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Diversifying the Combat Meta


Taelessael

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To keep it simple, the game as is can't be finely tuned enough to make mixed-size/design combat fleets reasonably viable, the combat system isn't complex enough. Every change to the existing numbers results in a lot of players sitting down, doing some math, putting some test shots down range to check their math, and then deploying fleets of copy-pasta ships built to the new mathematical definition of "best". They have no reason to deploy anything else because there is no counter to this best except more of itself. As this results in boring copy/paste fleets, this is an issue.

 

To solve this I would suggest the inclusion of additional elements that are only permitted on one or two sizes of core, or elements that encourage people to build large/heavy to defend against (since avoiding conventional damage pushes people to build as small as possible) such as:
-Bombs/Torpedoes: An exceptionally high damage short to mid range weapon with severely limited ammo, tracking, and firing cone that can only be fit to xs core constructs (perhaps also prevent it from being fired while docked to stop people from making docked-xs core turrets). 

-Targeting Computer: A device that substantially augments the effective range of weapons that can only be fitted to an s core construct, allowing it to better serve as a picket ship against xs bombers, and not be hopelessly out-ranged by m-core constructs.

-Radar Booster: An element that augments the radar of the ship to which it is attached, such as by allowing it to spot targets at ranges longer than 2su, or having it display data on its target (shield hp, mass, ect...)

-Shield Booster: A large element that recharges a target's shield (perhaps expending some manner of ammo/fuel in the process) and can only be fit to L cores.

 

E-War:

---Radar Disruptor: A large weapon that has a chance to blind the target's radar for a short period (perhaps to all targets other than itself and other ships using disruptors) that. The chance to work is inversely proportionate to the target's mass.
---Tractor Beam: Applies a set amount of force to pull a target toward you or push it away from you.

 

-Interstellar Drive? (can't hurt to ask): A large element that can only be fit to a large/XL core, and allows a craft to transport itself, its passengers, and docked ships between solar-systems. Uses a lot of fuel, ends up in a random location in the target system if it doesn't have some manner of beacon at its destination to lock on to.

 

Rather obviously we don't need things to be these specific elements/ideas, just as long as whatever extra complexity we do get encourages diversity of fleet composition. Elements for larger ships should probably be quite large in size, or require large periphery items to help encourage people to not be flying the smallest thing they can fit a shield, guns, and engines to.

Any thoughts/ideas?

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Only removing the cross section in PvP will suffice at first.

To bring the game to a diversity of ship visuals this will suffice.

This is requested since the addition of shields. It would take a few seconds for NQ devs.

It has never been done.

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8 hours ago, Lethys said:

Good luck.  such ideas have been around since 2013. And were obviously ignored since then

 

I'm aware that none of these ideas are new, I am simply trying to spitball things and see if anyone else has something I didn't think of to help encourage combat ships to not just be needles and nintendo cartridges. 

 

 

8 hours ago, Knight-Sevy said:

Only removing the cross section in PvP will suffice at first.

To bring the game to a diversity of ship visuals this will suffice.

This is requested since the addition of shields. It would take a few seconds for NQ devs.

It has never been done.

 

Cross-section is fine, it gives people a reason to not build cubes. What we need is something to conflict with it, a reason for people to build big. The goal is to make it such that you need to decide between having good defense against conventional weapons (small builds), having a good defense against the new thing (large builds), or keeping a balance somewhere in the middle.

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Too much work, that will never happen (or too late)

there is short and fast way to make it better (not perfect but better)

 

As almost every ship have the same shield, and shield it 90% of your survival time, small cross section is the only way to increase your survivability

so everyone wants the smallest L core possible.

 

2 easy and quick fix :

link hit chance to core size and not cross section

link shield strength to max core stress

 

that way you can have for exemple with L weapon

- very low hit chance on Xs / S core while keeping M and L core fully hit, no matter their shape, so you can be a bit more creative than a small rectangle

- you can also  choose to have a larger ship, with many gunners and lot of expensive voxel to be more resistant than a small solo L core

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11 minutes ago, Aranol said:

...

As almost every ship have the same shield, and shield it 90% of your survival time, small cross section is the only way to increase your survivability

so everyone wants the smallest L core possible.

 

2 easy and quick fix :

link hit chance to core size and not cross section

link shield strength to max core stress

 

that way you can have for exemple with L weapon

- very low hit chance on Xs / S core while keeping M and L core fully hit, no matter their shape, so you can be a bit more creative than a small rectangle

- you can also  choose to have a larger ship, with many gunners and lot of expensive voxel to be more resistant than a small solo L core

 

Removing cross-section from hit chance and just linking it to core size again would just turn everything back in to cubes.

 

Connecting max core stress and max shield-strength might do something, but I suspect there'd be a high probability of people just working out the sweet-spot for the hit probability to shield strength ratio, and then we'd just see a bunch of copy-pasta of that size. What we need is something that directly conflicts with building small in a way that isn't so easily math'd-out.

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You forget the mechanics of CCS which precisely counter the cubes.

If the chances of a hit are on a core size people will be able to build ships with a lot nicer visuals in the volume available to them.

This is one of the solutions that seems to be the easiest to do without having to ask for additional development time.

Mechanisms can always be added later. But the urgency is to fix the game and allow voxel constructions.

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7 hours ago, Knight-Sevy said:

You forget the mechanics of CCS which precisely counter the cubes.

If the chances of a hit are on a core size people will be able to build ships with a lot nicer visuals in the volume available to them.

This is one of the solutions that seems to be the easiest to do without having to ask for additional development time.

