Right... let's see:

Edits of skills above:

RAM
Ram
By ramming a ship, you reduce their integrity. There is also a slight chance of completely capsizing the boat. The amount of integrity and chance of capsize increases with the comparison of your size to theirs.

By aiming at their side, you have a 25% chance of penetrating the structure of the ship, allowing you to attach the ship to the other's side. This will greatly damage the integrity of the ship, and allows you to BOARD . Remember however, that the ship still maintain her passenger limit, and by boarding an already full ship can effectively raise the possibility of capsize, harming not only the target ship but also yourself. By being attached to a capsizing ship will bring your own under as well. You must DISENGAGE RAM in time, or else your ship will capsize as well.


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New skills:

GUNNERY
Target at
Trained in Gunnery, you are able to train your gun crew to target specific weak areas on the ship. By targetting the Hull, your shots may afflict huge damage, much higher than previous random shots. Also, there is a 5% chance of damaging the rudder, and thus making the ship unable to steer. By targetting the Deck, you can effectively damage the crew within the ship. By targetting the Mast, you can reduce the maneuverability of the ship by 75%. Although these are effective techniques, targetting is hard and will often miss.

CLOSE COMBAT
Construct Grappling Hooks (Require: 2 Iron, 2 Rope)
Although your seamanship is well trained, hand-to-hand combat is still preferred. Should your target ship be within range, those who can may LEAP to land near the crew onboard. Those who cannot will require the use of Grappling Hooks, where they can SWING ONTO . Of course, aide may be given in the same way. Remember however, that the ship still maintain her passenger limit, and by boarding an already full ship can effectively raise the possibility of capsize, harming not only the target ship but also yourself.

We were all Camo'd! Yeah, that's it..


The drydocks!

EDIT: Gods.. horrible horrible typo..

Did you write what I thought you wrote?

Yes, now stop encouraging him.

We don't need cannons, what you guys need to do is look at Greek, and Roman Naval Combat. They did quite well despite the lack of cannons...

Raming, Combat Towers with archers in them, greek fire, etc... There is more to ship to ship combat then cannons. Havn't even mentioned boarding yet.

and ballistas

It's good work, Aebrin, no doubt about that.

But I think everyone's missing one major point about this. There's isn't really any reason to be at sea on a boat (Sure there's the merchant ships, but what's the reasons for the big war ships?).

First of all I think that the ocean(s?) around Lusternia need to opened up for travel so there's actually some room for all this, and second, I think a good reason would be to have like, underwater nodes that only special devices on ships can capture power from, the conflict can stem from this.

out of curiosity, have all the people who want ships in IRE muds ever played a mud with ships in them?



I played one, I found ships to be more of a fancy way to spend gold and look popular.

There were several posts on wanting ships so I just whipped out a skillset... don't shoot the messenger

I am curious about the Roman and Grecian naval battles, can you tell me more about it in details? However, as I see it regarding arrows and such, it would mean implementing an entire skillset (ie the Archery specialisation) rather than just a couple of skills.

I am not saying that this skillset is a possibility in the near future, with probably the biggest event coming would be return of Hallifax and Gaudiguch, but eventually the land outside the mountains and the western ocean will open up, perhaps it is viable then.

Daganev, if we can get the skills and RP right, there's no reason why naval warfare cannot become an important part of the Basin's life - since especially we are an island.

Thanks for the feedback, and let me know what you think.

well, what i suggest it to great rid of the cannons. We didnt start seeing cannons until like....the 1600's, i fim not mistaken. instead, equip small balista's, small catapaults, big sligshots, etc. For example, we can ahve the geomancers make enchanted rocks that explode into pebbles when they hit things (like a grenade would). To fire that, you would load it into a catapault or slingshot. For the catapault, it has a short arm, and holds ammo from the use of a net. for the slingshot, there are 3 men. one to fire and aim, two to hold the big rubbery band. I think ballista's would be great, and having them equipped with winches to pull a ship towards you would be pretty damn sweet! Ships would be a real good thing for celest!

After thinking about it, I don't like the portaging idea. Sure, it would be nice, but realistically, 1 person can't portage a warship. I have no problems with portaging a smaller ship, but when you get up the the large ones, I'm afraid they should have to stay in the water. A docking system would have to be added, perhaps city-controlled. The city could lease out a dock to captian. But portaging a large ship? Not practical.

Heh the portaging details states how many people is needed to portage a ship.

Ok gimme a few hours to rethink the cannon/fighting procedures. There's enough people to go against it to take it out.

