Capture Enemy Ships to Dry Dock

[aielman]

What I was wondering is if it would be possible to make it so that there was an option to, when you defeat a ship, have it sent to dry dock so you can keep both ships.

Idea:
to do it you have to give the other ship, half your crew, half your officers (including first mate, no first mate and you can't do it) half your water and half your cash.

A message will pop up saying which dry dock they were headed for and once you get there to retrieve them, based on morale and distance (as well as captains traits?) the ship and officers (cash water and crew will be gone) will be there, or the first mate took the ship and everything you gave him and ran off (or it was destroyed in transit)

Thoughts? Its a huge risk/reward situation but would be a great compelling option for generating cash as opposed to surplus/trade runs. To make it easier, maybe the first mate is the only officer that leaves and if he makes it back you can pick him up at the palace/wherever the officer he is shows up at.

[Cory Trese]

There are several threads about it and it is on the list of eventual options. Probably including a new officer (Prize Crew) who has mostly penalties and a big up front purchase cost.

There are already many ways to obtain ships and additional ones will be coming in the future.

Also, if Ship theft is part of the game, why does anyone ever let the PC keep his or her ship?

[sebastian]

I will let the keep it to avoid negative rep. If i could haul em back to dry dock and turn em into a uhaul storage center I would be ship jacking more.

Usually after I blow the engine off some dense pirate I do not want to pay to fix it back up.

[aielman]

dittos...

For me, I finally get this great boarding ship (pirate crossbow) only to turn around and realize theres really not a whole lot of value in a boarding ship with no cargo space because I can't do much of anything with any ships I can grab. Destroying to gain 1500 just isn't worth it for the neg rep costs, I agree that having a "return this ship to dry dock" is going to be way to powerful without some way to balance it out but one of the things that has surprised me about this game is the lack of said option in some form. Honestly, if I am going to board your ship the last thing I am going to do is give you the keys back. "Thanks for the spare ship, let me drop you off at the nearest port"

[wd208728]

Let us suppose that you blow the absolute crap out of a ship with the following statistics.

12 Hull
5 Armor
13 Engine
14 Sail
35 Crew
16 Hold
18 Guns
6 Torp

And are left with

2 Hull
0 Armor
0 Engine
0 Sail
35 Max Crew
16 Hold
18 Guns
6 Torp

That ship is basically flying Swiss cheese right? Why would I fix it up? you wouldn't. you'd scrap it, but as it stands you gain didly compared to the hit to your rep, which can explain part of the reasoning why pirates don't just space you if you roll over, but honestly a star going vessel would be worth more intact than broken apart. Even in the olden days of piracy there were many options which you could simulate with a few simple formulas that you could tweak as you went along to provide the correct incentive for the player to feel it is open ended and REALLY up to the player.

So let's say that you have an intact ship from above where you add up all of the units hull, max crew etc. and times that number by 50.
or 106x50=5,300 that should be it's scrap value to just sell it at super discount to the breakers, quick and no one asks questions right for an intact ship using the same formula I come up with
77x50=3,850 which would work for a ship that you'd blasted the crap out of in scrap value and were turning it around quick letting someone else do all the work, but still taking the blame for destroying a ship.

What if you were to break it down to it's base components yourself and sell it??? like taking the hull apart with plasma cutters, removing the engines, sails, or whatever components you like and turning a simple "I blow up ship I get X dollars" into "ok I have X units of Metals, electronics, and reactors... It is PAY DAY"! think like 15-20 units of metal for scrapping a ship

Or last but not least SELL the ship intact to the independents or who ever is angry with that faction at that time and ship it out with a prize crew which you lose, So You could in some cases profit three or four times. So you could pick up a mission to bring a criminal to justice by capturing him...get paid, loot his ship of cargo and sell it...get paid, and capture his ship and sell it to the Syndics...get paid.

Flavor equals fun, and imagine all the permutations you could perform with a little ingenuity

Hmm, there is a major shortage of metal on X. Fly a little ways out and capture a ship and break it down and sell it to the planet, profit immensely. There is actually historical precedent for that too. If a ship yard was running low on seasoned timber for a ship then pirates would sometimes take a ship and use it simply for its timber "WHAT SHIP?" It is all about economics, provide incentive and you will get certain behavior

In one game I considered one house a write off for rep and used it to climb the ladder for the rest and profited immensely by popping in blockading their home planet, and simply cherry picking artifacts or cargo I knew to be high demand in a port and destroying the ship. My rep was something like -500 pretty quick, but you can only be put to death once right? and House Thulun are a bunch of monkey jackers.

[aielman]

Well... that all fine if you end up with a ship with 0 engines, 0 sails, 0 armor and almost 0 hull....

But I am a boarding ship. Screw shooting you, I am going to get in, get close, get on board, and then gun down every person I can find. Who cares about things like guns and torpedoes when you have a small fast ship with a huge crew readout?? (I took the battle up too, so I have like 130 crew members to duke it out with)

[wd208728]

Of course one thing our NPCs don't do is scuttle.

[sebastian]

It seems kinda complicated, perhaps to implement at any rate.

It would be nice though that if u r on crazy difficulty and in the early game u defeat some pirates that simply insist on attacking, and ur tempus fugit cannot outrun, that once u defeat them u get more than 600 spacebucks for the salvage for the rep loss.

Reward / risk ratio?

[aielman]

Actually I came up with the proposal based on ease of development. At the time of capture, when you say "yep lets keep this ship" you immediately deduct half cash, half crew and half water. Then you do a quick calculation based on Captain skills, Officer bonuses, distance, morale and type of space (red vs green) If its a success you create a first mate to be picked up (just as if you were picking up a new one and use all of the same code) at the planet with the dry dock and move the ship to the dry dock as well. If its a failure you get a random message saying the ship and resources are no more.

Overall the code change would(should?) be remarkably minor for the sheer size of change we are talking about.

[sebastian]

Breaking a ship down to component pieces though? I like that idea if / when we ge the tow / capture prize ship option and a personal base / hideout to use as a chop shop.

[aielman]

chop shop? No... that would be alot more difficult, at the very minimum it would require a new database table and code to control it.

[sebastian]

New database table sounds like a complete overhaul of the game.

[aielman]

Not for sure how Cory has it setup, but I would assume that yah, that would be quite a bit of a change.

[Tenebrous Pirate]

Jun 12, 2011 12:17:16 GMT -5 Cory Trese said:

Also, if Ship theft is part of the game, why does anyone ever let the PC keep his or her ship?

I would make it be very time consuming and dangerous to steal ships. While towing one, you should be very vunerable to attack, and be automatically flagged for near-constant attack by bounty hunters and military ships of the faction you commandeered from.

Add in a required officer or upgrade for a ship that would allow you to do it (say a tractor beam or grapple array) that NPC pirate ships may not have...

And basically, most NPC pirate captains don't wanna expose themselves to that kind of risk. Maybe toss in a test for when you are captured/surrender to pirates, there is a 2-3% chance that they will stuff you and your officers into an escape shuttle, and toss you out back. Your crew is enslaved and ship stolen. Tough luck!

[wd208728]

Well reasoned, and it is all about incentive, and frankly ships should actually be worse than destroying them in a reputation situation. Historical example? the burning of the Philadelphia. Lt Stephen Decatur was given a tiny ship that was piloted by a motley crew with inadequate supplies along with a singular mission to destroy the captured Philadelphia at all costs. Which they did before rowing off into the night.

"We'll burn our own boat so you can't have it, you monkey jackers".

I imagine is ST that they would probably have to have the same type of morals, especially as a syndic. You steal a ship we make you pay by making you bleed from the ass.

just my 2 cents

-A