New Core Ships - Design and Stats Discussion

[Dalas120]

Doofus has been working on some beautiful new ships, fully-animated and with gorgeous float/stand animations.

Our existing core ships are more-or-less fake units, not really designed to be used outside of cutscenes. I'd like these new ships to be actual units - this is a public place to discuss how we want to design these new ships' gameplay.
.

https://units.wesnoth.org/trunk/mainlin ... html#Ships

Here's some of my thoughts:

• Large ships like these should be powerful, high-level units.
• Resistances: 30% pierce, -30% fire, 30% cold, 60% arcane.
• Low defense: 40% deep water, 30% shallow water, 20% reef/swamp, 0% village.
• Can't travel over sand/flat/etc (unless we can get a portage animation), but can enter villages and heal.
• High hp. 100+ hp sounds absurd, but is compensated for by their low defense (compared to 60%+ merfolk/naga). From some playtesting vs the AI, even 80hp ships felt inferior to 50hp naga.
• No traits. 1.19 currently gives these ships traits, explained as unique attributes of their crew/captain/hull. That explanation is sensible, but I think people intuitively expect ships to not have traits.
• New "Aquatic" special: This attack can only be used if both the attacker and defender are in watery terrain.
• New "Transport" ability: This unit can carry a number of same-side passengers equal to its level. Cramped shipboard conditions prevent healing or resting, although poison will continue to take effect. To board adjacent units or to debark passengers onto an adjacent hex, mouse-over the unit/hex and press “t”, or right-click.
• New "Beachhead" ability: Passengers transported by this unit can attack after debarking, though they still cannot move.

transport-fullspeed.gif (3.26 MiB) Viewed 349 times

(I'm not suggesting adding ships to TRoW; this is just a debug ability test)

A rough proposal for some specific stats (now edited a few times):

Code: Select all

----Skiff:
level 1, 50hp, 5mp, neutral
transport (can only transport 1 unit, because it's level 1)
Ram: 20-1 melee impact; aquatic, unwieldy

----Derelict (advances to Ghost Ship):
level 2, 90hp, 5mp, chaotic
transport
Crash: 35-1 melee impact; aquatic, unwieldy

----Ghost Ship:
level 3, 120hp (60% cold resist, -10% arcane resist), 5mp, chaotic
transport
Ram:       35-1 melee impact; aquatic, unwieldy
Lightning: 16-2 ranged fire; magical
Lost Souls: 8-5 ranged cold; plague

----Pirate Carrack:
level 3, 120hp, 5mp, chaotic
transport
Ram:       35-1 melee impact; aquatic, unwieldy
Ballistae: 24-2 ranged pierce
Grapple:    4-4 ranged blade; slow

----Merchant Carrack:
level 3, 120hp, 5mp, lawful
transport, heals+4, cures
Ram:     35-1 melee impact; aquatic, unwieldy
Archers: 8-6 ranged pierce

----Coastal Raider (advances to Iron Raider):
level 2, 90hp, 6mp, neutral
transport, beachhead
+10% defense in shallow water, -10% defense / 2mp movecost in deep water
Ram: 20-2 melee impact; aquatic, unwieldy
Oars: 7-4 melee impact

----Iron Raider:
level 3, 120hp, 6mp, neutral
transport, beachhead
+10% defense in shallow water, -10% defense / 2mp movecost in deep water
Ram: 30-2 melee impact; aquatic, unwieldy
Oars: 9-4 melee impact

----Fireship:
level 2, 90hp (50% fire resist), 5mp, chaotic
deteriorate (This unit is deteriorating. It cannot be healed, and loses 5 hitpoints at the start of each of its turns.)
Ram: 35-2 melee fire; aquatic, unwieldy
Ram: 20-3 melee impact; aquatic, unwieldy

[Tezereth]

The proposed stats + transport mechanic sounds very un-mainline, especially in a game that very much doesn't center around ship gameplay.
Even naval combat with water units (mermen, naga etc) isn't nearly as important as ground combat in Wesnoth.

