High Priority Balancing: Levelling, Income and Fight Difficulty

[A.H]

I remember this issue also existed during previous versions.. ranking is very quick.

I played a poker game and gained a level.. did a governor sink ship quest and gained level.. i killed a few tavern brawl dudes and I got a level.

Ain't experienced life at sea yet and i'm already lvl 8


Also I find that making money is quite easy.. price of officers is in the 1,000's...
every one I kill I make a nice 300-600 gold each.
EXP gained from each kill is also heavy.. which could explain why leveling is pretty fast.

 

[Levis]

I remember this issue also existed during previous versions.. ranking is very quick.

I played a poker game and gained a level.. did a governor sink ship quest and gained level.. i killed a few tavern brawl dudes and I got a level.

Ain't experienced life at sea yet and i'm already lvl 8


Also I find that making money is quite easy.. price of officers is in the 1,000's...
every one I kill I make a nice 300-600 gold each.
EXP gained from each kill is also heavy.. which could explain why leveling is pretty fast.

The leveling now goes exponetional. So the first levels will be easy. This is mostly so you can get some of the perks. The longer you play the harder you will notice it gets.
On which difficulty are you playing?

Officerprices I noticed too, so I think I'm going to add a bit to that.

 

[A.H]

Im doing adventurer.
Last time I tried swashbuckler, it was too extreme and i ended up damaging my harddrive

 

[A.H]

I must say, ranking is super easy.. i'm level 24 already and haven't done much hard work to earn it!

Also just noticed that when I boarded a merchant pinnace, when I looted every enemy crew.. each had 4000 - 6000 in gold.. is this normal?

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Also just noticed that when I boarded a merchant pinnace, when I looted every enemy crew.. each had 4000 - 6000 in gold.. is this normal?

That.... does sound a bit excessive.

 

[A.H]

Yea i know.. and i don't know if i'm lucky or if there was something wrong.. but I had a tier 6 ship.. and suddenly on shipyard ship list, there was a tier 2 ship.. so i decided to spoil myself and take it! On game options I chose to allowing any ship to be sold in shipyard.. however I did this in previous versions and it wasn't likely that higher tier ships appear on shipyard list during early stages of a new game.


But during battle, I had 755 crew and enemy much less, and they managed to slay half of my crew! It could be because my leadership skill isn't high enough for the tier 2 ships, or could be something else





Particularly on this battle I remember getting 700-4000 gold from each enemy crew (manual looting), and when i automatically kill them, I already got tons of exp and gold and their weapon along with that.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Yea i know.. and i don't know if i'm lucky or if there was something wrong.. but I had a tier 6 ship.. and suddenly on shipyard ship list, there was a tier 2 ship.. so i decided to spoil myself and take it! On game options I chose to allowing any ship to be sold in shipyard.. however I did this in previous versions and it wasn't likely that higher tier ships appear on shipyard list during early stages of a new game.

Appearance of large ships should not depend on whether you're early or late in the game.
You probably just got lucky.

And of course with your change to the default settings, that is also a bit of a cheat.

But during battle, I had 755 crew and enemy much less, and they managed to slay half of my crew! It could be because my leadership skill isn't high enough for the tier 2 ships, or could be something else

Very possible. Check your F2>Character screen and note the second Leadership number. That one might be affected by your large ship.

 

[A.H]

 

[Levis]

you see this is the problem if there are all kind of different systems competing with each other.

refEnCaptain.money = makeint(rand(100));

This is from the boarding script.

I will take a look at it. it seems to be all connected with each other so I first need to figure out what is happening.

One thing I'm going to do is lower the overal XP gain a bit and make the difficulty difference a bit less. Then I will look into the money caried by NPC's

 

[Pieter Boelen]

you see this is the problem if there are all kind of different systems competing with each other.

Definitely! It does seem the game has been TOO heavily modded by too many people working independently.
Different features in the game just don't work together like they should.

 

[Levis]

Please try this:
Mod Release - Levis' Stuff [okt 2] | PiratesAhoy!

I've done some code clean up so I should now be able to manage mostly when they get gold etc.
Still need to look into the money more but getting there.
Depending on your difficulty they should have more or less already.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

@Levis' balancing changes for this now included in here: Mod Release - Build 14 Beta 4 Internal WIP For Testing | PiratesAhoy!

 

[Pieter Boelen]

BTW Kudo's if you are able to clear that dungeon on level 1, I sugest trying to get some melee skills somewhere else (your ship perhaps) first before doing that as they are quite tough .

Are we sure we want dungeons to be that difficult?
They always used to be a good place to go to gain some experience and money, while also being a challenge.
In other words: They shouldn't be too easy, but not overly hard either.

 

[Levis]

Thanks @Grey Roger for catching this one and thanks @Levis for fixing.


Are we sure we want dungeons to be that difficult?
They always used to be a good place to go to gain some experience and money, while also being a challenge.
In other words: They shouldn't be too easy, but not overly hard either.

I believe once you are level 5 or so and have melee 3 and 1 or 2 defense perks it should be quite dooable, if at least you don't walk the wrong way and get about 8 enemies attacking you at once .

 

[Grey Roger]

They should be doable, with difficulty, right from the start. If you're playing "Tales of a Sea Hawk" and didn't choose stormy start then there's one in Speightstown, plus the cavern a little way out of town, and if you didn't visit them right at the start then you'll get another chance when Silehard sends you to reconnoitre Speightstown. I usually use whichever dungeon is nearest, as soon as possible, as a means of getting to level 5, Melee 3 and a couple more defence perks.

