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Solved Losing sailors boarding ships with 0 sailors (w/o losing any men on fight)

S

Symban

Powder Monkey
As title mentions, when I board ships with 0 sailors (after all is killed with grape shots) I sometimes lose sailors (like 60-70 from my 500 total) even though their musket shot kills 0 units at boarding, or I am not losing any of my men at all (as I board with 7-8 men and my officers against opponents 1 man on board fighting (sometimes 2 muskeeters, but they can't kill anyone neither as they are at guard against being swarmed by my ship's sailors).
I have almost 100 defense from my bosun, and advanced medic as well.

Can someone explain me is there a way to prevent those loses? It is very annoying to lose %15 of your seadogs to be replaced by greenhorns, against empty ships. After I pillage a fleet of merchant ships I lose %60 of my men against empty ships.
 
Its probably friendly fire ,your sailors that board on the stern meet those that board on the bow and from the adrenaline rush of boarding they shoot and slash eachother until they realise that there is no one on board :pirates

I dont know, i think i never graped a ship till 0 crew since i play without those statsbars over ships
 
The way to prevent any losses would be to make the enemy surrender, not sure if in the gameversion you play is that enabled. So if a ship surrenders obviously you have no boarding thus no losses in your crew. Since you board a ship with 0 enemy crew it's 100% clear the ship surrender is not enable.

Otherwise the calculations are difficult to explain I can't... lol. It's futile to kill all enemy crew entirely with grapes as you explained the result is often you lose crew in a boarding aginst a non existent enemy crew. Only with the enable surrender it makes sense.

I don't know atm how to enable it haven't played aop2 gof since many month but I'm sure someone can explain "how to". It is pretty easy drawback is you certainly need to start a new career to be able to use that feature.
 
I personally feel that these problems should be addressed. I think losing large numbers of seasoned man-of-war's men every time I board a merchantman is slightly strange.
 
Maybe it's because the game was designed so that the vessels surrender and as in the mod they don't thus you have strange results, can be hardcoded. On the other hand there are huge differences in boarding crew amount, even if not realistic i tested a certain setting i went for max crew minus minimum crew equals boarding crew this seems to be a better result so far in the game i never had very strange boarding results/losses but also i have had the surrender active.

This would mean a complete overhaul of the crew idea i went that far and limited the max crew each class so no more 5th or 4th rate with +250 men i adjusted it that way so even with the random +/- crew amount that works in addition with the above mentioned, this works for me much better but probably I'm the only one. Could be discussed with the whole mod team of course.

I'm still to busy modding/playing other games these days but I think this post might help to get maybe another crew setting rolling and to some degree a better balance IMHO. Just my 2ct.
 
Check if you have enough weapons. If you dont, part of your crew will die despite enemy ship having 0 sailors.
 
I have a surplus of weapons and an experienced crew. It definitely isn't something that can be fixed ingame.
 
Mates, You are correct. We tried to edit this back when Luke159 and myself developed the RTBL (Real Time Battle Light) Mod. We experimented with grapeshot in every way you can imagine for dozens of hours between us.

I can tell you this. The effects of grape and munitions effects can be edited, but not the method for how the engine looks up/treats base damage. For every run-time simulation/game there is a PH/PK (probability of hit/kill) table or "kill thermometer". For COAS some numbers can be edited, but the method is hardcoded. This is one area that I could probably fix myself given my experience in real combat simulations. I have never bothered asking for the sourcecode because I didn't need to. Maybe its time I did.

I will also say with all of the experimenting we did with this that the starting difficulty level selected is definitely an entry argument into the PH/PK function.

For the easiest difficulty settings you will notice that you don't lose that much crew. In otherwords the source has percentages it leverages consistently against your crew - no matter what - based on the difficulty level you are playing on.

There is nothing we can do about this right now. But maybe something that can be fixed in the future.

