Author Topic: Bonus Ship Ommission File  (Read 29222 times)

Offline Draco18s

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #120 on: October 23, 2012, 04:21:46 pm »
I'd happily throw "just bombers" at a bomber wave...because of the turrets I put down.  My bombers absorb shots from the AI units quite well.  It's a war of attrition, but...I've got 40 turrets the AI doesn't have beating down on their side.
And, dun dun dun! You win, because you had more than just bombers!  Had you not put something down to deal with something that wasn't a big hulking pile of HPs, it may not have gone so well.  Had you just relied on "whatever" to take care of the bombers, without making sure some anti-polycrystal was in there, it may not have gone so well.

Actually, it would have.

Maybe not "against bombers" but "against most ships of most hull types."  E.g. if all I ever see are waves of units with composite (or light, or neutron, or...) armor, it doesn't MATTER what single ship type I throw at them.

The only time it matters is:
A) When the ship I'm throwing at the enemy is countered by that enemy
B) When the enemy ship type is of the Heavy or Ultra-Heavy category

Sure, I'd "win faster" if I threw the counter, but not so quickly as to actually impact general strategy.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #121 on: October 23, 2012, 04:27:49 pm »
Maybe not "against bombers" but "against most ships of most hull types."  E.g. if all I ever see are waves of units with composite (or light, or neutron, or...) armor, it doesn't MATTER what single ship type I throw at them.

The only time it matters is:
A) When the ship I'm throwing at the enemy is countered by that enemy
B) When the enemy ship type is of the Heavy or Ultra-Heavy category
So, if it can matter "against bombers", and A and B there are the only time it matters, does "against bombers" fall under A or B?
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Offline TechSY730

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #122 on: October 23, 2012, 04:28:32 pm »
The only time it matters is:
[...]
B) When the enemy ship type is of the Heavy or Ultra-Heavy category

Not because of of any inherent property of the heavy or ultra-heavy types, but rather because, overall, the most durable and/or dangerous stuff is typically in the heavy or ultra-heavy (or polycrystal) categories, right?

Offline TechSY730

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #123 on: October 23, 2012, 04:30:41 pm »
Maybe not "against bombers" but "against most ships of most hull types."  E.g. if all I ever see are waves of units with composite (or light, or neutron, or...) armor, it doesn't MATTER what single ship type I throw at them.

The only time it matters is:
A) When the ship I'm throwing at the enemy is countered by that enemy
B) When the enemy ship type is of the Heavy or Ultra-Heavy category
So, if it can matter "against bombers", and A and B there are the only time it matters, does "against bombers" fall under A or B?

His statement would almost hold if it was ammended to
Quote
The only time it matters is:
A) When the ship I'm throwing at the enemy is countered by that enemy
B) When the enemy ship type is of the Heavy or Ultra-Heavy category (or Polycrystal, see C)
C) When the enemy ship type is good against Structural hulls (which is nearly always Polycrystal units, which would almost lump this into B)


EDIT: However, I can think of some important exceptions.
Melee units, immune to FF units, and units with such a high base damage that even without a structural bonus, they could threaten your forcefields.

However, these are somewhat rare cases.
« Last Edit: October 23, 2012, 04:36:33 pm by TechSY730 »

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #124 on: October 23, 2012, 04:44:31 pm »
And where does "missile frigates just glassed my homeworld" fall in that scheme?  I'm thinking of some high-difficulty AARs from a few months.  Plenty of forcefields were involved :)
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Offline Draco18s

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #125 on: October 23, 2012, 04:52:06 pm »
And where does "missile frigates just glassed my homeworld" fall in that scheme?

"Sheer numbers that require having my entire fleet, bonuses be damned."

Offline Hearteater

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #126 on: October 23, 2012, 08:59:56 pm »
And where does "missile frigates just glassed my homeworld" fall in that scheme?  I'm thinking of some high-difficulty AARs from a few months.  Plenty of forcefields were involved :)
Missile Frigates have AOE immunity which makes large numbers of them a serious issue for early game defense.  You lose two turret types, and when you are outnumbered 3:1 in mobile ships, that's not good.  That immunity is pretty much the only reason they are threatening in waves.

