Naval Units redux

[Roderick III]

I was going through Empire's files and I was wondering if the following would be possible. Before I break my game a couple times again (did plenty lately, needed three reinstalls), I thought that was better to ask our modding gurus here in the forum.

We can change the type and number of guns for the naval units, right? So I was thinking of something.

I want to build triremes, and basically galleasses (I am modding my game to a fantasy scenario of my creation, where gunpowder has the same use as in M2TW, so, very limited).
My idea is to edit the guns for the naval units to have basically this:

A max of 10 "greek fire" incendiary cannons, that would cause very light damage, and at very close range.

One big "cannon" that would work only at "contact range", and have a very narrow line of sight. This will be deployed at the ship's bow ONLY, so, I will have a Ram, somehow.
That "cannon-ram" should cause VERY HUGE CATASTROPHIC damage, meaning, pretty much break the hull on a way the target ship would sink, but they also should be under a random damage constraint (like regular cannons are), so if you don't hit the other ship with a straight perpendicular blow, the damage you'll inflict could actually not be really fatal, and your target ship may still leave the battle scene floating.

That way, if you leave "fire at will" turned on, every time your ship hits its bow against a target ship, you will cause damage. One thing that would be good is to have a modifier of some sort to increase the damage by the reason of the speed your ship was rowing/sailing when the contact happened. That may be something that can be done on the naval battle scripts (if there are any, didn't check it).

The animations and models are easy to create using 3ds Max. So, if the game logic above can be implemented. I can just go and replace all the models and their animations to have them looking like galleasses instead of ship-o'lines. And instead of cannonball explosions, we would have wood pieces flying from the ramming shocks, and fire from the "greek fire" cannons.
Boarding is already part of the engine, so there's no need to change that. Before gunpowder and cannons, sea skirmishes were mostly decided by boarding.

One last thing would be the capacity of increase, decrease speed of a vessel by increasing, decreasing its number of rowers. That would probably go along with the naval battle scripts changes as well. Something to do with the way crew influences the wind/sails function.

Hope this can work as food for thought for our Modding masters and that we may get a solution to bring to life naval battles from a time when the rams and boarding swords were crucial.

I want to PLAY the naval battles in 3d, so please don't tell me to go back to M2TW.

[Bethencourt]

Hi!

See in my signature the NAVAL MODDING link, it will lead you to a naval tutorial I have done, there look for guns section. I did not make a study of galleys but the tables and the group of stats are the same to the other ships.