There's also the fact that ships will get 3 new abilities + 1 new special despite how little they're used, which doesn't set a very good precedent in my opinion.
That being said, if the ships are gonna be separated from their old stats (https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/pull/9683), there is room to make the ships more imposing, but HP values and damage seems quite high for now. I think increasing blade resistance to 10%, pierce to 40 or even 50% and cold to 40% can help making them feel robuste in spite of their low defense without making HP values too high.

[matto]

The proposed stats + transport mechanic sounds very un-mainline, especially in a game that very much doesn't center around ship gameplay.
Even naval combat with water units (mermen, naga etc) isn't nearly as important as ground combat in Wesnoth.
There's also the fact that ships will get 3 new abilities + 1 new special despite how little they're used, which doesn't set a very good precedent in my opinion.

I don't think that should stop Dalas from implementing a naval gameplay, tho i agree that transport is un-mainline like

That being said, if the ships are gonna be separated from their old stats (https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/pull/9683), there is room to make the ships more imposing, but HP values and damage seems quite high for now.
I think increasing blade resistance to 10%, pierce to 40 or even 50% and cold to 40% can help making them feel robuste in spite of their low defense without making HP values too high

Seems like he wants to go for "The Fear of Tecnology Theme", kinda like that XD.. anyway yeah probably Resistance Upgrade is better than HP, considering that it would look scary even for a lvl++ unit, maybe this time Ulf can really shine! xD [20-1 getting rekt with bit of luck xD)

Is the ability Massive being considered? I think Rashy Era/Ageless Era has it for Ships, basically makes the unit immune to Slow; might be a good idea to make it immune to Berserk too if ppl dont like the funky (IMO don't add Massive if the reason is just for realism )

[ForestDragon]

looking at the current proposed stats, some thoughts:

-adding new ships can work as long as the old fake unit ships remain for UMC backwards compatibility

-Not really sure about transport abilities, Such a mechanic deviates quite significantly from wesnoth's design, and is likely to cause lots of problems and weird interactions, especially if used outside scenarios specifically designed around it.

I think if we design ships without transport (at least in core), the current more transport-focused ships can be given other buffs to compensate, like:
-merchant carrack: heal +8, unpoison (to specialize it into a support)
-coastral/iron raider: slightly better melee, +1mp and/or skirmisher
-skiff: better base stats or a secondary ranged attack

-fireship dealing 35-2 damage as a level 2 seems too extreme even for an attack-only weapon. I'd reduce the fire damage to around 25-2 or so, and 20-2 for the impact attack.

-Personally I think Ghost Ship doesn't really need an entire new ability, and one that can actively harm allies too. I think the ship would be better off with something like plague on its attacks, and/or drain on the lost souls attack. Leaning on the undead theme by using existing undead specials.

-unwieldy on ship melees is a good choice, and helps separate them from infantry

-for naval ram, losing 10hp seems a bit unnecessary for an attack that already has major downsides of "can't be used in defense and only usable against enemies in water", it doesn't need a third downside.

-right now there seems to be an oddly small difference between lvl2 and lvl3 for derelict/ghost ships and raider/iron raider (90 on lvl2, 110 on lvl3), so either level 2 would need to be more fragile and/or lvl3 even sturdier.

-pirate carrack is probably my favorite of the ships in terms of stat design - thematically fitting, stats seem mostly balanced at first glance, offers several options while not relying too much on new abilities/specials to make itself stand out.

[Dalas120]

especially in a game that very much doesn't center around ship gameplay. Even naval combat with water units (mermen, naga etc) isn't nearly as important as ground combat in Wesnoth.

While most of Wesnoth's scenarios revolve around ground units, I feel that's because most of Wesnoth's units are ground units. Looking at aquatic-focused campaigns like Dead Water, for example, there's a great deal of combat taking place in water and swamp - all places where proper ships would be good to have.

anyway yeah probably Resistance Upgrade is better than HP, considering that it would look scary even for a lvl++ unit, maybe this time Ulf can really shine! xD [20-1 getting rekt with bit of luck xD)

but HP values and damage seems quite high for now. I think increasing blade resistance to 10%, pierce to 40 or even 50% and cold to 40% can help making them feel robuste in spite of their low defense without making HP values too high.

