Naval Gameplay

[Buckethead]

Hi,

I've been playing 0ad for almost a year now. Overall, I'm impressed that the opensource community has created something of this quality. Keep the good work up!

However, I feel that naval gameplay is kind of lacking at this point. As far as I'm aware, the winning strategy to use when at sea is to spam triremes along with your cheapest troops to fill them. This is not unique to 0ad: I've played AoE 2 and the strategy is pretty much the same. So, here's my 2 cents:

Attacks:

• Ramming: This is already slated for implementation. I think that a successful ramming attack should deduct a lot of HP from the rammed ship, but if it survives, it keeps losing HP. This is to simulate the ship taking on water and sinking. This is also useful to get your precious soldiers off before it sinks completely. There should also be a tech in the city phase to eventually stop the sinking phase. This would simulate the technique of throwing an old sail under a hull to stop leaks.
• Boarding: From what I read, this was officially cut because of the complexity of showing soldiers fighting on ships. However, I have a way to implement boarding without all that complexity. Here are the stages of the attack:

1. The attacking ship throws grappling lines to the attacked ship. Of course, this requires that the ships be side by side.
2. Each ship has a loyalty bar in the same manner as siege weapons. and the total health of each soldier onboard is added. Citizen soldiers(incuding horsemen) have the same DPS, champs have slightly higher DPS, and heroes have the highest DPS of all.
3. When the enemy soldier's health bar goes to zero, the ship loses loyalty and eventually becomes the property of the attacking state. Of course, if the attacker's bar is depleted first, it becomes property of the attacked state!

• Missile: Only archers garrisoned onboard ships can fire arrows. 

Ships:

• Fisherman class: can garrison 1 unit. It has boarding capability, but as you may imagine, it has no chance against even a trading ship.
• Bireme class: has boarding capability, but no ramming. Mainly useful to protect merchants and fishermen.
• Trireme class: The staple of the navy. Has both boarding and ramming capability. 
• Quintrireme class: The siege weapons of the sea. Doesn't fire projectiles when empty, but fires long range projectiles when garrisoned with catapults. Can both ram and board, but is slightly slower than other classes to prevent the boarding attack being OP.
• Merchant class: For trading. Has boarding attack to give it a bit of defensibility.

If you got through all of that, thanks! I put quite a bit of effort into this. Hope this was of use,

Buckethead

[aeonios]

That's way too complex imo. I mean allowing standard capture mechanics for ships wouldn't be a big deal, but an attack that had a 100% sink rate with one click would be op, and adding overcomplicated mechanics to counter it would be awful. An attack that did a fixed DoT is one thing, but a DoT with infinite damage that requires a special procedure to remove it is ridiculous. Fully loaded warships already kill each other reasonably quickly anyway, and really the biggest problem with sea is just that ship pathing sucks and ships are really dumb when it comes to garrisoning units.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

1 hour ago, aeonios said:

an attack that had a 100% sink rate with one click would be op

Psht, yeah, tell that to the Athenians.

But in seriousness, making it an ability that has to recharge rather than a standard attack mode would work.

 

[Buckethead]

The reason why I don't like the ship mechanics already in place is that their only attack is ranged, while IRL boarding and ramming where the main threats, and projectiles where just a distraction(at least that's what my history book tells me...). How are my mechanics overcomplicated? So I know what to fix.

[RolandSC2]

On 5/21/2018 at 12:01 PM, aeonios said:

[Really] the biggest problem with sea is just that ship pathing sucks and ships are really dumb when it comes to garrisoning units.

True and true: Ships are clumsy, and can be tedious as a result. Unfortunate, because water maps offer a significantly different gameplay experience. Also, maybe it would make sense to allow ungarrisoning to stack in the action queue (with shift key). Perhaps with a directional cone to select where the units will debark.

[Thorfinn the Shallow Minded]

Realise that the only difference between biremes and triremes is the rows of oars.  Distinctions between the light and medium classes of ships could probably be done in a more intuitive way such as making triremes have better speed but biremes turning better.  On another note, most ships (triremes) during this time-period only had 14 men fighting on the deck.  This was occasionally augmented to numbers like 40, but those were mainly in instances in which the space for ramming was limited, leading to many boarding operations.  

As another point, archers were solely deployed as anti-personel troops; their role should be to damage the garrisoned soldiers, nothing else if boarding existed.  

A key thing to note is that if ramming was implemented, it would cause any civilisation that does not have ramming abilities to suffer as a result.  Thus, for one mechanic to exist, the other should as well to allow for balanced and interesting gameplay.