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    Maelstrom New Horizons


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where's the motivation?

well, as you said, i always do the quests instead of buying myself reputation. i don't really care that much about my fame either, but i usually manage to get it pretty high. i never devide the plunder.
 
<!--quoteo(post=185805:date=Mar 19 2007, 06:10 PM:name=Pieter Boelen)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Pieter Boelen @ Mar 19 2007, 06:10 PM) [snapback]185805[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
However, the skill points can not be immediately assigned by the player. Instead the player will need to find somebody to teach him or find some place to learn. Or find an item that teaches him, such as a book. This way the player will need money to learn the skills and it will also prevent the player from advancing through the game too quickly.
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I don't really like it, because the message around this is 'the more money you earn, the more skilled you can get if you pay the Pieter Boelen Skill Up Company, all right reserved, copyright microsoft etc."
In my mind you could have very wealthy merchant but with very bad skills, and a pirate as poor as a church mice but being a very good sailor. Money shouldn't give you everything, and certainly not experience.
 
that's a good point too. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/unsure.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":?" border="0" alt="unsure.gif" /> wisdom and skill can't be bought. it would seem natural to me that the player would learn from his experience, and not pay someone to tell him what he actually learned.
 
<!--quoteo(post=185805:date=Mar 19 2007, 05:10 PM:name=Pieter Boelen)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Pieter Boelen @ Mar 19 2007, 05:10 PM) [snapback]185805[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
One important thing you do need to keep in mind is that giving the player more things to do with his money, e.g. invest his money, will give the player additional money in return, possibly making the problem worse instead of solving it.

How about this idea with the skill increases:
- The player gains experience very slowly by using his skills (learning by doing) - same as in Auto Skill System, but perhaps even slower
- For every level-up, the player gains skill points - same as in stock game

However, the skill points can not be immediately assigned by the player. Instead the player will need to find somebody to teach him or find some place to learn. Or find an item that teaches him, such as a book. This way the player will need money to learn the skills and it will also prevent the player from advancing through the game too quickly.

I think this would be quite a realistic system. After all, people can learn on their own without any help, but that works slowly. With help, it goes much quicker, but you do need to invest additional resources (money) into that.

The good part is that doing this probably wouldn't actually require much work. After all: Most code is already present. original skill system and Auto Skill System both already exist, we would just need to make them work together at once, balance them, rewrite a bit of the learning from teachers code and make it so that the skill up items will never increase your skills further than the maximum of your free skill points.
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ARRRGGGG that sounds like the rudder for me !!! Have at "er
 
<!--quoteo(post=185860:date=Mar 20 2007, 09:14 AM:name=morgan terror)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(morgan terror @ Mar 20 2007, 09:14 AM) [snapback]185860[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
i don't really care that much about my fame either, but i usually manage to get it pretty high. i never devide the plunder.
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Simple enough. We make fame more important in the game. The trick is to do it without breaking the current gameplay. Right now, I think the only thing fame is used for is to determine whether you can join the pirates.

The complaint comes up periodically about the player having too much money, and I may be the only player in the entire community that thinks the game is balanced. There's literally no way to limit the amount of money a player can make without breaking something severely. The only option is to give the player something to do with the spare gold.

I have no problems with paying shares and dividing the loot to get my fame up. But some people don't care about fame. So... let's give them a reason to care. Put some nice bonus in the game that's only unlocked at high fame levels. Maybe several bonuses, one for each level. I'll let the community come up with ideas on this one.

Hook
 
To Morgan Terror: Make sure Maximus gets to see your comments on the Auto Skill System! These are very valuable test reports! <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/w00t.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":woot" border="0" alt="w00t.gif" />

<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I don't really like it, because the message around this is 'the more money you earn, the more skilled you can get if you pay the Pieter Boelen Skill Up Company, all right reserved, copyright microsoft etc."
In my mind you could have very wealthy merchant but with very bad skills, and a pirate as poor as a church mice but being a very good sailor. Money shouldn't give you everything, and certainly not experience.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Those are some very valid points and this will certainly need to be thought about thoroughly before trying to change anything again.