I'm a little nervous about giving ships high resistances - I'm worried we'll create into another Skeletons situation, where certain damage types are basically required to defeat them. But +10% blade/pierce/cold probably wouldn't be the end of the world?

While the HP values I've proposed are very high, I don't think they're completely absurd for a new race. A resilient Drake Enforcer or Grand Knight already has over 90hp, and the Yeti is- well, a Yeti.

Is the ability Massive being considered? I think Rashy Era/Ageless Era has it for Ships, basically makes the unit immune to Slow; might be a good idea to make it immune to Berserk too if ppl dont like the funky (IMO don't add Massive if the reason is just for realism )

Probably the direction this will go is reducing/removing special abilities, not adding them . But I'm not necessarily against some special trait for ships. I disagree with preventing slow, though, as slows is part of the design of the Pirate Carrack.

-adding new ships can work as long as the old fake unit ships remain for UMC backwards compatibility

Yeah, that's the plan. Way too much existing content uses those.

The proposed stats + transport mechanic sounds very un-mainline

-Not really sure about transport abilities, Such a mechanic deviates quite significantly from wesnoth's design, and is likely to cause lots of problems and weird interactions, especially if used outside scenarios specifically designed around it.

Yeah, I expected transports to be controversial. I'm not wedded to the idea - especially since it would be a lot of work for me to implement - but let me give my reasoning first:

• When campaigns and UMC use ships, the ships often transport other units - either as actual gameplay or just in a cutscene.
• Thus, players clearly expect ships to be able to transport units.
• And whether we add such an abilty to core or not, ships in campaigns and UMC will still transport units, just as they are now.
• Better to add a proper, standard implementation to core and thus fill expectations, rather than leave each campaign/UMC to do things their own way.
• (also it would be cool)

-fireship dealing 35-2 damage as a level 2 seems too extreme even for an attack-only weapon. I'd reduce the fire damage to around 25-2 or so, and 20-2 for the impact attack.

Let's decide about self-damage first; I'd intended that (lose 20hp if you hit both strikes) as a major downside to the fireship, balancing out its Lancer-level damage.

-Personally I think Ghost Ship doesn't really need an entire new ability, and one that can actively harm allies too. I think the ship would be better off with something like plague on its attacks, and/or drain on the lost souls attack. Leaning on the undead theme by using existing undead specials.

Yeah, fair enough. Plague works fine for me; I'll edit the original post.

-for naval ram, losing 10hp seems a bit unnecessary for an attack that already has major downsides of "can't be used in defense and only usable against enemies in water", it doesn't need a third downside.

I completely agree with your reasoning. Nevertheless, I really like the idea of a ramming ship losing hp. I don't suppose we could drop the terrain restriction and keep the self-damage, or some other simplification?

-right now there seems to be an oddly small difference between lvl2 and lvl3 for derelict/ghost ships and raider/iron raider (90 on lvl2, 110 on lvl3), so either level 2 would need to be more fragile and/or lvl3 even sturdier.

This was mostly motivated by art. Since the Derelict and Raider are clearly built on the same "chassis" as the Ghost Ship/Pirate/Merchant and Iron Raider, I felt the hitpoints shouldn't vary by too much.

While +22% hitpoints is low for a levelup, it's not absurd for core - the Hoplite only gains +4 from the Warrior, the Silver Mage only gains +14% from the Red Mage, etc.

[Refumee]

I read that the ships had traits. Was it anything else then mechanical? I think mechanical is kinda fine as trait.

I read unslowable would be good, I support that.

In Palms amid Blue Dunes, we have naval transport and combat. I like your approach to the unloading mechanic.
Did you check out what happens to the crew, if the full transport dies?
To answer my own question they are getting thrown out up to 2 hexes, getting 8 fire damage and slow.
Maybe that's an idea too.

Anyway, the ship vs unit combat felt always weird to me. I think it is about dimensions. We have a unit vs a whole ship with crew(?). The merchant vessel has archers with swarm. That reminds me on the toy soldier faction, who uses swarm as well, cause they are a punch of little archers.