MK
 
That's why I never comand ships larger that class 3.
This way I may have a maximum of 350-400 men and when I board a ship with 100 men I have sometimes no losses at all.
Plus, smaller ships are faster and when you command them with 100 navigation (which is a lot better than the needed number), they're even faster. This way I can easily take a man-o-war with a class 4 ship.
 
Indeed, I often come out of ship boarding encounters with zero casualties - BUT that is playing at Corsair difficulty level above Skill level 25. (BTW I think Corsair is a very good, realistic and fair setting) My guess is that Symban is playing on one of the hardest settings, with a skill level below level 25. My observations over hundreds of hours of gameplay and testing lead me to believe that while the percentages are hardcoded, they are on a sliding scale. So even given one of the hardest settings I would bet that the percentage declines to a set of lower single digit numbers or possibly even ( 0%-5%) entry when you achieve a level of say 40 or 50 even on the highest difficulty setting. I'm just guessing as I've rarely played on the suicide difficulty levels. Zero percent may never be the entry number on those difficulty settings.

MK
 
I found another area editing may produce more realistic results. This can be found in LAi_boarding

boarding_enemy_hp = boarding_enemy_hp + GetBoarding_enemy_hp_Bonus(mcrew, ecrew);
if (boarding_enemy_hp > 1500) boarding_enemy_hp = 1500;
// boal 30.01.2004 <--
if(ecrew > maxcrew)
{
rel = makefloat(ecrew) / makefloat(maxcrew);
ecrew = maxcrew;
mcrew = MakeInt(mcrew/rel + 0.5);

I will play with this when I have some time.

MK
 
Thread is marked as solved, but I could not find the solution mention. Can someone please point it out again?

I also want to provide some additional information;

it is not related with sailor experience / lack of weapons / initial grape shot kills / doctor skill / defense / lack of medicine.

Test:
Enemy Ship (5th grade) 12 crew
My Ship (4th grade) 400 crew (below max) sea dogs / 1200 weapons / 2000 medicine. +3 fighter officers

action on board: a single enemy running around and dying before he can swing
result: 70 loss on my side.

Dont get me wrong I have no quarrel with losing sailors against military convoys / bigger fleets. But when you attack a merchant fleet of 4 ships of 5-6th grade you should not lose 150-200 sea dogs against ships with 1/3 max crew capasity compared to your ship. Especially if they have 3-10 men left on board.
 
You didn't include what level you are at or what difficulty setting you are playing on. I'll say it again.... I don't think there is a solution because it is on a sliding scale based on your level and difficulty setting. I believe its hardcoded, so would have to be changed in the source code which we don't have access to. If you want to help validate my theory, play on the very easiest setting to level 15 to 25 and see what your losses are. I'll bet it doesn't happen to you.

MK
 
I play at corsair difficulty, and currently I am level 24. I have one more addition to the problem. I went back to some very old saves where enemy did not have muskeet shot yet and haven't encountered the problem yet.

The reason I checked muskeet shot is that, I noticed in some boarding fights enemy definately has (2) muskeeters on board, but there is no message for my loss in the start (I remember seeing message for "enemy muskeet shot killed 0 of our men" before). When there is no message at all I had these unexplained causilties. I will make more tests, but I suspect it might be that a bug might be making enemy muskeet shot killing my crew with the number of %25 of the enemy ships available max crew (instead of current crew) without giving the notification on boarding battle, but taking toll afterwards.

I will post my test results here later, thanks !
 
Interesting. Please let us know the results of your test. I am very surpised to hear you are having losses at level 24 on corsair. It may change in just a few levels more. I am at level 31 in my test game with mainly seadogs and having NO losses (maybe 1 to 3 men occassionally). Please keep us updated. Its always really great to have someone that is observing closely. Would you like to be a beta tester for my Eras mod?

MK
 
I would love to be a beta tester for people putting passion into their professional hobbies (which is the type of person I am as well) ! However I have a full time job which is nearing contract end time, and my wife is pressuring me hard to work on improving my portfolio and spend my time on *more responsible* activities in her opinion. I fear I would not be able in a position to sneak out enough time for testing. If I have a change in my time allowance I will definately inform you !
 
