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Feature Request Discussion about captain and crew bonusses

KillPhil

Corsair
Storm Modder
One of the first things I noticed, and this issue has been for a long time.. the ridiculous amount of HP many NPCs have. Best example are Captains. Its not unusual I have to fight (and turn on godmode) an enemy captain with 200HP+ . This is 1) really problematic towards balance and 2) simply not realistic. And you worked so hard for realism.. No man except maybe Davy Jones and Cursed guys should survive more than 2-3 hits with a blade.. not even the player. That would make meleefights more intense and more realistic. (Big exception: Crew on boarding fights)

I already tried tweaking the stats in Internalsettings for starting HP and HP per Level, also the level-multiplier for enemies.. But the level-multiplier somehow doesnt really work. I set it from 0.66 to 0.000066 without any difference.. the Level and HP-Multiplier for enemies have to be somewhere else I guess. If you tell me where I should look, I could try to finally balance this out.
 
One of the first things I noticed, and this issue has been for a long time.. the ridiculous amount of HP many NPCs have. Best example are Captains. Its not unusual I have to fight (and turn on godmode) an enemy captain with 200HP+ . This is 1) really problematic towards balance and 2) simply not realistic. And you worked so hard for realism.. No man except maybe Davy Jones and Cursed guys should survive more than 2-3 hits with a blade.. not even the player. That would make meleefights more intense and more realistic. (Big exception: Crew on boarding fights)

I already tried tweaking the stats in Internalsettings for starting HP and HP per Level, also the level-multiplier for enemies.. But the level-multiplier somehow doesnt really work. I set it from 0.66 to 0.000066 without any difference.. the Level and HP-Multiplier for enemies have to be somewhere else I guess. If you tell me where I should look, I could try to finally balance this out.
You should look in officertypes.c
Do note we are working on removing all dependency of the player level for enemies. For ships this should work now, so a merchant should be easier to capture then a navy ship.
 
Merchants are already easier to capture than navy ships anyway, because they have full strength crews at high morale whereas merchants often have understrength crews and generally start at "Poor" morale. Playing as a pirate, I try to avoid naval ships and go after merchants, partly because they're the ones with valuable cargo and partly because they are indeed easier to take. Only if I have a LoM, good melee skills and perks, a good sword and at least battle armour, and if my party officers also have good weapons and armour, will I try my luck with a warship.

But if you're facing a significant enemy, possibly the captain of a ship and certainly some storyline or side quest key characters, then the fight should take a long time. In films, the climactic duel between the main character and the main villain isn't over after a couple of swipes. In reality, you're evenly matched and would be trying for ages to score a worthwhile hit against each other; in games, you're more likely to be exchanging hits so the only way to keep the fight going for a while is with extra HP - though the new mod which allows NPC's to use armour will help here as well.
 
Yes I already noticed that. Though Crews of navy ships are always at like 300HP while my crew (pirate) has like 80HP, altough both ships have equal crewsize. Thats a bit too much imo.

I reversed my tweak yesterday and changed the levelmultiplier to 2.66 as test and strangely now captains etc. have reasonable HPs around 70-100 which fits quite good - weak captain withstand max 1 hit - strong ones up to 3.

I think I found the captains in officertypes.c , but e.g. the bandits in the jungle had this crazy HP too before I switched this levelmultiplier.
 
Yes I already noticed that. Though Crews of navy ships are always at like 300HP while my crew (pirate) has like 80HP, altough both ships have equal crewsize. Thats a bit too much imo.
What were the morales of your crew and the navy crew? I believe that affects HP. Navy (and enemy pirate) ships start off with relatively high morale and if yours isn't equally high then your crew will indeed be at a HP disadvantage. Give them a good pasting with grapeshot to reduce their morale before you board them, then see what their HP looks like.
 
My morale was Good at around 50. Dont know about the morale of the navy crew but since I already damaged their ship pretty hard they couldnt have much left. Anyway I somewhere read that your crew now actually get expirience. So maybe thats why, cause I am still at the beginning
 
Ok - there is something definitly not as intended with the navy crews. Just boarded a spanish navy Brigantine with 8 (!) Guys left and a treacherous Morale, while I had high Morale and about 100 pirates (I reduced the crew multiplier in the ships_init). Still enemy crewmen at the boarding hat over 200HP and slaughtered my crew.. that doesnt seem right at all.

Plundered a merchant Pinnace few minutes earlier - about 20 men left right before the boarding, also treacherous morale - at the boarding the men had around the same HP as my crew which was x4 as big. I think you either buffed navy too hard or nerfed pirate crews too much.
 
