Combat Update

thepackett shared this feedback 5 years ago
Submitted

In a couple of recent interviews with Marek Rosa he stated that combat in Space Engineers was one of the things that he would like to update in the future. To that end, I'd like to try and analyze the combat of Space Engineers and hopefully provide some interesting suggestions for a way to improve combat in future updates of the game.


To start I'd like to talk about exactly what combat entails in a game like Space Engineers. From a fundamental point of view, conflict occurs when two parties have competing interests that cannot be better solved through alternative methods. Put differently, combat is a means to some end. For example, a pirate may raid a ship for materials, factions may attack each other for control of valuable resources, infrastructure, or area control, and of course everyone is interested in protecting themselves from people who want to take what they have. It may seem odd to bring up this point when it seems so fundamental, however it is important to remember why combat exists in the first place and use it as the driving motivation for future design and implementation.


Conflict in Space Engineers occurs in three fairly distinct phases. The first phase is the design and construction of combat capable ships or facilities. This is the phase where ships, stations, and buildings are built and designed for various purposes. The second phase is the actual conflict event itself. This is the phase where the actual conflict between hostile parties occurs. The third and final phase is the recovery phase, where one or both parties attempt to recover from the conflict. This is the phase where repairs occur in preparation for the next conflict event. These phases are temporally separate and rely on their own unique mechanics, but also feed into one another to create the overall combat experience, making them useful categories for analysis.


The fundamental gameplay loop of combat in SE is solid, each phase of combat is interesting and compelling, however the current implementation of weapons, namely that weapons are far too powerful, is causing some big issues. For example, with the elite rifle a player can completely destroy a large ship heavy armor block in about a minute. A small ship gatling gun can destroy a large ship heavy armor block in about 30 seconds. This is far too fast. There is no point in armoring a large ship or station if a small ship can array 25 gatling guns and destroy your heavy armor blocks in about 1 second. This hurts the design phase as you can't really engineer defensive solutions and the best offensive solution is to just add more guns, it hurts the combat phase as combat is short and uninteresting, and it hurts the repair phase since once combat is done, your giant heavily armored ship has been torn to literal shreds. In the future I'd like the damage of all weapons to be lowered a bit, but then make it so weapons are only effective against what they are supposed to be effective against, but not anything more. For example, the engineer's elite rifle should be good against other engineers, somewhat effective against small ship light armor, barely effective (if at all) against small ship heavy armor, and unable to damage large ship armor. A small ship gatling gun should be good against engineers and small ship light armor, somewhat effective against small ship heavy armor, barely effective against large ship light armor, and unable to damage large ship heavy armor. There are just examples and the actual balancing can be different, but the key point is that weapons should have varied effectiveness against various types of targets so that designing the offensive and defensive capabilities of a ship is more interesting.


Additionally, more offensive would be a good addition to a combat update. Currently in the game we have 5 primary weapons (Handheld Rifle, Gatling Gun, Gatling Turret, Rocket Launcher, and Rocket Turret), and none of them are particularly distinct from one another. As discussed in the previous paragraph, they're all very effective against everything, they all have about the same range, about the same accuracy, and so on. A larger variety of more distinct weapons would make designing ships and fighting with them a much more interesting experience. I'd like the weapon rebalance and new weapons to help further a vision of how the combat phase of SE should be. Personally I'd like to see different combat styles for various sizes of ships. Small ship combat could be relatively much faster, up close, and much more lethal, while large ship battles would be slow, distant, and would end up with disabled large ships more often than completely destroyed large ships. Small ships taking on large ships would focus on taking out defenses, weak points, and critical systems while the large ship could use turrets to try and fend off small ships.


More defensive options would also be welcome. Currently we have light and heavy armor for defensive options. In the future a medium armor may be a good addition, and perhaps a super heavy armor that is either prohibitively heavy for ships or is exclusively for stations and buildings so that stations and buildings have a better defense at the cost of materials. As directly mentioned by Marek in one of the interviews, shields could also be very interesting if they end up suiting the vision of Space Engineers.


Lastly, I'd also like to point out a problem with the repair phase of combat. In general it is simply not feasible to repair a ship after it has taken some damage in combat. Partially this is due to the hyper effective weapons we have now that absolutely shred ships, but also because ships in SE are generally compact and internal damage is difficult to repair simply due to accessibility issues and lack of any autonomous way to repair a ship. Repairing a very large ship by hand could take hours to find every damaged block (it would be useful to be able to indicate damaged blocks on the hud) and slowly repair them by hand. In fact, it turns out that the best way to repair a large ship is to completely grind it down and then use a welder setup to rebuild it from scratch. To me this seems odd, but I'm not sure how to best fix it. It may be necessary to add in a new game mechanics, for example something similar to the Nanite Repair System mod, that allows for a slow repairing of ships over time.