I think the player should indeed be able to learn by himself. But how will your skills increase? In reality you learn either by doing or by learning from other information sources (people/books). So that is the way it should be in the game as well, I think. You learn by doing with the Auto Skill System. But I also like the idea of having other ways of learning. I don't like the idea of an actual school or "learning company" though. Instead I would random events or meetings where you can learn. For example: The random character who can teach you that already walk around in the game. But I think the skill increased from these characters should be limited to a maximum of their OWN skill. And what about learning from people you KNOW to have the experience? For example: Learn to trade by one of the merchants. You will need to pay a lot for this knowledge though, of course.

So there would be the following ways of increasing your skills:
- Learning by doing: Auto Skill System. Works slowly, but steadily
- Learning from random people: Characters are randomly generated and can only increase your skill up to their own skill. These people do ask money, but not overly much. Their "cheap" knowledge is balanced by their infrequent generation.
- Learning from preset characters: Learn trading from a merchant, learn repair from the shipwright, perhaps even learn leadership from the governor. This knowledge is always available, as long as you are willing to pay AND are friendly with these characters. You can't learn too much at once either. This to simulate needing to gain real life experience to go with the theoretical knowledge gained from your teacher.
- Learning from books: Simply buy books from the traders and increase your skill that way. However, you don't know if the books are good and whether they increase or decrease your skills. Also: These books should be rare.

This should give enough different ways of increasing your skills and, if done correctly, your skills won't increase too quickly, no matter which ways you use to learn.

About Hook's suggestion: The simplest would be to lock certain things in the game until you have a high enough fame. For example: Good items and ships can't be gotten if you don't have a high enough fame. Or you need a certain fame level to play/continue certain quests. I can see, however, that this is probably not a very popular idea. But it WOULD be the easiest.

What I would personally like is, if we work on adding personalities to the characters in the game, your fame will determine the way these characters treat you. Some will envy you, others will welcome you. Some might try to kill you*. It might also influence the loyalty of your crew. I can imagine crew and officers would be much more loyal to a famous captain that to a captain nobody's ever heard of. So I think this could make for some major gameplay improvements, both in terms of giving money and plundering some use, but also to add interest to the game in terms of character interaction. At the moment characters are just completely personalityless, except for the scripted quest characters. As good as our game already is, this is one thing I think is severly lacking and results in the player never being truly involved in the game.

* Have you noticed how the assisins currently in the game seem to have no relation with your fame at all? "I heard someone with a lot of influence put a prize on your head." Right. I only just started the game and already somebody with a lot of influence wants me dead. Perhaps these attacks should only occur if you have a high enough fame.
 
on it!

one thing about buying skills though that might make it interesting is that it might be someone trying to make off with your cash, realizing that you can't buy skill. (not sarcastic, but maybe something he would say when he steals your money?)
 
<!--quoteo(post=185896:date=Mar 20 2007, 07:42 PM:name=Hook)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Hook @ Mar 20 2007, 07:42 PM) [snapback]185896[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->

The complaint comes up periodically about the player having too much money, and I may be the only player in the entire community that thinks the game is balanced. There's literally no way to limit the amount of money a player can make without breaking something severely. The only option is to give the player something to do with the spare gold.

Hook
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No you're not the only one - but my hair is the same colour as yours ! <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/whistling.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":wp" border="0" alt="whistling.gif" />

As to what to do with the cash - how about buying rank ... after all that was the custom in those days.
Very often an inexperienced officer was found to have purchased his position - having little skill to match it.
Just a thought.
 
believe me, i've already seen that happen many times. mainly with myself, as i simply bought a huge ship and some good officers and made it easy for myself. until i was good enough, then i would simply kick those expensive officers off the ship and sail mostly on my own.
 
As far as investing in ports go....who says that you you MUST make money by investing ? It could be you are investing in the port so that it can produce better items and upgrades along with better and mote varied ships and cannon . Investing in the economy would bring more and better items for sale....ans all this could be lost when the Pirates or France or Spain Etc decide to take he port....Forcing you to either protect it or invest in defense for the port...JUST ..like Age of Pirates..a little backwards engineering .


The important thing is it GIVES you a reason to go earn gold .

And earning Fame and Tiltles ...by earning gold is a brilliant Idea..in fact add that to certain weapons and armor only being available to high level fame in mechant/ war / ??? skill ....all things that require you invest time and money to earn .


