Experiment 3: Firstmate/doctor switch, rebalanced crews and captains, and officer tweaks

[Tingyun]

The attached is number 3 in my line of recent experiments. All have been tested and work with the latest 4.1 zip file.

Spoiler: Further info on these experiments

None of this is intended for the main mod at this time. Anyone wanting to try one or more of the experiments is welcome to--I've tried to make them mostly independent of each other--and provide feedback on what parts you hate or like of any given component. The changes are meant to be dramatic, and may be subject to further revisions to remove undesirable parts or tweak how things work. Feedback will be invaluable for that. Everything should end up being saved game compatible, even if things are changed and then reverted.

Tagging @Eskhol , who has expressed interest in trying some of these experiments. Also, @imado552 if you like, you might find some of these interesting. I encourage you to only try out those that personally appeal to you.

Completely compatible with current campaigns. INCLUDES Levis's recent reinitilization of officers patch (officers.c), since it is needed to work correctly with current campaigns. Officers.c is only included for his fix since it is not yet in the main download, and is not part of the experiment.

Installation: Just extract to your game directory, should replace 3 files. Press F11 to reinitilize if continuing a saved game.

Connections to other experiments: This is a much more extensive set of changes than Experiment 1, and it completely includes everything present in Experiment 1.
See the experiment 1 thread for details of the changes included from there: Mod Release - Experiment 1: Skilled AI Captains and fair sea battles | PiratesAhoy!

You do not need to separately download experiment 1, it is included.

You do need to separately download experiment 2 if you want those changes as well: Mod Release - Experiment 2: consistent bandits, apply difficulty to AI captain skill, and non-magical luck | PiratesAhoy!



One main additional change from experiment 1 is that the doctor loses the basic/advanced/professional defence perks, and the first mate gains them. The first mate previously lacked a vital role on the ship, and organizing and managing its defense seems logical enough. Meanwhile, it never made sense for the doctor to be getting perks to reduce damage to the ship's hull.

Aside from that, all the crews and captains have been heavily rebalanced in skills, and general balancing and consistency work was done throughout the file. Many perks were moved and officers lists and non-contributing chances altered to better reflect their needs (and, often, how many combat perks they would need to pick up).

The rebalancing is so extensive it is difficult to provide a full list, so I will leave some notes on that in the spoiler below. Meanwhile, as to the firstmate/doctor:

Spoiler: First Mate now in charge of ship's defense, doctor loses the perks that protect the ship from damage.

Currently, the first mate doesn't really play much of a useful role in a current ship, he's more of a trainee for future ships, when in reality he should be critical. Second, the surgeon somehow has the perks to cause the ship's hull itself to absorb much less damage in combat, when this is clearly outside his expertise.

Accordingly, the defense role is split, with the first mate taking over as the professional managing the defense of the ship during combat (presumably, supervising measures to limit damage, training the crew accordingly, managing things efficiently so less men are injured and those that are are promptly brought below to be cared for by the doctor, etc).

The doctor retains the role of healing men after combat with his defence skill, but can't purchase the perks. Both have defense set at 2, for proper leveling. The only remaining weirdness is that the doctor's defense skill can affect damage to the ship itself, but it is a minor oddity compared to the prior state.

In this way both become essential officers, given how expensive the perks for defense are, and a more sensible and realistic reflection of the doctor's contribution is achieved.

The doctor is still very important, contributing full skill to both defense and luck, and being the exclusive source of healing and preventing casaulties. But too much emphasis was placed on him when he was also the officer responsible for the list of perks that reduce damage to the ship itself as well. At any rate, he by no means needs those perks to be important to the ship.

(but gave him high stakes as a new contributing perk, after all, he is the luck contributor)

First mate loses accuracy half skill, and generally revamped perk list for him focussing on new role. A couple of additional perks that seem to make sense (like troopers, since he would probably be commanding the detachment of troops)

Spoiler: Extensive rebalancing explanations

Went over all generated character type stats, and attempted to make them consistent progression and fit with each other, with a mind to gameplay balance.

I also moderated HP bonuses, steering towards moderate hp base boosts rather than per level. Ultimately, if a character trains up their melee skill to a high level, they should be a competent fighter regardless of what their formal role is. Small base hp bonuses seem to be the best way to preserve the effect of tough fighting roles while not completely blocking the others from being effective warriors at high levels. Among player officers, now just the first mate, master at arms, gunner, and bosun get a small 10 hp boost (half of the old master at arms 20), a difference that reflects their potential to be frontline fighters but also allows any officer type to fill that role with proper training.

