Ship releated bug and vague mechanics.

[Wormerine]

I found some dodgy things with ship to ship combat. I am sure some of them are bugs, but some of them I just want to ask about:

1) Half sail and full sail movement is the same

 

 

 

According to a tooltip, half sale should provide half of the speed and smaller defensive bonus - however, they are pretty much the same. While in this example halfsail is indeed a bit weaker, it is not always a case. I often moved 50m on fullsail, while moving 60 on halfsail. I am not sure how movement is calculated, but the tooltips make no sense whatsoever. Anyway, in current build fullsail is simply useless.

 

2) parallel movement not... well... moving

This is more of a question, than persay bug report. If we face enemy ship with our port/starboard side and move - shouldn't we "sail around" an enemy ship and change his position in regards to us? We can move toward&away from enemy, but there doesn't seem to be a way to move around an enemy. Right now if enemy is about to shoot us, there is no way to move out of his way. As ship2ship cmbt. seems to revolve around moving in and out of range of our enemy, wouldn't it make sense to be able to move out of line of fire? Shouldn't, at the least, full sail allow us to do it?

 

3) does showing enemy our stern/bow do anything?

It seems that unless we are commited to boarding an enemy ship or running away, there is no benefit to showing enemy ship our thinner, more difficult to hit side. Shouldn't ship be harder to hit from bow/stern sides? As we are able to move 180 degrees in one move, there seem to be little benefit to using front/back of the ship in combat.

 

4) destroyed sails disable full sail only

Which is probably intentional, but as full sail is useless anyway, it doesn't do much.

 

5) immortal crewmen

While not tested it personally, it was reported that that crewman injured in ship2ship combat fight just fine during boarding. Shouldn't they be disabled - possibly allowing us to thinout more populated ships before boarding?

Also, after boarding report said some of my crewmembers were killed. However, back in the world map's ship management they are still fine and completely uninjured.

Edited February 2, 2018 by Wormerine

[Wormerine]

While I am at it - could we get a more detailed look at each of crewmembers stats? Reading their CV from small pop-up tooltips is a bit uncomfortable.

 

Edited February 2, 2018 by Wormerine

[Wormerine]

During boarding about half of enemy crewmembers seemed neutral but still attacked me and did damage. My crewmembers ignored them. I had to manually force-attack "neutral" hostiles.

 

Edited February 4, 2018 by Wormerine

[Wormerine]

I played around with the "docked" view of Tikawara trying to see if I missed ship equipment shop somewhere. I am sure you are aware of those, but just in case I found broken crew hiring screen:

 

and this beauty:

[Cdiaz]

Hey Wormerine!

 

Thanks for these posts! We've gone through the list and bugged up all the issues presented here for our devs to assess.

 

You the best,

 

-Caleb

[khango]

In terms of things that actually seem like bugs, no matter how long you sail your non-crew party members don't seem to rest or heal. It seems pretty weird. Like you can sail for months and they still have wounds/injuries. Not sure if there's a way to feed them while sailing that I'm missing or what.


Another thing I'm confused about is moral. What makes it go up? Destroying/defeating other ships seems to make it go up, but otherwise does it just go down? (I seem to repeatedly end up with zero moral despite having supplies loaded on the ship, etc.)

[Wormerine]

In terms of things that actually seem like bugs, no matter how long you sail your non-crew party members don't seem to rest or heal. It seems pretty weird. Like you can sail for months and they still have wounds/injuries. Not sure if there's a way to feed them while sailing that I'm missing or what.

 

Another thing I'm confused about is moral. What makes it go up? Destroying/defeating other ships seems to make it go up, but otherwise does it just go down? (I seem to repeatedly end up with zero moral despite having supplies loaded on the ship, etc.)

