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Ship Classes

Doober

Doober

Buccaneer
Storm Modder
Other than the amount of work that would have to go into it, is there anything in the game that would prevent us from rating ships as they actually were in real life? Class 1 would be ships 100 guns and over, 3rd rate would be 64-80 guns, 6th rate 20-28 guns, etc. All ships below 20 guns would be considered unrated and could be rated at class 7. Would reworking all that cause any problems with how the game generates ships, especially the class 7 ships. I have been trying to get all the ships to be historically accurate and thought that if we had them rated correctly, it would make alot more sense.
 
You'd be welcome to do that. It might mess up gamebalancing with smaller ships becoming less likely to appear,
but we'll find out soon enough after you did that. Maybe it'll work fine.

While we're at the subject, I would very much like the ships' .sname attribute to be changed,
so that there's much less ship types. Have a quick look through this thread if you will:
http://forum.piratesahoy.net//index.php?/topic/13529-new-shipyard-interface
 
It is a rather ambitious project, but I am working on renaming all the ships to their historical names and streamlining the naming system, adjusting caliber to the appropriate historical weight, correcting points of sail, correcting crew amounts and tonnage, and fixing all the ships that don't have icons on various screens. I have gotten part way into it when the classes issue came up and I figured I would ask as it would be bad to do all this work and then have it not generate class 7 ships and have to redo everything.
 
Wow... sounds like you're doing an INCREDIBLE job on ships_init.c! MUCH appreciated! :bow
Class 7 ships do show up, but not so very frequently, I think.
Right now it's mostly tartanes and such and you do encounter those.

What kind of ships would end up as unclassed/class 7?
If the worst comes to the worst, we can probably recode the ship selection code
so that class 7 ships DO show up more frequently.
 
small question, if you are changing the crew amount of ships to be historical, i guess there going to alot less, wouldnt that make the game alot harder?
(you loose alot of crew in some battles and by lowering the max amount of crew it doesnt exactly get easier to preform seabattles)
 
Of course there's a difference between the maximum amount and the optimum amount.
The optimum amount depends on the number of cannons and such and is usually lower than maximum.
The ship will run optimally at or over the optimum amount, but going over optimum can help to sustain losses.
Hook once found some ships where the maximum amount is BELOW the optimum.
In that case, the ship will never run on optimum amount.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we can have the maximum values higher than the historical values.
The maximum would indicate the number of crew you can cramp aboard the ship, but everybody will be stacked together.
If we ever add in diseases, the chance of sickness amongst the crew would be higher in that case too.
 
Some questions:

The classes were for the military ships, what should be done with merchant ships? Should I place them in the corresponding class in accordance with the number of guns? Should they all be lumped in with unrated ships?

Another issue is that we currently have no class 2 warships which were ships with 90-98 guns. They weren't used often in real life, but if we are going to properly classify all the ships, we should probably have at least one or two. We have a boatload of class 1 ships, should I pull a couple cannon off of a few of them and take them down to a class 2? If I just reduce the cannon number in the ships_init file will that be sufficent or will it still fire with 100 guns and just use 90 ammo? Any opinions?

I agree that there should be 8 classes as we wouldn't want tartanes to generate as often as a sloop or brig
 
Putting in merchant ships with the unrated/class 7 ships seems like a bad idea to me;
I think for the classification we shouldn't distinguish between navy and merchant ships.
Otherwise generating the encounters properly is going to be REAL complicated.

I think maybe you should move away from 100 percent historical accuracy.
For the class 2 ships, I think that the original manowars and Endeavour-style ships should be class 1
and battleships and lineships and such should be class 2.

What kind of ships would end up being class 7 (or 8 if we add that)?
If even brigs and sloops end up in class 7, there's going to be a HUGE number of ships in that class.
In that case, we indeed should add another class (probably NOT easily done) or have to revert to
some slight historical inaccuracies again by moving some of the bigger ships some classes up... :?
 
Well, I discovered the the Victory/Endeavour style ships only have 90 guns on them even thoug the ships file has them listed at 102. I will list them at Second Rate warships.

I will get a list together so you can see how many ships are in each level. Class 7 would be unrated ships, class 8 would be tartanes and gunboats. If we can get class 7 ships to generate like class 6 ships do currently, we should see them alot, even though there will be alot of ships in the category. It will be all the ships with less than 20 guns. The Class 6 actually encompasses a huge number of ships because so many ship are overgunned such as the schooners, brigs, snows, etc. In real life, those ships all carried 8-12 guns at most and in the game, they are carrying 20-22.
 
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