Topic: Naval warfare rethought

In my opinion, rather then requiring soldiers on a ship to fight we should and can simply increase the bonus for soldiers on ships and reduce the randomness by this, so it would be just an easy change of some factor rather then developping new features.
for the cost part of a warship I agree with the problem as it is very easy to scatter the ocean with warships, so making refitting more costly might be a good idea. Cost could be any of food, shipwright, level 0 soldier, or just a precious ware.
Another possibility would be to let the shipyards produce different ships based on fleet settings, which would further reduce the manual intervention in making war ships and allow for different costs.
With the implementation of an auto attack feature we would reduce the necessity of manual intervention a lot, which has been to most relevant critics so far leading to some strategies to completely skip usage of warships from some players.

So for me the most relevant problem with the current state of the feature is the massive burden of micromangement necessary that might take all the attention of the player and result in clickraces that do not fit to widelands as widelnds should be slow paced (actually this was the problem description of the thread opener, everything after came from his suggestion to fix this problem).
The different parts of this problem might be:
- necessity to convert each warship manually ---> might be solved by letting warships being produced separtly and skip the conversion feature
- necessity to manually attack each ship and micromanage seabattles --> might be solved by an auto attack / auto retreat feature
- necessity to reduce the capacity for each ship manually and doing this after conversion has taken place to cover for wares on board --> auto zero the capacity might fix this

with such changes the focus could be more on building an economy to support more ships and soldiers which is what Widelands is aboput.

Top

Quote

@Nordfriese
Any chance / forecast whether this might be possible within the next 2 weeks to be part of the next round.

Top

Quote

Nordfriese wrote:

hessenfarmer wrote:

Another possibility would be to let the shipyards produce different ships based on fleet settings, which would further reduce the manual intervention in making war ships and allow for different costs.

I previously disliked the idea of having the shipyard produce multiple ship types because it would involve special-casing the shipyard (which currently is an ordinary productionsite like any other), but adding a warship target to the new fleet settings would be a great way to solve this cleanly and without requiring any micromanagement.

Would it be OK to need a separate warship yard, which would be an enhancement of the plain shipyard, and need an experienced shipwright? That way it would be possible to require different materials for a warship than a transport ship.

Top

Quote

tothxa wrote:

Nordfriese wrote:

hessenfarmer wrote:

Another possibility would be to let the shipyards produce different ships based on fleet settings, which would further reduce the manual intervention in making war ships and allow for different costs.

I previously disliked the idea of having the shipyard produce multiple ship types because it would involve special-casing the shipyard (which currently is an ordinary productionsite like any other), but adding a warship target to the new fleet settings would be a great way to solve this cleanly and without requiring any micromanagement.

Would it be OK to need a separate warship yard, which would be an enhancement of the plain shipyard, and need an experienced shipwright? That way it would be possible to require different materials for a warship than a transport ship.

having a different building would be possible with such changes, but no prerequisite. An Enhancement would not fir into the Atlantean tribe as they do not need any experience at all. As the warships should require the same basic materials as a normal ship and only add some precious materials like Iron and / or gold just adding these additional wares as input for the shipyard would do the trick as well.

Top

Quote

Well, I have a prototype branch now at https://codeberg.org/Nordfriese/widelands/src/branch/navalwarfare/refactor-refit
Warship targets don't really work yet and counting of expeditions and warships in a fleet is basically not implemented yet, but the main change is that the shipyard now builds both warships and expedition ships, with warships 25% more expensive than transport ships; and removed the ability to refit at ports.

However I am no longer sure this is a desirable way to go. Now you can build warships without needing a port, which allows you to gain early sea domination much earlier and cheaper than before. While a port is still needed to actually invade the enemy, we have seen in several tournament matches that a player who builds a few warships earlier than the opponent has already half won at sea, so this change turns naval warfare into even more of a race for early ships.

So I have changed my mind and no longer favour this approach. I still don't like the idea of strictly requiring soldiers for naval combat, but the branch also contains a commit to make warships with soldiers much stronger than before and give less randomness to their attacks (not actually tested, maybe it's too strong now). It also has a change to set the soldier capacity initially to zero.

I could live with the concept of consuming some wares (and a few minutes of time and a shipwright's work) when refitting a transport ship to a warship in a port, maybe we should give this approach a try instead?

Top

Quote