Combat Update

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.