Standardizing Hull Type Meaning

[TechSY730]

Right now, it's a little unclear about what hull types are supposed to model about a ship.

The name would imply that it would represent hull material or properties of the hull material, which for the most part, it does. (Polycrystal, nuertron, refractive, etc)

However, there are several inconsistencies.

Some of the hull types seem to "model" hull durability. (ultra-light, light, medium, heavy, ultra-heavy) This seems strange, as the armor rating value is supposed to model that

Some of the hull types seem to "model" a ship's role (swarmer, close-combat, artilery, command-station, etc.) This is sort of strange, as this is supposed to be describing the hull, not the ship.

Now I realize that many of the hull types are supposed to be associated with a generic "class" of ships
Like polycrystal tends to be associated with bomber type ships, and nuetron tends to be associated with engineers and engineer like stuff.
However, they should all be named after a material, or all be named after their role. Not some one way, and some the other way.

Much of this is "in name only", so just renaming the hull types, without altering associations or bonuses, would fix this.

That does leave the question of what to do with hull types that seem to describe a ship's durability/size. One way would be to rename those as well to "clever" material names. However, there could also be a mechanics change.

Something like splitting hull type and "ship tier/size" into two separate stats, and have sets attack bonuses for each stat, which are multiplied together. (The logical purpose of very-light, light, medium, heavy, and very heavy would be shifted to this new stat and/or adjustments to thier armor value. Either they would need to have a new hull-type assigned to them, or rename those hull types into a "material like" name)

So we would have something like (I can't remember actual bonuses off the top of my head, so I am making some up)

Laser gattling Hull type: swarmer (or whatever the new name is) Size: very small
2x vs nuetron, 2x vs artillery, .5x vs command station armor
1.2x vs medium, .5x vs large, .7x vs very large
(omitted values are implied 1x, so that would mean 1x vs very small and small)

Plasma siege starship Hull type: artillery Size: large (note, no hull type bonuses)
.25x vs very small, .4x vs small, .8x vs medium, 1.2x vs very large

(Again, these values are completely made up, proper values for balancing would need to be found)

Thus, a laser gattling would do 1x vs. a large artillery (2 (from hull type bonus) * .5 (from size "bonus")),  but 2.4x against medium artillery (2 * 1.2)

Now before you panic about a whole new set a stats to balance, keep in mind that most ships and/or shot types don't make alot of sense to vary depending on the size or "tier" of the ship, so the vast majority of ships would just have 1x for all sizes the board. Only for ships designed to counter certain specific tiers of threats would need these.

Also, this would be a GREAT way to make the determining large stuff for ship that "can only hit large stuff"  explicit to the user instead of implicit based on trial and error (or looking up the code).

So something like
Bomber starship Hull type: Polycrystal Size: Large
0x tiny, 0x very small, 0x small, 0x medium
(note, omitted entries are implied to be 1x, so that would be normal vs. large, very large, and humongous)

I think that this change would be a great way to make relations between not only ships but "tiers" of ships clearer.

[TechSY730]

Oh, I almost forgot. It should also be clearer what hull types frequently get paired with what ship roles. Like somewhere, maybe on the wiki, there should be a description of the hull types, their importance, and general roles of the ships they tend to get assigned to.
Like, for example, it should mention that polycrystal armor tends to get assigned to bomber like ships.

[Diazo]

One of the pages I am intending for the wiki is an entire page dedicated to the Damage and Hull Type mechanics that would cover all this, so it is planned, just a long way off.

As for the suggestion itself, I'm not sure this should be split off from the damage bonuses and mitigation discussion started in the 'Armor not that useful thread'.

Based off Keith's comments in that thread, I'm thinking the Ammo Type/Immunities/Hull Type/Damage Bonuses/etc. mechanics should get an in-depth discussion when work on the next AI War expansion starts in earnest.

I've already commented on this idea itself in that other thread.

