The Historical Ships Mod

[vinnipuk]

Vinnipuk, I'm not quite sure how to address that problem because I think the problem there is more the fact of being able to board ships that you don't cause to surrender than anything else. Even if the ship that you had boarded was a class 2 warship, you would still have been able to board it and capture it, you would have had a subtraction to you leadership and such, but that hardly matters when you are a level 1 in leadership at the beginning of the game anyhow. Any thoughts on how to improve things?

:gday

i`ve just installed B14 alpha 10 wip 7 and noticed that sometimes i even end up command 8th class ship at the beginning.
however, i posted here just to underline that at the beginning of the game i was commanding a lugger classified as 6th class ship.
then i boarded a merchantship with 30 guns, which was classified as 6th class ship as well.
so, when my charachter raised leadership and sail ability points i didn`t have any penalty at all.
in short:
or the lugger was wrongly labelled as 6th class ship or the merchantship should be put in higher class.
notice this: i boarded a ship, whose level was 1 above mine.
leadeship and sail ability points got "frozen" to 1. (still beginning of game)
when my avatar gained new experience points in sailing, for examples, the first row in the avatar interface raised to three, while the second row, which shows the effective ingame ability used by my charachter, was still stucked at 1.
because the ship was just one level above mine level, it should show two.
to resolve this i simply swapped my ship with one of lesser level, so the second row would show 3 and then i re-swapped again with the original ship, so the second row would show the penalty lowering to 2.
this bug can be found since b14 9 alpha full.
i know there are hundreds of ship to classify, and i like it, however even adding 3 or 4 more class ships a lot of them would stay out of any categorization.
so, why do not give `em a new status?
like premium ships, for example.
you should find them only travelling round the islands escorted by pirates or merchants (and if they are custom warships, only by military vessels).
you could board`em, but not command`em `till you reach higher leadership levels, even if the class says otherwise.
it would be nice if the AI could handle boarding: french ships assaulting spanish ones, sinkin`em or capturing `em in order to use the new ships against enemy and so on.
this would be cool.
moreover, often ships surrender even when they have more than half crew and are of higher class: i`ve just boarded a light frigate i was fleeing from.
she had 180 crew members against 39 of mine....
just ideas.

 

[Doober]

Hmm, thats odd. I don't have the Alpha 10 yet, so I can't say for sure what is in there. Luggers should be classified as class 7 ships (historically, that would be an "unrated" ship). Class 8 ships are reserved for tartanes. How did you get a tartane at the beginning, doesn't each storyline start with its own default ship? Could you give me a screenshot of the lugger if you still have that game available? Adding a bunch new classes can be rather difficult and the closer you get to 10, it seems that there is a higher tendency to mess with the probability of generating that type of ship. As far as the penalties for sailing bigger ships, I don't really know anything about that as I have never worked on that, what your describing does sound like a bug though.

 

[Doober]

Regarding surrenders, I don't think there should be a problem if a ships surrenders to another ship on the seas. There is nothing unusual about that. I think the problem comes in when you as the player can "cherrypick" the surrendered ships and capture ships that weren't really intending to surrender to you. That could be fixed by having a check in place that if the ship didn't surrender to you, it would fight you on boarding rather than have the captain surrender. If that sort of a check is too hard to put in, putting in a check where it looks at both crew sizes and if yours is substantially smaller, have the surrendered ship put up a fight in the assumption that it probably didn't surrender to you. It isn't the best option, but it would be at least a improved workaround to the problem of huge ships surrendering and you as the player picking them up with no effort.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Just to let you know... we didn't reclassify any ships in the Alpha 10 WIP files.

 

[vinnipuk]

Hmm, thats odd. I don't have the Alpha 10 yet, so I can't say for sure what is in there. Luggers should be classified as class 7 ships (historically, that would be an "unrated" ship). Class 8 ships are reserved for tartanes. How did you get a tartane at the beginning, doesn't each storyline start with its own default ship? Could you give me a screenshot of the lugger if you still have that game available? Adding a bunch new classes can be rather difficult and the closer you get to 10, it seems that there is a higher tendency to mess with the probability of generating that type of ship. As far as the penalties for sailing bigger ships, I don't really know anything about that as I have never worked on that, what your describing does sound like a bug though.

:gday

regarding the famous penalty: yes, it`s a bug, an old one, quite common, but it ain`t a prioririty.
i never said my charachter started on a tartane.
there`s a small icon on my portrait showing a ship with a number beside that, which, if i understand correctly, would indicate the class ship i can command.
at the beginning it`s 8.
yesterday, was 7, but i could swapp the lugger, 48 men, tonnage: 480, with a war schooner, 148 men, tonnage: 1195 labelled as 6th class ship.
no penalty.
my charachter was level 6 and as i understand it, everything depends on leadership, which was 2.
now, i have only one quicksave saved as rar file (if someone wants to have a look, please tell me), which became corrupted in port Royale, so i`m going to start a new game (sigh).