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Explosives, Nuclear and Tactical


BliitzTheFox

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Deployable warheads for use in creating explosions, mining, clearing areas, eh we all know we won't be using them for that. Now we aren't just talking physics based explosive warheads of varying yield and magnitude, can we infiltrate an enemy construct and plant explosives? 

 

Now for the next topic, constructing a nuclear warhead is a very time consuming and expensive process, not to mention the design of the warhead itself is crucial to its function. As far as nuclear warheads in the game, if at all, they should be required to be built realistically, aka spending great amounts of time and resources separating U-235 from U-238 making them expensive, and used sparingly.

 

As for the design aspect things would be different, unless there is some weapon specific designer, which I doubt, they would probably be technologies of various parts that would together make an explosive device that can be detonated or loaded onto a deliver system. 

 

As for yield given the scale of the game it may be possible to use real world yield predictions in terms of nuclear devices. As for radiation that all depends on survivals requirements which a different topic.

 

I mean we can obviously dial the yield back, or we could have another arms race.

 

 

 

Imagine an entire city withstanding a nuclear blast using a great shield.

 

Now imagine a giant crater that used to be your opposing corporation's main supply yard.

 

Next two giant capital ships launching nuclear missiles at each other from great distance and attempting to withstand the blasts, or proximity detonation to devastate small ships. 

 

In order to balance this its got to be hard, expensive, and time consuming. And everyone is going to know you're building nukes if they find the giant facilities necessary to refine the components. Which may cause, preemptive strikes. 

 

It could add a lot to the immersion and politics, but honestly I think I might have gone too far, we should probably dial back yields a bit and add countermeasures.

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Crap forgot to talk tactical, by tactical explosive I mean C4 and specially placed explosives that can be placed and blown from a short distance, or a script (such as self destruct system). C4 is obviously a lot cheaper than nuclear and tactical strikes can often limit unnecessary causalities.

 

Also don't nuke something you intend to loot or capture, that's not going to help you. If you intended to take a ship for its technology nuking could destroy enough of it that you will not find anything useful.

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Perhaps it's just me but I would consider high-yield nukes to be ... literally devastating, but also for gameplay. Not that war or conflict is always fair, but I see vastly higher benefits for attackers than for defenders.

 

The worst case scenarios I have in mind are simple: You spend months or years to build large cities only for someone to vaporize them or large parts in an instant. Even if creating them takes time and whatnot, the balance would still be somewhat off if you secretly tailor away in your base and then deliver them to a city and collaborative effort to vaporize it in an instant.

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I'm pretty sure that somewhere NQ said there's not going to be nukes. (not sure where, sorry) Other kinds of explosives, maybe. I would like to see some kind of infiltrator planting C4 in an enemy's base, that sounds neat. But it would have to be difficult, and the C4 can't be too powerful or else the balance gets skewed.

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I thought about the subject and must admit I'm not sure if the inclusion of WMDs in the game is a good idea. It carries the risk of scaring off all the creative builder types which we will need for the game to work. As fun as reducing a city to a crater at the press of a button sounds, it might be a necessary sacrifice to completely omit such a feature. I imagine this is subject will lead to lots of heated debate both in the community and amongst the developers.

 

At the very least there would need to be some kind of strong defence against such weaponry, defences that attackers would need to take out on the ground before they can drop a nuke. Maybe this is a workable compromise where we sometimes can witness cities getting obliterated in a satisfying mushroom cloud without scaring off all the "carebear-y" types (not sure if it's fair to call someone a carebear who starts crying when hundreds of hours of his beloved work just explode). Balancing this might be difficult.

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I also believe that such powerful weapons simply don't have a place in a game like this. They would be too devastating and unbalanced in any situation where they're getting used as a weapon. Games such as Dual Universe need to put limits on what is achievable by players, because the game is based so heavily around player interactions. What it comes down to is that WMD's just wouldn't be fun.

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Good points, I know they would be simply too powerful, but as far as sub nuclear weapons wouldn't mind seeing a siege of good old 1000lb bombs WW2 style. Now for tactical explosives, C4 isn't necessarily that powerful, but placed on a critical component such as a warp core, shield generator, ammunition store, it could seriously cripple a ship and could be ideal for taking a ship without seriously damaging it. Of course if these explosives are found then they could easily be disarmed (maybe depending on the explosive/skills), the hardest thing would be to place them without anyone noticing.

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I agree there should be explosives of some type or another. How powerful they should be will be a very crucial balancing element in a game like this. I don't think we can determine that this early in the development cycle.

 

Structures would have to be easy to defend with shields, turrets etc. to allow for big explosives without upsetting the balance. This is also closely related to the question of how much damage you should be able to do in foreign-owned territory, if there's some magical protection against damage, if you can even damage stuff in foreign territory at all without fighting some kind of red tape á la war-declarations or "hacking", and so on.

