that point. because maybe at another point it is right and there shouldn't be a lineair progression there but something else...

I believe I did say that this was right at the start, when they used to be moderately tough and rightly so, and are now next to impossible. Later on dungeons are easier but boarding is next to impossible. When I had Melee 4, good sword and battle armour, I couldn't even board a tier 7 merchant. (Which means if the idea was to make it easier for people to board large ships early on, it didn't work. ) I suspect the problem may be that I'd gained a lot of levels but much of that experience is nothing to do with Melee, e.g. sailing skills from DirectSail, gunnery skills from shooting at things, defence and repair skills from being hit, commerce skills from selling stuff. If the enemy was similar level to me (I've had about 200 HP and so did enemy crew), but their skill was primarily Melee, then they'd outclass me.

Eventually I got my Melee up to 10 (by killing land-based enemies and by boosts from equipment), and now I can successfully board ships - enemy Melee skill can't be higher than 10 so now we're more evenly matched.

Do note that we tried to extend the gameplay also. because the storylines keep getting longer and it's not fun if you max out halfway trough a storyline. I don't mind if you max out 1 certain skill pretty quick because thats your choice to do so. but getting maxed out completly halfway trough a story would be very bad.

On the other hand, it's no fun having the progression so slow that you haven't maxed out until right at the end, or perhaps not even maxed out by the end of the storyline. It's good to be able to get all the skills and perks you can, and then be able to use them before the story is finished and it's time to start over. (Some people like continuing in free-play for ages after the story is over, but for me, once the story is over, it's time to start something different.)

So the system is set up for you to max out round level 50. If you want all perks you need to be level 100. So effectivly it's not possible for you to get all perks. This is where officers come in play.

Officers are already necessary if you're playing with expensive perks, especially as more perks are added. So it's probably impossible to get everything during the storyline, you'd need to continue in free-play to reach high enough level. But if you stick with it long enough, you ought to be able to get the lot.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I believe I did say that this was right at the start, when they used to be moderately tough and rightly so, and are now next to impossible. Later on dungeons are easier but boarding is next to impossible. When I had Melee 4, good sword and battle armour, I couldn't even board a tier 7 merchant. (Which means if the idea was to make it easier for people to board large ships early on, it didn't work. ) I suspect the problem may be that I'd gained a lot of levels but much of that experience is nothing to do with Melee, e.g. sailing skills from DirectSail, gunnery skills from shooting at things, defence and repair skills from being hit, commerce skills from selling stuff. If the enemy was similar level to me (I've had about 200 HP and so did enemy crew), but their skill was primarily Melee, then they'd outclass me.

Eventually I got my Melee up to 10 (by killing land-based enemies and by boosts from equipment), and now I can successfully board ships - enemy Melee skill can't be higher than 10 so now we're more evenly matched.

I do think you've got some valid points there.
Balancing is a hard thing to get right. Especially four-way balancing because it needs to seem OK on ALL difficulty levels.
As I figure it, Apprentice should be REALLY easy and Swashbuckler next to impossible.
Inbetween, Journeyman should be a a fun challenge with Adventurer being a good option for more advanced players.

On the other hand, it's no fun having the progression so slow that you haven't maxed out until right at the end, or perhaps not even maxed out by the end of the storyline. It's good to be able to get all the skills and perks you can, and then be able to use them before the story is finished and it's time to start over. (Some people like continuing in free-play for ages after the story is over, but for me, once the story is over, it's time to start something different.)

Having the progression linked to the storylines is next to impossible anyway.
Different storylines have different lengths and most of them allow any amount of free play inbetween.

It does seem fair to me to use the Standard storyline as a "benchmark" of sorts, so if you play ONLY that story and nothing on the side, then you aren't maxed out by the end.
Of course doing free play inbetween could speed that up and it will be different for different storylines as well.
If you're maxed out at the end without doing anything on the side, there is little free play potential left for those who do like that.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

To add to the above, I reckon the strength of boarding enemies should be related to:
- Number of your crew v.s. number of their crew
- Your crew morale v.s. their crew morale
- Probably game difficulty as well

That automatically factors in ship size, but also allows the player to influence the difficulty of boardings by either killing the enemy crew, demoralizing them or increasing the player ship morale.

