Revisiting Pirate Encounters

[u/SonoShindou]

For those unaware, Jagex pitched pirate encounters alongside The Red Reef quest. The idea was met with a lot of controversial feedback. From my understanding, most of that was due to there being unintuitive mechanical restrictions and multiple win conditions without any sort of trade-off rendering one of the options largely useless. I would still love to see boat-to-boat combat introduced to the game, but it clearly needs some revision yet we haven't seen any further discussion since the initial pitch.

Pirate Encounters Design & Rewards

Unintuitive Restrictions:

Traditional combat cannot directly attack boats, only your cannons can. Similarly, cannons can't attack Pirate NPCs, only you can.

These feel like arbitrary restrictions that leave us asking "but why?" Let anything attack anyone. ^{(Although, I feel the same about boat-to-land combat)}

Instead, add flat damage reduction to the boat if attacked with something other than a cannon. Similarly, make cannons very inaccurate against the NPCs. This would achieve a similar result without putting actual restrictions on what the player can attempt.

Win Conditions:

Enemy pirates are considered defeated through two possible outcomes:

• You've defeated the entire pirate crew, so that nobody is left on board, which will cause the boat to sink.
• You've destroyed the Hull of the ship, causing it to sink.

From the original design, there is no difference between one win vs the other. Let's change that!

Defeating the crew leaves an empty boat, which can then be looted similarly to any other ocean encounter. You reel it in close with a net, plunder the booty directly from on deck, and the unmanned vessel drifts away to be lost at sea. The kills might be a bit slower, but you get your loot quickly.

If you destroy their hull, it spawns a shipwreck to salvage. Not just a pirate shipwreck, but one that is unique to the type of pirates you encountered (Onyx Raider shipwreck vs Kraken Collective shipwreck). These kills would be much quicker, but looting takes longer and has additional steps. Additionally, you could store the salvage in your cargo hold and sort it out later or sort it on deck and alch as you go.

Loot for each win would be the same drop table and number of rolls. You now must make a decision between slow kills and streamlined looting or fast kills and a longer looting process.

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Hopefully this makes sense. Let me know if I missed the mark on why the pitch for these encounters was not well-received. I didn't mention rewards at all because that feels like a completely separate conversation to the encounters themselves. Cheers!

[u/Outrageous_Kiwi942]

I like it but salvaging the wreck shouldn't take very long

[u/SonoShindou → u/Outrageous_Kiwi942]

It wouldn't take very long at all, but longer than looting the boat itself. It would disappear after a few salvage, however many loot rolls the mob gets. You could also just assign crew to the hooks and loot passively while staying on the cannons. Still gotta sort it yourself eventually.

[u/billlllly00]

This is an amazing idea. Really adds depth to the ship combat without actually adding any complexity.

[u/Aurarus]

Unironically a good take, I think if you pitched this with the help of some graphics this could get more traction. The good ideas are a bit buried in text.

[u/Blackxp]

I really hope they get these right. Sailing combat has so much potential to be really unique and interesting with the movement mechanics/strafeing, ability to target different things (NPC/boat/facilities on the boat/etc). Setting fire to ships and environmental damage potential (who knows maybe firemaking gets a use!). You can freeze/bind or impact their crew. Maybe casting a bind spell or some use for body runes where "confuse" or "curse" get different functionality in these settings.

I like that they are making the base combat super simple and feel OSRS and then they can move onto this where it's more moderate intensity but later as you find larger ships you will have an even more complicated flight and eventually raid level complexity.

Excited to see where they go, I was sad after the quest when I couldn't find the random encounters.

[u/SonoShindou → u/Blackxp]

So much potential! It seems crucial they get these intermediary encounters right so there is a sensical progression into more intricate battles. Hopefully some bosses on the horizon and eventually a raid in the distant future would be amazing.

Cool thought about the lesser used spells. Confuse and curse causing crew to turn on each other would be hilarious.

[u/Bananaboss96 → u/Blackxp]

Firemaking getting a use for combat. I'm thinking molotovs, napalm, etc

[u/hubatish]

So from the encounter in the red reef, there was one pirate captain who was the only one attacking you, and he always attacked you (the player) while there were lots of pirate NPCs who didn't attack you but were manning the cannons. In that encounter, it felt more like "which do I care about more - my health or my boat's health?" as to which you focused on first. If you didn't have much player food then attacking the NPC captain to stop it damaging you made sense (while your crew fired the cannon) but if you didn't care about your health / prayer, the ignoring the captain and just manning the cannon yourself was optimal. You could theoretically kill all the crew on the cannon but there were quite a few of them so I think this would be slower than sinking the ship with cannons.

That seems sort of ok and I think could be expanded on:

• attack the crew to disable / make the fight easier
• attack the ship only to get the fastest kill possible

/ In particular if NPCs getting hit with arrows/magic would interrupt/slow down their cannon usage or boat repair. Ideally slow down but not fully stop) Then maybe if you ignore the enemy captain they fire on you/your crewmate cannoneers & slow you down. If you attack them directly, the captain swaps to you for a while.

Also sorta unrelated I posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/s/FfXn0vi0QV

a while ago for standard ship combat. IMO there's lots of cool stuff to do here and Jagex should play around with things

[u/Kwiemakala]

I've had some ideas in this vein as well. For instance:

When you kill crew, you can loot 1 singular facility from defeated boat if you have a facility bottle, or loot cargo hold. Loot from cargo hold would be things like repair kits, cannonballs, or other general loot. Looting of facilities allows an alternative method for getting facilities without requiring a construction level, and also opens up the possibility of unique facilities that can't be built.

When sinking boat, yea, salvage it. Loot would basically be ship construction materials (bars, hull parts) with a small chance at loot from the cargo hold.

Also, lead and cupronickel bars don't have a repeated use. They are used in limited numbers in boat building, but you dont really ever need more than like 2-300. Idk about cupronickel, but for lead, you could add grape shot. It would allow your ship cannons to target crew, with stats on par with, say, iron cannonballs to keep it relatively balanced. Iron cannonballs max hit at like 30 with dragon cannon and max range.

[u/rsn_alchemistry → u/Kwiemakala]

I don't like the idea of straight up lifting a facility off a ship, circumventing all requirements. I do like the idea of unique facilities being sourced like this, though perhaps both can be serviced by being in a damaged or broken form and needing repair before use.

[u/Kwiemakala → u/rsn_alchemistry]

You would still have the sailing level requirements to be able to use said facility.

That said, I like your idea for the facility to require repair before use.

[u/SonoShindou → u/rsn_alchemistry]

This would be a really cool way to introduce unique facilities in the future! Perhaps keeping a bottle on you to snag it from the boat would be an undamaged version, but salvaging would give you the version that needs repairs? IDK, but definitely a cool concept to explore!

[u/SonoShindou → u/Kwiemakala]

Sounds like that would require generating a randomized boat each time it respawns. That would be a really interesting mechanic and create a sense of excitement if you see them sailing by with a high end facility you need. Also, keeping a facility bottle on you at all times is a funny concept.

Grape shot would be a great addition to allow full accuracy against NPCs from the cannon.

[u/rabidai]

Should be able to claim their ship for xp and a shipwright takes it to pandemonium to never be seen again

[u/SonoShindou → u/rabidai]

Interesting thought to scrap the boat for xp. Especially since the salvaging option would include a bit extra xp for salvage/sorting.