What officer skills/perks should be shared

[BelThorne]

Hi All,

I'm having a play with getting only certain officer types. (eg, gunners) to share only the relevant skills/perks with you.

The eventual idea is that gunners contribute gunnery skills and perks and not things like navigation and such.

Also I’m thinking of checking the passenger list for roles, not just the three selected officers, allowing the full set of 8 officers to contribute


So, my question is: what skills / perks go with what roles:

<u>Current thoughts are:</u>

First Mate:
<blockquote>Skills: Leadership
Perks: Fire-ship and Landing Party.
</blockquote>
Navigator:
<blockquote>Skills: Sailing
Perks: Speed Increase, Maneuverability, Storm Helmsman, Quick Turn-Around, Sense Fairway, Sea Wolf
</blockquote>
Boatswain:
<blockquote>Skills: Grappling
Perks: Long Range Boarding, Musket Volley, Master Of Boarding, Instant Boarding
</blockquote>
Gunner:
<blockquote>Skills: Accuracy, Cannons
Perks: Fast Reload, Pre-reloading, Increased Ship Damage, Increased Sail Damage, Increased Crew Damage, Critical Shot, Increased Volley Range, Professional Cannoneer
</blockquote>
Quartermaster:
<blockquote>Skills: Commerce
Perks: Trustworthy Lad, Basic Commerce, Advanced Commerce
</blockquote>
Carpenter:
<blockquote>Skills: Repair
Perks: Light Repairs, Quick Repairs
</blockquote>
Doctor:
<blockquote>Skills: Defence(?)
Perks: Basic Ship Defense, Advanced Ship Defense, Professional Ship Defense (??)
(This was roughly how AOP used doctors, though it's a bit weird)
</blockquote>

Should we have some shared perks? For example, the First mate could contribute some basic perks from other roles. Maybe: Basic Ship Defense, Basic Commerce, Increased Ship Damage and Maneuverability

And anyone have a better idea of what to do with doctors?

Any input much appreciated.

 

[morgan terror]

sailingprofessional is called seawolf. you need it to have instant boarding so it could become conplicated with a boatswain. maybe you should look what the real names are and what you need for them to avoid confusion.

 

[BelThorne]

<!--quoteo(post=170513:date=Nov 9 2006, 07:53 PM:name=morgan terror)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(morgan terror @ Nov 9 2006, 07:53 PM) [snapback]170513[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
sailingprofessional is called seawolf. you need it to have instant boarding so it could become conplicated with a boatswain. maybe you should look what the real names are and what you need for them to avoid confusion.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Okay, good points.
I've updated the original post with the displayed perk names (was using the code references, which weren’t quite the same)

The seawolf thing would probably still work, it would just mean your navigator would have to learn a whole pile of perks that had no real effect except for being pre-requisites of Sea Wolf. Not ideal, but still functional.

 

[Black Bart]

looks ok - Doctor is the main sticking point isn't it?

I think much of the Doctors fate is tied up in what new role he gets put into. Pieter and others(and myself) have had some thoughts on this, so once thats all finalised the Doctors role will hopefuly end up different from how it is used in AoP. In short i dont think he will be responsible for ships-defence as it currently stands. What he will be responsible for is not clear, but it should imho be more appropriate(like "crew health" - link it with the blue 'crew health bar' on the ships stats? - better doctor slower crew loss? something along those lines or maybe a new perk(s) especialy for Doctor class).

what happens with ships defence then? the logical thing would be either to give it back to the navigator(it was part of his core skills origonaly) or make it part of the carpenters remit - he has to build them after all(defensive wooden slats/hull thickness etc). On balance the carpenter should get it - he only has two perk specific things, so this would give him more development potential(thus making him a more valuble member of the team).

And Luck was also part of the First Mates core skills origonaly(now seems to be the Doctors). But i'm half in favour of leaving the player the lone 'luck' specialist(if the player chooses to invest in it) - e.g. as in "lucky" Jack Aubrey from master and commander - the captain's luck. So reduce the luck scores for hireable officers?