Offline Histidine

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #127 on: October 24, 2012, 12:42:40 am »
Since there was a little veering into armor, and since a good armor system will have an effect on what the multipliers can look like, I'll throw out a quick system that would make it easy to have ships specializing in armor piercing be different from those that don't, while also being both simple to both understand and implement:

Rate unit's Armor as Mark I - Mark V (with some ships have no armor, effectively Mark 0).  Armor reduces all incoming damage by a percent as follows: Mark 0: -0%, Mark I: -20%, Mark II: -40%, Mark III: -60%, Mark IV: -80%, Mark V: -90%.

Armor Piercing is also rated from Mark I - Mark V (with some ships having no armor piercing, effectively Mark 0).  If the attacker has an equal or greater Mark Armor Piercing than the target's Armor, then the armor is completely ignored.  Otherwise the armor is fully effective.  This means you have distinct matchups between ships.  Mark V armor ships really want Mark V AP ships to counter them.

Armor Rotting reduces the Mark of Armor by one (and doesn't stack within a single ship type, but does stack between multiple ship types, so Acid Sprayers and Autocannons together could knock off 2 Marks of armor).  This gives those ships the powerful ability, but also makes it very clear intuitively.  Armor can't be reduced below Mark 0, so ships with no armor to start with aren't affected by armor rotting.

Lastly, Armor Boosting adds one Mark of armor, capping at Mark V.
Keith is gonna have so much fun letting the AI roll a bonus ship with Mk V armor when the best AP ship you have is Mk IV.
(Or, to put it less glibly: I'm not sure I like the idea that having an AP capability even one level lower means it's useless.)

A slightly different armor system that I devised for a different game some time back goes like this:
  • Ships can have armor of any (non-negative) number.
  • Some units have a specific Armor Piercing value that is a positive number, others have the "default" value (say 100).
  • If the unit's AP value equals or exceeds the target's armor, it does full damage. Otherwise damage = damage * AP/armor.

So a unit with really high armor piercing can severely harm very heavily armored targets, while a unit with modest AP can still do decently against them, and a unit with low AP will just plink away at them all day long.

Advantages over current system: Doesn't use absolute values; thus doesn't depend on the attacker's damage per shot,  and isn't influenced by Mark level if we don't want it to be.
« Last Edit: October 24, 2012, 04:28:34 am by Histidine »

Offline KDR_11k

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #128 on: October 24, 2012, 04:32:31 am »
One hull type I'd like to see is "Invincible" so you don't have to pore through all the immunities and guess whether that means it's invincible.

Light bonuses (and similar) aren't that important because with enough raw power you can chew through the HP of most of those units without multipliers. Ultra Heavy is a different matter, you'll need a massive high-mark fleet (the kind that only the AI can afford) to bring one capital ship like that down and the AI has the advantage that the player's goal is the total annihilation of all mobile forces on a planet, not just hit and run on the command station so there's more time to kill those capital ships.

Seems pretty normal to me that capital ships require using heavy weapons but with fleetships it often gets confusing which of the half dozen types deployed by each side in a battle will eliminate which other type quickly and which ones will get to use their full health.

One thing I don't see people here talk about with armor is that armor punishes using multiple small shots over one big shot, that's the main point of armor (forcing enemies to deploy awkward heavy weapons and seeing all their cool mass killing guns invalidated, especially since weapons designed to penetrate armor can be rather crappy when it comes to damaging what's behind that armor compared to non-AP weapons). Armor disproportionately impacts ships with high rates of fire (unless they're crazy rapid fire doom cannons like the Cursed Golem). In fact I suspect the swarmers are currently the only units affected by armor at all (when you've got damage in the quadruple digits those 1.5k armor will suddenly matter), further skewing the game against them.

If we go by real life then armor is an all-or-nothing affair, damage to the armor by previous hits doesn't matter all that much because the holes are so small that you probably won't hit them twice. You penetrate or you don't. Company of Heroes uses that model, armor doesn't reduce damage, it determines the probability of a shot actually doing damage (I think shots that fail to penetrate still do something like 5% of their original damage). Higher AP means a shot has a higher chance to penetrate against armor of a certain strengths, a gun designed for hitting soft targets may pierce the armor on an armored car but will have next to no chance of ever denting the heavy armor found on medium and heavy tanks (medium tanks are units like Shermans or Panthers, heavy tanks are Pershings and Tigers). Since AP in real life means kinetic weapons and kinetics lose speed in the atmosphere they actually work roughly like the old shields in AIW 3.0. Of course that makes no sense in a space setting and we already have radar dampening to reduce enemy ranges.

