Ship combat balance needs work...

[thelee]

I generally like the ship combat, but the higher-level ship combat (what little exists) really needs some combat tweaking.

 

My biggest gripe is that except in specific situations, there's basically no reason to not lay everything you have with cannonball. In lower-level combat grapeshot can be a way to disable most of the ship, and chainshot can prevent escape or pursuit. In higher-level ship combat, everyone has super-powerful surgeons and lots of people in reserve. Even with a junk ship magically knocking out all above-deck crew in one volley, by the time you jibe to fire with your other cannons, the other ship has already swapped everyone out with reserves, and the surgeon has already healed half the injured crew. Meanwhile, the other ship has just been shooting at your hull, and with 4 or 5 cannons, while you wasted a volley just to get the enemy ship to waste half a round swapping people out, they took out half your hull strength :|. It also doesn't help that the surgeon is a below-deck crewmember, so if you want to take out their surgeon you have to use cannonball anyway... Meanwhile, if you're in a galleon or junk and do just do cannonball and nothing else, you can basically destroy the hardest ships in the game with just a few volleys and it basically boils down to RNG.

 

Anyone else feel the same way? What does the community think of ship-to-ship combat?

Edited July 20, 2018 by thelee

[thelee]

Bah this post probably needs to be moved to the general discussion.

[omgFIREBALLS]

Bah this post probably needs to be moved to the general discussion.

No, best to avoid that forum as much as possible because you never know when a discussion calls for spoilers. Like here we could end up talking about the Floating Hangman or the RDC submarine.

 

I agree it seems pointless to not use cannonballs if you're trying to sink.

[ziphnor]

I always sail straight for the enemy ship and board them. Much simpler, and doesn't drain any ship resources and rarely damage the ship

[1TTFFSSE]

It is definitely simplistic at the moment and the two big STAT culprits are:

 

-not enough accuracy/ to hit variation between ships - like a voyager is almost the same chance to hit in combat as a big fat galleon. 

-not enough speed/maneuver variation between small and large sips. again like the above point.

 

 

also as an aside, enemy ship ai needs to learn jibe tactics. 

 

like right now you just get a junk, load it up both sides with double bronzers and win in 2-5 turns every combat on average. that really has to be looked at.

 

but the junk/galleon loaded with double bronzers is overkill actually at the moment and expensive. 

you can do the same effect right now on a Dhow for much cheaper just get the red dream hull to get the hull hp up to near galleon levels. 

[MaxQuest]

I generally like the ship combat, but the higher-level ship combat (what little exists) really needs some combat tweaking.

 

My biggest gripe is that except in specific situations, there's basically no reason to not lay everything you have with cannonball.

 

[...]

 

Anyone else feel the same way? What does the community think of ship-to-ship combat?

Yeap. Feeling the same way.

 

We have cannonballs, chainshot and grapeshot.

But, I do use only cannonballs, because in Deadfire I haven't been in the situation when alternatives are better.

 

 

That said, I have played other games where naval combat was balanced. Specifically I had probably 600h+ in the corsair games developed by Akella studio. It was more than 10 years ago, but I still remember, how great the naval combat was. Not to mention that if you were using only one type of ammo, you were dead.

> you had to use chainshot

- if the enemy ship was faster than yours and a much stronger crew (which was often); and you didn't want to risk getting boarded and killed.

- if the enemy ship was faster but you wanted to capture it - you also had to use chainshot.

- if the enemy ship was jibing and firing non-stop; and you wanted to reduce it's maneurebility and sit in their dead zone.

- there was also a tactic when fighting 1 vs 3-4 enemy ships. You could chainshot the slowest/sturdiest/weak-firepower ship, sail around it in circles and use it as a partial cover vs his allies. Otherwise would could grapeshot the fastest enemy, full sail away, and annihilate them one by one from distance.

 

> you had to use grapeshot

- if you wanted to board the enemy ship and reduce your casualties from deck-to-deck combat. Officers and crew could get killed. But you didn't want to lose experienced officers with selected/tuned percs, nor disciplined crew members with high morale.

