Combat Design Space: Making Combat Richer

[Hearteater]

So I've been thinking on the topic of some bonus ships being underwhelming, the difficulty of making high cap ships useful, or making low cap ships useful without heavy-handed immunities (such as to insta-kill), and similar issues relating to how combat is balanced. Keeping in mind AIW needs to actually be able to run on reasonable hardware, and players actually need to be able to comprehend how combat actually works, I've got a few ideas rattling around.

Armor (modified)
This topic has come up again and again, it overall I think a lot of people aren't satisfied with the current mechanic. It seems ok until you actually look at the ships and start realizing what the Mark system does to it. Worse, there isn't a solution to the Mark problem with how armor currently works. In addition, tracking not only armor values of ships, but armor piercing is mentally cumbersome. Effectively most players simply remember "oh, this guy has some armor and this guy is good verse armor" even when armor values can vary greatly.

Solution: Armor becomes a flat -50% damage taken. Units that ignore armor (aka, have armor piercing) do not have their damage halved. Units that strip armor remove the armor property for a period of time (that could be the difference between Autopods and Armor Rotters: Autopods are -armor for 2 seconds, Armor Rotters are -armor for 20 seconds). Armor can even scale up, with "Heavy" Armor reducing damage by 75%, and possibly some insane armor on something like a Mothership being -7/8ths damage. Armor stripping could work in a few different ways for stacked armor, but that's a detail that can be considered later. In the end, armored ships become simple to understand quickly. They take half damage unless something counters armor. Done.

The Mark Problem: Since damage increases greatly with ship Mark, when a Mark I with armor fights another Mark I, things work okay. But when a Mark I with armor fights a Mark II, that Mark II preforms MUCH better than normal because its DPS increases by more than the normal 100%. And it works the same in reverse. In fact, an armored ship with a greater mark than its target outperforms on two fronts and those two advantage multiply together in fleet battles.

Evasion (new)
This ability causes every other attack to automatically miss. Each attack flips a flag and the resulting value indicates whether it is a hit or miss. Shots that ignore evasion don't change the status of the evasion flag. Some ships could even have improved evasion, causing 3 out of every 4 attacks to miss. Mirroring armor, the option could exist for some crazy ship against which 7 out of 8 attacks miss. Most AOE damage cannot miss and so ignores evasion.

Shields (new)
This ability functions like an additional set of health. Unlike health, it is applied in Layers and listed as "Shields: 100x4" much like attacks. Damage to a ship is subtracted from shields first (and internally a ship with 100x4 shields is tracked as having 400 shields). Every 20 seconds every ship gets one layer replaced. So a ship with 100x4 that has 175 damage against its shields would conceptually go from 100+100+25+0 shields remaining to 100+100+100+0 shields. In effect layers act as the regeneration rate. An additional advantage of shields is bonus attack effects do not apply against shields (e.g., reclaim, sabotage and engine damage is ignored). A disadvantage of shields is any unit that ignore Force Fields also ignores shields. Attacks with "Shield Breaker" always completely destroys any partially damaged layer after dealing damage. So 105 damage with Shield Breaker would take out two layers of a 100x4 Shield.

Unit Size vs Weapon Size (new)
All units have a size right now, but it isn't codified into a player-friendly chart. So assign each unit a size from Micro (1) to Colossal (8). Next assign each weapon a similar size. So a Fighter might be Size: Medium (4) and its ammo might be Medium Shells. Whenever one unit attacks another, it deals 20% less damage for each size difference between its weapon and the target, in either direction (dmgMult = |hull.size - ammo.size|^0.8). So an Artillery Golem with its Colossal Artillery ammo deals a lot less damage to a Medium Fighter than a Massive Armored Golem. Of course its base damage is so high it still erases the Fighter. If every unit in the game used weapons the same size as the unit, this would not change match up results at all (because if I'm doing less to them, they would be doing less to me). But this does leave room for units mounting larger or smaller weapons to specifically make them better against a different sized opponent.

