Author Topic: What's happening with high and low cap ships?  (Read 7843 times)

Offline TechSY730

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What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« on: September 20, 2016, 08:40:58 pm »
Pardon if this was in the design doc, but what is happening with high and low cap ships?

Personally, I wouldn't mind if the extremes on either side got scaled back some (aka. no more than 2x normal cap on the high end, no more "only 5" on the low end); the "extremes" were notoriously hard to balance). However, I still feel that gave some "personality" to the various ship types and I wouldn't want to see ship cap variance be eliminated entirely.

Note, this only applies to "fleet ships". Things like starships should remain few and "big".
« Last Edit: September 20, 2016, 08:42:30 pm by TechSY730 »

Offline Cinth

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Re: What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« Reply #1 on: September 20, 2016, 08:44:50 pm »
Squads are going to take care of this for the most part (that is in the DD).

Starships aren't exempt either, they will be squads of one ;)
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Offline x4000

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Re: What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« Reply #2 on: September 21, 2016, 09:41:11 am »
Right: basically the idea of having a lobby setting for the ship cap scale will go away, because that was always a crutch for performance purposes.

If you want to have extra ship cap in the "I want a bigger game" sense, then doing the equivalent of a multi-homeworld start (aka like you're playing multiplayer by yourself) would instead be the route I'd take.  That's a cleaner approach and gives more consistent results while also getting at the "I want bigger stuff" feel.  The "I need better performance" side is handled by squads, as Cinth said.
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Offline TechSY730

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Re: What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« Reply #3 on: September 21, 2016, 10:55:38 am »
Sorry, I meant per ship type ship cap, not the global ship cap setting.

Offline Pumpkin

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Re: What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« Reply #4 on: September 21, 2016, 10:58:52 am »
Excellent question, actually. And the answer sounds fine. I still have issues with how the multiplayer is handled, and in particular the multi-homeworld-start, but I guess we'll have a closer look at in post-KS.

Related question: speed "style"? (epic/normal/blitz) Will there still be that? I believe this option added the similar balance problems where not everything scaled in the same way. Specifically with speed, and as an example, units attacking a long-range GPost took more damage if slower.

Sorry, I meant per ship type ship cap, not the global ship cap setting.
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Offline Draco18s

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Re: What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« Reply #5 on: September 21, 2016, 11:04:53 am »
Sorry, I meant per ship type ship cap, not the global ship cap setting.

"A squad" is a number of units.  Starships will be "squads of 1" while fighters are "squads of 10" where microfighters would be "squads of 20."

It's in the dev notes already.

Offline x4000

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Re: What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« Reply #6 on: September 21, 2016, 11:10:01 am »
Quote
Sorry, I meant per ship type ship cap, not the global ship cap setting.

Oops.  Did your question get answered, then?  The document basically addresses that, and Pumpkin summarized a lot of it in general.

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I still have issues with how the multiplayer is handled.

Me too.  I have various things I'd rather do that would allow for more drop in and drop out, frankly.  Those are things I need to address soon.

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in particular the multi-homeworld-start

Tying ship types to the worlds you start on won't be a thing anymore, fyi.  But Cinth and others would kill me if it wasn't possible to have "big games by myself as if there were 8 people playing."

Quote
Related question: speed "style"? (epic/normal/blitz) Will there still be that? I believe this option added the similar balance problems where not everything scaled in the same way. Specifically with speed, and as an example, units attacking a long-range GPost took more damage if slower.

Honestly my impression is that this was not particularly used.  One way or another, I don't plan on having it in this fashion, I can tell you that.  If people want options for things like "ships all move x% as fast" and "ships do x% as much damage" and "waves come at x% frequency as usual," those are individual lobby options I could support.  I'm not here to tell anyone how to play.

But with those sort of things, you're basically tossing conventional balance out the window and you make your own fun -- which is half the point.  Having those combined into official and less-flexible "epic mode" or whatever implies that balance is going to be equally polished between those modes, which can never be the case.  We need a default that is balanced for the vast majority of players, and anyone who wants to do something else can basically "mod through lobby options" as much as they want.
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Offline Pumpkin

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Re: What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« Reply #7 on: September 21, 2016, 11:15:16 am »
But Cinth and others would kill me if it wasn't possible to have (...)
Kill them first. :P
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Offline Draco18s

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Re: What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« Reply #8 on: September 21, 2016, 01:01:33 pm »
But Cinth and others would kill me if it wasn't possible to have (...)
Kill them first. :P

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Offline tadrinth

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Re: What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« Reply #9 on: September 21, 2016, 01:28:47 pm »
There will still be fleet ships that have unusually high caps.  The design doc lists Laser Gatlings as having an unusually high cap, for example:
Quote
double the number of ships per squad, and 1.5x the number of squads. Outranges many other units.