In general, the hp and skills for boarding crew differences were somewhat tightened. Military has become less overpowering in comparison (after all, it was not like the soldiers of the time were highly trained in personal combat), pirates made less of pushovers (they used to be extraordinarily weak, with hp and rank penalties), and military kept very strong at lower levels to protect their items but with limited growth, reflecting some consistency of professional military training across ship sizes and captains. Captains also rebalanced, navy captains not really being known for being especially deadly at personal combat.

Number will of course be tweaked in response to feedback.In general, the balance looks like this now for relevant stats for boarders, with military not heavily influenced by rank (consistent across captain levels/ship tiers), and pirates with the most potential to be fearsome boarders under great captains, and merchant crews a bit weaker than others.

HP base bonus, HP per level, fencing importance, accuracy importance

master at arms (crew for privateers and regular captains): +10/+0/5/6
pirates +0/+2/6/5 (pirate crews are the most dramatic from ship to ship--they can be desperate and weak, or they can be fearsome under great captains)
sailor (merchant guards) +0/+0/4/3 (weakest of course)
guards +150/+0/5/10 level bonus of 10 (in addition, navy captains get +10, so we are looking at +20 to them)

(the guards +150 hp may look high, but their old +5 per level and 20 boost to level meant that anything tier 7 or better basically had this HP or more)

So Pirates start out weakest, but under a fearsome captain have the most potential. Soldiers are consistently excellent but don't change as much captain to captain. Some extra incentive also for the player to "go pirate", his crew of desperate bucaneers will have a bit more hit points, and it helps out the pirate ai captains, who dont get big ships and thus generate lower level boarders.

I also brought their perklists and other importances and noncontributing chances into a reasonable comparative relationship so reasonable amounts of combat perks would make an appearance on each (noncontribut chance tweaked, aprox same number of contribut perks to distract from combat for each except guards which have less, and 14 other points of non combat skill importances)



Additional minor changes:

- Pirate crews now much more fearsome boarders (they used to be very weak)

- convoy trade captain given a watered down perk list, mainly aimed at ways he can avoid being annoying to the player + some thematic perks

- quatermaster given cooking perk (seemed the most logical companion for it, since he will be purchasing and managing provisions, and the Captain probably wouldn't be personally cooking every meal)

- Some officer price changes (surgeon and firstmate payed slightly more, as was historically true, Pay in Britain's Royal Navy : Napoleonic Wars : Napoleon Bonaparte : , as is quatermaster, because it is unwise to underpay the person who manages your money)

- Some unrelated odd perks are removed (ie, the doctor previously had "increased crew damage", which makes no sense unless you imagine weird fantasy things like the doctor filling cannonballs with poison )

- Some fixes, like some types having a later perk but lacking the prerequisite perk

- some noncontributing chances reduced in light of new perk lists, or need for combat perks to fill role (boatswain), increases others (doctor)

 

[Pieter Boelen]

But the doctor does still contribute the Defence skill itself?

Actually, that technically doesn't matter so much anyway. The doctor is the ONLY type of officer that gets checked specifically for his own skill.
Only a DOCTOR can decrease after-battle casualties and no other officer can take that place.

Related code is here in PROGRAM\Characters\CharacterUtilite.c:

int GetWoundedHealedPerDay(ref _refCharacter)
{
   int healing_rate = HEALED_PER_DAY;
   if(CharacterHasOfficerType(_refCharacter, OFFIC_TYPE_DOCTOR))
     healing_rate = healing_rate + CharacterGetOfficerSkill(_refCharacter, OFFIC_TYPE_DOCTOR, "defence");
   if(GetCargoGoods(_refCharacter, GOOD_TREATMENT) > 0)
     healing_rate = healing_rate + HEALED_WITH_MEDS;
   return makeint(0.5 * healing_rate + rand(healing_rate));
}

int GetWoundedKilledPerDay(ref _refCharacter)
{
   int death_rate = KILLED_PER_DAY;
   if(CharacterHasOfficerType(_refCharacter, OFFIC_TYPE_DOCTOR))
     death_rate = death_rate - CharacterGetOfficerSkill(_refCharacter, OFFIC_TYPE_DOCTOR, "defence");
   if(GetCargoGoods(_refCharacter, GOOD_TREATMENT) > 0)
     death_rate = death_rate - HEALED_WITH_MEDS;
   return makeint(0.5 * death_rate + rand(death_rate));
}

That is something I added many years ago as it seemed to make sense.
I do wonder if something similar should be done with other officer types.
The 'CharacterGetOfficerSkill' can technically handle any officer type. It just isn't used anywhere else.