That's all I have, hopefully it'll help give you guys some ideas. Congratulations on the Space Engineers 1.0 release, I'm looking forward to what's to come.

Replies (1)

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I made my own suggestion regarding combat some days ago, however, my take was actually making combat faster and take less time to do the same amount of damage as now, in what we do overlap, is in rebalancing the different weapons to be diferent and letting the player choose, I favor a faster combat since, my experience with vanilla SE is that you will get bogged down in a slugging match, where all external features but armor are erased and you´re manouvering trying to keep that one still working turret facing the enemy.

I hate gat-deathballs or gat turret arrays, because you shouldn´t have to spam something to be effective and such solutions are performance intensive. It´s also restrictive that we´re firing the same 20mm ammo from small ship gats as the large ship turrets, so, of course a clump of 20 of them will put any defence to shame.

Anyways, just chatting a bit, it was interesting seeing a different view on the subject. I do wonder what Keen has thought of.

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Thanks for the comment! Rebalancing weapons so that you have to choose which weapon to use in which situation is important to me as well. In terms of combat pace though, I'd rather have a mix of fast paced high lethality combat for small ships and a slower paced combat for large ships with a focus on disabling rather than outright destroying them. The reason why is that large ships in survival are expensive and time consuming to make. Currently the only time you'd want to use a large ship in combat is if you have a huge refinery and autowelding setup, otherwise your huge ship just gets torn to shreds and there's not much you can do about it. I'd like for a player in survival to be able to build and maintain a large ship without having to grind it down and rebuild it anytime it takes a bit of damage in combat. Along those same lines, I'd like it if it was effective for you to capture a large ship you disabled and repair it and take it for your own rather than just grinding it down for scrap because it takes too much time to repair it for not enough of a payout (it'll just get destroyed again in the next fight).

I also don't like the idea that you can just pile up weapons on a ship and have it be more effective, which is part of the reason why I'd like to see weapons that are specialized for a certain thing. A small ship gatling gun should be effective against other lightly armored small ships and a bit effective against heavily armored small ships, but it should basically just plink off the armor of large ships. If you wanted to take on a large ship with small ships you would need to avoid its anti small ship weaponry and take down it's weak points (thrusters, turrets, etc), and then board it to capture it. A large ship might have some kind of artillery, like an armor piercing railgun which is incredibly power consuming with a low firerate that is only worth using against other large ships. More gatling guns won't help you take out a large ship and a small ship is already fairly weak to gatling guns, and likewise having more railguns would be very expensive to build and run for not much of a benefit. Thus these kinds of weapons would have significantly diminishing returns the more of them you had.

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Aye, my ships are throw-aways compared to a lot of other designs, still, I would repair them by hand if needed to and relegate them to support, in my try, I didn´t make new weapons since I wanted the most simple overhaul I could get, the best option is to make a small ship deal with it, they can do it cleanly with a single target and with accurate fire, have minimal colateral damage, but only with gats, missiles are the "I don´t want spoils, I want smithereens"


I believe combat between large grids should be slow indeed, but because you want it to take it slow and steady, not because the combat can´t go fast, as is now, it really is bad, the small engagement range of large grids and fast turret snap they have doesn´t let for much of the above, it´s "you´re in the engagement zone baby, get those welders ready" There´s no "prepare"->"aim"->"FIRE" it all happens almost instantaneously as it´s set up now.


Regarding gat spam, yeah, I thought of some kind of overheating mechanic of guns when in proximity of other guns of the same type, it would not neuter it completely (For better or worse), but make impossible the large, continous barrage of fire as we have it now. I really don´t know how to deal with that in a simple way

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I SAID THAT YEARS AGO. COMBAT SYSTEM IS SHIT. MAKE IT ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS. UVE GOT ALL THE ELEMENTS. HEAVY ARMOR AGAINST THE GATLINGS, GATLINGS AGAINST LIGHT ARMOR, MISSILES AND SYSTEMS AND MISSILES AGAINST HEAVY ARMOR. ADD DMG REDUCTION VALUES TO ARMOR, SO IT CANCELLS ALL THE GATLING DMG AND ONLY MISSILES CAN DEAL DMG TO THE BLOCK. ADD SO MUCH REDUCTION, THAT A RIFLE IS INEFFECTIVE. GOOD THING U PUT BACK LADDERS INSTEAD, AFTER ALL THIS TIME.

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