So, this whole armor thing

[Martyn van Buren]

One more, if not a popular one --- take armor and piercing away from all ships that don't have it as their "gimmick" and make armor into a new mechanic that reduces damage based on the defending ship's mark advantage, and armor piercing into a new mechanic that gives ships an advantage based on the target's mark.

NB: These suggestions are not symmetrical; otherwise armor piercing would go down in value as you upgraded a ship.

Examples:

Mk I attacking Mk IV with armor: Damage reduced by (N * 3)
Mk IV attacking Mark IV with armor: No reduction

Mk I with armor piercing attacking Mk IV: Damage increased by (M * 3)
Mk IV with armor piercing attacking Mk IV: Damage increased by (M * 3)

I imagine N and M being in the range of 15% and 10%, but that would obviously want a bit of balancing work.

I think this approach would create a fairly clear, but mostly new mechanic --- tank ships specialized at clearing out lower-Mk enemies, and assassin ships specialized in taking out high marks.

[Bognor]

[stuff about a poll]

But remember Keith has already stated there's only one option he sees as a big step forward.

[Tridus]

[stuff about a poll]

But remember Keith has already stated there's only one option he sees as a big step forward.

That's true, but it doesn't eliminate the value of seeing if there's any one option that the rest of us like. Right now this is kind of a chaotic swirl and it's hard to tell anything from it.

Thanks for the suggestions, I've added them to the list. I'll let it sit for a little while to see if there's any others.

[PokerChen]

To keep this thread a bit more in line with Keith's opinions, this is what he said in my words:

- Motivation to compress realistic, EVE-level calculations into 3 variables weapon type versus hull-type + hull-size,

- End up with a net damage multiplier table like ship-type interactions in Sins of a Solar Empire, but a bit more complicated.

- There will no armor values. It is redundant. Armour type becomes hull-type and Armor thickness becomes effective HP.

- There will be no hit-chances. It's too RNG reliant.

 = = =
Thus, assuming that we will follow his lead:

(1) New roles are to be found for ship-types that use Armor-mechanics. It will help to find meaningful niches for ships with Armor-piercing (effective against what?), versus
 - Implosion ammunition (effective against all armor thicknesses)
 - Ships with rare hull-bonuses (e.g. Acid-sprayers and Missile Frigates that are designed against rare hull-types).
 - Ships with general anti-large properties (IRE, Youngling Vulture, etc.)
 - Ships with general anti-small properties (Flak, Grenade Launcher, Rail-clusters, etc. )

In my view, anti-armour ships have a niche in being the opposite of anti-rare hull ships. So, anti-armour is the opposite of the acid sprayer with strong bonuses against conventional hull-types, but weak bonuses against un-conventional hull-types. More talk in a new thread.

(2) It will also help to draft a re-alignment of existing ship-types and ammunition types into the new paradigm. E.g.:
 - Should missiles be essentially agnostic to hull-sizes above very small? (Do we make the abstraction that all missiles are well-guided?)

 - What will be its hull-type values? (i.e. should we abstract away HEAT / fragmentation / KEM or should we split missiles into subtypes? Do we assume that all missile-carrying ships will adapt their warheads respectively?) This is important due to missile-immunity being the most commonly-occuring immunity.

 - Translating the existing rationale for hull-types into hull-type + hull-size. For example, polycrystal is the most common unconventional hull-type, in the sense that IRL we currently understand armour as being of steel, carbon-fibre, concrete, composites, organic (chitin-CaCO3 composite), etc. and have insufficient knowledge in constructing poly-disperse, neutron, refractive materials.

 = = =
 EDIT: Also, I think it's important that the rebalance actually starts from a clean slate - so that we don't get hobbled over old saves, etc.

[keith.lamothe]

[stuff about a poll]

But remember Keith has already stated there's only one option he sees as a big step forward.

Don't let that stop y'all!

Though as usual I don't promise to just take the winner of any given poll and do exactly what it says, there's always other considerations.  But such polls are always useful information to me, and there's been a pretty high correlation in the past between them and what actually happens.

[PokerChen]

 In any case, I've drafted up an .xlsx that imitates what the Ammo-type versus Hull versus Size might look like. Tried to preserve the existing categories of ammo-types and hull-types, although I decided to rename Lasers to Plasma because it's my pet peeve about non-light speed lasers.

 There is a minimum of ~8 sizes needed to express the current range of mobile assets, and also 8~9 hull-types without going too deep into electronic warfare.

