Ship combat needs to be revamped

@brothanigus

Let us raise the ladder. Have woodplanks not fully seal a hole, if you want to repair your ship fully then you NEED to go to an outpost. Nerf the amount of water a bucket can carry.

I will never agree to raising ladders. It fundamentally breaks too much in this game. Stealth in any form is outright removed, it also pretty much screws over smaller crews getting knocked off their ship with no means to rejoin it outside of a mermaid.

Why does the current meta demand boarding? Because its out of necessity. Ships are too easy to maintain being afloat. One of the simplest approaches to shake up the meta is nerfing that ship maintenance balance. Rather then nerf boarding, give incentive to remain on the ship. By making water flow faster or buckets less efficient, you make a crew want to remain on their ship or risk sinking. This makes the game put more value in navel over boarding while keeping boarding as an option. The goal should be to push a crew past a point of not being able to keep up with bailing and repairing. Right now, that point of no return is just too hard to get through normal means besides boarding.

The whole reason boarding is effective is due to interrupting that repair/bail cycle. Give other ways to interrupt that and boarding becomes less dominant. You can change a meta without outright breaking the game.

@brothanigus the game is not boring and pointless PVE is the main part of the game and like someone else said let’s say we are on a duo slope and we raise the ladders to avoid boarders and someone shoot a good cannon and we are off the ship... then what besides a mermaid you have no way to get back on. The boarding meta is a good meta. Not everyone is on galleons and jumps off of the ship with blunder bombs and unless your a good cannon shot your dead on the ladders if they are camping it so your 9/10 thing is mostly false especially if your fighting a brig or a galleon it’s more of a 4/10 that’s if your on a galleon your chances of actually getting on a ship via ladder are quite small just due to the fact that people sit their with blunders waiting and even if you do get on almost guaranteed at least 1 to 2 people dead due to ladder campers. So don’t talks about that and gold is the main currency you buys cloths and cosmetics with it and if you have ever one in the game cause that’s possible go for commendations got all of those done as well reset your character and do it again. I’m not trying to sound like a a**hole but the way you describe the game made it sound like it was very bad which it’s not there are so many parts of this game including PVE and I don’t know if your know this but without pve there would be no pvp and every event and boys he is considered PvE there are dozens of events scattered around hundreds of areas across the map maybe stop doing PvP and do some Pve.

What so hard about, loading cannon, aim, fire and hope to hit said ship?
What needs to be revamp about something so easy?

If you make having your ship fully repair by only outposts.....then Skeleton ship battles will be death wish for anyone.

Its not about running out of wood, Ive seen people sink with a full stock ship because they couldnt do it quick enough or just had to many holes and not enough buckets.

It simple down to tactics, planning, player communication and knowing what needs to be done. How much time a ship takes to fill with the holes you have.

Maybe, if you yourself put a limit or handicap? No boarding ships....just straight up cannon fire. You have to set these limits.

Getting aboard someone's ship is certainly important but to say that it is everything is nonsense. It sounds like your crew is only relying on boarding if you send 3 people at a time to do it which can be effective but is by no means the only way to do it. You can do the job with 1 mabye 2 and still have the rest shooting cannons or maintaining the ship. Or just don't send anyone, with chain shot, fire, blunderbombs, cursed cannonballs, you can easily sink a ship without anyone boarding or it coming down to running out of boards which i don't think decides that many fights.

Also if you guys are good at hand to hand that's great but if you fail to board or are all killed then you've left one guy on your boat to steer, repair, work sails, cannon, anchor, defend ladders. Doesn't seem like a good or safe strategy

I think ship combat is fine.

Sure the waves can be anoying at times, while fire'ing the cannon on a sloop, but that is just my bad aim lol.

@sot-player30 said in Ship combat needs to be revamped:

@brothanigus Ship combat is the most balanced type of combat in the game. It doesn't need any changes as of now.

agree. I mainly naval combat ships down for pvp, when solo. naval pvp is great, just wish we could get rid of cursed cannonballs.

if I'm struggling with a fight, I just spam curse balls til I win.

@nabberwar

Raise the ladder??? Sure then Introduce other ways to get on board.

Every use a rowboat full of powder kegs and load it on the back of galleons..most fun I ever had.

Create new ways to get on board ships.
Two daggers and pull your self up.

Climb the anchor chain.

Shoot yourself over with a canon shot and land on the deck..most crazy battle I ever had was doing one of those. We where a new spawn only had the 20 wood. Guess what I stole the last 5 wood off the enemy boat...so yeah if your ill prepared or you use all your supplies something bad happens.

