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