 

[Levis]

hmmm.... Just an idea.
What about scaling enemies to your fighting level instead of your actual level?
Your fighting level is based on your melee, defense and accuracy skills and weapons etc.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

What about scaling enemies to your fighting level instead of your actual level?
Your fighting level is based on your melee, defense and accuracy skills and weapons etc.

That could work. Though that also means if you don't focus on increasing your Fencing skills, then the enemies don't ever become stronger either.
So you don't need to "stay ahead of the game", because the game is always in line with you anyway (scaled by difficulty, of course).
In the worst case, that could even make it almost pointless to try and increase your skills in the first place because the game remains balanced towards you one way or another.

Yesterday I found myself wondering again if this could be a good time to completely untie NPCs from the player altogether. Or at least partly.
Just like ships at sea can freely differ in size and it is up to the player to pick their fights or run away. Real life doesn't scale based on yourself either, after all.
This does have the risk of making the early game too hard or the late game too easy.
And of course it negates the concept of a "min level" for items as well. So that could be a rather huge change better left until after the Beta 4 release.

An alternate approach could be by making use of the officer types in @Levis' Levelling system.
Bandits and soldiers in jungles and dungeons would probably focus on their fighting skills with each level-up.
Town guards are already hardcoded to be "far too strong for beginning players". Maybe something similar with reduced effect could be done for bandits?
So in the early game they can be relatively hard and in the late game they would be complete push-overs.
But to be fair here: A scale of 10 in fencing isn't a huge range.

Then any random characters who aren't soldiers or bandits, but for example citizens could have ANY sort of background.
Especially the RANDOM types (Enc_walker) could either be MUCH higher/lower than the player and may be either really good at fencing for their level or really bad (doctors, for example?).

That also ties in with the suggestions about boarding crews elsewhere. So merchant ship boarding crews would not actually get so high fencing skills at all.

 

[Levis]

The biggest problem with this all atm is that all of the combat perks are seen as personal perks.
So I think to counter things a bit already I have to remove some of the more advanced combat perks from the combat group (its actually set up that way so its very easy to do) and assign them to the useable officertypes and captains manually.
In that case I could remove them from for example randchar. So a bandit could have basic defense for example but not the advance defence perk. So when you get higher you can be better.
It would probably also mean I take it away from some of the normal officers, but need to look into that.

I also think about untying it completly from the player, but indeed lets wait till after beta4 with that.
I will see what I can do. the system as it is set up now is pretty flexible already so I must be able to do something .

 

[Pieter Boelen]

The biggest problem with this all atm is that all of the combat perks are seen as personal perks.

You mean that the system doesn't distinguish between the combat perks and the other personal ones?
So you can't have regular Citizens and/or Sailors who don't focus on combat perks?
I could imagine Sailors, for example, focusing on Sailing first and perhaps Repair or Defence, but not so much Fencing?
Bandits probably would focus on combat perks, though perhaps not the more advanced ones.

Related to the above, do we really need to set sensible perks and "officer" types for ALL characters?
Apart from enemies, I think this has very little impact on the game for regular town folk and random characters.

Here's another thought: Have pre-defined town folk ALWAYS set to "citizen" type, but allow the "Enc_walker" types much more freedom in their choice of character type.
Then rather than having that shared dialog be completely random, have it linked to their character type!
So if a character is generated as a merchant, that is what they offer. And only characters who actually ARE a usable officer type could join you and/or offer to teach you skills.
I reckon that would make a whole lot more sense. And then when you talk to the same character,
you'll always get the same type of response and save/reload won't completely change the responses you get.

If that is done, then those skills COULD play a role. For example, a random character may be a Gunner.
He could then offer to teach you some Gunnery skill, but not above the skill that he himself already has.
That would also save the trouble of having to generate a brand new officer from them if they try to join your crew, but they don't already have a valid officer type assigned.

 

[Levis]

You mean that the system doesn't distinguish between the combat perks and the other personal ones?
So you can't have regular Citizens and/or Sailors who don't focus on combat perks?
I could imagine Sailors, for example, focusing on Sailing first and perhaps Repair or Defence, but not so much Fencing?
Bandits probably would focus on combat perks, though perhaps not the more advanced ones.

Related to the above, do we really need to set sensible perks and "officer" types for ALL characters?
Apart from enemies, I think this has very little impact on the game for regular town folk and random characters.

Here's another thought: Have pre-defined town folk ALWAYS set to "citizen" type, but allow the "Enc_walker" types much more freedom in their choice of character type.
Then rather than having that shared dialog be completely random, have it linked to their character type!
So if a character is generated as a merchant, that is what they offer. And only characters who actually ARE a usable officer type could join you and/or offer to teach you skills.
I reckon that would make a whole lot more sense. And then when you talk to the same character,
you'll always get the same type of response and save/reload won't completely change the responses you get.

If that is done, then those skills COULD play a role. For example, a random character may be a Gunner.
He could then offer to teach you some Gunnery skill, but not above the skill that he himself already has.
That would also save the trouble of having to generate a brand new officer from them if they try to join your crew, but they don't already have a valid officer type assigned.

I can have them focus on other stuff then combat perks.
But if they don't have other perks they won't.
So say I want an enemy who is bad at fighting I would need to give him a officertype which has a lot of other perks and make it focus on that.
Because at the moment I only let them pick perks which they actually contribute.
I could change this. If the officertype isn't a contributing one it just picks from all existing perks, that sounds logical right ...
The idea for enc_walker I had already and I had planned to do that after BETA4.