Galleys?

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fishingbear

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First off, I don't want to suggest anything that would take too much hard-core programming to add in. But I think that, assuming the world map is enlarged or made mod-able at some time in the future (so that we could make an enclosed sea), it would be fun to be able to capture or buy war galleys, longships, and other simple, non-armed vessels.

You would most likely only be able to hold a certain number of troops on a ship. Perhaps troops with horses take up more room. Your army would need to be less in number than the ship's troop capacity to board the ship. If your army is too large, you would either have to buy a larger ship or add another ship to your fleet (or disband some of those peasants following you around).

One question is, what happens when you leave a ship behind and go on land? You're probably not carrying your ships around in your backpack. At first it would be necessary to just let unoccupied ships remain unmolested by enemy groups, but in later builds your ships would be tempting targets. Maybe you'd have to post troops to guard your ships? That alone would probably take a fair amount of work to implement.

Instead of basing your speed on the average speed of your troops, you could base your oceangoing speed on the ship's speed or fleet's average speed, with bonuses for however many galley slaves you brought with you. This would make prisoners much more valuable (and perhaps you might end up stopping by Zendar to buy slaves instead of sell them). If the team decides to implement weather at a later date, it could also dramatically affect ship speed (especially for ships with sails).

Since the combat AI at this point seems to consist mostly of run-straight-at-you-and-attack, combat on the ships would need to be very simplistic. Probably just side-to-side boarding melees, with nothing complicated enough to make the pathfinding AI unhappy. Troops and heroes would probably automatically be dismounted (I don't know if historical marines ever fought ship-to-ship on horseback, but it seems unlikely).

Adding ships with cannon, catapults, ballistae, etcetera would take away from the most enjoyable part of the game, I feel, as well as adding in a lot of other questions about ship combat (like why don't you fire your cannons at that other ship before it gets to you?). I really like the rough-n-tumble mob-on-mob fighting in this game, and big weapons would be a distraction from that. But leading a group viking-types on a boarding party, slaughtering a galley full of merchant sailors, would be damned fun.

This would probably be graphics-intensive to implement, but the coding doesn't seem like it would take too long. I guess I just feel sorry for those sea raiders, wandering around like lost puppies out on the open plains.
 
fishingbear said:
Instead of basing your speed on the average speed of your troops, you could base your oceangoing speed on the ship's speed or fleet's average speed, with bonuses for however many galley slaves you brought with you. This would make prisoners much more valuable (and perhaps you might end up stopping by Zendar to buy slaves instead of sell them).

I am not sure if we'll be able to implement ships but this is really a good idea. :smile:
 
Yeah, until one of them buries a throwing axe in your noggin. But I do like the idea, for such a time as armagan has a chance to consider implementing it.
 
Yes yes to ships. With sea raiders that's a logical conclusion :smile:.

Maybe not until later in the game development though.

BM
 
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