Mechanisms can always be added later. But the urgency is to fix the game and allow voxel constructions.

What about a hybrid of both core size bonus + cross section as a start. Then we can talk about CCS tweeks etc?

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8 hours ago, Knight-Sevy said:

You forget the mechanics of CCS which precisely counter the cubes....

 

It weakens cubes substantially, but it still favors building heavy to absorb fire. You make a good point though... with CCS in the mix and cross-section-accuracy replaced by core size accuracy, people would build to the CCS falloff, but they wouldn't all be tightly packed boxes.

May need to nerf the miss chances of larger weapons vs substantially smaller targets though, the old system before cross-section had a 50% miss chance against a core 2 sizes smaller and a 75% miss when going L vs XS, and while that may seem like a lot it tends to be immediately rendered irrelevant rather quickly by the larger core having 4 to 8 times the effective weapons range and twice the dps per gun. Its fine if L does a huge amount of damage to a small target on a hit, but the ideal anti-fighter weapon really shouldn't be a battleship's main guns.

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16 hours ago, Physics said:

What about a hybrid of both core size bonus + cross section as a start. Then we can talk about CCS tweeks etc?

 

A hybrid system can be considered yes I think. But the bonus must be reduced enough not to be the mandatory choice as it is currently.

 

Maybe just to differentiate the core sizes from each other with a variable of a few%.

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15 hours ago, Taelessael said:

 

It weakens cubes substantially, but it still favors building heavy to absorb fire. You make a good point though... with CCS in the mix and cross-section-accuracy replaced by core size accuracy, people would build to the CCS falloff, but they wouldn't all be tightly packed boxes.

May need to nerf the miss chances of larger weapons vs substantially smaller targets though, the old system before cross-section had a 50% miss chance against a core 2 sizes smaller and a 75% miss when going L vs XS, and while that may seem like a lot it tends to be immediately rendered irrelevant rather quickly by the larger core having 4 to 8 times the effective weapons range and twice the dps per gun. Its fine if L does a huge amount of damage to a small target on a hit, but the ideal anti-fighter weapon really shouldn't be a battleship's main guns.

 

Yes, and to give some figures in relation to the CCS.
in our fleet, we had ships with 500,000,000 health points. After the hp voxel + CCS nerf, the same ship has 100,000,000 health and 20,000,000 shield health.

 

There is really little point in flying with a full cubic ship, and the shield with its dynamic resistance has tremendous defensive power.
I think the cross section mechanics are old and need to be removed / changed with the features we currently have in the game.

 

And yes one of the first functionality of passing the chances of hitting on the size of the cores is to allow a better survivability of the XS or S ships against L weapons.
It can be discussed the% chance of hit. But it seems logical to me that a 380mm gun is not as effective as a 40mm anti-aircraft gun VS a plane.

 

Let L breastplates equip themselves with S weapons to kill XS hunters. I think the game will still be a lot more fun like this.

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9 hours ago, Knight-Sevy said:

Yes, and to give some figures in relation to the CCS.
in our fleet, we had ships with 500,000,000 health points. After the hp voxel + CCS nerf, the same ship has 100,000,000 health and 20,000,000 shield health.

 

There is really little point in flying with a full cubic ship, and the shield with its dynamic resistance has tremendous defensive power.
I think the cross section mechanics are old and need to be removed / changed with the features we currently have in the game.

 

Now that I've thought on it more (and taken a more recent look at the combat ships to refresh my memory), CCS might need some manner of mild direct or indirect fiddling as well. The copy-pasta ships I've seen were all thin and lightweight voxel with a shield, the people I've talked to all agree that once the shield goes down the ship is a write-off anyways because of CCS. They figure CCS burns down too quick for armor to substantially matter... 

 

Perhaps if there were to be some incremental-honeycomb feature, where the weight/CCS (and/or other stats) were applied in larger increments than single voxels and any value within a given increment acts as though it were all the same. The material itself would still behave in combat as it does now (hitpoints and resistances and all that reacting as they do to weapons impacts), but adding in extra voxel for aesthetic reasons wouldn't change the weight or ccs as long as the extras didn't push it in to the next increment. Add to that scaling the increment sizes to core sizes (because an L core will probably need bigger greebling than an XS) and when paired with the removal or reduction of cross-section related accuracy modifiers we could see some interesting designs.

 

What do you think?

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13 hours ago, Taelessael said:

 

Now that I've thought on it more (and taken a more recent look at the combat ships to refresh my memory), CCS might need some manner of mild direct or indirect fiddling as well. The copy-pasta ships I've seen were all thin and lightweight voxel with a shield, the people I've talked to all agree that once the shield goes down the ship is a write-off anyways because of CCS. They figure CCS burns down too quick for armor to substantially matter... 

 

Perhaps if there were to be some incremental-honeycomb feature, where the weight/CCS (and/or other stats) were applied in larger increments than single voxels and any value within a given increment acts as though it were all the same. The material itself would still behave in combat as it does now (hitpoints and resistances and all that reacting as they do to weapons impacts), but adding in extra voxel for aesthetic reasons wouldn't change the weight or ccs as long as the extras didn't push it in to the next increment. Add to that scaling the increment sizes to core sizes (because an L core will probably need bigger greebling than an XS) and when paired with the removal or reduction of cross-section related accuracy modifiers we could see some interesting designs.

 

What do you think?

 

It is said a little differently. Yes that's it.

Just give the builder a way to make a cool design without having to fly out of a box or cube.

It's a sci-fi game after all, and 90% of sci-fi ships are anything but realistic.

We need fun in this game. The current PvP is tasteless, there is not even the pleasure of building what we want.

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