D.

edit: Just saw the other thread and what you are trying to do. I'm going to recap my suggestion here:

First, get rid of armor. Then roll all this stuff (damage bonues, armor, ship sizes, etc) into the hull type and reviewing the hull types of every unit. And then move the damage bonuses from a per ship basis to the shot type. So you would have 'energy bomb' and 'shell' and so on, including 'light' 'medium' 'heavy' for each type of shot if necessary. And then each shot type would get bonuses damages (or penalties) against most (I'm thinking at least 50%) of the hull types in the game. So a big ship would have a 'heavy' hull type and a bomber would have a shot type that does bonuses damage against 'heavy' stuff and a damage penalty against 'light' hull types.

The specialty armor stuff would be replaced by the deflector mechanic and armor piercing ships would have an ignore deflectors flag. (This part of the suggestion does need more thought.)

D.

[TechSY730]

Just wanted to make something clear I didn't make very clear in the OP.

This topic is primarily about how there isn't much consistency in the naming scheme of the hull types. Some of them refer to materials, some of them refer to ship roles, and others refer to "armor strength".

What I am saying is that we need to pick one naming scheme (it doesn't have to be one of those three) and stick with it to make it clear what hull types are supposed to represent.

This can be fixed by simply renaming the hull types, no rebalancing needed.

[TechSY730]

As for the suggestion itself, I'm not sure this should be split off from the damage bonuses and mitigation discussion started in the 'Armor not that useful thread'.

In my mind, these topics are distinct enough that they deserve their own thread. The two threads refer to very different mechanics, even though they both play a role in net damage.

It is true though that any changes and balance shifts in one of these, we should at least consider how that would impact the other.

Based off Keith's comments in that thread, I'm thinking the Ammo Type/Immunities/Hull Type/Damage Bonuses/etc. mechanics should get an in-depth discussion when work on the next AI War expansion starts in earnest.

I've already commented on this idea itself in that other thread.

D.

edit: Just saw the other thread and what you are trying to do. I'm going to recap my suggestion here:

First, get rid of armor. Then roll all this stuff (damage bonues, armor, ship sizes, etc) into the hull type and reviewing the hull types of every unit. And then move the damage bonuses from a per ship basis to the shot type. So you would have 'energy bomb' and 'shell' and so on, including 'light' 'medium' 'heavy' for each type of shot if necessary. And then each shot type would get bonuses damages (or penalties) against most (I'm thinking at least 50%) of the hull types in the game. So a big ship would have a 'heavy' hull type and a bomber would have a shot type that does bonuses damage against 'heavy' stuff and a damage penalty against 'light' hull types.

The specialty armor stuff would be replaced by the deflector mechanic and armor piercing ships would have an ignore deflectors flag. (This part of the suggestion does need more thought.)

D.

Not sure how I feel about "rolling up" mechanics. Yes, that leads to less mechanics, but you get a "combinitorial explosion" of possible values in that one mechanic.

Let's say we have 3 properties, each of them having up to 5 values.
In terms of gameplay intuitiveness, is it better to roll them up into 1 property of 125 possible values? Or if that is too much, 1 property of 25 possible values, and the other property having 5?

So you would wind up having a light polycrystal, medium polycrystal, heavy polycrystal, light neutron, medium neutron, heavy neutron, etc. That seems to get very unweidly very fast, especially if, say, light polycrystal is entirely independent  from medium polycrystal in the code.


One way to mitigate this "explosion" of values is to prune and/or merge values together. (In this case, thing like "heavy" hull type would not get light and medium variants, among other things)
Although this does have the nice side effect of reducing the state space over both the naive merging and the original system, it also reduces variety and "balance granularity". In other words, if you prune like this, there would be less ways ships could distinguish themselves from other ships. (That may be a good thing though, considering the absurd number of ship types in this game, and how complicated the game already is)


About bonuses being applied to shot types instead of ship types, I don't really care. It would really ultimately get to a similar result.

