The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

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Bob_The_Mighty
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

Post by Bob_The_Mighty »

I'm pleased to see this old add-on getting a new lease of life. I tried it out again recently and it was a fun game (I was quite surprised!) I have no intention of updating it, so it's all yours. However, here are my thoughts on the version I tried:

1. The start is very slow. I'd suggest removing the taverns by the gaol and giving each player a full complement of Ruffians to man the ships.
2. All the right-clicking for cannons and masts is very fiddly. Maybe it would be best to reset the ship stats each turn depending on where your units are standing on the deck. I guess you'd do this in a side turn refresh event. And you'd need to add an extra hex for leaders to choose between speed and skirmisher.
3. The banking system amused me at first, but it's totally against the theme of the game. I probably included withdrawals and interest rates just to see if I could get it to work. I'd remove all that stuff and just have them as places to raid.
4. Embarking/disembarking needs improvement, but it sounds like you've been working on that.
5. The option to get an onboard village would be nice as there are very few spaces for units to heal.
6. Victory points could be displayed in the default objectives pop-up (using delayed variable substitution).

Nice work on it so far, and feel free to develop the add-on however you want.
Last edited by Bob_The_Mighty on August 16th, 2022, 11:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Atreides
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

Post by Atreides »

Bob_The_Mighty wrote: August 15th, 2022, 11:10 pm I'm pleased to see this old add-on getting a new lease of life. I tried it out again recently and it was a fun game (I was quite surprised!)
Yes it was epic. In the end it came down to a close finish which was cool. We would have had you if we had managed to co-ordinate better. : ) Not a problem for your side. ; )

I do hope this can be uploaded as an addon soon, it's pretty hard to find opponents when only the few who follow this thread have the files! (Although I must admit I'm pretty fuzzy on what actually is needed to take part - I've only figured out that maps only need to be had by the game starter... the rest... no clue)
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

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Bob_The_Mighty wrote: August 15th, 2022, 11:10 pm I'm pleased to see this old add-on getting a new lease of life. I tried it out again recently and it was a fun game (I was quite surprised!)
Your add-ons never disappoint, the older ones are no exception!

1. The latest version (Alpha 2) gives 8 Ruffians but I will up that to 12 and remove the starting taverns as you suggest.
2. Yeah, the latest version does basically this and it really streamlines play.
3. That makes sense.
4. Indeed, ship decks are now "directly" linked to the world map using [Tunnel]. Human and AI controlled units can freely move between the two spaces. I just hope it is clear enough to new players that they just have to click on the deck to tell a unit to move there on its own.
5. Good idea, a "sick bay" village.
6. Yeah, it definitely needs that.
secretspacepolice
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

Post by secretspacepolice »

so I love all the new action on the high seas- one of my favorite addons
I definitely second the request for an upload, but I'd also like to see a dedicated PVP map, like in elvish-pillager's updated version, where you recruit people and ships with a set amount of gold, and have some pvp fun in a small(ish) arena
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

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secretspacepolice wrote: October 10th, 2022, 8:02 am I definitely second the request for an upload, but I'd also like to see a dedicated PVP map,
You can download the latest version (Alpha-2) from here. Then just take out the contained folder (The_High_Seas) and put it in wesnoth's data/add-ons directory. You can even play it online with other people if you host (no need for them to download it independently).

There is still some more work to be done before it can play other maps. And some features need to be redesigned for PvP, especially boarding. I am currently working on improving these aspects, so they should be better in the next alpha version.
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

Post by name »

At long last...