By my reasoning, a boarding action should be evenly balanced if the above mentioned ratios are in balance and on Journeyman difficulty.
So on Apprentice, the game is technically easier than might be considered "fair", on Journeyman it is simply fair and on Adventurer it is harder than average.
There should be limitations in place to avoid too high/low level enemies in relation to the player level for all the above.
But on Swashbuckler level, those limitations need not apply!

I think what I described is pretty much how it was originally meant to be set up as well.

 

[Grey Roger]

That all sounds good to me. "Standard" is, well, standard and should be the benchmark! It's also a good storyline to continue into free-play for a while because you end the story with two nice ships so you may as well use them for a while. So ending the story at a high level with plenty of perks and in command of Sovereign of the Seas means you can plunder your way around the Caribbean for a while and maybe collect the rest of the perks before moving on to something else.

Having enemy ship crew strength based on relative numbers, relative morale and difficulty level sounds perfect. Possibly factor in whether the ship is merchant, navy or pirate as well. Pirates and navy are professional fighters, merchants aren't. Could that perhaps be used as a factor in choosing weapons for the crew? Merchants get basic weapons, navy get something appropriate to nation and period, pirates get something appropriate to period regardless of nation because they stole it from someone else.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Having enemy ship crew strength based on relative numbers, relative morale and difficulty level sounds perfect. Possibly factor in whether the ship is merchant, navy or pirate as well.

In a simplistic way, you could argue that the number of crew and morale already takes care of that.
Navy ships should have more crew and I think there is some code in place to give them higher morale too.
Can't remember for sure though.

Pirates and navy are professional fighters, merchants aren't.

That may be already taken care of by @Levis' "GetBoardingCrewType" function that determines the type of "officer type" you get in a boarding.
Different captain types get different boarders now as per the below list:
OFFIC_TYPE_CAPMERCHANT gets OFFIC_TYPE_GUARD
OFFIC_TYPE_REGCAP gets nothing???
OFFIC_TYPE_CAPNAVY gets OFFIC_TYPE_GUARD
OFFIC_TYPE_CAPPIRATE gets OFFIC_TYPE_ABORDAGE

That determines the skills and abilities they get.

I wonder if perhaps merchant can get something like "sailor" or "citizen" as type instead.
Then the crew may not get very good fencing skills at all because, as you say, they're not professional fighters.

Could that perhaps be used as a factor in choosing weapons for the crew? Merchants get basic weapons, navy get something appropriate to nation and period, pirates get something appropriate to period regardless of nation because they stole it from someone else.

In general, I do like that idea. I applied the "period soldier weapons" functionality to nation ships before, but we had to disable that again.
Problem was that the always-soldier crews each got very high-level weapons, so the loot after boarding any ship was far too valuable and you got good weapons for too easily.

Of course now that non-navy ships get Sailor crews instead of Soldiers, that could give a good excuse to bring this feature back but link it to "captain type".
So navy ships DO still get those "plenty high-level weapons". Of course navy ships should then be made MUCH harder to capture successfully.
Which means that if you succeed, you get all the nice goodies. But that is a BIG if.

I definitely like distinguishing between the crews of navy, merchant and pirate ships.
Then it also pays to take note of the flags flown so you take the easy, far merchant targets and steer clear of the navy ships.
And pirates, who may very well be the players' most common target, wouldn't get the awesome soldier weapons anyway.

So @Levis: Do you reckon you can do something with the above suggestions?

 

[Hylie Pistof]

I don't understand your reasoning behind adjusting the skills based on the numbers of crew. You should not be able to take a Man O War with a pinnace, as I have done. Bigger ships with bigger crews should be harder to take.

 

[Levis]

I think I can work with these sugestions yes.
Let's me think about them a bit more and see what I can make.
@Pieter Boelen could you take a look at the weapons?

