Elheru Aran wrote:I wouldn't use ransoms as part of the game personally, I think it'd be likely to piss off too many players.
Well the notion was a fixed price ransom linked to the skill of the capture, not set yourown price. And I think players would net fucking love this.
But you're right, crew would get fairly important there. Perhaps use something along the lines of the Commanders and have more options per ship. If you capture a ship, you become vulnerable to getting shot at by ships allied to the ship you're capturing, and potentially THEY could capture YOU if you don't have enough Crew, yours isn't well trained, whatever.
Another thing is while it varied by navy and date, ship commanders have some control over how the ship was armed, and what kinds of ammo it carried. So on the one had hand you could arm a ship with as many 24pdrs firing chainshot as possible to knock down rigging, making closing to board easier, while as a different option one could mount maximum light guns to suppress the enemy at close range, or heavy guns to try to sink her.
I was thinking about it and realized that there's enough variety that you're looking at millennia worth of various ships, so it'd be better to have separate categories with only a few ships. Say 'Ancient Mediterranean' for your galley battles with maybe three ships in increasing size/complexity, the largest having artillery; 'Spanish Armada' starting with galleys and ending up with galleons, you could mix this up with pirates for extra fun; 'Rule Britannia' mode for the Age of Sail proper. [/quote]
In any era it wouldn't be hard to have 6-8 progressive types, 10 might be tricky though. 3 ships might not be enough to keep people interested.
Of course we could EASILY get to 10 types of ship if we simply ignore reality like wargaming does anyway, and allow six and seven decker ships of the line with masts carved from giant redwoods.
You could have more variety here. Wind it up with 'Age of Steam' and introduce a few steam-powered sailships and early ironclads.
That wouldn't work out well without throwing reality so far out the window its silly to try. The early steam ships were much larger and much more heavily armed then all but a handful of sailing vessels, compare HMS Victory to HMS Marlborough of 1855 for example, its about three times as muchship. Plus it'd eliminate any basis for wind direction to matter, which would be interesting. Though I'd make it so players can sail directly into the wind, just very slowly, so as to avoid the problem of the average person not understanding sailing at all.
The game would focus more on quick battles in each category rather than progressing up a tech-tree. Pop in, go play a few games in your galley, sink a few ships, get sunk a few times, pop on out. This might work better on mobile than computer, though.
Yeah probably better for a persistent multiplayer world then a WoW style game. LIke you could order your ship to join the Far East sever from Europe, and it'd actually be busy a few real life hours sailing over,with possible random encounters on the way. That would also favor letting each person have multiple active ships.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Ram kills are hilarious - especially Die Hards. Nicely done. Unfortunately a lot of time people use it because they don't understand how to actually outplay or outmaneuver an opponent (that's the "Battlestar Pegasus" maneuver).
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