- in case of a very few unique ships (like Flying Dutchman), you had a hard time even simply approaching for boarding. You had to heavily reduce their crew (in addition to sails), in order to make the ship a sitting duck, and not risk a fatal cannon shot when closing distance.

Edited July 20, 2018 by MaxQuest

[rjshae]

After trying various approaches I'm finding that using pure grapeshot for the cannon fire reaps seemingly unrealistic benefits. It kills off enemy combatants prior to boarding, it causes the opponent to waste a bunch of rounds swapping crew members around, and it can cause sails to burn or become battered. When I finally close to board, the foe has been significantly whittled down as demonstrated by the dead bodies on the deck. Why bother with cannon ball or chain when you can take out the crew?

[thelee]

51 minutes ago, rjshae said:

After trying various approaches I'm finding that using pure grapeshot for the cannon fire reaps seemingly unrealistic benefits. It kills off enemy combatants prior to boarding, it causes the opponent to waste a bunch of rounds swapping crew members around, and it can cause sails to burn or become battered. When I finally close to board, the foe has been significantly whittled down as demonstrated by the dead bodies on the deck. Why bother with cannon ball or chain when you can take out the crew?

it shouldn't actually be killing off enemy combatants prior to a boarding fight. i could be wrong, but istr this is a deliberate choice by the designers.

grapeshot can be very effective in low to mid ship fights.

the problem is that it scales very poorly into high-level ship fights because surgeons are too good and there are lots of crew members. you can continue to get the enemy ship to cycle combatants around, but they will still have crew members to spare to shoot you down, while their injured sailors heal so quickly that you aren't causing any lasting damage. grapeshot in this case doesn't get you closer to winning, it just slows down how quickly you lose. the one exception is when you have high-enough-rank sailors to trigger events with some regularity, then you can waste tons more enemy time with grapeshot and the game sometimes glitches out and deletes sailors from ship combat (not boarding combat) while trying to move sailors around to deal with events. but cannonball shots also can trigger events, get you closer to winning, and can disable the ship surgeon AND ship cannoneers.

 

for high level ship fights, there's only two good strategies and all other strategies are worse:

1. just cannonball the enemy ship down with the best DPS you can manage

2. use magranite flamethrower  on a fast ship like your default or the voyager with high level cannoneers and just brute force the enemy ship down.

 

the fundamental design problem is that they simply made cannonball do too many vital things (your main win condition, disable surgeon, disable enemy weapons [which is their main win condition]).

Edited October 11 by thelee

[yorname]

I wonder if there is a way to deal with the Rathun ones in ship combat? IIRC they always try to board and even without Ondra challenge you can't outrun them? Maybe with abosolute max speed it's possible?

[Kaylon]

On 10/12/2024 at 12:21 AM, yorname said:

I wonder if there is a way to deal with the Rathun ones in ship combat? IIRC they always try to board and even without Ondra challenge you can't outrun them? Maybe with abosolute max speed it's possible?

Ondra's challenge doesn't change their combat speed and with the best ship upgrades you can be at least as fast as them with any type of ship. If you do over 50% damage to their sails then their speed is cut in half and you can outmaneuver them.

[ArnoldRimmer]

I just click "Close to Board"... I always found the fighting pointless and boring. If I do get caught in a fight I just jibe and sail away.

The only thing I hate about the fights, if you turn tail and run you lose morale for 'fleeing a inferior enemy' also when it is 3 red skulls and 10 levels higher than you. That annoys the hell out of me.

[thelee]

On 10/11/2024 at 2:21 PM, yorname said:

I wonder if there is a way to deal with the Rathun ones in ship combat? IIRC they always try to board and even without Ondra challenge you can't outrun them? Maybe with abosolute max speed it's possible?

i find the huana voyager to be extremely useful in particular for this. load up like those double-barreled cannons and you don't have to waste time turning, just fire (you may even have a turn to hold position for greater accuracy). contrary to what i said earlier, iirc, rathun might be perfect case for grapeshot. IIRC they don't have surgeons, so once you disable their above-deck sailors, they literally can't sail anymore.