 

[Grey Roger]

Relative size of crew shouldn't affect their skills but should perhaps affect their HP. To some extent a mismatched crew size is already accounted for because if they outnumber you then you won't have as many crew or companions - you may find that you're on the gun deck, you'd normally have three companion officers but because it's a big ship you only have one or two because you're outnumbered. Higher HP for members of the larger crew can also make it harder to take a larger ship.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Having thought about this some more, I get to the following suggestions:

- Ratio of number of crew between both ships should directly determine the ratio between the number of boarders on both sides.
There should be a limit so this ratio is never more than, say, 1:3 or so. This limit can be skipped for Swashbuckler.

- Ratio of morale of the crew between both ships should directly determine the boarders' character level in relation to the player.
This COULD then be scaled by difficulty, so that if both morales are completely balanced on Journeyman, the enemy crew would have equal level to the player.
However, difficulty already has an effect on how hard the fencing is and on morale as well, so I'm not sure if a direct influence is truly needed.

- The choices of skills/abilities should depend on the enemy captain type; this is indirect through the boarder "officer type" from @Levis' recent changes.

- The choice of weapons would be based on enemy captain type and nation. This is optional, but I suppose I can look into it at the same time that I try and fix the boardermodel code.



I'm not entirely sure how player skills/abilities should affect all of this. Definitely Luck should NOT factor in, because that already affects many other things.
And I like any "random chance" values to be more truly random so that "Luck" itself can be used more in its original intention of "Sneak", aka. how good you are at evading
After all, actually "being lucky" is not a real skill that you can increase in any way.

The "boarding skill" itself already controls how easy it is to deliberately get into a boarding action with another ship, right?
So perhaps it doesn't actually need to influence the boarding itself once you actually got into the scene? Would that be OK with players?
I do like the idea of NOT adding too many variables to the same things, so that separate things (skills/abilities/difficulty/values) have only a few effects each.
Otherwise they end up used EVERYWHERE and it really becomes too complicated to know what affects what and how and to what extent.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Relative size of crew shouldn't affect their skills but should perhaps affect their HP. To some extent a mismatched crew size is already accounted for because if they outnumber you then you won't have as many crew or companions - you may find that you're on the gun deck, you'd normally have three companion officers but because it's a big ship you only have one or two because you're outnumbered. Higher HP for members of the larger crew can also make it harder to take a larger ship.

By default HP is directly related to character level and that relates to skills as well.
But I think something can be done with the "HP bonus" to allow changing that as you suggest.

If I recall, your three officers are ALWAYS with you, regardless of whether you are outnumbered or not.
That is difficult to prevent because officers and crew aren't treated the same.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Let me think if I can come up with a "final" approach here.... How about:

Boarder Level = Player Level scaled by Difficulty (Journeyman = 1.0)

Boarder Type = based on captain type:
- NAVY: "guard" with focus is 100% on fighting skills, so toughest possible enemies
- PIRATE: "abordage" with focus halfway on fighting skills, so medium enemies
- MERCHANT: "citizen" (or possibly a new "sailor" type?) with focus NOT at all on fighting skills, so easiest possible enemies

Boarder HP Bonus = value based on ratio between ship morales.
OPTIONAL: Include ratio of boarding skills.
There should be a min/max limit on how much this can be scaled so that enemies aren't too strong/weak.
This limit can be skipped for Swashbuckler.

Number of Boarders = based on ratio between crew sizes.
There should be a limit so this ratio is never more than 1:3. This limit can be skipped for Swashbuckler.

Boarder Weapons = based on captain type:
- NAVY: Get period-correct soldier weapons. Could make for excessive loot, but these are ALSO the toughest enemies, so having a larger reward is OK.
- PIRATE and MERCHANT: Get random weapons based on nation.

Does that sound about right?
@Levis, what of the above can you take take of and when might you be able to get something done for this?
I may be able to look into adding the remainder over the weekend. Perhaps....