 

Personally I think I'd favour a system where there's little protection or automated defenses, but explosives are rather puny for balance (do a lot of damage and destroy voxels, but have a very small explosion radius). Simply because this would be less punishing for builders. Hey, those guys took over your base, but at least it's mostly intact and they can appreciate your designer skills. I imagine this would be less upsetting than seeing it all reduced to craters.

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Deployable warheads for use in creating explosions, mining, clearing areas, eh we all know we won't be using them for that. Now we aren't just talking physics based explosive warheads of varying yield and magnitude, can we infiltrate an enemy construct and plant explosives? 

 

Now for the next topic, constructing a nuclear warhead is a very time consuming and expensive process, not to mention the design of the warhead itself is crucial to its function. As far as nuclear warheads in the game, if at all, they should be required to be built realistically, aka spending great amounts of time and resources separating U-235 from U-238 making them expensive, and used sparingly.

 

As for the design aspect things would be different, unless there is some weapon specific designer, which I doubt, they would probably be technologies of various parts that would together make an explosive device that can be detonated or loaded onto a deliver system. 

 

As for yield given the scale of the game it may be possible to use real world yield predictions in terms of nuclear devices. As for radiation that all depends on survivals requirements which a different topic.

 

I mean we can obviously dial the yield back, or we could have another arms race.

 

 

 

Imagine an entire city withstanding a nuclear blast using a great shield.

 

Now imagine a giant crater that used to be your opposing corporation's main supply yard.

 

Next two giant capital ships launching nuclear missiles at each other from great distance and attempting to withstand the blasts, or proximity detonation to devastate small ships. 

 

In order to balance this its got to be hard, expensive, and time consuming. And everyone is going to know you're building nukes if they find the giant facilities necessary to refine the components. Which may cause, preemptive strikes. 

 

It could add a lot to the immersion and politics, but honestly I think I might have gone too far, we should probably dial back yields a bit and add countermeasures.

 

But it wouldn't make sense for the lore, humanity just escaped extinction, and now they are making weapons that can destroy themselves again? I don't think the orgs would like that, it would be overpowered.

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The worst case scenarios I have in mind are simple: You spend months or years to build large cities only for someone to vaporize them or large parts in an instant. Even if creating them takes time and whatnot, the balance would still be somewhat off if you secretly tailor away in your base and then deliver them to a city and collaborative effort to vaporize it in an instant.

 

Well this could be done even without a nuke...kamikaze a large ship into a city...that space station they show in the tech demo for instance, and same effect.

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But it wouldn't make sense for the lore, humanity just escaped extinction, and now they are making weapons that can destroy themselves again? I don't think the orgs would like that, it would be overpowered.

Remember kids: Humans are always going to be ***holes.

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I don't think he got it from anywhere. NQ is, however, probably leaning to some sort of elastic collision model. Recently they said that when ships break in half, they still remain a single entity. Weird, but that's what it is.

 

Small explosion radius is a good idea. Even the most powerful explosives shouldn't have a very big radius (20m?).

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I don't think he got it from anywhere. NQ is, however, probably leaning to some sort of elastic collision model. Recently they said that when ships break in half, they still remain a single entity. Weird, but that's what it is.

 

Small explosion radius is a good idea. Even the most powerful explosives shouldn't have a very big radius (20m?).

I think a warhead should simply take out durability out of the blocks. Lets say DIRT has a Durability of one, and the warhead has a explosive power of 1000.

1 Durability = 1 explosive power to destroy it.

After a warheads max explosive power has been reached (in this case, 1000 dirt voxels have been removed), the explosion stops. Lets say concrete had a durability of 100, so the warhead can destroy 50 concrete blocks.

 

A warhead can NOT deal all of its damage to a block. Lets say you have 50 voxels of "Unobtainium", each with a durability of 500. A warhead can only deal 1/10 of its explosive power to a single voxel, so you could 0 unobtainium, and with THIS warhead (2000 explosive power) you could only damage,

Tell me if this is complex. I need a graph or something

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Has it been confirmed that there will be no way to crash your kilometer long ship into a cityscape, that some how the engines will stop before the ship can intersect with something else?

It has been shown and said in several interviews.

 

As for explosives: I propose shieldbreaker bombs for sieges and element-disabling "C4" charges for infiltration. This way, important infrastructure wouldn't be damaged, but attackers would still have potent ways to conquer/sabotage

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Sorry, I haven't had time lately to come back to this and look for where it was said, but I'm 100% certain it was said by the devs that you can't crash your ships, at least for now. I was surprised and a little sad by that... until I thought about how often kamikaze ships would really be a thing.

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