Ha. Good stuff. The first one (companions not resting on the ship) is not a bug - they don’t consume food while traveling, and you give them food when manually resting. Companions injury system is different than crew members injuries. Being able to rest while on a go might be a worthy addition, but I wonder how it could be implimented - maybe an upgradable “rest in cabin” option, like in PoE1 stronghold. Feeding them food with crew seems like a bad idea, as that would mean replacing resting bonuses outside our influence. Unless, we could assign seperate food/resting place for our companions while on the ship, but it seems like more hassle than it is worth it.

 

After one full playthrough I might be wrong, but I don’t think moral goes down passively. It is tied to food quality, so if you feed them with water (0 moral) and hardtracks (-1 to moral) you end up loosing -<amount of crew members> per day. You can loose moral by getting your butt kicked in combat, gain moral by winning and even further by splitting cash with your crew. You can also raise moral by giving better quality food&drink to your mates - a nice supply of rum will boost your moral significantly.

[swamp_slug]

The half sail/full sail issue seems to me to be a major problem for ship combat. From what I can see the equal speeds issue only seems to affect the player's ship. In all the ship combats I've been in my ship seems to full sail at 60m but my enemy full sails at 120m. It took me a couple of rounds to realise I could close faster using 2 half sail actions since each half sail action is 50m.

This issue has caused problems in combat vs a fleeing ship. I've had a target at 1 hull and 0 sails that was fleeing, using both of its actions to half sail. Because of the full sail issue, I have to use 2 half sail actions to maintain pace, but as it is ahead of me I have to use 3 actions to turn, fire and turn again, giving it an opportunity to escape. While losing the full sail action is a detriment, it also seems to me that having 0 sail should also negatively impact your speed for each action. In this sort of combat, having your masts and sails completely broken should put you at the mercy of your opponent.

 

In this instance my target ship did escape, bringing me back to the world map with the target ship directly ahead of me. Reengaging the ship from the world map I reenter the ship combat screen to find that the target is now at full hull, sails and crew. It is basically a brand new ship!

 

With this "new" ship I decided to board instead. After winning the fight I found that I couldn't interact with the loot screen. It appears that the loot screen is behind the arrow overlay indicating where characters can jump between ships (see screenshot). 

 

 

Overall, I find the ship combat system enjoyable, although firing cannons could do with fewer mouse clicks. Currently firing the cannons requires a minimum of 5 clicks: one to select "Fire the cannons", once more on the next screen, two more clicks to get the results of firing cannons and a final click to return to the order screen. It seems to me that at least one of those clicks could be removed with its information auto-populated.

[Wormerine]

Two new oddities to report, Captain!
 

1) I was fighting this chap (found right below Tikiwara):

 

First I defeated her by boarding the ship, however after the fight I got nothing:

 

As i remember that not being the case before, I replayed the battle using boarding autosave but with the same result.

I defeated her once again, this time in ship2ship combat and this time I got the loot:


2) The second one might be a bug, or a feature. I wanted to test this issue on a next ship to see, if the same will happen. I was charging him, however I had spare actions so I took a close range shot a him - and I one shotted him. Literally, my first salve in the battle, one cannon hit for 7 damage and KABOOOOOOM:



I am not sure, if the victory message is a flavour text, or I actually got a lucky roll and hit his powder reserves blewing him sky high. I got all the loot anyway, which if it was scripted would make little sense as the ship... well, exploded.

PS. Yes, @IndiraLightfoot, I plagiarized your Barrage Witch build.

Edited February 4, 2018 by Wormerine

[khango]

How do you board a ship?

[Aeschylus]

Get within striking distance (head straight for them) ;D

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

Yeah, I've had this (weird bugs with loading shipboard autosaves) happen, and a similar bug where I started up the game fresh and loaded an autosave at the start of a ship combat, and at the end of combat, it never actually ended -- 
I had to go to world map manually, no combat rewards.

Edited April 9, 2018 by Dr. Hieronymous Alloy

[mrmonocle]

I've got a feeling the whole ship business is going to be a huge bug hole that nobody wanted or liked in the beta in the first place.