When you first imagined ship combat, did you think that you would be spending your time shooting birds out of the air with your cannons? Did you imagine an albatross being able to sink your whole ship? I sure didn’t. This is the thing that bothers me the most about sailing thematically. Sailors in the old days weren’t paid to sail out to sea and shoot birds out of the sky. They weren’t firing their cannonballs directly into the ocean to kill sharks or whales. It doesn’t make sense that you need a whole ship armed with cannons to defeat a fish. So what were they firing at? Other ships! That was the whole reason for having cannons on your boat and yet there isn’t a single other attackable boat in the game right now. You’re telling me that nobody has any pirates that they want slain? No shady characters want you to steal treasure from a merchant ship? No faction has any rival they want on the bottom of the ocean? Why does everyone posting on the bounty board just want animal parts like tern beaks and shark liver? I feel like a poacher supplying goods to a wet market. I believe that ship combat should primarily revolve around fighting other ships and ship-sized enemies. Thematically, it makes more sense than a manta ray or seagull being able to hold its own against a huge boat, and there are tons of ways to expand on combat into the domain of exciting naval battles that have been tried and tested in other video games before. Some things you can do with ship enemies that you can’t really do with simple creatures: - Getting boarded. Maybe an enemy ship doesn’t have a lot of firepower, but there’s a really scary enemy waiting to cross the gangplank. Maybe a ship of wizards is able to cast spells to summon creatures on your ship once you’re within range. - This opens up a new crewmate function: fighting enemies that have boarded you. Maybe you could arm your crewmates with a whole player-provided loadout. - Boarding your enemies could also be explored, as well as facilities that let you do that. - Make it so player weapons are for killing the NPCs on ships and cannons for damaging ships directly. Now both of them are important to sailing combat while not stepping on the other’s toes. - Crippling ships. You could target their masts to hinder their movement and give you an advantage, or even stop their movement altogether. Maybe a new ammunition type damages sails and slows down ships (e.g. like the chain shot from Sid Meier’s Pirates). - Killing the helmsman could disable movement, shooting the cannon operators could disrupt damage output. I don’t believe that ship combat can ever feel satisfying and fleshed out while the core progression comes from sitting there dumping powered staff charges and cannonballs into unmoving enemies while sitting still in the water yourself, regardless of whether it’s the cannon or the player’s weapon doing more damage. It wouldn’t even feel bad that kills are slow if the enemies were fun to fight. We also shouldn’t have to choose between sea enemies having so much health that albatrosses have more hitpoints than brutal green dragons and the Tumeken’s Shadow dealing a maximum of 12 damage against anything at sea for some reason. No amount of tweaking is going to make fights like those feel satisfying. I had to air my frustrations even if at this point I’m just screaming into the void. It was disappointing seeing Jagex offer the ability to ignore the only thing currently distinguishing sailing from regular combat and marketing it as combat improvements. I really hope they have a real overhaul in the works behind the scenes because I fear if they keep going in the current direction it will lead to sailing combat being left as nothing more than a dumbed-down version of land combat. submitted by /u/YEGIRL
Originally posted by u/YEGIRL on r/2007scape
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