ships Naval Boarding - seizure of ships

[Tapothei]

Imagine me building my first arrow ship and out of nowhere an enemy ai's ramming ship stocked with champions stole my ship and return to fog of war waiting for more oppurtunistic booty and I'm now officially landless for all eternity.

[CheckTester]

On 27/01/2026 at 1:10 PM, Tapothei said:

Imagine me building my first arrow ship and out of nowhere an enemy ai's ramming ship stocked with champions stole my ship and return to fog of war waiting for more oppurtunistic booty and I'm now officially landless for all eternity.

Why not.

But this fail may be possible and without garrisoned champions on ram ship. Three ram ships also will beat one arrow ship, as I understand.

The enemy may disembark units from the ship and give you a hard time. What does it mean ? This is war reality. 
When enemy have more units and use it with mind he will beat you any time. Try to find the solution! For example - sink his ramming ship with javelinners or archers. Small amount of distant units will sink one ram ship with ALL the champions for short period. Fastly!

"The enemy will have more units and I will be defeated" — it is not the real reason to decline the feature. 

 

In case you lost the unique ship. And lost your shipyard. There are a lot of ways how to build new doc and new ship, even you have not gold and gold mines around. Just make a market and trade the food (or other goods) for the gold.  By the way. The dock is also a market.

But.. In other way.
You may garrison some units to the trade ship as a garrison and capture any war ship without units. Only imagine...

And this is also war reality.

Defend your units. Be carefull! Use the tactics! Guard everything.

This is real strategy! 

Edited yesterday at 14:53 by CheckTester

[Tapothei]

@CheckTesterit was a joke that came up onto me, so I wanted to share a laugh. I look forward for this feature to be implemented. I also want a troll ai that does what I thought of. Trully it will caught people off guard, those whose used to it will get annoyed which serves the purpose of trolling. Man, my urge to troll is high....

[CheckTester]

I have created a ticket to develop this feature: https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/issues/8696

[Thalatta]

I think only ramming ships should be able to board, and should have a harder time with faster ships, needing to ram them a bit beforehand. Then, a defending “base garrison” would need to also be overcome in “virtual combat”. This base garrison could be depleted by ramming, making the target ship incur a speed (and maybe attack) penalty. After capture, the base garrison from the attacking ship (never involved in boarding actions) should be automatically distributed among both ships. Base garrisons could slowly replenish at sea, fast at ports. All this easily removes the necessity of having to garrison everything, while making things realistic by keeping boarding fairly common (as it was) but preventing snowballing from opportunistically hoarding ships.

 

Better explained:

 

It would be annoying to have good ships get captured by hit and run tactics from slower ships with a small crew and when not even engaged in combat (which happened mostly with sails lowered, but I guess the game simplifies this and that’s why the ramming ship has them like that). This is the Fortress capture problem at sea (which these ideas also try to solve). Boarding should then be done only by ramming ships, the one representing close combat. They should have a “Grappling Hooks” button that would work when really close, but the target ship should have a chance to get away depending on its speed relative to the attacker’s ship. Ramming was done not just to sink ships, but also to slow or stop them by shearing their oars (which would injure or kill the oarsmen). Only then using grappling hooks for boarding would be feasible. The corvus could prevent the target ship from getting away, but it wasn’t just “way more efficient at boarding”, it was necessary because the first Roman ships were slow compared to the Carthaginians’, after a couple of battles their ships improved and they ditched the corvus (which apparently made ships unstable), so it shouldn't be seen as a technology that improved things from then on but as a short lived early necessity.

 

I’d change needing “4 or more garrisoned troops” and instead give every ship a “base garrison”, taken into account for the defenders when in virtual combat. This would be just a few parameters regarding how many they are, their attack, and defense (and loot, which I’d reserve for a successful boarding, but maybe that’s extra code and not how the game works). The number of troops needed to take an ungarrisoned ship would then depend on the ship itself (would be annoying having to garrison the biggest ships because of small ships with 4 archers lurking about). I feel units like cavalry or elephants shouldn’t count in any of this. An attacker can choose to disengage the grappling hooks if things are going south, which would also automatically happen if the defenders repel the attack (leaving the attacking ship only with its untouched base garrison).

 

Most oarsmen were skilled armed free men, who were killed or taken prisoner, not generally made row a captured ship (which is very complicated, they had to be willing and motivated). This is why I disagree with “the first ship will receive part of the second ship's garrison”, it's not rooted in reality, and it's too snowbally. If the boarding is successful, the base garrison from the defending ship could be considered killed (or sold to slavery considering loot, etc), and the one from the attacking ship would need to be split (maybe in proportion to capacity). A depleted base garrison should give speed penalties to the ship. After all, captured ships had to be scuttled or were slow after battles for being poorly manned. The base garrison could replenish slowly, fast if close to a port. All this makes keeping ships harder than just boarding and capturing, allowing for more strategic decisions and preventing disproportionate gains. When everyone is killed in the target ship, one would take control of it and, while still hooked, one should be able to choose if to keep it or scuttle it (and maybe if just abandon it). For now I'm not proposing any base garrison manual redistribution not to complicate things.

 

I’d make ships suffer damage mostly from ramming only, I feel ships are too weak to arrows in this game, they should be more like rams, while arrows should mostly affect their garrisoned troops, and the base garrison should be affected mostly by ramming (oar shearing and hull breaching). I would add this mechanism on everything, siege engines and buildings. Fortresses would have a decent base garrison with a bigger defense bonus than on a ship. They wouldn’t count as population, they’re just a “resistance to be taken” parameter (which is going to be implemented one way or another anyway, better to rename things realistically for immersion and intuition, all this is a bunch of parameters only), and a “speed (and maybe base arrow rate) penalty” if depleted, for things to work nicely on ships to take faster ones.

 

Big ships is one of the things that are good about this game, no need to try to be just another RTS clone. A few words about realism: what I said before greatly simplifies reality, even when much was written. The only difference from the original proposal is the few parameters to characterise a base garrison, whose quantity would influence the speed of ships and be reduced by being rammed (if just being damaged can be considered for now that’s ok), and that faster ships could get away from the grappling hooks (Edit: and removing the arbitrary troop quantity requirement to be able to board, one might try capturing a small ship with 4 soldiers, but a big one would be suicide). If one would want more realism, ramming should be done on the sides (made difficult when ships are formed side by side), and shearing should be done with an angle from the front (diekplous), or back after going around (periplous), but I know this is too much detail for a game like this (although the more is taken into account the better for tactics).

Edited 1 hour ago by Thalatta