Additional, the Point Defense ability allows a ship's ammo size to count up to two sizes smaller, allowing for 100% damage against targets that are 1 or 2 sizes smaller than its ammo.

[Toranth]

Shield already exist - no need to add another complicating stat with special timers (for extra micro!).
Evasion is what shields used to be, turned semi-deterministic.  But it either becomes massively important to micro, uncontrollable and hence unpredictable, or not different that an +X% HP bonus.

The Armor discussion has gone on and on and on... personally, I hate the concept of %-damage reduction armor.  I think it is silly in concept, and silly in impact.  I'd much rather see a unit get a +100% HP bonus than a -50% damage bonus.  We can rehash the entire discussion again, or links:
"Armor is not that important currently"
"Ye Ol' Armor Debate"
"So, this whole armor thing"
"Poll: Which armor system do you like?"
You probably remember some of this, of course.  But here they are again for everyone's reference.


Now, on the Size issue, I kind of agree.  I think hull-types should be reduced in number, and a separate hull size factor added.  That allows weapons like Flak to get a large anti-small unit bonus, without accidentally making them good against planetoid-size units.
I think weapon types should have standardized bonuses, but I'm not sure I see the need for sizes on weapons.  Different weapon types could cover that just as easily, in my mind.

[Aeson]

I dislike percentage-based armor systems for more or less the same reason as Toranth gives.

I think the shield system that you've proposed is overly complicated and unnecessary, and besides which we already have shields within the game, as wide-area shared defense systems.

I dislike your proposals for size and especially evasion; there's no good reason in a game that isn't doing any significant physical simulation why 50-87.5% of the shots fired should miss. Your size proposal would be a more reasonable place to fit in an evasion system than giving everyone a free 50% or higher dodge rate, and evasion makes more sense there than mysterious damage penalties for no apparent reason, especially when the effect can effectively be replicated by making larger units have on average more armor and health than smaller units have while making smaller units more likely to evade incoming damage. A 5" gun isn't less effective against a battleship than a destroyer because the battleship is a big target while a 5" gun is a mid-size weapon, it's less effective against the battleship because the battleship has significantly more and heavier armor than the destroyer carries. The big guns are also mostly less effective against the smaller targets due more to overkill, aiming difficulty, and having ammunition designed for use against big targets - a shell intended to penetrate battleship armor before blowing up may well pass completely through a destroyer without encountering sufficient resistance to trigger detonation, but that's more a question of having appropriate ammunition than a question of the size of the gun.

[Draco18s]

I'd like to throw the idea of "ablative" armor into the pot.

That is, as a ship takes damage, its armor value drops some amount.  Exact mechanics can be up for debate, but essentially giving "all" units the kind of effect that Armor Rotters have now and then increasing armor values substantially for the units that have it.  (Suggested: Floor(damage/1000) be applied to armor until repaired).

This makes a ship with a lot of armor be able to effectively ignore low-damage shots (Tank > Infantry) and mitigate high-damage shots, but not forever (Rocket > Tank).  But it also means that you can "wear down" a tough unit's armor until it's so shot full of holes that the low-damage units can get hits in through the big gaping holes.

This doesn't invalidate Armor Rotters and Acid Sprayers, but instead they just need a small change of being a "low damage" unit that instead of doing no armor damage, does MASSIVE armor damage (Acid Sprayers could even do a "poison" effect on the armor).  So instead of being a primary damage dealer, they compromise armored targets so that other units with DPS can start doing their job of taking down the target.

Then force fields (which don't normally have armor) protect against that sort of thing.

[Hearteater]

@Toranth
We have Force Fields, an application of the Shield technology. Unlike Shields, which protect various vehicles and shields, Force Fields are so named because they expand the area of coverage greatly and "force" units outside their area of coverage. Or whatever other lore reason. Just because we have Force Fields doesn't mean we can't have something called shields. Of course they could be called something entirely different as well. The name is just fluff.