Hm, how is armor calculated against continuous beam weapons, by the way?
« Last Edit: October 24, 2012, 05:07:07 am by KDR_11k »

Offline Hearteater

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #129 on: October 24, 2012, 09:41:08 am »
Keith is gonna have so much fun letting the AI roll a bonus ship with Mk V armor when the best AP ship you have is Mk IV.
(Or, to put it less glibly: I'm not sure I like the idea that having an AP capability even one level lower means it's useless.)
We already have ships with so much armor those without insane AP do only 20% damage (Mark IV armor in my suggestion).  And we already have some big ships that could use more than the current 80% damage reduction cap.

Because of the all or nothing nature of this armor suggestion, Mark V armored ships would be much rarer.  Possibly only 2-5 ship types in the entire game.  When picking Mark V armor for a ship, its health would need to reflect the fact that against most enemies, it has x10 as many hp.  So it is balanced assuming no one has AP, and so those with AP are a bonus and not a necessity.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #130 on: October 24, 2012, 10:34:29 am »
Hm, how is armor calculated against continuous beam weapons, by the way?
It's actually applied per frame of the hit, making it relatively more effective against those.  But in general the beam cannon damage is high enough to punch right on through anyway.
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Offline Draco18s

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #131 on: October 24, 2012, 10:48:36 am »
You penetrate or you don't. Company of Heroes uses that model, armor doesn't reduce damage, it determines the probability of a shot actually doing damage (I think shots that fail to penetrate still do something like 5% of their original damage). Higher AP means a shot has a higher chance to penetrate against armor of a certain strengths

That would be the old %-to-hit method that was removed, due to some units being impossible to hit (acid sprayers come to mind) even at point-blank range.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #132 on: October 24, 2012, 10:59:11 am »
Yea, %-chance-to-hit works in more tactically-oriented games, but in grand-strategy it's pushing it.

I don't mind simulating "your massive anti-capital cannon has a hard time hitting a fighter, so it does way less damage on average" but outright misses just don't fit here.
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Offline Hearteater

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #133 on: October 24, 2012, 11:20:10 am »
Taking Hull Types in a different direction, what if Hull Types weren't exclusive, but instead represented properties of the ship that reduced incoming damage.  For example, imagine hull types like: Evasive, Stealthy, Reflective.  Each ship could have any combination of those three, or none at all.  Each hull type it has cuts the damage taken in half.  So an Evasive, Stealthy and Reflective ship would take 1/8th damage.  Attacking ships counter one or more hull types.  So a Missile Frigate might have homing missiles and so counter Evasive, and the missile might explode rendering Reflective useless.  So a Missile Frigate would do only 1/2 damage to an Evasive, Stealthy, Reflective ship instead of 1/8th.  Basically, Hull Type would become a bit field.

Offline TechSY730

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Re: Bonus Ship Ommission File
« Reply #134 on: October 24, 2012, 11:24:10 am »
Taking Hull Types in a different direction, what if Hull Types weren't exclusive, but instead represented properties of the ship that reduced incoming damage.  For example, imagine hull types like: Evasive, Stealthy, Reflective.  Each ship could have any combination of those three, or none at all.  Each hull type it has cuts the damage taken in half.  So an Evasive, Stealthy and Reflective ship would take 1/8th damage.  Attacking ships counter one or more hull types.  So a Missile Frigate might have homing missiles and so counter Evasive, and the missile might explode rendering Reflective useless.  So a Missile Frigate would do only 1/2 damage to an Evasive, Stealthy, Reflective ship instead of 1/8th.  Basically, Hull Type would become a bit field.

Obligatory Starcraft comparison.
That is exactly what Starcraft and Starcraft II do for the "enumed" per-unittype properties that play into damage bonuses*. (Biological, Mechanical, Robotic, Hovering, Flying, Psionic, etc). One unit can have multiple flags (like SCVs have both Biological and Mechanical, letting them be both repaired and healed, but also making them vulnerable to both things with biological bonuses and things with mechanical bonuses)

*Other than the unit size flags, those are mutually exclusive relative to one another.