Ships!

[Gurken Khan]

 

So, let's talk about ships (and everything wrong about them).

 

5 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

Besides that my warship can magically materialize projectiles, it is also a total stormtrooper. Looks like it always aims at the head of that poor fisherman, naturally that would be hard to hit. (I assume the inner circle shows the minimum range, so that shouldn't be the issue?)

 

3 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

I think structures and siege are given an 'elevation bonus' and 'launch height' which changes the trajectory of the projectile. However, this is often not shown on actors and there is something worrying about projectile physics in 0ad: the value of gravitational acceleration (approximately 9.8ms^-2 on Earth) varies for different structures and units! This is the stats for a Quinquereme:

@Gurken Khan There are many issues with ships in 0ad and they are overlooked because most TGs happen on Mainland. If you can kindly start a new thread to report all of the problems you have spotted with ships that will help a lot. Most bugs and balancing issues for ships are trivial. 

Naturally, I do as @Yekaterinasuggests! ;P

Eventually my warship killed that fishing boat, but I watched at least five consecutive missed shots in a row which seemed to be a lot of misses. Frankly, I can't say anything about 'elevation bonus', 'launch height' and 'gravity'; so before the more knowledgeable people sort those out I start with two more basic things. First, this Quinquereme looks a lot more like a Trireme:

 

Second, currently the projectile materializes out of thin air behind (!) the mast. On a quick look around the internet I didn't find anything reliable about the ranged capabilities of the (cart) quinquereme; maybe it's possible to add an onager on the ship's deck like in RTW?

 

Hoping for fruitful discussions!

 

[Yekaterina]

My suggestions:

1. Make Quinquereme projectiles more accurate

2. Allow Quinquereme and Triremes to switch between firing modes: stone, bolt or arrows. If a Quinquereme is fully garrisoned with archers, there is no reason why it cannot shoot arrows. Similarly for a Trireme with bolt shooters. Although Triremes probably cannot mount catapults on them that easily. 

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

My suggestions:

Simplify warships with an upgrade progression. Light -> Medium -> Heavy. Add a bolt shooter to Medium ships, add a Catapult to Heavy ships (Light ships shoot arrows). 

[Freagarach]

(See e.g. https://code.wildfiregames.com/D3811.)

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

2 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Simplify warships with an upgrade progression. Light -> Medium -> Heavy. Add a bolt shooter to Medium ships, add a Catapult to Heavy ships (Light ships shoot arrows).

I like the upgrade system as it has been implemented and suggested before, but I feel that it would not make the gameplay better in this case. I like the ship classes and roles you gave, but I think these are fine being trained straight from the dock rather than all starting at "light". The main problem that I can find off the bat is the need to upgrade those ships and wait for the upgrade while you are under attack from other ships.

 

[Player of 0AD]

Maybe nerf ships? They kill soldiers like crazy. I dont see why their arrows should make 35 damage...

[Yekaterina]

1 hour ago, Player of 0AD said:

Maybe nerf ships? They kill soldiers like crazy. I dont see why their arrows should make 35 damage...

35 damage arrows is ridiculous. Can you suggest another value? Consider pierce, hack and crush. 

Also where are the ramming features of Quinqueremes and Triemes?

[Silier]

8 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

Also where are the ramming features of Quinqueremes and Triemes

Sitting in design documents, there is ticket for naval warfare but no-one picked it up as far as i know

[Yekaterina]

2 minutes ago, Angen said:

Sitting in design documents, there is ticket for naval warfare but no-one picked it up as far as i know

I will try to add it

[Gurken Khan]

6 hours ago, Player of 0AD said:

Maybe nerf ships? They kill soldiers like crazy. I dont see why their arrows should make 35 damage...

I do my best to keep my soldiers away from warships because of that. On the other hand I think it takes really long to sink an enemy's warship, even when I attack with several warships; I wouldn't want it to take even longer...

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

3 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

I do my best to keep my soldiers away from warships because of that. On the other hand I think it takes really long to sink an enemy's warship, even when I attack with several warships; I wouldn't want it to take even longer...

Yeah, that's where a ramming feature (essentially the same as a charging feature for land units) would be nice. I think originally, arrows were supposed to kill the enemy ship's crew, while the ram or siege projectiles would kill the ship.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

7 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

Also where are the ramming features of Quinqueremes and Triemes?

I honestly think this would go hand-in-hand with a charging and running feature for land units. Same concept, just extended to ships. So, if someone were to want to add charging to soldiers, they could easily add it to ships at the same time with little essential difference between the 2, unless we wanted to add some kind of cool-down time between ram attacks (which we might want to add to soldier charging anyway too).

[Grapjas]

1 hour ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

So, if someone were to want to add charging to soldiers

It will be included in my next mod update. Right now it's in it's prototype phase, but it's already working as discribed below.

Melee units have energy and automatically initiate a charge attack when they are close enough to their target. They consume energy at a rate while they are charging their target and deal bonus damage on the first attack if they had energy left when they reached the target (after a succesful charge attack the left-over energy will be consumed). Units that do nothing AKA idling will recharge their energy automatically. Rams will be able to charge aswell and have bonus damage/speed based on how many men are garrisoned inside it on the first attack. Rams only have energy equal to how many are inside though, that means 0 when they are ungarrisoned.

Pierce damage receives the highest damage bonus, so that means pike and spear charges are stronger than sword charges.

