Arelith

I like sailing when we're going after pirate ships (PvE) because it gives short bursts of combat that you can rest and socialize between (this incidentally means you can load spellcasters with more offensive spells for boarding). What I wish, however, was for the ship-to-ship combat to involve more than waiting for the captain to order going to half-mast or using the ballista over and over again (not sure why you can't just set it to fire automatically until the ammunition of the type you've been using is exhausted - the constant dialogs spam the chatbox and keep you from noticing the captain's order to cease fire). When there are 8 players on board, everyone should be doing something exciting, because as it is now, ship-to-ship combat is a spectator sport.

Do people like it that way? And if not, what can be done to fix it?

I personally wish ship-to-ship combat was more engaging for everyone. A good way to ensure activity would be to make enemy siege weapons actually damage the people on deck, the way lightning-bolts on ship-killer storms do. This would give healers and wizards an incentive to run around casting healing spells, stoneskins and elemental protection buffs. My most exciting time at sea was when I sailed with someone who entered a ship-killer storm and I was frantically casting healing spells and energy buffer as the lightning-bolts hit, hoping we would escape on time before the spells ran out. Having siege weapons hit the people on deck would penalize low-level characters, however, unless siege weapon damage on characters were capped by the user's level.

If fire-based weapons left a flame object where they hit that did damage over time to the hull before expiring, the crew could be fighting fires on deck to eliminate the flame object. This would give people who aren't on the rigging or siege weapons something to do. Likewise if (for instance) a weapon existed that could summon creatures like slimes on board that did damage over time to the hull and pressed the warriors on deck to guard the ballista crew to ensure uninterrupted firing. All this would penalize ships with very small crews, however, as they wouldn't be able to man all stations while fighting off fires, slimes, other summons or whatnot, so small ships would have to be resistant or immune to anything like this by design.

If you could target the enemy's siege weapons with your own siege weapons to cripple them (not turn them to rubble), this would give the people on the sidelines an incentive to take them into their inventory to restore them, so they could work on them the way you work on masts while other crewmen switched weapons. This wouldn't really hinder small ships because they're meant to be running away from serious combat rather than taking out weapons. It would also give helpers with low sail skill something to do.

I'm not saying you should implement any of these approaches - they're just examples of how ship-to-ship combat could be less about waiting. If you see the pattern I'm trying to describe with them, it's that things should be more hectic, with everyone scrambling to heal from the enemy fire and handle crises on deck while the captain is trying to evaluate everything and keep order. The more things are happening on deck, the more important a good captain and first mate are, and this ensures the role of the captain is more than to just check on the hull, give orders to fire / set sail or use the spyglass all the time.

On another note (posting it here so as not to make too many threads), ships are probably too dialog-heavy right now - it would be great if the spyglass, rigging and ballista dialogs could be kept out of the chatbox entirely via a -ship setting so they don't prevent you from seeing the captain's orders. I don't use the spyglass while at the rigging often, for this very reason.

Finally, unrelated to all this, I think everyone agrees that the area of effect of the good hope spell should cover the entire deck, just as the bard song has been made to cover the entire deck.

What does everyone think? Is ship-to-ship combat too much of a spectator sport, or do you like it this way?

I'll preface this with the obligatory tipping of the hat to ActionReplay, as where ship content is today compared to where it was nine months ago is really staggering. I feel like this can not be said often enough and I am so happy PvE ship combat even became a thing.

That being said, yeah. I completely agree that more engaging and interesting ship to ship combat is something that would very much elevate it.

The big stumbling block for a lot of what you describe is needing to rebuild the ship functionalities. Right now the vast majority of ship interactions are dialogue-based, and as soon as your character is in combat (such as fighting boarders) nobody can interact with the ship weapons, rigging, ship wheel, etc. It would need to all be rebuilt using NGUI, which became available in an update not too long ago, in order for combat not to become too much of an interruption.

Just to tack on a small point, one huge benefit of what you describe is moving more into the visual space of ship combat. Characters dousing flames on a ship, or needing to deal with boarders while fighting another ship, are both great examples of content you can see and interact directly with on-screen. So much is currently communicated by necessity via the combat log and -ship command that it feels a little distant and abstract. Opportunities to flavour that up would add a ton to it.

Interesting, tricky subject that is very recurring among the sailing crew.

Every time I discuss the sailing system and sailing combat, my baseline for comparison is always Sea of Thieves. A lot of what Arelith has done recently in terms of bulking up the sailing combat and adding more tactical depth is either inspired by or has somehow convergently evolved with that game as it tries to create a fair approximation of what sailing combat might look like in NWN.

Ship combat is a constantly evolving paradigm, and ActionReplay is a super active, very responsive, highly talented developer who is always surprising us with new systems and the evolution of existing ones. I have no doubt that he has in his plans some form of the things you have suggested here: crew damage, things for wizards/casters to do other than managing sails, etc. It will never have the insane hectic feeling that Sea of Thieves has, simply because of the interface we have to work with; We can't move about in a 3d space, gripping the anchor winch and desperately pushing it trying to get the anchor back up as another ship circles menacingly to tack the wind and get some traverse shots into our front that might hit below the waterline if they time it just right.

At the same time, any new expansions of the system have to be careful not to further stress the already difficult requirements for getting a crew to tip top shape. If systems are layered on top that make having, say, a cleric or wizard on board as vital as having a bard (bardsong), then that goes against most of the feedback given about the sail system at present which is that a large, varied and capable crew is hard to manage and administrate on an ooc level.

Changes will likely be forthcoming to make sailing combat more active, but the prudent approach is to add these systems slowly. In the meantime, we use the somewhat 'passive' nature of sailing combat to our advantage. Our Captain (who is also our bard) mostly just sings sea shanties and chats, trying to get people's morale up. A designated helmsman for the day (always rotating) manages the helm functions. Since everything runs off of average sail, we give control of the siege weapons to the newbies who will love shooting at things. Others who are around being 'passive' are providing information and status updates by using the spyglass and talking (my character does this a lot, and I always picture myself as Uhura in terms of the leadership dynamic).

All in all I don't think a lot of people will disagree with the idea that ship combat could do with being more *active*, but care needs to be taken not to make it overly complex, lest it lose the simplicity that makes it so attractive in the first place.

I want to add that ActionReplay has done a wonderful job with the sailing system. It's grown by leaps and bounds compared to what it used to be.

Thanks for the suggestions and kind words. I have plans to make Ship Combat more active, as you put it, and the AoE effects is something that has been discussed before. Though before tackling that I need to move a lot of the Dialog Heavy systems to NUI which is a beast of its own but once that is done then players can interact with systems even inside of combat which would let us do some more interesting things in Ship v Ship battles.

I dont know how feasible this is, but it'd be really cool if archers or spellcasters could attack neighboring ships as well as with the various seige weapons.

Directly attacking things with spells or ranged attacks would seriously break ship combat. Right now everything is predicated on the balance of the various ship types and ship stats + the number of weapon hardpoints/slots in each ship class.

We don't want to be in a state where the optimal pvp strat is to cram the ship with 10+ archers/wizards and just completely break that parity to bits. That said, some kind of interaction for those types of characters (in the form of buffs, ship-specific spells, etc) could be cool.