What does this mean?
At the current stage of the game, ship combat requires players to shoot canonballs at a ship to sink them. It’s simple, but not very intuitive.
What this suggests aims to do is split ships upto 4 parts.
the hull
the deck
the stern
the sails
These 4 sections of the ship will have their own health pools and will only take damage if hit within their hitbox. The point of this is to make players aim for specific ship parts in order to either slow down, damage, or weaken ships.
Ship damage:
broken sail, effects the ships speed and turning
damaged hull, effects ship speed and opens them up for critical hits. Critical hits are likely to sink ships instantly.
damaged deck, reduced canon accuracy and fire rate. Also may effect deckhands.
damaged stern, effects turning
Now players who want to slow a ship may aim for the saila first as the hull will likely be reinforced. Once slowed down they will be able to ram the stern and make the enemy ship lose control. This is your moment to attack the deck and lower their offence and finally breach the hull and sink the ship.
TLDR;
Specific parts of ships should take damage sperately and as a result reduce the ships efficiency depending on the area damaged. This would lead to more thoughtful and intuitive ship combat and allow for more dynamic fights down the line against stronger and bigger ships.
Ok so, I have an answer for that but you know how suggestions don’t let you edit because of slow mode.
Basically the ship will still have a max total health pool. Damaging parts will subtract from the total health pool the sane amount. Once a parts health is at 0, the negative effects will kick in such as slowed speed, turning etc. Also hitting a damaged part will now score critical hits to the max health pool.
So basically, ships wont require you to take down each part and have insane health pools. The hp per part is mainly to damage the parts for the effects.
That’s fine since smaller ships in general should be easy to take down. However larger ships will have more spread parts and also a small re balance of canon balls shouldn’t be anything impossible. It also gives strength to certain ammo types which encourage players to experiment.
Maybe different ammo types will be more effective on different parts.
sails kind of sound like a nuisance to take damage to
there’s already chainshot for the purpose of slowing ships down and i assume in later ship customization we’ll have harpoons or other things of the like to keep ships engaged in combat
Sails are really easy to hit they are quite big and only require you to shoot slightly higher. Also it is not necessary to take out every ship part to sink a ship if you read my first reply.