The musket salvo ability is a big point here when it comes to "strange crew losses". It you enable the surrender option (which is disabled by default in gof AFAIK) you will see they surrender and you have no such strange crew losses. That's the only way to avoid this musket salvo thing. Since as they don't surrender you will have losses even if enemy crew is none.

Also its a more accurate playing and merchants give up a bit faster as far as i can tell, but to fully make it work one have to adjust the ship file and boardingcrew and max crew for each ship so quite an amount of workload. Like i posted before the formula
max cerw - minum crew = boarding crew
works pretty well for me.
 
Thats interesting because as it stands the boarding crew should be minus that of the gunners, cannoners and minimum crew. IE, lets say a 7th rate ship with 4 guns mounted.

Max crew = 30
Min crew = 7
Guns = 4
Cannoners = 8 (people who pass the shot type etc)
Boardinmg crew = 19 - 30 = 11 (boarding crew is set to 11)

If the game is taking into account those who load and fire the guns then that might explain crew looses been higher since in the above theory the game would not use those crew, i alway's have a.5 ratio of weapons to my crew aswell and i haven't experienced heavy looses in less my crew are not very experienced or i try to board (or i'm boarded) by a ship with much more crew than that of my own.

I think like many i also tend to use class 3 ships as my flag ship, i only ever use MOW's as a flag ship if taking on a fort but even then i sometimes have MOW's in the group but i use a class 3 ship and remain at a distance allowing the MOW's to take the brunt end of the forts shots. As a rule though its rare for me to use a MOW as a flag ship and if i have one in my group its normally at the rear of the group in less its ship speed has been upgraded at the pirate shipyard and then it depends on how its speed mesures up to the other ships in the group. The faster the ships the closer i have them to the flag ship as to avoid the ships from getting in each others way and damaging each other by taking avoiding action (which the AI is not very good at).
 
Hm, I noticed that too; I think there is some botched up portion where it calculates the Ecrew and Mcrew (Enemy Crew and My Crew, I think?), on the other hand, I modified my scripts so the crew never surrenders, and it seems to take over a "minimum" amount, even if it says "0" are left, there may actually still be 2-3 left, and strangely THEY manage to kill at least 40 of my 400+ men all the time. Solved this by ADDING my lost men to the captured ship's remaining crew AFTER the captain was defeated - it's a random(lost men) + X amount I added, so I always AT LEAST get SOME of my lost men back from the defeated crew.

I see it like that: not all the enemies may be on the ship some may be sleeping or busy sittin on the toilet and whatnot, so after the captain was defeated, my men still find some random people in hiding, which I can drown with the ship (when I sink it) or recruit. It's only a partial workaround, but it works.

PS: Changes in LAi_Boarding need a reinit, and sometimes even after that, the enemy ship still behaves according to the old settings, so to make them work, you may have to find a different enemy ship and retry at that one.
 
I think what you said is pretty much true Usop. I tested it by boarding a ship with 3 times the crew I had, and I let all my boarding crew die on that fight. Then I killed rest myself, and took over the ship. Funny thing is I had 100+ man still alive onboard (mincrew of the ship is 18). (might or might not be result of defense skill)

If not defense result than that means crew dying on board is not all of the crew.

Still it does not explain how come I lose 70 seadogs (from 600) when I board a enemy ship with less than 10 men, and not losing anyone on boarding fight, OR to muskeet shot.

I noticed however almost in all cases this happens enemy had 2 muskeeters on board, but several times I did not get message of 'enemy muskeet shot killed N of our men". (still they should not kill anymore man than the left ecrew on board).

Is it possible that any damage dealt on boarding fight is killing crew regardless of the guy taking hit dies or not ??? If so it would explain mysterious loss as both muskeeter always get the chance to fire off 1 shot when fight starts. (with 80% hit rate)
 
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