Still don't like it. You'd need about 500 slaves to move a ship. Besides, ships are meant for the water. I think they should stay there.

The only thing I can think of having Portaging as a useful skill is when the western ocean opens up you should be able to move the ships from the large ocean to the Inner Sea and the Sea of Despair.

EDIT: Or a rig... these were designed later on. Basically the boats are lifted onto a rig where they can be carried by horses to another place. But horses...?

well, the thing is, we dont need 500 or so slaves to move it. We do HAVE MAGICK here, so maybe, we can animate the corpses of the slain to move a ship or dragons or something, or just pu them through warps in the time fabric and place them from one ocean to the next without using the land?

Just because there is magic, doesn't mean there is magic for everything. I'd like to see a canal between the Inner Sea and the Outer Sea, though.. but you wouldn't want to try build a canal through the swamp to link the Blighted Sea to the Inner Sea.

I think there's a lot of good things that can be done with ships that could
make them much more "lusternified".

Firstly, imagine all this is taking place in the oceans around Lusternia, and
traveling on ships is near completely necessary because of the powerful
currents and the vast oceans are full of powerful aggro denizens or something.

I think ships should be centered around power. They could have
a battery (rudimentary name) on board that would hold power obtained
from seaborne power nodes. This power could then be used for a variety
of incredible abilities, or just dropped off at the city's nexus. This would
make the objective of ships to go around collecting the power from nodes
while fighting off competition from the hostile ships of other cities/communes.

I had lots of ideas for ship feats, the best of them include stuff like being
able to submerge the ship underwater at a steady power drain
(everyone on board better have waterbreathe), powering the elemental
cannons or whatever the heck the ship fights with, and being able to
"ghost" the ship, making it invulnerable but at a heavy power drain.

Also I think that ship speeds should be redone. On the ocean ships should
take a bit to move from one room to the next, like the delay you experience
when you swim. The speed of ship decides how long this delay is. Also you
should be able to expend power from the ship's battery to move faster. I
think many people would prefer this to the ships falling apart if you move
too fast.

Power could be gotten from either the nodes or you could load up from the
nexus at your city's port before the voyage if your on a search and destroy
type mission so you wouldn't have to mess around with the nodes while your
busy.

Addressing the problem of Celest and Magnagora having not being connected
with the outer sea, there should be a tunnel at the bottom of the Inner Sea
and one at the bottom of the Sea of Despair. These tunnels would lead to the
outer oceans and they couldn't be easily blocked because it would takes a
constant power drain to stay underwater. Besides, part of seafaring would be
to fight your way around.

Something I think this whole system would help, is the problem of villages
being "excessively necessary", which has been oftentimes diagnosed as a
major source of burnout. If cities can get lucrative power incomes from
sea nodes (I'm thinkin ship batteries could hold like 1000 power) then
villages would just become a nice way to get comms.

One more thing in this excessively long post....
Ships should be a monumental construction, not just something any newbie
could put together with 10 wood. A city should unify to build these wonders.
I think they should cost about 500 wood, 200 iron, and 100 cloth, these comms
varying on the size and type of the ship. Also, during construction, there
should be many issues of customization. For example, in Aebrin's system
you add on a hull to increase integrity. I think you should be able to customize
and either build a wide hull for durability or a narrow hull for speed.

All this open to suggestions/criticism of course

Cannons may not be great, but I really dislike the idea of ballistas, slings, ect. as well. This isn't ancient rome, however much you love it.

I suggest magical weapons, crafted with the boating skill but then enchanted and placed on boats as sort of long range statues. They shoot out various bolts and spheres of elemental energy, and cause various affects to the enemy ship. Slowing it down, damaging it, afflicting the crew... scabies would be /very/ bad at sea.

What ended up happening on the mud I played that had ships, was that people would end up portaling onto ships, killing everybody on it, and then steal the ship.

If this was not happening to you, you navigated endlessly manuvering around the waters and currents and remote islands bored to tears trying not to crash your boat. Then you would get off the island, explore and either get killed or someone would again teleport to you and kill you. At which point your boat was now at some far off location, and you had no way of getting there unless you found someone else with a boat to take you there.

In the end, all the boats stayed on dock, save a few that kept getting stolen and restolen by the people who liked playing pirate with eachother, but the rest of the people just set up gateways and portaled to the various secret islands and such, or just flew to them on their dragons.

Being that people can fly themselves in Lusternia without dragons, I see this as an even more likely scenario.

I think the most fun I had with those boats was when I was given a creation orb and took a date on an island I created just for us.

Thats why I asked if people have had experience with boats and ships in muds before or not.