Balancing the Pre Build 13 Mod

[Pieter Boelen]

Hello all,

I said I'd post a thread on balancing the game, so here goes:

Uberships, useless ships, finding a Cardinal's Guard blade at Oxbay Port, looting tons of money and buying yourself a Corvette during the tutorial, it all seems possible in the game at the moment. And although some people might like it, I don't think it makes for very good gameplay. So we need to figure out some ways to balance the game so that it will be fun for the player, but it will also feel realistic. The player should have the freedom to do as he/she likes in the game, but there should be limitations to keep the game challenging. Preferrably we should also figure out a way how to do this with the least possible code changes.

So to discuss these issues, we should first decide on which parts of the game actually need balancing, then we need to decide on a way to balance these issues in such a way that it will both be fun and feel realistic.

To keep everything from becoming a mess, there are a couple of "rules" that apply in this thread:
1) Whatever your own personal opinion, please treat the other members and their opinions with respect
2) Please think before you post and don't post anything that might offend any of the other forum members. You are free to disagree with anything anyone might post, but you must disagree with respect (this sounds pretty weird, doesn't it? <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/whistling.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="whistling.gif" /> )

Please stick to these two rules. They should help in keeping this discussion a friendly one. If this ends in a conflict, nobody profits from that: People get angry, people might leave and we would be still no further in getting the game well-balanced.

The following is not a rule but a request: Please keep your posst as short and to-the-point as possible. Adding headings should help in seperating the different topics that you might discuss in your post. I would like to keep this thread as clear and organized as possible, so that it will be easy to see what the ideas are without having to read every post twice. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/icon_mrgreen1.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="icon_mrgreen1.gif" />

In the end I would like to come to some agreement on ideas that (almost) everybody would be happy with. So expect your original ideas to not be fully adopted, but also expect to see parts of your ideas used in the final version of the game. I value everybody's opinion and we will try to figure out a way to get it working in such a way that everybody will be happy with it as far as possible.

So far the introduction to this discussion. I hope you all agree with the aims and rules of this discussion. If not, please DON'T post your comments here, but start a seperate thread on how to handle this discussion. That way, we keep the actual discussion seperated from arguments on the procedures of this discussion.

 

[ronlosey]

I'm working on some new numbers for the ship combat. However, I had a real tough technical question... It's posted in the "damage adjustment" thread, so I won't repeat all of it. However, whenever I get some help on that, I'll take a big swipe at game balance.

If gun damage was historical, a "better" ship would help, but without some tactics you could still get shot to bits. That would add an element of continued gameplay, no matter what the economics looked like.

Anyway, I'll take that corner of the balancing, at least as far as testing goes. I will need some programming help, from time to time, starting with what I posted earlier.

 

[dendee]

Here's my attempt in structuring the issue:

1. Land activities:

1a. The corpse looting issues. Uber goods and overwhelming ammount of goods on the corpse.
1b. Dungeons. An easy way to accumulate a fortune in goods and XP easily.
1c. Treasures. Another easy way to accumulate a fortune without much effort.
1d. CCC colonies.
1e. Governors missions. Seems to be pretty balanced, but see Sea battles below.

2. Sea activities:

2a. Boardings. Being too easy to accumulate a fortune in ships and loot as of now.
2b. Surrender issues.
2c. Standing with the nations. Flag issues, cost of LOMs, careers in nations navies.
2d. Balance of ships themselves (uber ships, cannon balance, ship class availavility, costs, crew payment, morale etc.)

3. Logistics/handling of ships

3a. Extra "nitpicking mods", such as gunpowder, food/rum, morale issues.
3b. Berthing, fleets, relationship index.

4. Other issues:

4a. Generic bugs, not having direct effect on playability. Example: inverted map.
4b. Quest bugs caused by the modding.

5. Assuring arcade players and hardcore ones both have a worthwhile game to play.

Here you go. This is but a template, I am sure is can (and should) be extended and detailed. This is merely an attempt in structuring the issues we have to address. Additions are welcome of course, as is discussion.

 

[Thomas the Terror]

Set requirements to ship, so lvl 6 ship for lvl 1 char, lvl 5 ship for a lvl 5 char, and so on, and maybe the same on swords/ pistols and ship cannons.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

To Ron Losey: At the moment, we again have very few good coders here. Actually, I think Hook is the only one at the moment and he is working at the boarding code. Maybe you should send him a PM?

To Thomas the Terror: That has already been done in the latest modpack update. Not for ship cannons though.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I will try to sum up some of my ideas on the gameplay and gamebalancing issues now. I will try to stick to Den Dee's lay-out. Please correct me if any of my assumptions below are wrong. Also: Some of the ideas I write up below might not actually be MY ideas, but instead ideas I read in other people's forum posts.