First Mate - consider 'Iron Will' perk, to help with keeping the crew in order? at the moment it seems to be a player perk, i have seen officers with it though - not sure if it really hs an effect in game for either the player or the officer?

Another thing to consider is that we only have 3 active officer slots available for their skills to come into play. Not sure if this has been seen as being possible to change or not?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

There's some good discussion here. These are definitly things to work on for Build 14.

As for increasing the number of officer slots: We have come up with a possibly different solution in the <i>A suggestion about sailing thread</i>. ALL officers in your passenger list contribute the skill points of their own officer type to the total "party skill". So if you have two navigators in your passenger list, but only one navigator in an officer slot, both navigators will contribute their sailing skill. However, each ship would require some minimum skills. Small ships would sail just fine with a total of 5 sailing skill points shared between the player and the navigators. However large ships might require more than 10 shared sailing skill points. This will also result in the player absolutely <i>needing</i> his officers to sail the ship to full effectiveness. Officers in the officer slots would not be the officers that are in use, but the officers that follow you ashore. So you choose the best fighters to follow you ashore. This will also solve the annoyances of having to change the officers in the officer slots all the time for the best effect. The way it is now, you would put a navigator and a cannoneer in there when you go into battle, but when you go boarding, you'd have to change this to the best fighters, so you'd keep switching.

More information about these ideas can be found in the thread where we discussed this previously.

I think the main goals we would want to see with these things are the following:
1) Make officers play a more important role in the game
2) Make all officer types truly special and make it so that no officer type is useless
3) Make the game more interesting and more challenging, especially on higher character levels

I agree that a doctor really should function as a doctor. At the moment there is no need for a doctor to be in the game at all, so we would need to figure out a need. Small crew losses, among others. But perhaps we should also add the concepts of "diseases" and "injured crew members" to the game. That would give the doctor a use. Also if the character's health will be made to work more like "stamina", perhaps that could introduce a use for the doctor as well.

 

[morgan terror]

i think we should keep the three officer slots, but only to use them for the officers that are walking around with you. otherwise you would have all your afficers active at the same time, and risk losing them. it is also important for certain quests that it stays active, such as the artois voysey and the nigel blythe quest. i do agree however that all the officers should contribute their skills and that ships would need officers to control them properly.

 

[Black Bart]

ref Pieters post, yep all sounds ship-shape(sorry i had to!) <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />

 

[Aconcagua]

I think for this problem AoP provides a fine solution, you have specialized slots for each type of officer (3 fighters, navigator, boatswain, surgeon, ...). Only tear to cry: You can assign just one officer to your secondary ships, so you just put a navigator, but have no cannoneer...

We have already these roles, we can tell an officer to be the navigator, first mate, cannoneer (by the way, I still do not know what's the sense of this so far - I can't have enough active officers to put one at each position, and I can't see how such a job influences both active and inactive officers). Can't this be used somehow?

Counting all officers' skills? Wouldn't this mean to have more than one officer for a job, e. g. three navigators at the same time? Is this realistic? Or could we have one chief navigator, who's skill's get a bonus, and the others keep their normal value (or the other way round, chief keeps his values, the others contribute only a reduced value - just an idea...)?

How the solution ever might look like, it should be possible to assign officers the same way to the partner ships, too.

One thought about the perks: Some perks only seem to get active when the main character has them, others already when given to an officer. Would be nice, if the description of each perk would tell, under which circumstances respectively to whom the perk has effect.

 

[Thomas the Terror]

I think if you would hire a doctor, he should be ON your ship and have his own "office" just like the apothekery in Greenford, so that he can heal you through dialog and improve your health.

 

[morgan terror]

i don't think that would be nessesary, although it's a good idea. to make it useful, the player shouldn't heal over time. then he wouldn't heal along the journey until the next port, making the apothecary unessesary.