How about a repair ability? The ships are having a crew right? Let the crew repair the ship. Similar to a troll, high hp, regeneration, low defense and hits hard.
To give the repair ability a limit, we can also add, that it only heals until 50% of max health, the rest needs to be healed at port.

Why are the ships not allowed to move on land? It would be nice if they were able to move over land with heavy debuffs. We need to think about the recruitment of ships.
I saw that in Palms amid Blue Dunes. The AI seems not smart enough to take the tiles next to water to recruit boats.

I know that there are now campaigns for ships, but these ships are the precursor to a campaign. I am looking forward what comes next.

In the end I have some question? What is a Fire ship? Looks like a burning cursed ship.
Will we get ships from other cultures? (I think not) I mean, how about a Elvish, Orcish, Dunefolkish or Saurian (?) Ship?

[ForestDragon]

Yeah, I expected transports to be controversial. I'm not wedded to the idea - especially since it would be a lot of work for me to implement - but let me give my reasoning first:

• When campaigns and UMC use ships, the ships often transport other units - either as actual gameplay or just in a cutscene.
• Thus, players clearly expect ships to be able to transport units.
• And whether we add such an abilty to core or not, ships in campaigns and UMC will still transport units, just as they are now.
• Better to add a proper, standard implementation to core and thus fill expectations, rather than leave each campaign/UMC to do things their own way.
• (also it would be cool)

Maybe so. At least this on new units not tied to default era. Though I'll warn you that you'll have to deal with a lot of edge cases if you decide to stick with this route.

Just a few examples off the top of my head:
-what happens to poisoned/regenerating units inside a ship
-what happens on victory if a unit is hiding inside a ship
-an event checks if a specific unit is alive via [have_unit], but a unit is hiding in a ship. will the game treat the unit as alive or nonexistent.
and there's more


UMC/campaign-specific transports can get away with being specialized for specific scenarios and ignore many edge cases, but a core abilities doesn't have such luxuries, it would have to be cover a lot more cases to be core-quality.

Yeah, fair enough. Plague works fine for me; I'll edit the original post.

Alright, looks decent now.

This was mostly motivated by art. Since the Derelict and Raider are clearly built on the same "chassis" as the Ghost Ship/Pirate/Merchant and Iron Raider, I felt the hitpoints shouldn't vary by too much.

While +22% hitpoints is low for a levelup, it's not absurd for core - the Hoplite only gains +4 from the Warrior, the Silver Mage only gains +14% from the Red Mage, etc.

Alright. In this case the emphasis can be more on the attacks/abilities for the difference between levels.

-fireship dealing 35-2 damage as a level 2 seems too extreme even for an attack-only weapon. I'd reduce the fire damage to around 25-2 or so, and 20-2 for the impact attack.

Let's decide about self-damage first; I'd intended that (lose 20hp if you hit both strikes) as a major downside to the fireship, balancing out its Lancer-level damage.

-for naval ram, losing 10hp seems a bit unnecessary for an attack that already has major downsides of "can't be used in defense and only usable against enemies in water", it doesn't need a third downside.

I completely agree with your reasoning. Nevertheless, I really like the idea of a ramming ship losing hp. I don't suppose we could drop the terrain restriction and keep the self-damage, or some other simplification?

A few issues I have with the current ramming:

On the design side, it is a fixed value of 10 self-damage, while most damage-related specials in wesnoth are percentile (with poison being a notable exception, but that one is a status effect), so that might limit the design of the special and its usefulness for UMC creators in my opinion.

On the technical side, a major problem I can see with the self-damage is that it can mess up the expected HP/damage window, at least if it's coded via events (which the statics window doesn't take into account), giving players a misleading impression of how likely a ship is to survive an attack.

I wonder if "take self-damage equal to X% of the damage dealt" might be better than a flat 10. Would make lower-level ships less punished for using ram, larger ships worse at spamming ram, and make the special more widely applicable for UMC than a flat 10.

But in general, unwieldly + some self damage can work, or unwieldly + the only-water restriction. Don't have a strong opinion in either direction here, just want ramming to not have too many different effects packed into one attack.

