Damage and defences for combat rock paper scissors
I saw recently that the plan for combat is to have a rock paper scissors element to it so its not always one size fits all solution for how to build your ships, so I wanted to give my thoughts on how that could be implemented. Implementation of some parts of this have been suggested before but I'm suggesting this as a whole system of things interacting with each other and how they interact is the most important thing to me.
So the first issue to discuss is that you cant have combat rock paper scissors in a vacuum with just weapons, because then either the weapon that deals the most damage is the best or they all deal the same damage and there is no practical difference between them. You could do this by making contextual differences in weapons for example different weapons working differently in space vs in atmo vs underwater, and I think thats probably a good idea, but the other thing I heard in the same place was in the desire for longer, more drawn out combat, which means you need to either massively reduce damage stopping you from getting those big satisfying ship destruction scenes where a ship is absolutely destroyed, or you need someway to mitigate damage before a ship can get crunched, and I think thats the more interesting path.
The second issue is you cant have just two forms of defence because if you do then the best solution is going to be a balance between the two or if the two are mutually exclusive then that means theres just two different ship types that both exist and people will probably decide one of them is better. In SE1 thats armor vs mobility. In order for there to be at least some complexity there needs to be at least 3 different types of defences (and corresponding weapons that are good against each) and there should be some kind of trade off between them. With that in mind heres the solution I came up with.
Defences
Mobility
Mobility needs a buff in my opinion, as its simply not that effective of a defence as things currently are. There also needs to be more of a tradeoff between a big ship and a mobile ship beyond just requiring you to add more thrusters. My suggestion is to make it so that the effect of the mass of a ship has a reduced impact on acceleration (compared to the current state) but that the effect of mass on acceleration increases with velocity. By my understanding the way this is currently handled is a = F / m like in real life with maybe a few constants thrown in there for tuning reasons, but my suggestion is something more like a = F / (m + (m^v)) . If you didn't immediately catch what that means it basically means that a big ship and a small ship with the same mass to acceleration ratio will be equally manoeuvrable at low speeds, but at high speeds a larger ship will be very slow to change its direction compared to a smaller ship, and this isnt a linear relationship its an exponential one meaning the faster things are the more pronounced the difference is. Obviously that formula cant be implemented as is, every value would need to be multiplied by some constant to tune it (v in particular needs to be made way smaller), but doing this should make it that you can allow small ships to manoeuvre at incredibly high speed without risking giving large ships the same ability. This should be to the point that it becomes incredibly difficult to hit a manoeuvrable ship with any weapon with a travel time, but still easy with hitscan.
Armor
In order for armor to slow down combat without making it so that ships are too durable when they actually get destroyed there needs to be a mechanic which prevents damage from doing too much until some sort of threshold is reached then limits the effectiveness of the armor. My suggestion for this is damage sharing. The idea is that all connected armor blocks form an armor group. When a block takes damage some of the damage is dealt directly and some of it is divided amongst every single armor block in that group. The exact ratio should depend on the weapon, with armor piercing rounds dealing more individual damage and light rounds dealing more spread damage. In order to stop armor from exploding from the ship being hit somewhere else and to act as the threshold I suggested earlier, once an armor block has taken a certain percentage of damage it no longer acts as part of the armor group, Id suggest like 30%. At which point the armor starts being able to deform, taking full damage from all weapons, and no longer reducing the damage to other armor. This means weapons that cant focus damage well or that have low flat damage are ineffective against armor, but weapons that have high single target damage are good against it, since it will potentially be able to punch a hole through to the more delicate internals. Things like armored windows and armored cockpits could probably be included in blocks that can benefit from an armor group to allow people to build cool looking ships without making it so that the cockpit can easily be sniped. For this to work though you would need some ability to repair massive sections of armor at once. Theres a few ways to do that, but without it repairing armored ships after battle would be too annoying to use them. Side note this would mean you could have a detector connected to an armor group that tells you how many hitpoints the armor group still has, and you could input a max hp value so that the ship tells you your hull integrity as a percentage which would be cool!