As for the micro issue, it is easily avoidable by making the refresh period smaller. A 2 second refresh would make micro impossible.

On evasion, it isn't microable. It is the same method POE uses and it isn't microed there so it certain won't be here with so many more attacks and units.

I'm not sure what you mean by +100% hp. That isn't armor at all because it isn't possible to have any unit be good against armor when armor just mean "lots of hp". That would actually reduce the richness of combat.

@Aeson
These defenses are NOT intended to be something every ship has. Less than 10-15% of bonus ships might have armor. Another 10-15% might have evasion. And a further 10-15% might have shields. Very few, if any, would have two of the three. Both the armor and evasion ability reduce incoming damage by half unless the attacker has the counter, but they do it in different ways.

The shield complexity could just be reduced to "bonus hp that some units can ignore". We can simulate that now with a shield module, but this would remove the need to use two units.

[Toranth]

@Toranth
We have Force Fields, an application of the Shield technology. Unlike Shields, which protect various vehicles and shields, Force Fields are so named because they expand the area of coverage greatly and "force" units outside their area of coverage. Or whatever other lore reason. Just because we have Force Fields doesn't mean we can't have something called shields. Of course they could be called something entirely different as well. The name is just fluff.

As for the micro issue, it is easily avoidable by making the refresh period smaller. A 2 second refresh would make micro impossible.

On evasion, it isn't microable. It is the same method POE uses and it isn't microed there so it certain won't be here with so many more attacks and units.

I'm not sure what you mean by +100% hp. That isn't armor at all because it isn't possible to have any unit be good against armor when armor just mean "lots of hp". That would actually reduce the richness of combat.

@Aeson
These defenses are NOT intended to be something every ship has. Less than 10-15% of bonus ships might have armor. Another 10-15% might have evasion. And a further 10-15% might have shields. Very few, if any, would have two of the three. Both the armor and evasion ability reduce incoming damage by half unless the attacker has the counter, but they do it in different ways.

The shield complexity could just be reduced to "bonus hp that some units can ignore". We can simulate that now with a shield module, but this would remove the need to use two units.

Percentage based armor, evasion, and your shields all come down to basically the same thing: more HP.

With %-armor, the equivalence is pretty direct.  50% damage is equivalent to 200% HP.  Armor Piercing changes that, yes, but it is equivalent to a 2.0 damage multiplier against that target: a pre-existing mechanic.
There's also the silly results:  A unit's armor will block 500,000 damage from an Artillery Golem!  But only 16 from a Laser Gatling.

Evasion, if deterministic (aka, a counter that blocks exactly every X-th attack) is open to micro.  On the other hand, if it purely random (1/x chance) then it has two problems.  First, it makes the game too unpredictable.  What good is a Spirecraft Penetrator under those circumstances?  It is also highly abusable by save-load mechanics anyway.
Second, if it dodges 50% of all attacks against it, this is on average the equivalent to surviving 200% of the attacks - the same as having 200% HP (only more unpredictable).

Shields vs Force Fields, you are correct that currently Force Fields are more Area defense than purely individual.  I was comparing them more as the quickly regenerating health-equivalent idea.  Even right now, Force Fields are usually treated as additional HP for whatever they are protecting; shields end up being very similar.  While your ideas for Shield Break and phased regeneration are interesting variants, they are still variants on the same idea: Regenerating HP.
And that's a concept that already exists.  I'm not sure bring additional complication to that mechanic adds much.  Not to mention the difficulty in balancing - a three-factor ability like that that interacts heavily with 2 other stats is going to be very awkward.

[TechSY730]

WARNING: Personal opinions and preferences with little to no supporting arguments ahead.
EDIT: I have already stated my arguments/justification/rational/reasoning for many of these things in the numerous threads about these issues that have come before. I sadly don't have the time nor motivation anymore to really restate them all again nor digging through the archives to find my original posts.