I don't see any ships in there that are listed as having unusually low caps. 

Many of the mechancs that interacted weirdly with ship caps, like swallow, are either not returning or will probably work per-squad.  That should reduce the power imbalance between low and high cap ships.  Being able to repair a squadron up to full unit count should also make high cap ships less annoying to deal with by alleviating refleet micro.

At some point I'm going to try to figure out some numbers on how to adjust cap-hp when adjusting cap to preserve total DPS output under fire.  I think that'll help also.

Offline x4000

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Re: What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« Reply #10 on: September 21, 2016, 02:27:55 pm »
Cheers! :)
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Offline tadrinth

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Re: What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« Reply #11 on: September 21, 2016, 05:55:07 pm »
Okay, I have some very simple ruby code that tells you how much to adjust cap-HP when you adjust cap.

pp [1,2,4,8,16,32, 64, 128].map{|cap| dps = (1..cap).map{|i| Rational(i, cap) * Rational(1,cap) }.inject(0){|i,j| i+j}; [cap, dps]}
[[1, (1/1)],
 [2, (3/4)],
 [4, (5/8)],
 [8, (9/16)],
 [16, (17/32)],
 [32, (33/64)],
 [64, (65/128)],
 [128, (129/256)]]


So, what's happening here?

If you have a starship with a cap of 1, then then it does 100% of its cap DPS until it takes 100% of its cap health (and dies).

If you have a starship with a cap of 2, then a full cap does 100% of its cap dps until it takes 50% of its cap health and the first starship dies. Then the other starship does 50% of cap DPS until a total of 100% cap health is dealt.  That works out to 3/4ths as much damage.  This assumes perfect focus fire and no overkill effects, because those are super hard to model. 

I don't think you want to change the cap DPS, because some other ship might be tanking and their DPS will be at 100% for a while.  Instead, I think high cap ships should get an HP bonus (or low cap ships an HP penalty) that preserves their total DPS output under fire. 

The above code lets you put in a cap and see what it's theoretical total-damage-under-fire is as a fraction of a ship with a cap of 1.  IE, a ship cap of 2 deals 3/4ths as much damage under fire, a cap of 4 deals 5/8ths, etc. 

list= [1,2,4,8,16,32, 64, 128].map{|cap| dps = (1..cap).map{|i| Rational(i, cap) * Rational(1,cap) }.inject(0){|i,j| i+j}; [cap, dps]}; list.each_cons(2){|i,j| pp [[i[0],j[0]],(i[1] / j[1]).to_f]}
[[1, 2], 1.3333333333333333]
[[2, 4], 1.2]
[[4, 8], 1.1111111111111112]
[[8, 16], 1.0588235294117647]
[[16, 32], 1.0303030303030303]
[[32, 64], 1.0153846153846153]
[[64, 128], 1.0077519379844961]


This bit of code lets you put in some caps and see, for a change in cap, how much you should increase the cap HP to compensate for the reduced damage under fire.  IE, going from a cap of 1 to 2, you should increase cap health by 33%. 

It also makes it clear that this really doesn't matter for regular caps; going from 32 to 64 only recommends a 1% increase in cap HP, which probably isn't enough to bother with.  For very low caps, the impact is much more noticeable.

Ergo, the perceived fragility of high cap ships is probably more due to the targetting logic prioritizing them because they're easier to kill, or some other factor. 
« Last Edit: September 21, 2016, 06:00:32 pm by tadrinth »

Offline kasnavada

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Re: What's happening with high and low cap ships?
« Reply #12 on: September 21, 2016, 07:21:43 pm »
Ergo, the perceived fragility of high cap ships is probably more due to the targetting logic prioritizing them because they're easier to kill, or some other factor. 

Yes, but those ain't going to change much. Also there's another thing to take into account. What happens when refleeting ? When against larger opponents ? Smaller opponents ? When dying before firing a shot due to range ?

High cap ships are significantly fragile due to those. Those effects probably would requires an gradual augmentation of up to 25 to 50% on top of the calculations you've done.

 

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