Shields
Shields are the only defence not currently in SE1 and theres probably other types of mitigation that could work but I think shields present the most interesting potential for mechanics and changes in the way a ship would need to be built. Shields should have a base size cost making it difficult or impossible to fit shields into a small ship. This should be done by breaking shields up into a few blocks. First you have the shield core. This would be a large production block sized core inside of your ship. That block would be where your shields would get managed from and where you would need to get power or resources you need for the shields to work to. If this block gets destroyed or taken out, the shields go down. It would work kind of like a battery where it has a power capacity, when the shields get damaged this battery is drained, when its empty the shields go down. Importantly the shields will only be able to charge while down, and if the shields get fully popped by damage they can only get turned on again when the shields are at 100% so that popping a shield gives you a chance to focus down the ship itself. Other blocks would be shield capacitors which increase the shield power capacity, but mean that it takes longer to get shields back up if they go down, and need to be piped/wired into the shield core somehow, and shield emitters which actually determine where the shield is protecting. These would be like grav generators but instead of applying acceleration in the region it would apply shields to friendly blocks. Ideally these would have a smaller radius than a grav generator meaning you actually need to distribute them throughout your ship, to make it a bit more interesting as you would also need to pipe these up to the core, which could lead to some cool things like having two separate shields so you can turn one one while the other recharges, or having non combat shields and combat shields, or having separate shields for different parts of the ships so that only some parts of the ship become unshielded when the shields go down. All of that having a tradeoff obviously with having a single bigger shield. For the way shielded blocks work any time they would be damaged, they arnt. Instead a flat amount of energy plus an amount scaling with the damage gets taken away from the shield core capacity. This would mean that the most effective way to drain shields is lots of instances of low damage. I would say that if a block is shielded by two different shield systems then the damage cost gets split between them evenly.
Weapons
Lasers
Lasers arnt in SE1, but I think they make for the perfect hitscan weapon to counter mobile ships. They should have the lowest dps of any weapon and a really high energy use to compensate for the fact that they dont need ammo, but thats not an issue for what we want them to be doing. Since they have such a high power usage that makes them pair great with ships that have armor since you can afford a robust power system mass wise, and arent already spending all of your energy on shields. There should be burst and continuous lasers. Burst lasers shoot a single hitscan shot with high damage(for a laser) for taking out mobile ships with a bit of armor. Continuous lasers shoot a constant stream which has low damage but which triggers the bonus damage on shields about once a second, for mobile ships that also have light shields. This still wouldnt be that useful against heavy shields or armor but prevents making it so that a mobile ship with a little armor or a small shield is the best choice between the two.
Light Kinetics
Light kinetics, or rapid firing low caliber bullets are the perfect counter against shields since they would trigger the bonus damage against shields multiple times a second for every bullet that hits, but having travel time wont be able to deal as well with evasive manoeuvres from an agile ship and will have most of their damage distributed on an armored ship. They would have the side bonus of being the best anti-personnel weapon as well. These guns would work best with manoeuvrable ships since they dont require a ton of power or storage infrastructure (but still a little) that bigger munitions or lasers need, making them easier to implement than any other weapon.
Heavy Kinetics
Heavy Kinetics includes things like railguns as well as straight up ship to ship ramming. This is high instant damage, with big cooldowns making it really effective against armor, since it can punch holes through the armor to the squishy important components on the inside, but less effective against shields due to not dealing lots of bonus damage from the flat per instance bonus, and they would be even harder to hit highly mobile fighters with than with light kinetics. These would work best with shielded ships since they dont take a ton of power, and shielded ships can easily avoid taking damage during the cooldown after firing. Additionally shielded ships would be the best at ramming as a well shielded ship deals with ship to ship impacts better than an armored ship, since a ship to ship impact would be a single large instance of damage.
Explosives
I think explosives should be a special extra damage type, but not the king of damage types. Rather it should solve a different problem than all the others so far. Explosive damage should be weak against all defences, but if you get past the defenses then explosives should be the kill shot. Rockets should barely do any damage to shields, have low armor piercing and be hard to hit on mobile ships. But if youve punched a hole in the armor, disabled the shields, and cornered the ship, then a single well placed rocket can be the perfect killshot, exploding reactors and shield cores and things like that, which explode in turn and can cripple a ship. Explosive weapons are valuable and important on any ship, once youve set things up to make them usable!
Im interested to hear what people think about this as way to get a rockpaper scissors feel to combat while also letting combat be a bit more drawn out, and if anyone has any thoughts about differences they would suggest to this idea!
I like this feedback
Campaign for the protection of small ships (Satire)
Small ships have been having a hard time lately.
With all those armadas of dreadnoughts and carrier maxes everywhere the little guy is being oppressed. And now with the prospect of shields, all of the big ship players are saying, 'no shield for you little one'.