Every game gets to a point that youu are running out of thing to do ...except those with dynamic living economies .

and persistent opposing forces...out to get a piece of your gold for themselves..
 
Morgan Terror's idea of the random dudes stealing your money would also be a good idea. That adds a risk to trying to improve your skills for little money. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/icon_mrgreen1.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":cheeky" border="0" alt="icon_mrgreen1.gif" />
 
it might seem smart that the player invests in a port, but it seems a little odd to do so. nevertheless, it would indeed add to the gameplay. but how to code something like that in?

how big should the risk be of someone trying to scam you? should it be bigger than the chance to learn or smaller? it would make sense that the chance would be bigger, as i don't see that many people teaching something to the player for money. however, it might a bit too annoying when the chance is too high. maybe this way of gaining skills should be somehow combined with a slow increase rate for the autoskill mod? the automatic increase functioning as a backup for the learning of skills from NPC's. maybe the learning of skills in this manner should replace the simply buying of skills that you can do at the moment. or maybe the scamming should simply be added to the current system of buying skills.
 
BTW, there are already settings in the game which enable you to make the game somewhat more expensive and challenging. They are hidden in program\internalSettings.h, in the section

// DAILY UPDATE CONSTANTS ---------------


For example there is

#define FOOD_PER_CREW 0.01 // FLOAT - qty of wheat eaten per day per crewmember

If you increase that you will not only have to spend more money on food for your crew, but you will also need more hold space to store the stuff. Or you will have to resupply more often.
Can be quite a logistics challenge.

Another one is

#define RUM2_SCALE 1.1 // FLOAT - ratio nominal morale is scaled by when rum rations are normal

Decrease that to below 1.0 and your crew's morale will decrease daily if you don't constantly do something to keep those spoiled loafers happy. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/whippa.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":whipa" border="0" alt="whippa.gif" /> Often there will be no other way than a money handout.
A setting of 0.5 results in a moraledrop of about 2 per day.

And of course there is a setting for the monthly crew pay
#define BASE_CREW_PAY 12 // INT - Base salary gold paid to each crew member, not adjusted for skills, perks & difficulty.




As for investing in a port, sorry to promote myself <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/whistling.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":wp" border="0" alt="whistling.gif" /> , but with the Buildingset you can invest money into ANY place if you build yourself a humble home, a fortified base or a flourishing settlement. (Provided you can stand the looks of my models <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/icon_mrgreen1.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":cheeky" border="0" alt="icon_mrgreen1.gif" /> )
And if you want to make that more expensive and/or more profitable: the explanations how to change those values are included in the codefiles.


Just an info for those who want to make the existing game more expensive, not a negative comment on the proposals raised here <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":)" border="0" alt="smile.gif" />
 
I'd like to jump in with a philosophical counterpoint. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/bookish.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":mm" border="0" alt="bookish.gif" />

Pieter and others have suggested closer ties to the officers, more interactivity with the crew, and a good deal of randomness. The trouble is, when you try to engineer these features, you quickly hit an upper bound. To illustrate, consider two other Bethesda games, Daggerfall and Morrowind, both of which were a delight to play.

Daggerfall had innumerable randomly-generated dungeons; lots of towns with both functional and non-functional buildings. Characters and townsfolk genereated on the fly. After a while - about 4 to 6 months for me - the randomness is simply repetition of very familiar patterns. "Go to guild X, get quest to visit the Y-house and confront character-Z". This makes sense - the content-generation algorithms were essentially string-substitution into templates. After you bought a house, and a boat, and summoned a Daedra or two, what's left but to wander the world and go on the occasional rampage punctuated with cloned guards shouting "Halt...halt-halt-halt...halt-halt...". Sort of like running from the law in England where cops don't carry guns <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/razz.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":razz" border="0" alt="razz.gif" />

Morrowing "solved" this problem by randomly generating *nothing* except for a few generic combats. Instead, they hand-crafted enough content that most players would feel satisfied they got their dubloons worth. Short of making PotC multiplayer (but please don't do this), the best way to make it feel original is not with more feature (but please keep adding them), but by creating a new campaign. We've all worked through the original PotC campaign that ends at Khael Roa? Well, it's time for an optional total conversion that is 1) Build14 compatible and 2) crafting a different plot, perhaps with a different hero of a different age.

