BOARDING SKELETONS

@offic3rravioli said in BOARDING SKELETONS:

It's almost a year since the release of The Cursed Sails, which brought us the skeleton ships. Oh, how quickly the time passes! Anyway, I'd love to take this opportunity to talk about my new idea, which is: boarding skeletons!

Yep, that's right, we've been boarding their ships for almost a year now, and now they'd like to strike back!

Now, there are two cool ways I could think of on how this could be done.

1. With the help of a brand new tool for our ships (and theirs!), the Boarding Rope, we can swing from one ship to the other! And the skeletons can do the same!
   Also, the addition of ropes are not exclusive to ships, they started to appear all around the sea of thieves as well, granting a new way of traversing the islands...

Since I guess this is probably pretty difficult to develop, mainly the skeletons using the rope to get on our ship, this second option was thought as a more doable implementation of boarding enemies, but just as awesome!

2. Remember those Coral Skeletons we fought while discovering the Tall Tales? Well turns out they are basically regular skellies, just with some coral all over themselves, go figure. So I thought I could make them a little bit more.. interesting.
   As a new encounter while sailing (like megs, the Kraken and ambushing skeleton ships), Coral Skeletons will climb on board of your vessel when you least expect it, that's right: they'll climb the hull of your ship from the depths, then get on board and start swinging and shooting. Imagine sailing through the fog when this happens!
   They could even make it so there's a new type of skeleton that can pick up your loot and return it to the sea.. just to add some spice to the event. Managing to defeat the ambush will grant some special "coral skulls" that can be traded to the OoS like the others.

So that was it. Personally I'd love for both of the options to be added, but I'd like to hear what do you think first!

love the rope idea mate

personally i think island skeletons have always lacked the ability to win. we have an infinite amount of re-spawns because of out trusty ship, which cannot be sunk by the skeletons unless they have a cannon. the only thing that made them difficult was their flawless aim, which was recently nerfed.

i think that if in someway they could board and maybe sink our ship from within (only when their stolen loot is aboard), that would make them more of a challenge.

I hate to pop your bubble, but the AI cannot transition between ship to shore, and vice versa.

This is why pets were postponed, even the parrot had insufficient pathfinding and needed to teleport on/off boat, breaking immersion.

Skeletons don't swim or climb ladders.

@barnabas-seadog I never mentioned any transition between ship and shore, only ship to ship (in my n.1 option). And even then I said that this could only be exclusive to players, since the AI for skeletons to do something like that is just not there.
In the second option, I talk about skeletons climbing the hull, not the ladders, of your ship, but they are not the skeletons you fought on land. They just spawn already under your ship, then with a new animation they climb the hull, get on board and start fighting. I'm not a dev, but this seems to be somewhat doable, in line with what was done with other "ambush-like" additions like the skeleton ships or megs.
While having regular skellies be able to run from the shore to the ship and get on board would be really awesome, I agree with you that it would be really hard to pull off. But that was not my idea anyway.

EDIT: also, I'd like to add that I think that my second option should be much easier to implement (again, not a dev), since all they would have to do is make the new climbing animation and make the skeletons spawn. The fighting AI would be the same, and the pathing on the players' ships would be the same they use on the skeleton ships, only thing they will have to do is the pathing for the Brigantine, which I guess they will have to do anyway when they eventually add the Skeleton Brigantine to the game.