As if masses of heavy armour weren't enough, impenetrable capitol ship shields too now, this is unreasonable.
Small ships are made mostly of tissue paper, string and glue, why can they not have better protection.
'Oh lets just ban all small ships and only let them exist for target practice.', I hear you say.
OK, dark side force user, remember what happens when you get over confident.
Small ships need better protection, big ships do not. end of.
But seriously, game balance and varied play styles are king.
Campaign for the protection of small ships (Satire)
Small ships have been having a hard time lately.
With all those armadas of dreadnoughts and carrier maxes everywhere the little guy is being oppressed. And now with the prospect of shields, all of the big ship players are saying, 'no shield for you little one'.
As if masses of heavy armour weren't enough, impenetrable capitol ship shields too now, this is unreasonable.
Small ships are made mostly of tissue paper, string and glue, why can they not have better protection.
'Oh lets just ban all small ships and only let them exist for target practice.', I hear you say.
OK, dark side force user, remember what happens when you get over confident.
Small ships need better protection, big ships do not. end of.
But seriously, game balance and varied play styles are king.
Oh boy where to start. There's some areas you make good points and some I just flat out can't agree with at all. Also first thing I will warn you about, anytime you dare mention something like shields or lasers even in passing, be ready for the anti-shielders to try to shame you for daring to suggest something like that could exist in their game. Some have already made their appearance.
Mobility:
This is one area they need to leave alone and simply not fix what isn't broke. If a person has found an engineering solution to get a large dreadnought sized ship moving like a fighter, then good on them. The people whining about it are just mad they didn't think of it first. A ship with more thrust available and less mass to lug around should absolutely be faster than a ship with less thrust and more mass. This is just basic physics. What I do not support is some people basically wanting artificial speed limits as that punishes people for the crime of building a craft too well. I could not get behind a formula that basically punishes larger ships purely for existing. it's up to the individual to make sure their craft has sufficient thrust in each direction to move and to stop itself.
Armor:
This again strikes me as trying to fix what isn't broken and overcomplicating what is a simple thing. Having a damage resistance baked in until you hit threshold x and then taking that away just needlessly complicates things. First you have to answer what that threshold should be and then you open the door to different people saying "I think it should be 30%," or someone else saying "well I think it should be 50%" another guy saying "I think it should be 10%" and on and on with endless bickering. It also throws a monkey wrench into damage calculations by essentially changing the formula mid fight when it doesn't need to and makes blocks artificially weaker and artificially stronger at respective points making it harder to determine the overall durability of a block. You also shouldn't be relying on armor alone to keep you alive in a fight. Yes proper design is part of it, but your best defense is not getting hit to start with. Armor should be your second defense against damage, not your first.
Not everyone is going to agree on how durable armor should be so this is a mixed bag. Simplest and only viable way to balance armor for a game like this is to decide how much damage you want each armor block to take from a single weapon before it fails, such as how many shots from what amounts to a large grid gatling before the armor fails, then adjust values accordingly. Once you've established your baseline it's then up to players to tweak it to their liking, which is why alot of armor type mods exist.
A key issue I have with what you've proposed here involves your "armor group" suggestion. Let's suppose just for sake of argument I have a slab of armor that's 3x3x1 meaning it's 3 long, 3 high, and 1 deep, or basically one small layer of armor. Discounting an AoE type weapon like a rocket hitting said armor slab, why on earth should all the other blocks around it be effected if only the center block is being hit? Or even better, if say only the corner block is getting hit, why should it effect the opposite corner block at all? You're basically giving someone a 9 for 1 or a 3 for 1 deal in those scenarios. You might say "but that's not what I'm suggesting" even though by necessity that's how it would function if the blocks shared stats. Unless that center block or corner block are being shoved into the surrounding blocks by the force of impact from weapons fire or some kind of AoE weapon is being used, only the blocks getting his should be effected at all. We can discuss different innate tiers of armor, but the armor grouping thing is just a big fat nope.
Shields:
Despite what the rabid anti-shielders will tell you, this is an easy defensive solution for a game like SE, especially now that we're 10k years into the future. To deal with the proverbial elephant in the room, I get that some people aren't a fan of them and that's perfectly fine. I always assume there would be the ability to turn shields on/off like there is with most other major features. Shields can be as complicated or simple as people want them to be, and as strong or weak as people want them to be. I'm not opposed to essentially having shield facings like you have in Star Trek Online or something like Bridge Commander. In STO you have 4 shield facings (front, back, left, right) and in bridge commander you have 6 (front, back, left, right, top, bottom). Or you can just borrow from what other games do and keep it simple with just the shield generator itself being a thing and let that be it. I still say it should be kept simple and just have the basic shield generator and call it good. If we want individual facings then having emitters on the ship is doable. You can certainly split shields into something like a capacitor, generator and controller if you wish, but I don't see the capacitor being needed as it just separates out power storage into a separate block when not needed. A shield controller makes more sense and would be like the guidance system is to a missile.