Thoughts?
 
the main quest is being re-written to fit the PotC movies and the story before the movies. it's impossible to make this game multiplayer.
 
It is indeed true that randomization can eventually become quite predictable. This can be seen in the random quests in PotC: Sink pirate ship, deliver trade goods, find treasure, etc. Once you've done one quest of each type, you basically have done them all.

What I am proposing is something different though. I want to add personalities to the characters in the game. This can only be done by giving random characteristics to the characters, on which the characters will then react. If you add enough different characteristics, there can be almost infinite different personalities in the game, which can then result in lots of different situations. Examples of characteristics could be "trustworthyness", "loyalty", "alcoholic", etc. Imagine that you hire a good officer. You know his stats, but not his character. It turns out he is an alcoholic who ends up in brawls aboard your ship quite frequently. This might cause a morale drop. Should you fire him? He might be quite a loyal officer. Or how about hiring a good officer who never seems to cause trouble at all. He might be plotting a mutiny without you noticing!

Imagine the possibilities of such a mod. You'd need to get to know your officers' personalities (for example by talking to your crew, inviting your officers to dinner in your cabin or simply by paying attention to what your officers say and don't say to you) and find out if you want to keep them, promote them or fire them. This would al have effect on the other officers and the crew. If you don't pay attention to your officers' personalities, you might just end up all alone in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean.

Such a mod would probably be quite complicated to make, but I think it might be a way to add much, much more interest to the game.
 
Some months ago we were indeed talking about what should be done to have more personalised officers...
In my opinion the same job should be done on the merchants you escort. I don't know if in the build 14 betas the situation have been improved, but basicly here are some idears :

- severals possiblity of meeting a merchant, other than talking to a tavernkeeper (in the street, already sitting in a tavern, in the store, by asking the harbor master...)

- differents type of merchants, for exemple :
~class 1 : honest & poor
~class 2 : rich, with a strong ship
~class 3 : captain working for ship owners, buying and selling cargo for his masters
~class 4 : scoundrels who tries to sell/buy contraband goods (like the suspicious ones that want to be excorted to Leviathan's rock...)
each merchant's 'class' would have specific clothes.

- different way of reacting to you :
~reputation : if bad, class 1 and 2 won't follow you, but on the opposite class 4 will
~whereas you already excort a merchant : that's a positive point for class 1 & 2, negative for class 4
~whereas a storeman asked you to deliver a cargo : class 3 can have two reactions, you can be considered as a collegue (+), or a concurant (-).
~your trade skill : if its low, you would be considered just like an escort. If it's sufficiant, merchants considers you as a trader like them, so again as a collegue (+), or a concurant (-), depending on the merchant.

- different events :
for exemple having problems with the coast guards if you escort a class 4...

- if the merchant enjoyed your escort at the end of the journey, you could met him at the tavern and drink with him. Then randomly :
~he gives you free advices on trading (increase a little the % trading skill)
~he gives you some 'tricks' of the trade - my father got rich trading wine from that island to this one, etc : the existing rumors
etc...


At least all journeys wouldn't be alike this way...




Now about the idea of a new main quest, I totaly agree with you Vaustein. (I would add that it would be interesting to have the hero not serving England for a change...)
I'd like the idea of a different age too. Personally I would enjoy the possibility to have the game running in the XVI century : no man-o-wars or ship of the line, strong Spaniards and Portugueses, French and Englishmen being mostly corsairs, the fighting mode being somehow different (more armors, even for French & Englishmen), pearls, gold & silver being more important and some goods not existing yet (rum for exemple)... We could follow the indepedence war of Holland against the Spanish Crown. That would make an interesting plot for a new main quest.
 
meh. i don't really feel anything for a new period. this is a game about the 17th century, not the 16th. if you want the 16th, pick a different game.

harr! this is just mean! finally got the best icon, and it dissapears! <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/mybad.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":facepalm" border="0" alt="mybad.gif" />
 
On the contrary, I think it would be good if we could choose the time period we want at the begining of the game, from the XVI to the XVIII. But for the moment it would require too much work.

One more thing, Morgan terror - watch your tongue sometimes. 'this is a game about the 17th century, not the 16th. if you want the 16th, pick a different game.' One could feel easily offended with those kind of words.
 
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