 

[Tingyun]

Pieter, yep, with the ship defense perks transferred and the doctor's personal skill checked for healing, I think it functions pretty well.

I had earlier planned a more dramatic change: reimagine the luck skill as basically skilled hands (fits with the lock picking/picking pockets) change the doctor to purely a luck contributor, change those references for after battle healing to luck, and change the relevant items like doctor's toolkit to luck, then rename it "dexterity" or something.

I really liked the idea, but thought it was too dramatic a change to be likely to be accepted, and figure better to experiment a little more cautiously.

That's why I didn't lock perks or do anything that would be too likely to bother people, I basically just changed background balance for the most part.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

Pieter, yep, with the ship defense perks transferred and the doctor's personal skill checked for healing, I think it functions pretty well.

Only problem if all Defence skills are transferred away from the doctor...
how will players ever know it IS still important to have a doctor with high Defence anyway....?

 

[Tingyun]

With Levis's excellent right click for skill descriptions on character screen improvement, we can write it into the skill description. Should work fine for new players, just add "For a doctor, defense skill represents their ability to heal injured crew members after battle." To the current text.

Also, starting skills are based on skill importances (I've left their defense importance at 10), so they always will have high defense skill if hired, and advancement for a doctor will mostly be defense. I think the game kind of hits you over the head with the fact, not sure if adding the perks is needed as a clue. But could always give them the most basic ship defense perk.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I'll leave the specifics to you. 't Was just something to think about.

 

[Levis]

@Tingyun please if you edit files or so try to put some comments in there so we know what you changed and don't need to use winmerge, you can also explain why so people wont revert it back so easily.
I will try to take a closer look at some of the changes you've done, but as explained before I don't like the captain changes and don't think we should add them because they don't really fix the problem. We should try to make captains have officers too. If the things I'm working on work now that should be very easy to do.

 

[Tingyun]

Levis, once Captains get officers, I'm going to roll back the captain changes as well and rebalance with the officers in mind. Current values are a concession of prioritizing gameplay and preserving challange in a world where no captain gets an officer and thus needs to fill all essential roles themselves. A temporary measure by intent.

The day after AI Captains get officers, I will release a new version. I will probably make some changes still though, like Navy captains should get some sailing perks. But much less extensive.

I will add some explanatory comments when I do so, though I wrote a 2 page essay in the spoiler above explaining why the changes are made. Each experiment actually has a detailed changelog. Hard to really present the full "Why" in short notes, like this chart from the spoiler section above which explains the crew rebalancing:

HP base bonus, HP per level, fencing importance, accuracy importance
master at arms (crew for privateers and regular captains): +10/+0/5/6
pirates +0/+2/6/5 (pirate crews are the most dramatic from ship to ship--they can be desperate and weak, or they can be fearsome under great captains)
sailor (merchant guards) +0/+0/4/3 (weakest of course)
guards +150/+0/5/10 level bonus of 10 (in addition, navy captains get +10, so we are looking at +20 to them)

Anyway, I'll be more attentive to adding comments in the future, to at least reference the more detailed explanations and keep things in order. For the total rebalances though where it is impractical to comment on 100 lines per file, the detailed change logs I posted in each experiment post under spoilers should be a good makeshift guide. I did post comments on all discrete explainable changes, like for the deleveling and difficulty level stuff.

I am very much looking forward to officers for AI captains! It will be gamechangingly wonderful, thank you Levis!

 

[Tingyun]

@Levis Oh, also, I don't think any of this is ready to be looked at piecemeal for addition to the mod. Better to test it out for awhile as an experiment and see how it works--many of the changes only really make sense and are balanced in relation to other changes, like the deleveled bandits/changed weapon stats/swords not disappearing/armor for AI/item cost changes.

Adding any one piece of that on its own would create huge balance problems, it all needs to be tested to see if it works together and achieves a new balance with the other components. And I'll be tweaking things in response to playtesting for awhile yet.