Note: Some of my ideas should not be used for Build 13, but can be kept in mind for when we start work on Build 14.

Hmm. I seem to have written up quite a long post, haven't I? Request: Please don't quote it in full. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/whistling.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="whistling.gif" />

<b><!--sizeo:3--><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo-->1. Land activities:<!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec--></b>

<b>1a. The corpse looting issues</b>
I think corpses should have a blade and sometimes a gun and some ammunition. They should also have a little big of personal money. And maybe sometimes some additional items, such as a potion or something. At the moment, it works exactly as I describe above, so I don't see a real problem here. The only case where a corpse has a really good blade/gun is if the player has advanced far into the game. By that time, the player also has similarly good blades and guns.

Another corpse looting issue is the way it works: At the moment, there are two options:
1) Automatic looting: You get the gold, blade and gun from the dead enemy straight away
2) Manual looting: You can take all items the enemy had on him/her

Might there be a better way to handle the looting of corpses? A way where the corpses don't get in the way? A way where it isn't so darn annoying?

Random idea for boardings: The corpses really get in the way on a small and cramped boarding deck. It might be an idea that all items from all characters who die during boarding and remembered by the game, then once the boarding is done, you get an itemsbox interface where you can take all the items that you would like.

A problem might be that you get a LOT of items that way, which you could sell for quite a bit of money. Should that be prevented? If so: How?

<b>1b. Dungeons</b>
I think that dungeons should be a place where you can go to find riches and experience. But it shouldn't be easy. You should need to try and work hard for the wealth and experience you can find in the dungeons.

<b>1c. Treasures</b>
Treasure maps can be very expensive. I think that in the beginning of the game, the player should only find small treasures. When the game progresses, the player can find larger treasures. But as with the dungeons, it should be hard to get to the treasures: The enemies you encounter in finding these treasures should be pretty tough.

Random idea: Pirates who want to steal your treasure map and will try to kill you for it. Or you could strike a deal with them and they'll be your companion until you found the treasure. Once you found it, you will share the treasure. Or the pirate will try to double-cross you.

<b>1d. CCC colonies</b>
What do you mean with this? The ability to build buildings using the Building Set and the profit you can make from them? I have never playtested that part of the game much, so I can't really give any good comments.

<b>1e. Governors missions</b>
I don't see a problem here really. But sea battles in general should be worked on. Maybe redo some of the sea battle workings. Ron Losey had some pretty interesting ideas. See my text on the sea battles that I will write tomorrow.

Random idea: More variation in the type of missions the governor might give. Add something else than sink-the-pirate missions. Sinking one pirate is pretty easy.

<b>1f. Fighting System</b>
At the moment, the amound of damage that is done to enemies is mostly depending on the dmg min and dmg max values of the blade of the blade in use and not very much on the character's skill. As long as the blades get progressively better during the game, this does work game-play wise. However, it is still a weird way to handle this. Also: The character's health has no influence on the amount of damage he does. Even if he's almost dead, he would still do 40 damage points to his enemies.

What if we have the character's fighting skill play a much greater part in this? I also think it would be a good idea to have the current character's health factored into this. So if the character is almost dead, he will not do much damage anymore. This would be a good reason to try very hard to not get hit. This way, the character would also do more and more damage as his level progresses. Maybe make it somewhat similar to the fists in the game: The higher the character's level, the higher the damage that is being done using the fists.

This way, the character health becomes more of a character stamina. It would also be interesting to add in the concept of injuries: If you take a hit in health during a fight, the damage you do to your enemies will become lower. The hit points will slowly regenerate, but if you don't rest enough, your max hit points might take a hit as well. You would be able to rest in tavern rooms, but also at your ship. The doctor aboard your ship should also be able to cure you for a bit. Not to forget the apothecary in Greenford.

If we are to go this way with the game, we should think of a way how the doctor and apothecary would work in the game. Will the doctor follow you around like any other officer? What special functions would the doctor be able to provide? How and where would he be able to provide these functions? And at what cost? Having a good doctor aboard must cost a lot of money.