For shields getting a beginning balance point is super easy. All you need to do is the same thing you would do with armor. You need to figure out how much damage you want the shield or shield facing (depending on form factor) to be able to take from a single weapon before it fails, and how fast said shield can regenerate/recharge itself. From there you adjust the numbers accordingly. Once a starting balance has been achieved you ship it off to players and let them adjust to their liking. From there it's an arms race of defensibility vs offensiveness. Just like irl anytime one nation comes up with a defense for weapon A, the nation with the weapon tries to counter defense A and creates weapon B. The first nation then comes up with a defense for weapon B after defense A no longer works and it's basically a ping pong match.
Shields if done right have can have their proper place and is something folks will either have or they won't, just like higher armor tiers. While they have value and their place, they also shouldn't be so cheap that you can just blink and have them everywhere without some kind of investment.
Lasers:
irl these are certainly useful depending on what you do with them. They've been used to swat down drones and incoming munitions by detonating them at a safe distance before they can do harm. However the potential downside is the energy requirements to use them and that sometimes they can take awhile to do actual damage depending on what they're being fired at. Where as something like your more classic munitions don't have said weakness. Assuming base SE, they could be great point defense weapons, or to reach out and tag something fast moving that isn't going to be so easily tagged by standard arms. So I agree with you on them being good for zippier ships. The problem you have to avoid too is you don't want them to be so potent that people just stick a bunch of burst lasers on a ship and then making them objectively the best weapon. Would like to see you elaborate a bit more on the form you would want them to take.
Kinetics:
No issues here as we basically have different effectiveness with smaller kinetics and larger ones already. Both small and larger kinetic weapons have their places.
Explosives:
I don't see this as needing its own damage type per say, but I can see why the suggestion was made. These are your classic AoE type weapons like rockets or a warhead. I don't see much of a change needing to be made here, save potentially for easier ways to make lock on missiles. Explosives aren't nearly as bad as people make them out to be. Folks just don't really use them as effectively as they otherwise could.
Overall I don't see the need to make things overly complicated for this kind of stuff or the need to reinvent the wheel. We've already got a decent thing going with SE1 that can be expanded in SE2 to include other stuff. If there's areas we can expand on without having to fix what isn't broke then cool. Otherwise keep it simple.
Oh boy where to start. There's some areas you make good points and some I just flat out can't agree with at all. Also first thing I will warn you about, anytime you dare mention something like shields or lasers even in passing, be ready for the anti-shielders to try to shame you for daring to suggest something like that could exist in their game. Some have already made their appearance.
Mobility:
This is one area they need to leave alone and simply not fix what isn't broke. If a person has found an engineering solution to get a large dreadnought sized ship moving like a fighter, then good on them. The people whining about it are just mad they didn't think of it first. A ship with more thrust available and less mass to lug around should absolutely be faster than a ship with less thrust and more mass. This is just basic physics. What I do not support is some people basically wanting artificial speed limits as that punishes people for the crime of building a craft too well. I could not get behind a formula that basically punishes larger ships purely for existing. it's up to the individual to make sure their craft has sufficient thrust in each direction to move and to stop itself.
Armor:
This again strikes me as trying to fix what isn't broken and overcomplicating what is a simple thing. Having a damage resistance baked in until you hit threshold x and then taking that away just needlessly complicates things. First you have to answer what that threshold should be and then you open the door to different people saying "I think it should be 30%," or someone else saying "well I think it should be 50%" another guy saying "I think it should be 10%" and on and on with endless bickering. It also throws a monkey wrench into damage calculations by essentially changing the formula mid fight when it doesn't need to and makes blocks artificially weaker and artificially stronger at respective points making it harder to determine the overall durability of a block. You also shouldn't be relying on armor alone to keep you alive in a fight. Yes proper design is part of it, but your best defense is not getting hit to start with. Armor should be your second defense against damage, not your first.
