At ease Captain,
Welcome to the second entry to our current diary reboot series. Captain. Today's diary will be about the changes we are making to the qualities of the men under your command. Let's begin.
First of all, we are introducing a new attribute system consisting of 6 attributes, shown in a classic hexagon diagram. These stats are Resilience, Agility, Hand-Eye Coordination, Cooperativeness, Adaptability, and Grit. These stats affect various parameters, so let's go through them one by one.
Resilience determines the total health of the sailor and contributes to how likely they are to be pushed overboard.
Agility determines the sailor's movement speed, as well as reduces their sprint cooldown.
Hand-Eye Coordination generally makes slight improvements in speed to most tasks, but also offers some gunner-specific effects. It also determines the sailor's skill with handheld weapons.
Cooperativeness determines how effectively the sailor's proficiencies contribute to overall team performance.
Adaptability determines the sailor's rate of experience gain.
Grit determines how easily the sailor will come back from the brink. For now, it will simply determine the instant death chance of the sailor upon losing all of their health, as well as how long they'll last when downed.
Sailor attributes are generated upon character creation, and are also affected by traits and eventually, character equipment.
Aside from a factor of age in certain attributes, which is a new parameter you can see along with weight and height, they are more or less completely random but will tend to cluster around the middle. Officers will also get a different stat distribution than Enlisted, favoring Cooperativeness over other attributes.
Traits are no longer universal and given in the same amount to all sailors; they will instead follow a more random distribution as we no longer need to rely on them to handle all of the personal variation. So no more getting enough Traumatized Drunkards to fill your boat up, Captain.
They will generally affect attributes, though some special traits will have bespoke effects and will be clearly marked as such.
You might also have noticed the numbers on the top right that change as you swap crew members around. That's our new score system; which can best be described as a weighted sum of the veterancies of the crew, which map to the Mechanic, Medic, and Loader+Gunner roles respectively. The contribution of a crew member to the overall score is determined by their Cooperativeness attribute.
Increasing score improves the overall performance of your crew in relevant fields, with diminishing returns as you get higher score. Individual veterancy effects still remain, and are still important, but now your crew can help each other excel so consider cross-training your sailors on rotation!
Last but not least, we are making it so that clothing items will be tied to status, so Officers will automatically swap to Officer clothes when assigned to a role. So you will no longer have to worry about that when moving crew around.
That about wraps up what we have for this week. Hope you've been enjoying the Experimental Branch so far. As usual, it's a period of hectic development, and so is your best chance to be a part of Boat Crew's direction. Don't be shy to hop on, and to give us any thoughts and comments either on the community forums or on our Discord channel.
You'll be able to see most things we've talked about for yourself in the Experimental update tomorrow.
Fair winds,
Captain,
T.T.