Time passed. With the proposal of entirely removing hull bonuses, the "organic design", etc, I think it is time for me to go back at it.
I'll base that on my past works:
New Hulls and
Immunities and Ammo.
I'll keep my list of new hull types (because I love them and I worked a lot to make them match a ship role and sort all the units in them), but I will refine the hull bonuses with more streamlined rules.
Ultra-heavy: high health, low speed, bonus against ultra-light and refractive. (Also starships but without bonus)
Ultra-light: high speed (and teleport), low health, short range, bonus against polycrystal and nanomesh.
Polycrystal: short range, high damages, bonus against ultra-heavy and structural.
Nanomesh: fragile support ships with long range or spawner. (Medium renamed.)
Composite: AoE and multitarget.
Laminar: rare hull for contact and suicidal ships. (Close-Combat renamed.) (Also, all warheads should become Laminar, IMO.)
Neutron: Strange weapons and high armor, also very Zenith themed.
Polymer: high cap, "annoying" perks (Weasel, Attractor, ...). (Swarmer renamed.)
Refractive: cloaked assassin ships.
Xenosteel: Special abilities as teleport, reclamation and booster. (Brand new.)
(The hull bonuses are no more accurate, however; I'll work on them now. But when we know what kind of ship prefer what kind of ammo, they seem to fall right in place.)
Technical ammunitions (Beam, Railgun, Blade, etc) have no hull bonus because they already have a special perk. Only the thematic ammunitions have.
* Energy Bomb: Structural & UHeavy (Short range, high impact. Can do lot of damage to immobile or slow targets.)
* Missile: UHeavy & Neutron (Long range, high impact. Destructive weapon projected at long range with on-board propulsion; effective against big targets.)
* MLRS: ULight & Polymer (Short range, high RoF. Different kind of smaller missile -- rocket, actually, designed for destroying numerous small things.)
* Shell: Polycrystal & Nanomesh (Short range, high RoF, destined for fragile and/or unarmored targets.)
* Laser: Refractive & ULight (Long range, high RoF. High precision weapon able to target fast units at long range.)
Each ammo has bonuses against only two hull types.
The triangle's weapons would respect the triangle's hull bonuses if the missile frigates get MLRS instead of Missile. That would be much more coherent with their ability to tear fleets of Fighters.
UHeavy and ULight have two common weapons having bonuses against them because they are among the most common hulls.
Composite, Xenosteel and Laminar are rare hull types that no ammo has bonus against.
Flame Wave, Minor Electric and Energy Burst are thematic weapons with no particular mechanic and no particular hull bonus. I could match one of these three with one of the three rare hull types, but that would be totally arbitrary. If I do so, I'll do it later.
Now, I'll go further and tie each hull with one common speed and armor/mark ratio, and each ammo with one common range and RoF. (However, some ships could have a higher-than-hull speed or longer-range-than-ammo as a special perk -- I'm thinking about Raptors and Zombers, essentially.) If you agreed up to here, you can change your mind now. I will probably do when I'll be back to that
With the
EntitySystem, I'm sure we'll be able to design separately chassis (hulls with speed, armor rating and health rating) and weapons (ammo with RoF, range, bonuses, etc). I'll dive into speed+armor+hull another time.
I browsed the fleetships's stats and tried to find an "average" for each category:
* Energy Bomb: RoF 0.066/s, range 4,000 (Structural & UHeavy)
* Missile: RoF 0.1/s; range 11,000 (UHeavy & Neutron)
* MLRS: RoF 1/s; range 6,000 (ULight & Polymer)
* Shell: RoF 0.25/s; range 3,000 (Polycrystal & Nanomest)
* Laser: RoF 0.2/s, range 6,000 (Refractive & ULight)
(Anyway, I'm not dealing with turrets, here; they have equivalent RoF but approximately twice the range, and for design purposes we can get away with that.)
I'll briefly abstract what I found in order to create the base of a future work on ship design and balance. Here are what the common ammo should follow, IMO.
In order to have more extreme stats and recognizable profiles, I increased the shell's RoF and the MLRS's range. This way, we have four different combinations of extreme values on two stats, and the Laser being average on both. Elegant design, yay!
RoF Range
EBomb - -
Missile - +
MLRS + +
Shell + -
Laser o o