The High Seas Alpha-3 is now released:

The_High_Seas Alpha-3.zip
(92.98 KiB) Downloaded 30 times

Changes:

All ships have decks and can be boarded (and will board you too, so watch out!)
All ships can be captured and added to your ill-gotten fleet
Crew can directly board the deck of any ship adjacent to their own ship
Crew on deck can suffer injuries from hits to their ship
Manned rigging improves ram damage (as well as ship movement speed)
Sick Bay / Galley 'villages' onboard ships to help heal and upkeep your crew while away from port
Thief and Fencer can now be hired as crew (at taverns and barracks, respectively)
Four new classes of ships
A new horrifying sea monster
Several mutually hostile factions fight each other (and players) for control of the waves
Factions slowly replace sunk ships with new ones
Roving and respawning sea monsters
Ship replacement and monster spawn rates are player adjustable from custom options menu (during game setup)
Individual player income and starting gold now adjustable (during game setup)
Objectives screen scoreboard
Improved in game help
Fully crewed starting ship to speed up early game play
Major rewrite to better support new maps and scenarios
Major refactoring to remove unused features and custom macros now redundant with core macros

This alpha is a technical leap forward, so new bugs and imbalances are likely to be encountered.

Overall, the play should be better streamlined with a bit less micromanagement. However, moving crew in and out of raiding locations remains a needlessly clunky and time wasting feature, so removing that is one of my top priorities for the next alpha version.
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

Post by Atreides »

Bug report: while trying to load MP getting THS_REFRESH_CARGO_LABELS has 1 arguement expecting 0 (or was it vice versa?)

I had a quick look but didn't see what was causing it. : (

Looking forward to trying all the new and improved stuff, it sounds great.
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

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Atreides wrote: November 10th, 2022, 12:22 am Bug report: while trying to load MP getting THS_REFRESH_CARGO_LABELS has 1 arguement expecting 0 (or was it vice versa?)
That is very strange, the THS_REFRESH_CARGO_LABELS macro does take 1 argument and it looks like every time it is called it receives this.

Could you post a screenshot of the error message and the log file? (Hoping to see the stack trace to know which file and line number the call with seemingly 0 arguments came from.) You may need to delete your wesnoth cache first since wesnoth tends to remove add-on scenarios from the menu list if they fail to run the first time due to an error.
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

Post by Atreides »

name wrote: November 10th, 2022, 3:50 am
Atreides wrote: November 10th, 2022, 12:22 am Bug report: while trying to load MP getting THS_REFRESH_CARGO_LABELS has 1 arguement expecting 0 (or was it vice versa?)
That is very strange, the THS_REFRESH_CARGO_LABELS macro does take 1 argument and it looks like every time it is called it receives this.

Could you post a screenshot of the error message and the log file? (Hoping to see the stack trace to know which file and line number the call with seemingly 0 arguments came from.) You may need to delete your wesnoth cache first since wesnoth tends to remove add-on scenarios from the menu list if they fail to run the first time due to an error.
The reason it's very strange is because I was sloppy and copied it over the old version instead of making a new directory. It works just fine. Really sorry about the false report. <ashamed>

Only played 3 turns but it looks and runs great. Looks like the old getting intercepted and assaulted by monsters every few hexes is gone. It was sorta fun but also kinda annoying. Curious to find out how they work now. I'll see when I get a chance (I've been cursed by the may you live in interesting times curse ; ) to play more.

Oh and a quick question: I didn't find the High Seas era as a choice for era to play, is it gone now? I played it safe and chose default+dune, later I'll try something more exotic. Only affects leaders anyways as I recall.
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

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No problem whatsoever; over reporting is much preferred to under reporting issues. Not to mention your feedback has been most helpful in bringing this venerable scenario back to life.
Atreides wrote: November 11th, 2022, 6:03 pm Looks like the old getting intercepted and assaulted by monsters every few hexes is gone. It was sorta fun but also kinda annoying.
Yeah, it really bothered me they were always appearing in the same spots and were almost always hidden underwater. So I made them less common but more... adventurous. Unfortunately there are slightly too few of them in the early game but I have something which will fix that for the next version.
Atreides wrote: November 11th, 2022, 6:03 pm Oh and a quick question: I didn't find the High Seas era as a choice for era to play, is it gone now?
Yeah, I removed the era due to its being rather minor. What I aim to try moving forward, is to make THS balanced for all default factions and units, including even drakes, naga and mermish. Then it might be possible to add "Helm Keeps" to ships, so that you can recruit new crew directly to your deck, to remove the micromanagement of moving new crew onboard all the time. Effectively, your ship would be a moving castle (in the wesnoth sense).

