Ship Weapons Overhaul

Doomed Person ●

In case you hadn't noticed, blocks that would qualify as systems are generally worse than even light armor and shooting any type of weapon at them will deal good damage regardless of type, disabling them and being more effective than a similar hit against an armor block. You can't play rock-paper-scissors without the scissors.

Additionally, shields have almost as many issues as water. I could go into more detail on that if you want, but let it suffice to say that they are bad in almost every way.

I could also go into the ways in which most of the weapons are obligatory damage type implementation or mediocre filler, but I really don't have the energy for that at the moment.

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Dan Spencer ●

I'm sorry, could just be a little bit more rude?

You come at me with all this attitude of yours and attack me with a bunch of arguments that are for the most part, incorrect, invalid, or would hardly take any change to work around. In case you've never played another space themed combat game, what I described is similar to how many of them actually work, and they are very well balanced.

Take your attitude somewhere else.

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Doomed Person ●

Sorry, I was in a really bad mood at the time. The basic arguments are sound, though.

Effectiveness against systems blocks doesn't really help much, because systems blocks are wet tissue paper compared to even light armor blocks. If you're getting a significant amount of damage multiplied with the bonus, you've already won..

Shields are, almost without exception, a direct upgrade to armor without some weapon type specifically countering them. Additional power is much easier to pack on a ship than additional armor, especially considering that punctures in armor can be much more readily exploited. It's possible to fix this with diminishing returns, but that has its own issues.

The high end of shield-stacking would need to be balanced for both smaller and larger ships, battleships and scouts, and require a soft trail-off point to prevent shields from being essentially fixed-strength for a certain class of ship (which just leads to standard setups and penalizes creativity). Add on merging and subgrids, and the shield strength formula will be so complicated that we'll get clang between the subequations.

Of course, they also unnecessarily break the hard sci-fi rule. While jump drives and grav generators are necessary, shields aren't the only solution to ship combat.

The adjustable rocket launcher might or might not be practically implementable, depending on whether Keen has fixed projectile types. In either case, it's an overly complicated block that makes aiming difficult and attack prediction almost impossible.

The homing missile is interesting, but it intrudes upon the functionality of grid missiles and likely won't be great for sim speed in a battle with debris flying around. A version of standard targeting might help with this, having it check in a cone in front of it for functional blocks and locking on to the closest one. Combining this with only a weak tracking component would solve both of the issues with this.

Exchanging impact for rate of fire on the rocket turret doesn't really help it much. It's more expensive to use and still gets outclassed by gatling guns.

I'd definitely rename a five-meter-wide gatling gun to an autocannon. I still don't really like it all that much, because high RoF weapons are generally for tracking small targets and you can't really do that with a whole large ship. I would be ok with it, but unnecessary blocks take valuable dev time and add more complication.

The mass driver cannon gets undercut by its inability to deal effective damage to shields. You can't snipe systems when there are both shields and armor in the way. Without the shield and energy weapon system, it's a good option for large ship weaponry.

Increasing the gatling turret's rate of fire more and decreasing damage? Is there any particular reason for this?

I can't really see a role for plasma guns outside of being the basic energy weapon. It's a short range weapon, so a small ship could just mount rocket launchers and get a little closer to avoid dealing with shields. A large ship has this as a fixed weapon, which means it needs to get close to land hits on other large ships with this. Because of the speed limit, any close-range engagement is voluntary. Which means that a good captain won't allow it unless there's a good reason to get up close. Like if the enemy shields are down.

The ion charge blast is just the mass driver cannon but as an energy weapon. I don't think there's anything unique to talk about here.

The laser turret, in the way you've described, is pretty much the gatling turret but as an energy weapon. Better than the plasma gun, by a bit. I'd warn against letting it be straight-up hitscan though, because small ships rely on bullet travel time to be effective.

None of these problems are incorrect or invalid, and I've tried to add minor changes to fix issues when possible.

Many sci-fi games have tried similar systems, but Space Engineers is different enough that I'm not sure there is a game with comparable PvP. Attempting to model ours after others is likely to result in failure because of the underlying differences, and we'd be better off thinking of our own solutions than trying to copy successful combat mechanics built off of completely different foundations.