Open MasterOfGrey opened 2 years ago
Good writeup! That' s a lot of detail, and I like the sounds of it.
https://github.com/Hurleveur/endless-sky/tree/boarding-rework I have brought my branch pretty much up to date with this
The defence
attribute thing is not yet implemented because its a bit too ambiguous (but it'll be easy to code in when needed)
I'll be adding the scanning part shortly - done
I like the idea of increasing crew salaries when there are casualties. Would it really be limited to extra crew, though? Regularly getting into fights and losing people might leave your regular crew pretty unsettled... Especially since in-universe, they do still have to worry about getting boarded back, even though in practice that doesn't really happen.
If we do it that way then your whole fleet will rebell against you by costing huge costs. Or did you just mean on the flagship? If so why only the flagship?
Also the idea is to discourage chain boarding, by removing these penalties when you stop doing that by firing the extra crew.
If we do it that way then your whole fleet will rebell against you by costing huge costs.
Yep, and I think that's a reasonable thing to do. If they signed up with a peaceful merchant trader, and then they learn that their peers are getting killed, it's logical that they would all get concerned and expect more pay.
It doesn't have to be a huge jump all at once, though. Suppose it was a 1 credit increase in salary per casualty, lasting a year. If you make a habit of capturing ships, to the point where you lose an average of ten crew per day, then you'll only have a 10% increase the first day, and a 70% increase the first week. That will hurt, but likely won't crush you, and you'll have the chance to decide if you want to continue, maybe drop extra crew if the costs are really unmanageable. If you do continue, and you don't take steps to improve the casualty rate, then within a month, you'll be paying quadruple wages, which would be very difficult to sustain. By the end of the year, you'd be paying 3700 credits per crew per day, which no one could keep up with. At some point before that, you'd need to adjust your strategy.
Or, for a completely different approach, perhaps there could be an upfront payment when hiring new crew, whose size is determined by your history of keeping them alive. That way, if the fees ever become unmanageable, you can just not hire anyone else, and stop capturing ships.
I've mentioned prizes elsewhere, but if death benefits are going to be implemented I'd definitely expect some kind of prize system.
Honestly, I'd urge a prize system before death benefits, because a prize system only affects those who succeed, while death benefits don't punish success that much but punish failure hard indeed. And failure is already a punishment.
Could boarding make increased use of self destructs?
Currently self-destruct is just determined when boarding specific types of ships, or as a pass/fail chance for capturing drones. But what if successful assaults on crewed ships resulted in an escalating risk that the remaining crew members give up on winning and blow the reactor?
For extra mileage, looting, especially of critical parts, could also trigger the self-destruct risk. You can steal the cargo of medical supplies and they'll wait for you to go away, but try digging out their engines and they might well decide that if they're dead anyway then they'll take you with them.
Problem Description
This issue outlines the philosophy and critical concepts (intended functions) of the Boarding Rework that is not far from being ready to PR. This philosophy is being provided here so that it can be reviewed properly by @tehhowch before proceeding with PR finalisation.
Related Issue Links
The following issues are associated with the boarding system problem. Some of which have been closed because of actual solutions, and some simply because there was no active pathway to their resolution that was likely to be considered viable. Regardless of status these will actually be considered fully or partially resolved by the proposed solution:
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1859
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Desired Solution
Desired Solution: The following objectives apply to the Boarding Rework Project:
The following outcomes are resultant of these:
As such, the following steps are involved in developing the system to conform with those objectives; taking consideration of the resultant outcomes. They're presented in order of application, not in order of objectives, hopefully for ease of seeing how the system builds up as a whole:
Alternative Approaches
These are all actually the more desirable approaches, that haven't been done initially due to complexity/controversy/effort.
Regarding only hired crew attacking: I think it would be reasonable that not all of your required crew are actually essential, so I think it would be sensible that some % of your required crew could be utilised in an offensive boarding action on the proviso that you have more crew than the enemy and greater strength in the combat width. i.e. some of your normal crew will be security staff, or just generally competent and willing to take a bit of risk for reward - but there's no justification for throwing them into the breach unless you have a good chance of winning.
Regarding H2H Capacity: Ideally the capacity for Primary, Consumable, and Armour outfits should all be independent, but this starts to make the outfit screen somewhat cluttered. Conceptually though It makes the most sense, and would allow you to have things like specialised "suit lockers" which are unique to a species that treat their suits like ammunition. This would simulate being able to hire other-species crew for combat, because in order to restock those suits you'd have to go back to their territory to re-supply, and also mean that you can't store grenades in the same space as suits which you can do with just a generic H2H capacity. There's validity to a H2H capacity abstraction shared across all 3 areas, but I can already hear the arguments on discord for it being a balance headache.
Regarding H2H Vulnerabilities Ideally there is a way of individually identifying which terrain features have what magnitude of impact on a particular H2H outfit. This could take a few forms.
Additional Context
Notable Additional Conclusions:
Screengrab of currently used boarding attributes that are in a text file for moddability:![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/60949828/176344882-d398e45a-5d4e-4241-8132-df4a9366eefe.png)
Current boarding window rework mockup:![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/60949828/176345291-8d1f0f6a-b3a1-41d9-84b8-24e0f3510682.png)
Broader additional boarding windows mockup:![image](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/60949828/176345359-0313da76-0478-4212-9af0-c0830e1576f5.png)
This is the current working branch for the development of this: https://github.com/MasterOfGrey/endless-sky/commits/Boarding-Rework-2