[azayrahmad]

10 hours ago, Yekaterina said:

35 damage arrows is ridiculous. Can you suggest another value? Consider pierce, hack and crush. 

Also where are the ramming features of Quinqueremes and Triemes?

That doesn't sound right. With that kind of damage it should have been Bolt instead of arrow.
Although I think ships should work like siege tower, with melee attack by default (ramming)
and arrow attacks only when garrisoned (with Building AI).

 

[Yekaterina]

what about adding a button to switch between ramming, arrow and artillery? That gives the player more control and makes the ship more useful and pro-friendly. 

[Loki1950]

The AI currently has no notion that ships exist so any update needs to take that into account.Ramming would be great to have but collision detection and damage arbitration still need to done as well so remember some of this needs work on the C++ side also.

Enjoy the Choice   

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

21 minutes ago, Yekaterina said:

what about adding a button to switch between ramming, arrow and artillery? That gives the player more control and makes the ship more useful and pro-friendly. 

Think about it this way. Every feature we add to the combat takes more APM. So, if we want ramming and ranged attack switching, you're looking at reducing the number of ships you're going to want to micro. At least with ramming, it could be semi-automatic (once the ability recharges, the ship's unitAI could wait X number of seconds before self-initiating a ram, a rather simple thing to do; the player can always override and initiate the ram manually or manually task the ship to something else). With ships weapon switching, can there be any semi-automation there? I take it, each attack type should have its own unique benefits and drawbacks, but can the unitAI self-determine which attack to use based on the benefits and drawbacks? Do you need additional manual input from the player?

[azayrahmad]

Due to 0 AD vision of less unnecessary micro, I think switching attacks manually or cooldown mechanic is not preferable for Empire Ascendant (it's really nice for a mod though).

Here are what I think might work for ships with current engine, only involving simple template modifications:

• Concept: Works like siege tower, but at sea.
  • Attack type is arrow but modify damage to be normal damage like one archer.
  • Add BuildingAI component to the template, so increased arrows on garrison.
• Concept: Big ships with corvus like Quinquereme & Juggernaut can capture smaller warships.
  • Hopefully capture animation can be added later (just lowering the corvus).
  • I'm not sure what would happen if two opposing juggernaut capture each other, so we could set only smaller ships are capturable.

Ramming would be a little more complex as it needs component modifications, but here's what I think:

• Concept: Ramming works as melee attack but multiplied with speed before impact. Speed increase should be automatic, but ships need to be more than certain range for it to work.
• Modification: Attack and UnitAI needs to be modified like this to allow automatic charge (sorry for rather technical description):
  • Attack type must include CanCharge and ChargeRange properties. If a unit can charge set CanCharge to True and set ChargeRange to a range, e.g. 10m
  • UnitAI will check if the range between a ship and targeted enemy ship.
    • If it is exactly the same, it will charge i.e ship use running speed
    • Otherwise (ship too close or too far) it will just approach the enemy with normal speed. 
  • On impact, record the current speed and multiplied this to attack damage before stopping and melee attack.
  • To ram again then the ship must retreat outside ChargeRange, otherwise the speed won't increase.

What do you guys think?

Edited July 18, 2021 by azayrahmad

[Grapjas]

6 hours ago, azayrahmad said:

What do you guys think?

I think you pretty much discribed what my mod does?  

Only difference is i use energy so a unit cannot endlessly charge after an escaping enemy and functions as a reset after a succesful charge attack. This pretty much means they can charge once per combat.

Only thing i would need to do for ramming ships is simply add a melee attack and set energy in the template. Ram speed and damage will be automatically increased with more garrisoned soldiers.

 

[alre]

Ramming as with Grapjas charge would be nice to see in the game, but would not add any real strategic layer to it. At the moment, naval warfare in the game displays heavy imbalance among civs, lack of rock-paper-scissors mechanincs, and also, I think, unsatisfactory scale of fleets and battles. All these problems stay.

All this, together with ships OP-ness and lack of viable counterplay, makes naval maps pretty unpopular in the MP lobby.

[Gurken Khan]

I'd like to come back to my first question from the opening post:

On 17/07/2021 at 1:22 AM, Gurken Khan said:

First, this Quinquereme looks a lot more like a Trireme:

I can only make out threes of oars instead of fives. And from how I understand it, even for a trireme the position of the oars are wrong:

 

 

 

So, is the current model a placeholder, a convention, or what?

 

[alre]

that reconstruction of quinquiremes is discredited. they had five lines of rowers but multiple rowers handled the same oar, so that in fact there were 2-3 lines of oars and no more.

[Genava55]

[Gurken Khan]

mkay, the number is referring to the oarsmen, not the rows of oars.

Looking at various articles/schematics, I don't have an idea what the Carthaginians' oars were actually arranged like. Searching on the forums didn't show me what source was used for our model. So I guess I just gonna live with three rows of oars in a triangular positioning (and not two rows, and not positioned directly above each other or offset diagonally).

[Yekaterina]

23 minutes ago, king reza the great said:

its great idea we can also think about ranged units in ship that shoot units

@king reza the great

16 hours ago, king reza the great said:

8-      Do you know why people often hate playing noval maps? Because ships are annoying. People spam strong cheap ships and kill troops easily with strong arrows of ship. Especialy when you have to make eco near beach ships can be more annoying. I think ships should not able to attack people same as real life. Ships just atatck ships its all.