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Solved Salary, Divide the Plunder and Leadership Skill
- Thread starter Nightblade
- Start date
Very true. It should be doable in all ways, but not be too difficult.
I'd prefer also if you can't rely on just one method.
Apparently not. Just checked the code for that in PROGRAM\Characters\CharacterUtilite.c . That would indeed make sense to add though.
The code for it looks quite advanced though and, having never played on Divide the Plunder mode, I'm not familiar of how it works.
I can easily add a Leadership increase into the void DividePlunder(ref PChar) function, but how should it be calculated?
More successful expeditions should yield more Leadership, right? How is the success level measured exactly?
Looks like there is some GetCrewShareRatioC(PChar) which looks like something I can work with for it.
But how to balance it so that it is neither underpowered nor overpowered compared to the Leadership bonus for paying salary on time?
I suppose successful expeditions should give more Leadership XP on average than just paying the crew by salary,
because you need more Leadership to be able to handle a crew not being paid regular salary. Right?
Yeah, well how to do that.
I have seen this divide plunder system in 2 games now, wich is our modded PotC, and Sid Meyers Pirates. I think both are very similar, probably because a modder has been inspired ... just a guess.
Basically, a crew that signs articles expects to accumulate plunder, simulated by crews money. The more they get in the shorter time, the more happy they are. Note that it is not only the amount of money, but also time plays an important role.
Sid Meyers went even a step further by letting the crew "getting anxious to divide plunder" after a certain time. They don't want to plunder the caribbean for years, but want to get and spend their money in the typical pirate style. I really much liked this.
When dividing plunder, both captain and crew get their share of it, and the more the crew gets, the happier it will be.
Now when putting in any reward in terms of leadership bonus, I'd take both the number of wealth accumulated into account, as well as the time.
But I have no idea about a formula for that.
But wait ... if I remember correctly, you get an information when dividing plunder about how happy the crew is with their share. Perhaps any bonus of leadership or XP can be based on that?
I will look into that as soon I find a loanshark ....
Have not yet been at a loanshark, but a new day has begun, and I got this message:
"Each crewman's share is now 17.526 * average for this time"
So as I guessed, there already is a parameter for what a crew would expect and what would make them happy. Maybe this can be used to modify a reward in terms of leadership when dividing plunder.
I also thought about the overall amount.
I would roughly scale it the same size as for achieving a pirate hunt quest. I think this is comparable to a pirate run to get some booty. I give an example:
What I actually did was approaching to Hispaniola, spotting a spanish lugger, and taking her. Nothing big. But it was fully loaded with wares I sold at the nearest port, sold the lugger too, and git about 50000 gold. That seems to make me crew happy. Now I could divide plunder, get a small reward in leadership, and do the same again, as a navy character would now hnt the next pirate for governor and glory.
Indeed I'm going to have to locate that value and see about using that for the calculation.
The way I'd figure it is that we should compare to Salary mode though. There you get 1000 XP the first time and 10000 XP maximum per month.
So if you're REALLY successful with Divide the Plunder, you should get more than 10000 XP per month.
But since Divide the Plunder doesn't even work with months, that'll be hard to figure out.
A Pirate Hunting quest gives 1500 XP. UNLESS I decide to recode it to the money-based version as per the currently unused KillPirateQuestDone() .
If we go with an average of 1500 XP, I suppose that would be multiplied with that share value you saw on the worldmap.
In your case, that would be 26289 XP. That seems like rather a lot, no?
Also, as I see it, if you can achieve a longer expedition while maintaining an above average share for your crew,
that should give you more Leadership than a short expedition where you get WELL above the average.
That does make it more complicated again though.
Aye, it's difficult.
At last, I just checked in to a Loanshark. Unfortunately, I was wrong, there was no comment about how happy my crew is with their share. That memory must have been from Sid Meyers Pirates then. Oh well, it seem's I am too fond of pirate style games at al.
I just wonder why that is so ...
Back to subject ...I think balancing would be hard. If the reward is well based on the frequency of dividing plunder, people may end up dividing after any succesfull capture. To base it on time is difficult, for other than in Sid Meyers Pirates, there is no limit of time. Time had a completely different value in that game. If I may explain ...
There, you had a big quest running in background, that was to find and rescue all members of your family. That was one hell of work, and very time consuming. So, building up your strength and ship and such took years of time. Building up a network of informers throughout the caribbeam too years of time (most of them being governor's daughters in various ports, whos support you got by dancing with them and giving presents to them. Lots of work. Also, travels took month there, so you had a very limited supply of time. Many of me pirates ended up old and broken, long before they achieved their goals. Age had an effect on health and quickness of action and reaction while fencing - and that was a huge effect.