[Ravana]

I think arcane resistance is unreasonably high. Self damage is not very enjoyable for playable units, but its ok for enemy units.

[Dalas120]

I read that the ships had traits. Was it anything else then mechanical? I think mechanical is kinda fine as trait.

Doofus's current versions always get mechanical, and also get 1 of quick/resilient/fearless. I agree with keeping mechanical, I'm against quick/resilient/fearless.

I read unslowable would be good, I support that.

Slows is part of the design of the Pirate Carrack, so I'd prefer to keep ships vulnerable to it if possible.

How about a repair ability? The ships are having a crew right? Let the crew repair the ship. Similar to a troll, high hp, regeneration, low defense and hits hard.
To give the repair ability a limit, we can also add, that it only heals until 50% of max health, the rest needs to be healed at port.

That's an interesting idea. It also raises questions about whether or not conventional healers (White Mage, Apothecary, etc) should be able to heal ships...

Why are the ships not allowed to move on land? It would be nice if they were able to move over land with heavy debuffs.

You know, I had thought this was completely unrealistic, but after researching a bit apparently it wasn't unheard-of. Question is - would it feel weird? Merfolk and Naga can already move over land at the cost of some pretty significant debuffs.

In the end I have some question? What is a Fire ship? Looks like a burning cursed ship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ship

Will we get ships from other cultures? (I think not) I mean, how about a Elvish, Orcish, Dunefolkish or Saurian (?) Ship?

Doofus has some planned! https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/pull/9683

I think arcane resistance is unreasonably high.

The existing Wesnoth ships have 60% arcane; I copied that over to the new ones. I'm fine with a different value if 60% is a problem.

UMC/campaign-specific transports can get away with being specialized for specific scenarios and ignore many edge cases, but a core abilities doesn't have such luxuries, it would have to be cover a lot more cases to be core-quality.

That's a very good point. @Refumee, how robust do you think the system in "Palms amid Blue Dunes" is?

On the design side, it is a fixed value of 10 self-damage, while most damage-related specials in wesnoth are percentile (with poison being a notable exception, but that one is a status effect), so that might limit the design of the special and its usefulness for UMC creators in my opinion.

I wonder if "take self-damage equal to X% of the damage dealt" might be better than a flat 10. Would make lower-level ships less punished for using ram, larger ships worse at spamming ram, and make the special more widely applicable for UMC than a flat 10.

Not saying we have to keep the current implementation, but flat instead of percentage self-damage was an intentional choice. With a percentage-based amount, it's hard to make a ship who's ramming is especially suicidal or especially conservative - the damage-dealt-to-damage-taken ratio is always the same. I'd hoped that flat self-damage would open up more design options, without needing multiple different specials ("reckless ram", "safe ram", etc).

For example, compare the current Fireship to the Iron Raider. The Fireship does more damage despite being lower-level, but is also much less efficient, taking 20/70 self-damage instead of the Iron Raider's 10/60. The Carracks, on the other hand, have both low efficiency (10/30) and mediocre damage (30-1) - their rams should only be used in desperate situations or against a defenseless target like another ship.

On the technical side, a major problem I can see with the self-damage is that it can mess up the expected HP/damage window, at least if it's coded via events (which the statics window doesn't take into account), giving players a misleading impression of how likely a ship is to survive an attack.

Fortunately, [heal_on_hit] works with negative damage. From some testing I did yesterday, both the expected HP/damage window and the AI are able to accurately evaluate the special. I agree that this would be a dealbreaker otherwise.

But in general, unwieldly + some self damage can work, or unwieldly + the only-water restriction. Don't have a strong opinion in either direction here, just want ramming to not have too many different effects packed into one attack.

Ok, in summary, the biggest pending questions:

• Should ships be able to move on land?
• Should ships self-repair? Should they be healable by healers?
• Is a Transport ability a good idea, or will it cause more problems than it solves?
• What specials/effects should ramming have? If self-damage, how much and how should it work?

