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 January 28 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 January 29 by Thalatta

[CheckTester]

The idea of reusing building capture logic for ships is excellent, but I believe it needs one critical addition: both ships should take hull damage during the boarding process. Otherwise, boarding becomes a no-risk, high-reward action that undermines naval warfare.

Why it's important

Historically, boarding was a brutal melee that damaged the ships themselves (broken oars, rails, rigging). In gameplay terms: if you can capture an enemy trireme for free just by having 10 hoplites on a transport, why bother building warships?

Proposed mechanics (simple and implementable)

1. Ongoing damage: During boarding, both ships lose a small percentage of HP per second. Damage rate depends on:

   • Ratio of garrison military strength (fiercer fighting = more damage).

   • Ship type (warships are tougher, transports are fragile).

   • Technologies (e.g., "Grappling Hooks" could reduce damage for the attacker).

2. Final penalty for captured ship: After a successful boarding, the captured ship suffers an additional HP loss (e.g., 15–20% of its current HP), representing the final deck struggle.

3. Attacker also pays a price: The attacker's ship takes damage over time and loses some of its garrison (e.g., 2–4 units killed). Half of the surviving attacker's garrison (rounded up) transfers to the captured ship; the rest remain on the original ship. This is in addition to the unit transfer already discussed. Defender's garrison is entirely eliminated (killed or captured).

4. Risk of sinking: If a ship's HP reaches zero during boarding, it sinks and the boarding is interrupted (or the surviving ship wins if the fight was almost over).

Why this improves the game

• Balance: Boarding becomes a costly operation, not a free alternative to destruction.

• Tactical depth: You can soften a ship with ranged attacks, then board to capture it with fewer losses.

• Realism: Reflects ancient naval tactics (ram, then board).

• Interesting choices: Do you risk your transport full of elite infantry to capture an enemy flagship?

• Prevents snowballing: The captured ship starts with very low HP and requires repairs, making it vulnerable to immediate counter-attack.

Example numbers for testing

• Base damage: 2% of max HP per second to each ship.

• Damage multiplier: (defender_strength + 1) / (attacker_strength + 1), clamped to [0.5, 2.0]. (If defender has twice as many soldiers, damage doubles.)

• Captured ship extra damage: –15% of its current HP after capture.

• Minimum boarding time: 5 seconds (prevents instant capture).

• Attacker garrison losses on success: 2–4 random units + half of the survivors move to the captured ship.

Visual feedback

Initially, simple effects would suffice: sounds of fighting, smoke/blood particles. Later, ship entanglement visuals (ropes or a boarding ramp) would be great. It would be nice if the ship's texture became more damaged.

Regarding the "base garrison" idea from @Thalatta – I see its value for reducing micro, but my proposal works with the existing garrison system. Perhaps both could be combined in the future.

I encourage everyone interested to share their thoughts. If there is support, I can help with testing and refining the numbers.

Thanks for considering!

Edited 14 hours ago by CheckTester

[Thalatta]

@CheckTester, I'm quite confused about your proposal. Let's imagine the case where a ship with a garrison of 30 boards an ungarrisoned ship. According to what I understand, successful boarding happens in 5 seconds, the captured ship suffers HP loss, and the attacker loses just 2-4 units? Always? What if the defender ship also had a garrison of 30? What does “almost over” mean? What does “soften” mean? That the garrison is vulnerable to ranged attacks? If the defender has more defenders, damage doubles where? On the attacker ship? Where is the fight even happening? It is unclear to me what happens with garrisons depending on which ship sinks. Seems like complicated ship combat where the parameters are the garrisons.

I don’t think it’s realistic for ships to take this much damage from boarding, this is mixing a couple of different things: either you ram a ship to sink it, or you ram (shear) the oars, to slow it down for boarding (and hurt the rowers, decreasing the number of defenders). You don’t want to ram a ship, breach its hull, and then board it, because the boarders risk going down with the ship. In fact, after breaching, the ramming ship has to move backward, to avoid getting stuck and going down also. That’s why ships getting so much damage that sink during boarding would have been quite rare, many measures were taken to avoid such suicide. What did happen is that ramming ships could get damaged (something simple that could actually be added to the game, considering they do a lot of damage anyway), but not really during boarding.