Most powerful weapon right now is the chain shot.

I destroy galleons now days. You park behind the galleon Aim high at the masts and shoot 3 chains shots.All 3 shots hit 3 mast down.

Your crew then just unloads shots into it.
Only thing to stop us if the Galleon spins and broadsides us.
If their player or players jump off to board us no one is bailing and repairing the boat it’s sunk. No respawns for them.

Mate you’ve barely played the game. When you’ve played it for a while you understand that you can easily sink a ship without boarding, and it’s easy to keep off boarders

I think there's a lot of people misreading OP. There can absolutely be improvements to ship-to-ship combat, and it's silly to argue that the systems they have now are perfect.

Things I think would improve ship combat, with proper tuning:

1. Fire should be far more problematic - it needs to damage the ship more. At the same time, though, it would have to be harder to set. If you can get aboard and firebomb or keg the ship, that shoudl be a real fire problem. But shooting firebombs out of your canon would be too easy.

2. leaving your ship should be riskier. You are right that the board and spawn camp play isn't necessary, but it is easy against mid tier or lower crews so it's a favored tactic. I would love to see ships be much more vulnerable while empty, but they'd have to tune that well.

I'm sure there are other elements that could help too.

@cptphteven

Fire should be far more problematic - it needs to damage the ship more. At the same time, though, it would have to be harder to set. If you can get aboard and firebomb or keg the ship, that shoudl be a real fire problem. But shooting firebombs out of your canon would be too easy.

If fire becomes more problematic, then in exchange ways of starting fires should be less available. This translates to fire-bombs becoming more rare. While include making is spread less as well. If the change is made, it just does damage quicker with less spreading.

I'm hesitant on this, because putting out fires isn't really enjoyable. Not in the sense that its hard to do, but just tedious and dull with its removal.

leaving your ship should be riskier.

How? Are we talking that a ship docked near an island that people have a voyage at should be at risk? Or, are we talking along the lines that boarders leaving their ship to board another ship should be a riskier play?

If its the boarding one, I think simply making bailing or plank repairing less efficient will put a damper on boarding. This would require more hands to fix damage, it becomes quite costly to risk leaving the ship to attack instead of focusing on keeping your own ship afloat.

@nabberwar said in Ship combat needs to be revamped:

How? Are we talking that a ship docked near an island that people have a voyage at should be at risk? Or, are we talking along the lines that boarders leaving their ship to board another ship should be a riskier play?

If its the boarding one, I think simply making bailing or plank repairing less efficient will put a damper on boarding. This would require more hands to fix damage, it becomes quite costly to risk leaving the ship to attack instead of focusing on keeping your own ship afloat.

The latter. Leaving your ship mid combat should put you more vulnerable than it currently does. It's tricky, though - I don't really know how to make that work. Maybe adjusting the respawn timer so dying to PvP off ship takes longer to respawn than dying to the same on ship.?

@brothanigus said in Ship combat needs to be revamped:

It looks cool, it feels good, but it plays so horribly that there's no reason to do it unless you have a crew of three or more men.

Ship combat in this game boils down to whomever runs out of wood first or whomever boards the ship first. It's a frustrating mess and it's not fun to win or loose. Me and my buddies always leave one person at the wheel while the other three launch out of the cannons to board the enemy ship with 5 blunderbombs each, you do this and you'll win 9/10 times. Being a crack shot means NOTHING in this game.

Let us raise the ladder. Have woodplanks not fully seal a hole, if you want to repair your ship fully then you NEED to go to an outpost. Nerf the amount of water a bucket can carry.

I'm trying so hard to enjoy this game but ugh, everything about SoT is just boring or pointless. PVP is really the only fun I get out this game, PVE is basically none-existent and there's ZERO reason to collect gold.

looks like some one lost a fight or it's a joke post? anyways no no no ship battles are fun and if you want realism go play blazing sails or ac black flag

@emzx99 said in Ship combat needs to be revamped:

@nabberwar "repair/bail cycle" One issue out of several, actually. Boarding is the joke strat. Player vs plyer combat is inherently flawed, no balance patch with the current uses and physics behind many tools will fix it. They built themselves into a corner. This game is probably already dying as is. Arena is a ghost town that never worked, pve is more boring than ever with all of 4 ish things to do with different skinned events in slightly different order. Ship combat is probably the best functioning aspect of this game. But even it has game breaking problems that will decide a fight before any player injects some sort of skill. Very questionable game design.

this game isn't dyeing Mr. speedrunner