 Current sizes are based on cap-numbers, from drones to golems. Close-combat is morphed into composite/medium. Scout effectively molded into Refractive (because they are all cloaked), all refractives have cloak but a few cloaks do not have refractive. All non-AoE Energy Bombs molded into Energy, Plasma Sieges should still probably get their own ammo type apart from Flak Turrets.

 Some things to think about before balancing can begin to be thought about:
 - Raider types will either need their own hull, special mechanics, or a smaller effective size.
 - Missiles is too catch all, e.g. MLRS and Missile and all the raiders that also shoot missile.
 - Fusion Cutters.
 - Consistent ammo-typing of status ailments (e.g. paralyzers).
 - Current degree of overlap between small-large in size and soft-hard in armour ratings. This is partially subverted by Forcefields (large and soft) and Armor-style ships (small and hardened).

EDIT: Ignore numbers - the point is if we even want to embark on this exercise, what kind of hull and ammunition types do we hneed to include?

[Cyborg]

I went through your spreadsheet.

I appreciate somebody making an attempt at this, but you have effectively removed soft counters by completely stripping the armor and going with this weapon multiplier system (which we already had over two years ago). For example, you are giving triangles .02 vulnerability multipliers. You equate this with space tanks? That's ridiculous. Going down the list, I see that you have given a couple of the ships bizarre multipliers, presumably from your own personal prejudice against these ships. I'm also looking at the spire types, where your reasoning listed on the spreadsheet is "because they are made of rock." I appreciate lore, but you can't possibly be suggesting we break the balance (which is fun for everybody) because in your mind they are giant floating space rocks.

We should be very, very cautious of taking spreadsheets like this at face value.

If anyone else remembers the weird damage multiplier system we used to have, it was changed in favor of hull types, not weapon types. If we do a rebalance, we can't have a system where one expansion obliterates all the others. We need variety, but we also need balance… you can't have your Zenith fleet flying around in paper airplanes when you are going after 7.0 game features.

[PokerChen]

All of the multipliers are placeholders, of course. You got distract by them numbers - the point is if we even want to embark on this exercise, how many hull and ammunition types should we actually be looking at?

There's a strong need to think about trying to compact the different bonus-ships down to a more manageable level.

[Cyborg]

You got distract by them numbers.

Seeing as most of the spreadsheet is numbers, yes, I did read them as if you meant them.

I think that each expansion should be able to produce ship charts like the following:


Imagine that each of these charts were ships from each expansion, each specializing in one of five points: speed, cap DPS, HP, range, and {armor, whatever}. Each expansion could have something that it does well, or taking two of these and specializing. This is a popular RPG mechanics, a tried-and-true method across many games. I think that's the direction we should go.

[PokerChen]

 Ah yes, I also wrote a radar graphs last year. It was meant to go on the wiki, but never did. 

 http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,10097.msg97103.html#msg971034

 It didn't take into account abilities such as immunities / radar dampening / paralysis / etc, which a lot of ships have, so IMO the base state for many bonus ship-types didn't give you the right impression.

 = = =

 Back to this experiment. The current in-game trends of the various race seems to be (to me)...

 Humans - Has a larger number of combat ships, from the base game. Of all sizes, but with many swarmer/light/medium/composite hulls. Also tend to have more specialised general combat ships with higher bonuses. the theme of the base game humans are hull-bonuses and immunities

 Neinzul - all very fast, plentiful/cheap, disposable, with many hull types. Each of them has a gimmick, although in the commando's case, scouting information is a little bland. However, the Neinzuls have their own ship-triagle.
 
 Spire - large number of cap 5 / 8 ships along with higher cap 40s for Grav-types and Leeches. Has Medium / Composite / Heavy / Ultra-Heavy. Until the Railcluster was added, they have higher base DPS and weak bonuses. No bombers - Armor Rotters and Mini-rams. Short-medium ranges.

 Zenith - a broad range of chip-caps and sizes, but with noticeably  more "rarer" hulls types. A large number of big guns or long-range guns. Has Medium / CC / 1 Composite / Polycrystal / Neutron / Artillery.  Medium-long range. the theme of Zeniths are rare-hulls and bombardments.

 = = =
 NB: About ammo-types, I feel that quite a few ships will need to change their ammo type in order to maintain a semblance of the old bonuses. Keith tuned most of the older ship-types individually instead of having rationally motivated bonuses recently, i.e. Needlers / Plasma Seige. See attractor drones, infiltrators, both raiders and raptors, etc.
- Space-tanks is an illuststration in this headache since it's a bullet-type with bomber bonuses, except swapping out CommandGrade for Polycrystal.
- Effectively, several original bonus-types counter 2 of the 3 triangle ships, and is in-turn countered by its own counter.