Author Topic: HP/Damage values for ships  (Read 2470 times)

Offline TheVampire100

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HP/Damage values for ships
« on: April 25, 2018, 03:47:09 pm »
In the xml files I find that all ships use modifiers based on what types of range, speed, durability and so on use.
So for an example, a ship that has the "glasscannon" trait will deal a lot of damage. Chris explained this in one of his longer blog posts or one of his documents (he simply said this at some point). This makes it obviusly easier to balance units around and aplies a more streamlined strentgh among all units without the need of having to redo every single ship when some balancing has to be done.
On the other side, I simply cannot find the base values for ships, only the modifies, my problem now is, I want to experiment a little around with different types of values to find a better balancing ground for some ships that I feel are currently too underpowered (or overpowered).
This means at the moment mostly fighters because I find fighters too weak compared to other units. They basically are just cannon fodder but not the good "you can bait enemy shots and kill with your other units" type of cannon fodder, more the "they simply die before you can even react" type.

Because of this I want to balance the Hp types of ships and maybe make some tweaks to damage as well. All I find however are the dps multipliers which don't help me because I don't know even the base stats of every ship.

Offline x4000

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Re: HP/Damage values for ships
« Reply #1 on: April 25, 2018, 03:50:29 pm »
Bear in mind that all of this is being absolutely redone, so any changes you make right now won't really line up with anything we can use.  All of the units are being taken out, remade into their AIWC form stats-wise, and put back in.  If you liked the stats in AIWC, then you should like the baseline stats after the pivot, because they're going back to exactly that so far as I know.

I'm super eager as well, but we just have to kind of go one step at a time in the short term!  I'm not sure if Keith is planning on getting rid of the multipliers or keeping them, to be honest.  I assume getting rid of them, since it would make the AIWC stats super duper hard to replicate.  But even if not, he'd be creating all new categories for them, based around the new units/stats.

I REALLY hate shutting you down, and I'm really not trying to, but we're just in one of those "not yet! not yet! not yet!" points. ;)
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Offline TheVampire100

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Re: HP/Damage values for ships
« Reply #2 on: April 25, 2018, 03:54:19 pm »
It is at the moment more for my personal use, so I have a more "fun" feeling while playing. Some units simply are not fun to use at this point and I simply have fighters in my fleets because I have more ships with them and don't have to worry that much about costs. But I don't even upgrade them so bad are they.

Otherwise I don't see  apoint to play the game further until the changes are done.

Offline BadgerBadger

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Re: HP/Damage values for ships
« Reply #3 on: April 25, 2018, 04:15:20 pm »
The easiest way to buff a ship is to change balance_strength_multiplier="X" to X+1.

Offline etheric42

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Re: HP/Damage values for ships
« Reply #4 on: April 25, 2018, 05:55:08 pm »
The base values are the same for all ships (unless they "cheat" by having balance_strength_multiplier).  I'm not sure what they are either, but there's a lot of interlocking pieces that determine what they are (such as the "engagement length" setting which I can't remember the right name for, which globally changes the time it takes a cap of 1.0 DPS ships to kill a cap of 1.0 HP ships of the same Mk that they are "good" against.

So if the global engagement length setting is set to 7 seconds, it takes 7 seconds for a full cap of bombers to kill a full cap of missile corvettes IF you take off all the traits that modify their HP and DPS (and assume they are in range 100% of the time, and assume that no DPS is ever wasted).

So instead of modifying values, you're really modifying the ratios.  So when I modded the default ships, I went in and tried to figure out how much each trait was "worth" to me, and then assigned the traits to the various ships.  (I had a weird balance mod where all fleet ships shared the same defense (evasion), all starships shared the same defense (armor) and all turrets shared the same defense (structure) (oh, and all supercapitals like flagships and the Ark shared the same defense: capital), then balanced under the idea that fighters needed to kill fleet ships, bombers needed to kill turrets and missile corvettes (renamed torpedo corvettes) needed to kill starships (and then the starships became destroyers for killing fleet ships, cruisers for killing other starships, "mobile railguns" for killing capitals, etc.  The game became super-tactical, but made the fights take more micro (thankfully not enough I had to pause) to win.)

 

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