Not everyone is going to agree on how durable armor should be so this is a mixed bag. Simplest and only viable way to balance armor for a game like this is to decide how much damage you want each armor block to take from a single weapon before it fails, such as how many shots from what amounts to a large grid gatling before the armor fails, then adjust values accordingly. Once you've established your baseline it's then up to players to tweak it to their liking, which is why alot of armor type mods exist.
A key issue I have with what you've proposed here involves your "armor group" suggestion. Let's suppose just for sake of argument I have a slab of armor that's 3x3x1 meaning it's 3 long, 3 high, and 1 deep, or basically one small layer of armor. Discounting an AoE type weapon like a rocket hitting said armor slab, why on earth should all the other blocks around it be effected if only the center block is being hit? Or even better, if say only the corner block is getting hit, why should it effect the opposite corner block at all? You're basically giving someone a 9 for 1 or a 3 for 1 deal in those scenarios. You might say "but that's not what I'm suggesting" even though by necessity that's how it would function if the blocks shared stats. Unless that center block or corner block are being shoved into the surrounding blocks by the force of impact from weapons fire or some kind of AoE weapon is being used, only the blocks getting his should be effected at all. We can discuss different innate tiers of armor, but the armor grouping thing is just a big fat nope.
Shields:
Despite what the rabid anti-shielders will tell you, this is an easy defensive solution for a game like SE, especially now that we're 10k years into the future. To deal with the proverbial elephant in the room, I get that some people aren't a fan of them and that's perfectly fine. I always assume there would be the ability to turn shields on/off like there is with most other major features. Shields can be as complicated or simple as people want them to be, and as strong or weak as people want them to be. I'm not opposed to essentially having shield facings like you have in Star Trek Online or something like Bridge Commander. In STO you have 4 shield facings (front, back, left, right) and in bridge commander you have 6 (front, back, left, right, top, bottom). Or you can just borrow from what other games do and keep it simple with just the shield generator itself being a thing and let that be it. I still say it should be kept simple and just have the basic shield generator and call it good. If we want individual facings then having emitters on the ship is doable. You can certainly split shields into something like a capacitor, generator and controller if you wish, but I don't see the capacitor being needed as it just separates out power storage into a separate block when not needed. A shield controller makes more sense and would be like the guidance system is to a missile.
For shields getting a beginning balance point is super easy. All you need to do is the same thing you would do with armor. You need to figure out how much damage you want the shield or shield facing (depending on form factor) to be able to take from a single weapon before it fails, and how fast said shield can regenerate/recharge itself. From there you adjust the numbers accordingly. Once a starting balance has been achieved you ship it off to players and let them adjust to their liking. From there it's an arms race of defensibility vs offensiveness. Just like irl anytime one nation comes up with a defense for weapon A, the nation with the weapon tries to counter defense A and creates weapon B. The first nation then comes up with a defense for weapon B after defense A no longer works and it's basically a ping pong match.
Shields if done right have can have their proper place and is something folks will either have or they won't, just like higher armor tiers. While they have value and their place, they also shouldn't be so cheap that you can just blink and have them everywhere without some kind of investment.
Lasers:
irl these are certainly useful depending on what you do with them. They've been used to swat down drones and incoming munitions by detonating them at a safe distance before they can do harm. However the potential downside is the energy requirements to use them and that sometimes they can take awhile to do actual damage depending on what they're being fired at. Where as something like your more classic munitions don't have said weakness. Assuming base SE, they could be great point defense weapons, or to reach out and tag something fast moving that isn't going to be so easily tagged by standard arms. So I agree with you on them being good for zippier ships. The problem you have to avoid too is you don't want them to be so potent that people just stick a bunch of burst lasers on a ship and then making them objectively the best weapon. Would like to see you elaborate a bit more on the form you would want them to take.
Kinetics:
No issues here as we basically have different effectiveness with smaller kinetics and larger ones already. Both small and larger kinetic weapons have their places.
Explosives:
I don't see this as needing its own damage type per say, but I can see why the suggestion was made. These are your classic AoE type weapons like rockets or a warhead. I don't see much of a change needing to be made here, save potentially for easier ways to make lock on missiles. Explosives aren't nearly as bad as people make them out to be. Folks just don't really use them as effectively as they otherwise could.
Overall I don't see the need to make things overly complicated for this kind of stuff or the need to reinvent the wheel. We've already got a decent thing going with SE1 that can be expanded in SE2 to include other stuff. If there's areas we can expand on without having to fix what isn't broke then cool. Otherwise keep it simple.
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