You might still have the option to hire crew at shore-side buildings, like taverns and barracks, perhaps for a reduced price and for access to units not part of your faction.
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

Post by Atreides »

name wrote: November 11th, 2022, 10:07 pm No problem whatsoever; over reporting is much preferred to under reporting issues. Not to mention your feedback has been most helpful in bringing this venerable scenario back to life.
Atreides wrote: November 11th, 2022, 6:03 pm Looks like the old getting intercepted and assaulted by monsters every few hexes is gone. It was sorta fun but also kinda annoying.
Yeah, it really bothered me they were always appearing in the same spots and were almost always hidden underwater. So I made them less common but more... adventurous. Unfortunately there are slightly too few of them in the early game but I have something which will fix that for the next version.
Atreides wrote: November 11th, 2022, 6:03 pm Oh and a quick question: I didn't find the High Seas era as a choice for era to play, is it gone now?
Yeah, I removed the era due to its being rather minor. What I aim to try moving forward, is to make THS balanced for all default factions and units, including even drakes, naga and mermish. Then it might be possible to add "Helm Keeps" to ships, so that you can recruit new crew directly to your deck, to remove the micromanagement of moving new crew onboard all the time. Effectively, your ship would be a moving castle (in the wesnoth sense).

You might still have the option to hire crew at shore-side buildings, like taverns and barracks, perhaps for a reduced price and for access to units not part of your faction.
That gives me an idea: How about being able to recruit on ship but only if the ship is in port? That would get rid of the irritating crew loading but keep a semblance of balance. Maybe it would be interesting if you can only hire ruffians on board (the usual crew type) and have to go ashore to get anything tasty. One thing that was neat about the original was that it had those temples for mages and priests.
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

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Atreides wrote: November 12th, 2022, 5:34 pm That gives me an idea: How about being able to recruit on ship but only if the ship is in port?
That does make a lot of sense... this may be a good place for more customization options.

Players could choose between:
  • Regular Recruiting (limited by gold alone)
  • Dockside Recruiting (as you suggest)
  • No Recruiting (must hire crew from inland buildings as it is now)
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

Post by Atreides »

Those would be 3 excellent choices. The idea of allowing one to play it "original style" is super.
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WOW!

Post by Atreides »

Belatedly started a game of this. WOW! 70 odd turns into it and just wow. Lost my ship but boarded the killer and took it.

Too much going on, I'll just upload the replay when (if?) I get it.

Amazing.

What a blast. I won, even though I had a horrid start where I was confused and trying to figure out the changes. Lost my ship but since my cap'n and half the crew were out raiding a plantation I was able to board the enemy ship and take it over. JUST BARELY. : ) After that I did some trading and boy was it PROFITABLE. 1000's of gold made. After that it was just a process of carefully learning the new rules and hoping I'd catch up in points. I was way behind. Estaban and the Monsters almost reached 100 but then they both seemed to stall (probably killed off all the killables and had to wait for respawn). That's when I started to catch up. Once I reached parity I cautiously picked my targets and used lev 0's to avoid scores for the 2 sides.

No major bugs to report, although there was something odd with the names. I was seeing stuff like ! frees prisoner.

As for playability the teleporting into and out of ships/areas took some getting used to but works fine. Occasionally a unit passing over a bank or such would tele in and out which was slow (so I turned on accel speed, it plays much better with it on) due to scrolling.

As for the new features the most stunning one was the crews taking damage from enemy cannon fire. I guess I was not the only one to have grown up watching old films of sea combat... : ) Of course they also took damage when the ship was bitten or clubbed but why not. I had one awful moment when I captured a third ship but the AI nastily sent a crew member out to club their former ship to death and my whole boarding crew perished. AI is too darn smart in Wesnoth...

Perhaps some crew members should survive a sinking? Esp. those that can swim/fly (95%) and maybe 5-10% for the rest. No option to buy life vests and of course the life boats probably should not make a comeback : )

Oh and the Nautilus was great, I stumbled across it and captured it late in the game. It was immobile because apparently it had lost the engineer (on the "rigging") at the back and so spent most of the the game stuck. Once I got it moving under my cmd it was quite mighty. It does occur to me now that boarding a submarine really should be limited to units with submerge ability (which the original crew naturally should all have).