The question then remains: What influence does the blade have? In reality, a good swordsman could win a fight from a bad swordsman, even if the bad swordsman had a good sword and the good swordsman did not. This suggests to me that the blade itself has a small part in the damage in reality. Maybe we could make it similar in the game? But if blades have a small part instead of a major part, we do not need so many different blades in the game anymore. The pros of this are:
- Less scrolling in the inventory screens
- Easier choice on what blade should be used
The con is:
- Less variety

I personally don't like taking things out of the game, so I would prefer to come up with a way where all the blades can be kept in the game. Maybe we could make it so that each blade in the game has it's own specific pros and cons. Problem: Having 30 different blades in the game, we'd have to figure out 30 different pros and cons. Not realistic. But what if we group several of the blades. So at level 1-5, the player will have blade group 1 available. At level 6-10, the player would have blade group 2 available and so on. That way, we would still have the diversity of many different blades, but also have the effect of all blades serving their purpose. So the Rapier would be a good blade for an agressive player at level 3. Once the player has become of level 6, the new blades will become available and the old blades will become unavailable. That way, there will never be too many different blades in the game at any given time.

Actually, the idea about blades posed above actually is pretty close to what we currently have in the game. We only need to iron it out a bit more.

Other things to think about: Blade quality, blade damage and the workings of blacksmiths.

Random idea: In the Russian Sea Legend is Back mod, the skill points don't range from 1 to 10, but from 1 to 100 (correct me if I'm wrong). By doing something similar in our game, we could greatly increase the longevity of the game, because it will take aaaages before the character is truly good. This way, the relative difference between a skill of 1 or a skill of 2 would also be much smaller. So if you get a level up, you would not suddenly be much better, but only a little bit better.

Random idea: Healing potions and bandages. At the moment, healing is being done by drinking healing potions. This can even be done in mid-battle. This works gameplay-wise, but is quite ridiculous if you think about it. Duncan (I think) once made interface pictures of bandages and other more realistic items to replace the magic healing potions. I still have the files. Maybe we can add these into the game and make them fairly common. However, they can not be used during a land fight. Then we would keep the potions in the game just the way they work now, but make them really rare.

The doctor officer should also play into this, of course. I once had the idea of making the doctors and carpenters not regular officers, but special ones. These special officers would not follow you on land and they would not fight alongside you. Instead, they would be available to the player on the ship's deck. You would be able to talk to these officers and they would offer several special options.

<b>1g. Officers and crew</b>
At the moment, every type of officer is basically the same. If you hire an officer who is a Navigator, you can give him a lot of fighting skill points and he will be a deck fighter instead, but he'd still be called a navigator. I think that each type of officer should have at least one distinguishing characteristic that no other type of officer could ever have. That way, a navigator would always be a navigator, no matter which skill points you assign.

Also: Which of the officers would actually follow you ashore? Why would a cannonner or a carpenter follow you ashore with their blades to fight your enemies? They have no real business on land. So I think a special officers type must be added: Officers who won't follow you ashore, but will always be at the deck of your ship. These officers should each provide a special service which can be handled through dialogue.

If we go the way described above, it will be much harder to have a full compliment of officers with you, because only deck fighters and boatswains would follow you ashore. Which is why you would want to take some crew members with you instead. This is already possible in the game, but is not done by default. I really like this option though and I think it should be more important than it is at the moment.

Crew members would not be as good as officers are and the biggest drawback of crewmembers would be that you cannot change their skills. You can't even see their skills at the moment. But crew members are much easier to get to follow you ashore than officers would.

Also: I think there is no point in having two officers of the same type aboard. So maybe we could somehow code something in to prevent that as well. Or maybe we could think of something else to make use of that notion.

In the current version of the game, the officers' skill points increase the ship's effectiveness. Until you reached level 10 at a certain skill: Then the officer's skill becomes useless. If we increase the number of skill points to 100 like in the SLiB mod, we could make it so that how good you might become in the game, you can never get a skill past 50. That way, you will need officers to get the other 50 to get to a total of 100. This will ensure that you need officers, even when you yourself are already at the top of your game. This plays into the idea that no one person can do everything alone. You NEED your officers and you NEED your crew.

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This will be all for today. I think I pose a lot of ideas for you to debate on. Tomorrow I will continue writing up more ideas. In the meantime, I hope you will find something interesting in the ideas above. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/icon_mrgreen1.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="icon_mrgreen1.gif" />

 

[dendee]

Excellent elaboration Pieter. I'll surely join the debate in a few days. As of now, my son got sick all of a sudden (some virus most probably), so I am temporarily out of here, until I get it all solved. I'll be back asap.

 

[ronlosey]

On the blades, I proposed a rework earlier where different types of blades had vastly different strengths and weaknesses. Very heavy blades would be high damage and hard to block, but their blocking ability would be poor (i.e. they were clumsy). Rapiers would be the opposite. And so forth. It would be a lot of work, but it could be worth it - it would eliminate the "worthless blade" effect - most blades would have a strength that still made them potentially useful. Within a given class, some would be a little better than others, but still within the range of that class. (There is no way that a rapier, no matter the quality or style, will get damage effects like a heavy hacking blade.)