I would be glad if hull type could be made more "focused" about what it is supposed to model (we have some that model ship size, some that model ship role, some that model hull material). Right now, it is sort of a mess of "mixed messages" and it does seem to be leading to unneeded confusion for both players and the balance team (no offense Keith )

Also, pulling out ships "size" into its own thing that ships/weapons can have bonus or penalties against would be really cool, and would make things such as "can only fire upon big things" explicit in the UI. But this is less important.

I have no opinion on whether bonuses should be defined per ship or per weapon/ammo type.

I do think the current armor system can be made to work with some adjustments to balance (mostly average and median armor values), but I would not object to another system as well that still accomplishes the same or similar job.

I do oppose any sort of non-determinism/randomness in the core combat model, or even any per ship mechanics that would add such an element to combat.

The shields idea proposed in the OP sounds just like existing forcefields (especially modular ones), but just with a small radius. Or rather, how exo-harvester forcefields used to behave (a forcefield that only protected one unit, but forcefield immune units could still hit the unit underneath anyways). No need for a new mechanic to implement it; it would be somewhat silly to have two identical mechanics (in terms of how it impact combat) with just different names and sets of immunities. (Note: the same criticism can be made for fusion cutter and regular melee immunity, which feels similarly clunky)

[Draco18s]

Evasion, if deterministic (aka, a counter that blocks exactly every X-th attack) is open to micro.

How?  The unit never resets its counter except when shot.

[Toranth]

Evasion, if deterministic (aka, a counter that blocks exactly every X-th attack) is open to micro.

How?  The unit never resets its counter except when shot.

Because you can do things like take shots from a Wormhole Guardpost up to the X-1 shot, then throw your units into range of something else that would insta-kill them (like a Fortress) knowing that next one of those shots will be 'evaded' for each unit.

[Hearteater]

Fortress would be a bad example as it has a ton of shots so getting missed by one isn't really that important. Doing that against an Artillery Golem could be abused, but I'm assuming that particular golem would ignore evasion.

So as others have indirectly suggested, let's step back and focus purely on the hull mechanic and multipliers. Right now they are entirely arbitrary. Back a year or so ago I started reworking hull mods. I created new categories (mainly just picking names with a consistent theme). Instead of weapons dealing "times X" bonus damage, I attached the multiplier to the hull type and weapons were just either "strong" or "weak" against a hull type. Depending on the hull type was what the multiplier was, and it didn't vary. As a result, some hull types were hurt more by their counter than others. Typically this would be balanced by those hull types hurt the most by "strong" weapons have to go up against "strong" weapons the least.

But conceptually I also started working out a purpose for each hull type to try and maintain consistency. So "Energized" was the anti-melee hull type and should go on ships designed to counter melee weapons. When designing melee weapons you then know not to make them strong against Energized, and that making them weak might be a good idea (although not required). I never really finished the design work, but the concept of formalizing hull types has stuck with me. I realize also there is some information conventions currently.

But the question remains, do hull multipliers serve us well? They certainly create a RPS-style system to a degree (with more nodes of course). Unlike others I have no dislike for them at all. But given the number of bonus ships (and I like the number and variety) is there a viable alternative?

Aside: I also started assigning special properties to each ammo type, but I abandoned that idea when I realized it would just step on the design space of new ships.

[TechSY730]

I personally love the fact that multipliers have more than 3 "states" (strong, neutral, and weak) and are a full fledged, numericly exposed to the player multiplier, will the full range of possibilities that implies. I will grant though that this adds more data for a player to process as well as greatly complicate balance work. IMO, this is worth the added nuances in ways ships can differ from each other (ship vs ship matchups, more ways to create "roles" for ships, etc). though apparently some people don't feel like it is worth it.

[Draco18s]

Honestly an "ammo vs. hull" system is MUCH easier for the player to remember.