The rate at which prices increase could probably be lowered a lot. In a 100+ turn game the goods become way too valuable. Oh and another suggestion would be to add a possibility to sell/buy all of a commodity. Bit tedious to sell X 12 times in a row. Also more variety in recruits would be fantastic (I think that was discussed a while back). Right now the easy choice is mages/adepts.
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Re: The High Seas (Naval MP Scenario)

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Atreides wrote: December 12th, 2022, 5:45 am 70 odd turns into it and just wow. Lost my ship but boarded the killer and took it.
That is a wanton act of piracy! And naught even a score of days since your release from the gaol!
Atreides wrote: December 12th, 2022, 5:45 am What a blast. I won, even though I had a horrid start where I was confused and trying to figure out the changes.
Yeah, one of the real challenges with this scenario is communicating how its fairly unique interface and numerous mechanics work. Which things did you find most confusing at first?
Atreides wrote: December 12th, 2022, 5:45 am No major bugs to report, although there was something odd with the names. I was seeing stuff like ! frees prisoner.
Will have this fixed for the next release, thanks for reporting.
Atreides wrote: December 12th, 2022, 5:45 am Occasionally a unit passing over a bank or such would tele in and out which was slow (so I turned on accel speed, it plays much better with it on) due to scrolling.
The next version will have only the ship teleportation tunnels; all the unnecessary static location tunnels will be removed. That should reduce much of this pathfinding/scrolling nonsense.
Atreides wrote: December 12th, 2022, 5:45 am As for the new features the most stunning one was the crews taking damage from enemy cannon fire. I guess I was not the only one to have grown up watching old films of sea combat... : )
That may have had something to do with it... :geek:
Atreides wrote: December 12th, 2022, 5:45 am I had one awful moment when I captured a third ship but the AI nastily sent a crew member out to club their former ship to death and my whole boarding crew perished. AI is too darn smart in Wesnoth...
A feature I am especially looking forward to adding in the next version is a grapeshot attack for your ship's cannons. It will do minimal structural damage to the enemy ship (compared with your regular solid shot attack) while hitting enemy crew over an even wider area of the deck. Which should make your boarding crew's job a lot safer.
Atreides wrote: December 12th, 2022, 5:45 am Perhaps some crew members should survive a sinking? Esp. those that can swim/fly (95%) and maybe 5-10% for the rest. No option to buy life vests and of course the life boats probably should not make a comeback : )
A possible explanation is the gunpowder magazine (or boiler) is set off and the explosion kills the crew... I will have to give it a think.
Atreides wrote: December 12th, 2022, 5:45 am It does occur to me now that boarding a submarine really should be limited to units with submerge ability (which the original crew naturally should all have).
I have not yet read the book, but my understanding was the Nautilus must surface from time to time to acquire fresh air for both the crew and the coal turbines which recharge the batteries? So my thinking went that this makes it vulnerable to boarding (in a highly abstracted wesnothy game mechanics sort of way where, for example, a swordsman can somehow attack a high flying gryphon).
Atreides wrote: December 12th, 2022, 5:45 am The rate at which prices increase could probably be lowered a lot. In a 100+ turn game the goods become way too valuable.
Yeah, that and/or the prices should be capped.
Atreides wrote: December 12th, 2022, 5:45 am Oh and another suggestion would be to add a possibility to sell/buy all of a commodity. Bit tedious to sell X 12 times in a row.
Hmm, maybe buying and selling a full hold's worth of a commodity (or the maximum you can afford) is the only option there needs to be? Trading one barrel at a time seems rather pointless.
Atreides wrote: December 12th, 2022, 5:45 am Also more variety in recruits would be fantastic (I think that was discussed a while back). Right now the easy choice is mages/adepts.
Interesting choice. I tend to gravitate towards footpads, thieves and fencers since they are such fast boarders that they can take advantageous positions on the enemy deck during the first turn of an engagement. But yeah, adding a lot more crew options is on the To Do list.
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