I would rework your mechanism like this: if attacker ship has N garrisoned units, defender ship has M garrisoned units, defender base HP is H and present HP X, then final surviving units that get split on both ships are F=N-(M+k)(X/H), where k is a parameter to set, and is how many attackers are killed if the defender ship has no garrison and full HP (just doing the trivial math, F=N-(0+k)(H/H)=N-k => k=N-F, attackers minus final survivors, that is, killed attackers). So k can be any coherent formula, from 2 to 4 as you said (the formula would give more survivors if the defending ship is damaged), or preferably something depending on the number of attackers and with how many the defending crew can handle, C, thus a simple formula could be C(C/N) (with this, crew resistance becomes inefficient when overwhelmed), that is, with C=5, 5 attackers get all killed (5(5/5)=5), and then goes down until from 17 attackers only one gets killed (5(5/17)=1.47), rounding up, and not taking yet into account defending garrison and ship HP, the final formula is of course F=N-(M+C^2/N)(X/H), which as a complete example, N=20 attackers against a ship with 100% HP that can handle C=10 attackers would mean F=15 survivors, that must be split in 2 ships, but if the defending ship is damaged first down to 50%, then there will be 18 survivors, and if the defending ship had a garrison of M=5, then these numbers would have been 10 and 15 survivors, respectively. If M=15 there are 0 survivors. If M=20, F=-5, which could mean 5 survived from the defender’s garrison (one has to be careful with extreme numbers, N=1 gives F=-24, when it should cap at -20, but I made the formula intuitively and fast). Furthermore, if it’s deemed that the defending garrison should have even more advantage, a defense factor D greater than 1 can be added, and if it’s deemed that ship damage should have a greater softening effect, a softening factor S greater than 1 can be added, resulting in F=N-(DM+C^2/N)(X/H)^S. In any case, both this and what you propose (or at least what you said) have a big problem anyway: blindness on how strong units actually are. That’s why I think “virtual combat” is necessary.

Now, I think you misunderstand the “base garrison” idea. It does take into account boarding not being no-risk, high-reward. To do ship damage is recommended to reduce it (I’m mixing ramming and shearing because the game doesn’t differentiate them, but it’s not the same as truly mixing them during boarding, that’s why it’s more realistic). It precisely avoids being able to “capture an enemy trireme for free just by having 10 hoplites”, since the hoplites have to fight the base garrison first, and then both their survivors and the attackers base garrison has to be split, greatly preventing snowballing. Garrisons should be vulnerable to ranged fire. If the existing system doesn’t include some form of virtual combat, then nothing reasonable can be done, because having a garrison of 30 workers would be the same as 30 champions. If it’s included, then base garrison is a trivial thing to add, and the same mechanism could be used for capturing buildings. The only worry would be that the AI would need to be taught all this stuff, which is something that has come to my attention a couple of times lately, and it’s indeed not a minor issue.

Edited 4 hours ago by Thalatta
I changed SX/H (S<1) to (X/H)^S (S>1) because the first version "softens" even when HP is at 100%, while the second version "softens" at increasing rate with damage.

[Grautvornix]

The discussion is starting to get REALLY interesting now!

[Deicide4u]

@Thalatta Kate, is that you?

Anyway, I'm not doing that much math. I stand by my opinion that the game should be simple to learn and harder to master. New players already don't want to spend a lot of time learning this game.

In fact, I believe that feature creep (especially since AoE III was released) has pushed people away from RTS. Couple this with the short attention span of younger generation, and you get only a fraction of former player base. No wonder that AoE 2 and AoE 1 (via Return of Rome) are still very popular. It's simpler, it works and is just wining timeless formula. There are some specific people who like to obsess over feature creep, sheets, statistics, and they are a minority.

But, I digress.

Edited 1 hour ago by Deicide4u
is - > are. Grammar hard.

[Thalatta]

1 hour ago, Deicide4u said:

@Thalatta Kate, is that you?

Anyway, I'm not doing that much math. I stand by my opinion that the game should be simple to learn and harder to master. New players already don't want to spend a lot of time learning this game.

No, I'm not Kate, and this forum is the first I have taken part in like 20 years, if I remember correctly.

Everything is math under the hood, but no one ever does it (not even me), one just gets a feeling of what will work when. One doesn't calculate exactly how many seconds a certain amount of units will take to capture some structure, but there's a formula behind it, and one just has some intuitive idea after some time. I was just trying to do that same thing with something a bit similar to what CheckTester said, with some realistic reconsiderations. And then arguing that virtual combat with base garrisons would be more realistic, simple, and help with intuitiveness.

Edited 35 minutes ago by Thalatta