Naval gameplay: flaws and fixes

[Yekaterina]

Greetings! After a naval game in the lobby with 7 other people, I noticed some frustrating issues with ships in 0A.D:

• Straits are too small for biremes to pass through, so they get stuck and cause pathfinding problems
• Ships cannot spawn at times
• Ships deal too much damage against units but not enough against other ships. 
• Quinqueremes are wildly inaccurate and cannot do any damage. 
• Some civs have stronger ships than others and there is nowehere for ships to escape and garrison if they are losing. 

My proposed fixes:

• Decrease the model occupation size so that seemingly large ships can manoueuvre through straits without causing huge pathfinding issues. 
• Change the passability class to include beaches. 
• Change the attack type to crush damage then give a negative bonus against buildings, such that they are effective against other ships but deal moderate damage to structures and soldiers. 
• Map designers, please consider the width of straits. 

[Yekaterina]

Another bug found, when a whale is killed, this is shown as the corpse. There is no error returned but a sudden square black hole in the middle of the ocean does appear strange:

 

Apologies if this is a duplicate thread, I saw many naval discussions on the balancing forum but I don't have the permission to post on there. 

[Gurken Khan]

Yeah, I agree. I say it again: ships are ridiculously large, causing a lot of those problems.

At least regarding the damage there was some discussion and we might see some changes in a26.

I got the feeling that most active devs aren't interested in ships, and that most active players simply play land maps, maybe to some part out of frustration with ships.

[Yekaterina]

Just now, Gurken Khan said:

I got the feeling that most active devs aren't interested in ships, and that most active players simply play land maps, maybe to some part out of frustration with ships.

I made some changes that reduces pabalancing.zipth finding issues with ships, see this mod for A26:

[asterix]

@maroder @wowgetoffyourcellphone

Edited April 4, 2022 by asterix

[asterix]

btw if you want to improve and discuss gameplay on fabricator there are some patches to review  https://code.wildfiregames.com/search/query/PHAy.y.030hD/#R

[Stan`]

19 hours ago, Sevda said:

Another bug found, when a whale is killed, this is shown as the corpse. There is no error returned but a sudden square black hole in the middle of the ocean does appear strange:

 

Apologies if this is a duplicate thread, I saw many naval discussions on the balancing forum but I don't have the permission to post on there. 

IIRC @wraitii had a fix but never finished it. @vladislavbelov had a potential hack for it.

[faction02]

21 hours ago, Sevda said:

• Change the attack type to crush damage then give a negative bonus against buildings, such that they are effective against other ships but deal moderate damage to structures and soldiers.

Currently, arrowships do pierce damages, cataships  do crush damages. So one is effective against buildings and the other isn't. With your suggestion, it seems you would like to remove that difference.

D4507  reduces the pierce damages of arrow-ships to the same level as the one of defensive buildings and add a multiplier against ships.

Could you develop your argumentation about why having all ships dealing a moderate amount of damages to buildings would make the gameplay better?

 

21 hours ago, Sevda said:

• Quinqueremes are wildly inaccurate and cannot do any damage. 

On the Quinqueremes/cataships' inaccuracy, the same issue was brought forward for catapults: Catapults dont work. I guess a similar fix should be made for both, D4511.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

My preference is this.

- All factions get 1 warship. No more 3 separate warship classes.

- The player can tech up their warships from light to medium to heavy. It's a teching progression. (Bireme to Trireme to Quinquireme)

- Warships are about the size (footprint) of the current Biremes/Pentaconters. Each new level just makes the ship look beefier (Heavy upgrade makes them 10% longer too, but they would still be smaller than the current Triremes, even at max rank).

- We abandon the "soldiers on deck" feature. They wouldn't look right anyway without massive unusable ships.

- Remove BuildingAI. They now attack just like any other unit-one target at a time. Means you can now micro them.

- Garrisoning soldiers on board adds health and speed to the warship.

- Add a ramming feature at some point. Probably when/if secondary attacks are added to the game. 

[hyperion]

4 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Garrisoning soldiers on board adds health and speed to the warship.

Probably should change defense instead of health to avoid odd side effects.

Otherwise why not, certainly no worse than current setup

 

[gameboy]

@vladislavbelov Do you have a good solution?

[gameboy]

On 04/04/2022 at 7:45 PM, Sevda said:

Another bug found, when a whale is killed, this is shown as the corpse. There is no error returned but a sudden square black hole in the middle of the ocean does appear strange:

 

Apologies if this is a duplicate thread, I saw many naval discussions on the balancing forum but I don't have the permission to post on there. 

Can this problem be solved?