@Pillat

I only have a minute, so apologies if the below is only an outline, or has grammatical mistakes.

1) crew level is based on captain level.

2) if you are low level, then your crew is low level, and it will be hard to win boardings. As you gain level, your crew gets stronger. @Pieter Boelen is right the crew doesn't get experience, but they borrow your level so they still go up over time.

3) enemy captain level is based on ship tier and type. As a rough estimate, take 7 times the number of tiers below 8, add (10 if navy, 8 if pirate, 5 if regular, 3 if merchant), add (8 if swashbuckler, 4 if seadog), and you have around the number.

4) a tier 6 navy ship has around a level 24 captain on mariner. A tier 5 merchant ship is about the same.

5) all navy ships have guards as crew, which are fairly standardized across levels, ie consistently good from standardized military training, they get +150hp regardless of level, and get +10 to their level from what it otherwise would be,

6) this is mostly a nerf from previous versions, where guards got +5hp per level and got the +10 levels. If you do the math, with their +10 levels, the +10 levels their captian gets, and the highish tier of navy ships, +150hp usually is substantially lower than the old +5hp per level, and about the same on the smaller navy ships.

In sum, if you are level 10 and attack a tier 6 navy ship, adding the guard and navy captain bonuses, your crew is facing an enemy crew that is going to have about 3x their level and +150 base hp.

You mention you think it has gotten harder to board navy ships--that could be true, but the change would have happened before my time I started playing so I wouldn't know. The only thing changed recently is the 150 base hp they are getting close to what they would get if they got the old +5hp per level multiplied by their high level on the smaller ships. Navy crews should be a bit weaker than before on higher tier ships now, and be rather consistent in the challange they pose from standardized military training.

The only other recent change is they can equip armor, but they should also have weaker weapons on average to balance it from no min cap (armor tables getting better as potential weapon tier gap increases, so they both do less and take less damage), and it sounds like the HP was the problem anyway, so it probaly isn't that.

It sounds like the source of this might not lie in the crews themselves, but your currently low level, and how morale and crew size affects hp.


What I understand from your post: basically you would like to see the morale and relative crew size differences exert a stronger effect on boarding HP, so that even if you are still only level 10 or so and facing crews 3x your crew's level, you can still win with superior numbers.

I think what you want is the functions in LAi_boarding, in the program/ loc_ai folder. Search for where morale and difficulty level go into the big HP difference equation (it is hard to miss), and you can finetune it to achieve the effects you are looking for.

(generally swamped at work and may not be around to answer replies, could be days or weeks before I can pop my head in again, just saw this at top of recent posts and figured I could provide a starting point to understanding what is going on)
 
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Yeah my post basically says that it is completely against logic that a crew consisting of 20 navy soldiers withstand a highly motivated crew of 100 pirates. I will look into the boarding file.
 
So now I am almost level 30 and it calmed down a bit now. If I have more crew as another captain I now clearly see that on the HP .. but I think this is a bit too late? As it is right now, it doesn't make any sense to board another ship until at least level 20
 
I thought we agreed to NOT link boarders to the captain level?

It should be mainly relative crew sizes and morale that affects it.
 
This is true, some thing is going wrong now, even the merchant are hard to handle.
Im Navy captain, level 17, now. The situation is not like before, and have never been
in this way before.
 
Whereas, test-playing my "Ardent" storyline, the boarding of the payroll ship (a tier 6 naval ship with a relatively low level quest character as a captain) was significantly easier than in previous versions. This despite the fact that my officers didn't join in the boarding - which was not my choice, they should have been there, and as they're also quest characters they don't have the normal officer dialog to tell them to stay out of the boarding or to join in the boarding.

The payroll ship crew no longer use standard military weapons (presumably neither do normal naval crew). Instead, they use pretty well anything. And I mean anything. One of them had a spade.
 
Oh yes I was just going to write a story about pix-axes and all the other tools I have to fight against
now! And yes! I have seen those tools on naval ships too.
Another thing: In arcade mod, the ships speed seems to have drop down, slow it goes.
And something is weird with the performance too.
 
And the dialogs in the forts are different now, you can't bribe the guards anymore.
All is in a mess, I guess ;)
 
Another thing: In arcade mod, the ships speed seems to have drop down, slow it goes.
Huh, I don't remember anyone mentioning to change that. @Levis or @Tingyun, any clues?

And something is weird with the performance too.
Are you getting a ridiculous amount of log entries by any chance?
That could potentially harm performance quite a bit.
 
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