[juhhyv]

Ships should be able to move in castles and possibly in sand but not in forest, hills etc.
Self-repair sounds good for ships.
I like transport mechanic in Palms and blue dunes. Maybe some ships should be more transport specified (high mp, weak attack) and some not have transport ability. It would allow use mainline ships in UMC both with and without transport ability. Or have ships both transport and non-transport versions. Just add T-letter on sprite of transport ability ships (no needless new art).

And if it would otherwise cause too much job, transport and non-transport versions can be nearly identical (transport ability only cost minor more gold than non-transport).

[ForestDragon]

Doofus's current versions always get mechanical, and also get 1 of quick/resilient/fearless. I agree with keeping mechanical, I'm against quick/resilient/fearless.

Slows is part of the design of the Pirate Carrack, so I'd prefer to keep ships vulnerable to it if possible.

Agreed.

That's an interesting idea. It also raises questions about whether or not conventional healers (White Mage, Apothecary, etc) should be able to heal ships...

conventional healers can already heal undead, fire guardians, and other stuff that doesn't really have an organic body. For the sake of not overcomplicating gameplay, I think it's best to keep the "normal healers can heal anything approach" approach.

As for self-repair. Don't have a strong opinion either way, but if it does get added I think it's best to reuse existing regeneration/regeneration +4 abilities instead of adding new names for the same thing (like how dunefolk use marksman for a melee attack), and probably keep it limited to the more high-level ships, while lower-level stuff needs to still rely on villages.

You know, I had thought this was completely unrealistic, but after researching a bit apparently it wasn't unheard-of. Question is - would it feel weird? Merfolk and Naga can already move over land at the cost of some pretty significant debuffs.

Hmmm, now that I think about it, pairing move-on-land and the ability to ram non-water units would result in some really weird ship tactics.

Basically, I think there is two options:

a) keep ships unable to move on land, but can use ram as normal

b) allow ships to move on some land very slowly, but re-add the original restriction for only water attacks. Reducing the total weirdness at the cost of a complexity. (While as I said, I think it's better to not put too many effects on an attack at once, on the other hand a ground ship ramming a ground unit would be too ridiculous even for wesnoth. And if necessary, we can try to compensate the triple-downside with some stat buffs later.)

I think arcane resistance is unreasonably high.

The existing Wesnoth ships have 60% arcane; I copied that over to the new ones. I'm fine with a different value if 60% is a problem.

Personally I think having 60% (or even more) arcane for ships is entirely reasonable. wesnoth has plenty of high resistances and high weaknesses to various damage types, and making new mechanical units arcane-resistant will make high arcane resistance slightly less uncommon (something which has been brought up in discussions of the arcane resistance as a whole.)

Ghost Ship would also give the undead a reliable anti-mermaid unit for water-focused SP campaigns, as default era undead's arcane-resistant units are either unable to swim (dark adept/ghoul) or have weak stats (bat). 1.16-like undead are well-balanced around ground fights but have less counterplay in heavily water-filled maps.

Not saying we have to keep the current implementation, but flat instead of percentage self-damage was an intentional choice. With a percentage-based amount, it's hard to make a ship who's ramming is especially suicidal or especially conservative - the damage-dealt-to-damage-taken ratio is always the same. I'd hoped that flat self-damage would open up more design options, without needing multiple different specials ("reckless ram", "safe ram", etc).

For example, compare the current Fireship to the Iron Raider. The Fireship does more damage despite being lower-level, but is also much less efficient, taking 20/70 self-damage instead of the Iron Raider's 10/60. The Carracks, on the other hand, have both low efficiency (10/30) and mediocre damage (30-1) - their rams should only be used in desperate situations or against a defenseless target like another ship.

Ok, good point.

Fortunately, [heal_on_hit] works with negative damage. From some testing I did yesterday, both the expected HP/damage window and the AI are able to accurately evaluate the special. I agree that this would be a dealbreaker otherwise.

Alright, good.

[Spannerbag]

Eh, just a quick though about boarding based on my experiences coding (in WML) an embark/dismebark logic for a campaign I'm nowhere near publishing yet (maybe 1.20 ).
In my case the craft is a raft which can only carry 1 person, so if a leader boards the raft inherits the leader's id and canrecruit=yes.
Otherwise, if the leader is simply removed from the map then the player may lose when said leader disappears from the map.