[Minotaar]

An explanation that works for me is that hull type highlights its single most important property that affects its strengths and vulnerabilites.
The three major categories you have outlined all seem to make sense in light of the above:
1) Named after a material: implies that the hull is made from a non-standard material with unique properties. Clear enough.
2) Named after the ship's role: implies that the role of the ship has a heavy influence on how the ship is constructed. When I think of what a Swarmer-type shi would look like, I imagine an extremely tiny hull - and voila, that's exactly what an Infiltator or an Autocannon Minipod is. Of course, such a hull type has distinct strengths and weaknesses. An Artillery-type would be a ship built around a large weapon - like a Zenith Bombard. Etc., etc.
3) The ultralight...ultraheavy line: represents hulls made of mostly standard materials, with varying degrees of size/thickness. Again, it is easy to imagine what a light fighter or an ultra-heavy battleship would look like, why it makes sense for those ships to look like that, what would they be good or bad at.
Basically, if you use your imagination, the current system doesn't look so weird that we need to change it anymore, which was the entire reason I made this post, because I don't want to have to multiply 2.45 by 3.5 by 0.8 or have to distinguish 20 different made-up materials  The mechanics are fine, and the "flavor" behind them is soild, if not always consistent.

[Diazo]

So you would wind up having a light polycrystal, medium polycrystal, heavy polycrystal, light neutron, medium neutron, heavy neutron, etc. That seems to get very unweidly very fast, especially if, say, light polycrystal is entirely independent  from medium polycrystal in the code.

Hmm, that's the other way around from what I was thinking.

I was expecting that it would be the ammo type that got the size, so using bombers, the standard Bomber gets the Medium Energy Bomb and the Zenith Electric Bomber gets the Large energy bomb. They are almost the same, just the Electric Bomber has a little higher damage bonus against the heaviest hull types in the game.

This would give the advantage to variety of being able to tweak the ammo types and having similar but slightly different damage profiles.

As for rolling up mechanics, this came out of the "no one pays attention to armor at the moment, so let's do away with it" school of thought.

Again, it's drastic, perhaps too drastic, but I see it as a valid option.

D.

[TechSY730]

So you would wind up having a light polycrystal, medium polycrystal, heavy polycrystal, light neutron, medium neutron, heavy neutron, etc. That seems to get very unweidly very fast, especially if, say, light polycrystal is entirely independent  from medium polycrystal in the code.

Hmm, that's the other way around from what I was thinking.

I was expecting that it would be the ammo type that got the size, so using bombers, the standard Bomber gets the Medium Energy Bomb and the Zenith Electric Bomber gets the Large energy bomb. They are almost the same, just the Electric Bomber has a little higher damage bonus against the heaviest hull types in the game.

This would give the advantage to variety of being able to tweak the ammo types and having similar but slightly different damage profiles.

Hmm, that still leads to the same "combinitoric explosion".

Small shell, medium shell, large shell, small energy bomb, medium energy bomb, heavy energy bomb, small dark-matter,...

So you still get absurd number of possible values for shot type. Especially hard to maintain if, for example, small energy bomb is considered completely different in the code than large energy bomb.

[keith.lamothe]

Not necessarily worse than Fighter I-V.  In fact, probably significantly easier.

Basically all "energy bomb" shot types would have very similar stats, just some variation where it seemed appropriate.

That's the idea, anyway.

[TechSY730]

Not necessarily worse than Fighter I-V.  In fact, probably significantly easier.

Basically all "energy bomb" shot types would have very similar stats, just some variation where it seemed appropriate.

That's the idea, anyway.

Ah, that's the thing. The vaious marks of fighters, although they are considered seperate ship types in code, they are related. Their stats reference each other (or at least reference the Mk. I version for linearization, and copy things like bonuses), and they belong to the same ship class (fighters)
(I'll have to double check the code to get the exact names for these categorizations)

If you can relate the various "versions" of shot types together in a similar way, that would be fine.