To come to the point, dividing plunder there took half a year of time, 'cause your crew now went into the taverns and did not come back unless they spent their money. This effectively prevented players from dividing plunder too frequently - but unfortunately, we don't have a mechanic likje this in PotC.
I think I may have sailed too far ... sorry ... if you want to give it a try, I suggest to start with a reward comparable to the reward for merchant or escort missions or pirate hunts, and modify that very sligthly by how happy the crew is with their share. The number from my example was 17 times ... perhaps, the number shall be divided by at least 10. So, a 10th part of the crews happiness-with-share-multiplicator should be a start, what do you think?
I've watched the Let's Play series of Sid Meier's Pirates, so I know a bit about how that game works. Unfortunately the person who played it never divided the plunder until the very end.
In PotC, I'm pretty sure there is some relation to how long the expedition takes. There is a lot of code related to that.
And every time after dividing the plunder, a lot of your crew leave. So I don't think you can do it over and over in a short time period; wouldn't be very economic.
Anyway, I've got some other things on my to-do list as well, so I'm not sure when I'll get to doing this. Maybe tomorrow; maybe later.
I'll see if I can figure out where to put the code and which factors it should take into account. Then we can deal with the actual values later on, I hope.
But if we can code in a dependency on the expedition length, with longer expeditions giving higher Leadership increase, that would at least be a reason to not divide the plunder too often.
Moved the Divide the Plunder Leadership skill increase discussion into this thread. I'll look into that soon; tomorrow if I can make it.
In the meantime, I still need a final answer on whether the Salary Leadership skill increase is balanced properly in the Beta 2.4 WIP files or not.
I did play that one game as french counterpart of Jack Aubrey purely on salary. I remember at level 15 or so I reached leadership 6 or maybe 7. I did no quests except an occasional pirate hunting. So, I think this is balanced. Perhaps it goes up too quick if combined with excessive quest playing, like in Nathanial Hawke or Jack Sparrow storylines, I can't say that. But I think there are some players who don't really care about quests, but still need to get their leadership up.
Don Lasagnetti is working on putting sidequests in the Free Play storylines though. That should make a bit of a difference too.
In the stock game, you would need a character level of 45 to get all your skills maxed out. Should we attempt to mimic that progression with the Auto Skill System?
Leadership and luck are tied together in that when you talk to the townfolk they go up together. I deliberately do not increase my leadership in order to make it easier to increase luck. In this game I have tried old setting, 1000 and now 500. I'm thinking about 300 next because leadership is 7 and luck is 6 at level 13. I just failed a smuggling run, so need higher luck yet.
Level 45? Sure but the only way to do that is with teachers for all abilities including luck and especially melee.
Well, what I'm saying is that in the original game you had 10 skills, each of which can be increased by 9 points. That is 90 points total.
You get 2 skills for each level, so you'd be maxed out only at level 45. So should we try to approximate that "2 skills points per level increase" too?
Ahh. So after one skill gets maxed out any increase to it would go to another unused skill? Like when Commerce is 10-10 any increase to it would go to Grappling which for me would be 3-4?
Uh? Wha? No, Commerce skill increases will only increase Commerce and nothing else.
To be honest, I never ever cared about maxing out all skills. What are officers good for?
But there are some skills of crucial importance, such as fencing and defence, that I want to be maxed out as soon as possible. Same is with leadership (I am captain, right?) and sailing (yeah, did I mention, I am captain?).
I think I never ever played a character above level 30.
Uh? Wha? No, Commerce skill increases will only increase Commerce and nothing else.
Then how will you max out any of the other skills? I was using commerce as an example since that is the most important one to me and grappling the least. How do you propose to approximate the other system where you choose which skills to increase?
Skyworm: The game actually becomes fun once you get beefed up to where you can compete with the AI on an equal basis. Just imagine a game where you should almost always win a one on one fight but will almost always lose when outnumbered 2-3 to one, unless you get creative.
I think he is referring to the non-automated skill system of the original game. So, with 10 skills available,. and getting 2 skill points per level, you 44 levels (=88 skill points) to max any skill from 1 to 10.
Errm ... is that related to the fencing system or to this subject?
I am very fine with the automated skill system as it is, with very few exceptions. One exception being the leadership skill ... this one is really hard without doing quests, but hopefully this is about to be changed soon.
I was suggesting that you play a game long enough to get to the higher levels where it is fun. I just grind through the first 15 levels as quickly as possible.
I'm just saying that around level 25, for example, you leveled up 24 times. So you should then have up and about 24*2+10=58 out of 100 skill points.
Is that sort-of how it works out in the game?
You were playing on Divide the Plunder mode, right? I'll have a lookey into that today.
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