...

Having skimmed previous posts there are some good ideas and potential issues there IMHO.
A few random initial thoughts:

Mechanical units
I've always thought that repair would make more sense than rest healing for mechanical units.
I guess the argument is that mechanical units have crews/operators that can maintain said mechanical unit.
(FWIW I also don't think rest healing is appropriate for undead either - but I'll not go down that rabbit hole here )

Ship movement
I don't think ships should be able to move on land except for sand where they can move onto any sand hex that is adjacent to water.
This could possibly make for quicker/easier embark/disembark?
Movement cost for this should be high IMHO.
It doesn't make sense to me that a huge great ship can sail on ford water (or mud for that matter...) but I don't see any easy way to prevent this.

Resistances
As ships are large structures made mostly of wood IMHO they should generally have high arcane, cold and pierce resistance and good impact resistance (all positive).
Blade (well, axe really ) resistance should be around normal and fire resistance should be poor.
However I guess it depends on how well the ship defends the crew and where the balance is struck between how much crew damage/hp/resistance and structural/hp/resistance damage proportionally contribute to total damage.

Cost
Ships should be a major investment so should be correspondingly expensive and rare.

Ram
I quite like this but it does raise the question of how ships interact with "regular" units.
As they occupy a single hex and are treated as a regular unit they can attack and be attacked by individual units therefore by default a ship can ram any other unit. Yet they potentially can also transport multiple other (regular, non ship) units (don't get me started on villages!) so there is, IMHO, a bit of clarification required about how ships are handled in the game?
I can accept the current convention (ships are regular units) but ideally I'd like some sort of separation between ships (large and massive) and regular units that limits interaction to some extent.
E.g. ships can only ram other ships and many attacks/specials have extremely limited effect on ships (arcane, pierce, backstab and slow for example).

Just my tuppence worth.

Cheers,
-- Spannerbag

[Lord-Knightmare]

I gotta say, the new ships and their stats do seem promising.
Might be an incentive to invest in a naval-battles campaign (not the kind of Saving Elensefar, but rather like Palms Amid Blue Dunes)

And also, they are in alignment with some plans I had for a dual-map (both sea and land) battle campaign involving pirates, especially the transport mechanic.

[Refumee]

So the Fire Ship is a suicide ship? Then I don't get its stats.

I do support the high arcane resistance on ships. It is basically a swimming building, haha.
I really like lore reasons why someone is resistant to arcane. Undeads die quick, cause they are unnatural and humans not, cause they are normal being.
Ships are dead wood basically, so a high resistance to pure anti magic/magic sounds good to me.

I do support your embarking mechanic, I'll integrate it into PaBD.

Healing should be general possible. We can heal Trolls, Woses ect with magic so why no ships?

So
to the Transportability:

The AI is able to use it. I am unsure how well.

For the Player it works very well. I didn't encounter any bugs with it.
It (the ship) also gets the leader/canrecruit trait, so that the player cannot lose.
On a win the transport auto-unloads.

Known Bugs are, poison units don't get poison damage.

In the Credits The_Gnat is mentioned, that he/she helped with the transport code. Maybe that user is still activ.

[Dalas120]

So the Fire Ship is a suicide ship? Then I don't get its stats.

In lieu of an actual suicide attack, its 35-2 ramming attack deals self-damage. If we do end up removing self-damage from the ram, I'd want to add something else to just the fireship.

I like transport mechanic in Palms and blue dunes. Maybe some ships should be more transport specified (high mp, weak attack) and some not have transport ability. It would allow use mainline ships in UMC both with and without transport ability. Or have ships both transport and non-transport versions. Just add T-letter on sprite of transport ability ships (no needless new art).

And also, they are in alignment with some plans I had for a dual-map (both sea and land) battle campaign involving pirates, especially the transport mechanic.

I do support your embarking mechanic, I'll integrate it into PaBD.

Ok, I'm going to make an attempt at writing a core-worthy transport ability based on PaBD. Will see if I can come up with something high-quality or not.