To go with that, greatly lower the number of hit points per level. (Like one point per level.) That will reduce the combat inflation. ("Ha, I have 700 hit points, so you can hack on me with that broadsword until St. Patrick's Day, and I can still beat you!") The idea is to make skill, armor, and weapon have some effect, not just to check and see who has the highest level.

Of course, we're talking about a major rework, and I simply don't have the skills to help much.

------------------

On the combat model, Hook was trying to explain it to me earlier, but it was more complex than first described. He'll get back with me on it, I'm sure.

 

[Jason]

<img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/par-ty.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="par-ty.gif" /> Pieter,

Thanks for posting this. It should be a good discussion. One general point about making changes before I go to specifics. We need to do something like a cost - benefit analysis on propsed changes. <b> That is how much will this really imporve the game, how diffiuclt will it be to make the changes, how likely are the changes to cause game killing bugs that we will spend weeks trying to find an fix. </b>

At the moment we have great game full of very interesting features that were not even comceptualized at Akella.

I presume all this for post build 13.

Now on specifics,

<b>1a. The corpse looting issues</b>

I like the way this works now and I like the default (manual looting). The only thing that might be changed IMHO is that you might not get gold form your crew mates when they die. Just enemies. Realisitcally, I don't think either side would have pocket money on them during the fight. But remembering how difficult it was to put this in originally, making any changes in this probably aren't worth the time and risk of bugs.

<b>1b. Dungeons</b>

I don't play this but I agree it should be difficult but no so difficult that you get frustrated and give up.

<b>1c. Treasures</b>


I think adding some more interference to the treasure quests is a good idea.

<b>1e. Governors missions</b>

I think this fine but adding some (small) additional missions might be fun. but very low priority.

<b>1f. Fighting System</b>


First we need to balance toughness mod, I agree with those who say it is more like an invinvibilty mod but you can still die with it if you don't pay attention.

Second as I have said in another thread, we need make sure fists can't win aganist long blades. The injuries suffered by taking on a sword with your hands will be immdeiate, crippling and life threatening.

Since the fighting system is so key to basic structre of the game I urge great caution here. I think it works well now. The changes you are talking about are really interesting. My question is in the middle of fight how much differnce would the player notice.

I like the blades in the game now I think the way they are tracked to you level and your enemies level is good.

Converting potions to bandages would be fine and might only require changing the icons.

<b>1g. Officers and crew</b>

Personally this is where I would concentrate. There is a lot of room for improvement here. We need something meangful for deck fighters, carpenters, and doctors.

<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->each type of officer should have at least one distinguishing characteristic that no other type of officer could ever have<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Yes


<b>So I think a special officers type must be added: Officers who won't follow you ashore, but will always be at the deck of your ship</b>. Yes, this would be an excellent change. On shore: quatermaster, first mate, boswain, deck fighter; on ship: carpenter, doctor, either/or navigator, gunner.

Of course this will require changing the number of officers engaged from three up to six or seven and the inverntion and insertion of lots of new dialogue.

Going to 100 points might be interesting. But you have accumulate points faster than in the current game, it think. If your going to 100 points getting 2 every time you level up will put the top levels out of reach.

These are my ideas so far. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/par-ty.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="" border="0" alt="par-ty.gif" />

 

[Pieter Boelen]

At the moment, I am working on writing up all my ideas for Build 13 and Build 14. I am trying to write up how I would like this game to work in the end. The "ideal" version of the game, so to say. Some of these ideas could be added for Build 13, but the most of them will have to wait for later builds. At the moment I am working on writing up my ideas as far as <i>officers</i> are concerned. <b>Please see my work on this <a href="http://pieter.piratesahoy.org/ideas.htm" target="_blank">here</a>.</b> Please posts your comments on this page I'm working on and on the ideas presented. Eventually this should become a to-do list for Build 14.

Once I have this page done, we can try to decide which of these ideas could be used for Build 13 and which ones will have to wait.

I would be very happy if other people would contribute to this as well. If you have anything to submit to this page, please write it up and post it here and I'll add it on there.

Note: I seem to be hyjacking my own thread. I am sorry for that. I have, yet again, run out of time but I DO want to share the work I did with you today. Tomorrow I will seperate the discussion about my idea-list from the discussion on the balancing of Build 13. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/diomed.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":dio" border="0" alt="diomed.gif" />

 

[Jason]

Pieter I think your idedas for officers are right on.