We have thought of 2 tweaks to make naval battles more interesting but above all realistic.
1)Auto repair
2)Critical hits
1)Auto Repair
- Manual repair will no longer be possible. (No instant repair)
- Ships will repair over time, automatically, as long as you got sufficient gold into your treasury. (Cost will be per minute - per 1% repaired - no price changes will be made)
- You will be able to set ON/OFF automatic repair per ship/fleet. (if a ship auto repair is OFF, it will not start repairing till you enable the option again - default setting will be repair on)
- Repair rate will be 1% per minute (entry setting, it can be changed later/we can add attributes/voodoo/buildings to affect this, etc)
- For battles against NPC, the repair rate will not be used. Instead we will add an option to auto repair instantly to the health the ship had when the battle started. This will also make patrolling faster as you won't have to repair after each battle manually. If the player chooses not to take this option, then the ship will resume repair with the standard repair rate.
As you clearly understand, this will make the 1 war fleet strategy that can dominate the whole game, obsolete. Something much needed in our opinion.
However,we will not stop here;
2)Critical hits
These already happen as our naval battle system is based on DnD rules. A critical hit occurs when you roll the highest possible dice (dices are rolled for you automatically when the battle takes place).
We want to add an extra functionality however. This functionality will give the small ships, a chance to compete with the biggest ships.
In detail:
- A critical hit will from now on deal % damage.
- The % dealt will be same for all ships
- This is set at 25% (entry setting, can be changed later/we can add attributes/voodoo/buildings to affect this, etc)
Let me give an example, as it can be tricky to understand.
Let's say that a Ship of the Line battles a small Sloop. In reality, sloop stands no chance. In the game, it stands ABSOLUTELY no chance. This is what we want to affect here. The sloop will from now on have a small chance to deal some important damage to the ship of the line (it still won't be able to beat it, except if you are insanely lucky). With the proposed auto repair feature, this can prove decisive.
So let's see how it would normally happen.
The SoL fights the Sloop:
-If SoL makes a critical hit against the Sloop (perfectly possible and legitimate) it won't make any big difference; the big ship is expected to win easily anyway.
-If the sloop makes a critical hit against the SoL, the SoL will end up with 25% damage where without this feature, it would probably have no damage. This will give small ships a role to play in battles.
So, I want you all to sit down and think deeply these two suggestions.
Developing wise, they are easy to implement and once we decide it, we will only let about 15-30 days pass and then we will implement it. The delay is only for the playerbase to prepare as ourselves we can complete this in 1 day.
From our side, it is rated highly important. The rest ideas about battles are not deserted but due to their complexity they are condemned to take long before implemented. This on the other hand, can be implemented as I said real fast.
There are several bonuses from these 2 implementations. One that is important, is the protection it grants to people that sleep; Your ships will auto repair where needed while the attacker won't be able to take off all your 400 ships in 2 hours, while you sleep. There are of course many more bonuses that I need not to mention here.
I would be interested to hear any potential negative affects you see from this suggestion.