Curious as to your thoughts on these. What about:
1. Basing the capture on a boarding score differential (ex: If this ship wins a boarding party by a differential of 8 or more, you capture the other ship but she cannot be given actions this turn.)
2. Only being able to capture non-derelict ships if they have no crew (ex: If this ship wins a boarding party against an enemy ship that isn’t assigned any crew, you capture the other ship but she cannot be given actions this turn.)
I’m still not really a fan of abilities that would allow someone to capture a non-derelict ship, but maybe with some testing and tweaking it could be okay. Basing it on a differential makes it pretty luck based between normal ships, but still gets skewed really badly when the 10-masters are factored in. If those could be excluded somehow without it just looking arbitrary, the 8+ differential might work.
Basing it on whether a ship carries crew really only makes Oarsmen even more essential as meat shields, but wouldn’t really change things much from how they’re already used to prevent capture by keeping a ship from being counted as derelict.
Currently I have the “nerfed” version as follows (from an edit made some years ago): This ship can tow a ship by touching a derelict in any location (not just the bow), and can immediately initiate towing after resolving any action. (currently ~7 points on a couple custom crew)
Allowing a ship to tow derelicts while touching any part wouldn’t cause any drastic issues, especially if you stuck with the existing towing rules and had it merely remove the bow requirement. 2-3 points would probably be more than enough for that.
From the Proboards forum:
marhawkman said:
Eternal Dragon – 5 – Jade Rebellion
Whenever this ship eliminates the last segment of a sea creature, instead of eliminating the sea creature, it gains the eternal keyword, becomes docked at your home island, becomes a member of your fleet, and its faction becomes Jade Rebellion. If Eternal Dragon is eliminated, all sea creatures affected by his effect are eliminated as well.
This one is really interesting. I think you could possibly justify a cost of 5 if it got nerfed a little more. I would add “removed” to the last part – “If Eternal Dragon is eliminated or removed from the game….” That way, if their ship sinks, the sea creatures go with them as well.
I know these probably aren’t the best for keeping it flavorful, but these alterations could also help:
-Have it only apply to Sea Monsters, not all sea creatures (or some variant that excludes perhaps at least two sea creature types)
-When he is eliminated or removed, eliminate all friendly sea creatures, whether or not they were “reanimated” by the crew or not.
-“If this crew is cancelled, sea creatures affected in this way cannot be given actions that turn.”
Adding a contingency that it doesn’t work on sea creatures that come back by some other means (like a built-in Eternal) would be good.
Beyond that, it’s a pretty niche ability, like Empress (the tiger in OE). Powerful, but unless a player was known to use a lot of sea creatures, it wouldn’t be a major factor in games very often.
Removing any creatures captured this way if you lose this crew is a decent idea, but specifically due to elimination or removal. Cancelling would make it too easy to defeat.