AI WAR CLassic vs AI WAR 2(Question)

[narb79]

In AI War Classic you have different hull types to counter other ships.

AI War II uses armor thickness for this?

Could someone layout the basic difference for me?

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

AI War II uses several stats for this now - armour is one of them. Hull types aren't a thing here.

You also have Albedo (reflectiveness, essentially, affects things like being uncloaked or tractor beamed), Engine-GX (the power of the units engines, used for things like if you can slow it down), and Mass (somethings are too big to be paralysed, too small for Mass Drivers to really hit, etc).

A number of units use those for their damage bonuses, like Ablative Gatlings do far more to units with high Albedo. Some also have situational bonuses, such as doing more damage to units moving faster than X speed, or just arrived to the planet.

There's also the rare case of a unit having a bonus depending on the targets current hull or shields.

I think I should mention that the old Immunities system is gone. Instead of having an immunity to all tractor beams, a unit could simply have albedo and/or engine stats high enough to be resistant to most, but there could be something like a Black Widow Golem that could still grab them, for example.

Hope any of that helps.

[tadrinth]

AIWC used hull types and damage bonuses as an abstraction of intuitive notions of combat mechanics.  Fighters counter bombers because the fighters are fast and have accurate guns, bombers counter missile frigates because they have weapons that are good against armor but easy to dodge, missile frigates counter fighters because the missiles are fast enough to hit fighters from far away and bombers have ECM or somesuch.  That all gets abstracted into a Hull Type and a set of damage bonuses per hull type. 

The problem with that system is that it went rather completely off the rails as more and more ships were added, with new hull types and damage bonuses that didn't have any kind of consistent intuition. Or at least, the intuitions got less and less obvious, and they weren't really explained anywhere.   What the heck is a neutron hull?  Why are raider lasers good against medium and space place lasers good against heavy? 

The new system forces damage bonuses to be consistent by actually implementing mechanics for them.  Before, a cloaking ship might have had Refractive as an armor type; now it has an low Albedo, and anti-cloaking ships might have bonuses against low-albedo targets.  Or a ship might have shields, and another ship might ignore shields entirely.  As long as those mechanics are intuitive, then the damage bonuses will also be intuitive as well.

The new system also allows for more variation in defenses.  You can't really represent a ship with both cloaking and high agility in AIWC; it can have the Ultra-light hull type or the Refractive hull type, but not both.  In AIWC, it can have a very low mass and a very low albedo, and then anything that's good against light or stealthy ships (or both!) will work on it.

[Draco18s]

(On the other hand, if you're trying to find something that's good against "this ship I'm looking at now" you have to hold 4 or 5 different numbers in your head: armor thickness, power usage, engine strength, albedo and mass)

[narb79]

Thanks! This helps explain a lot, really loving the little things QOL that I see in AI WAR 2. Wish there was a stat that combined those 5 things and put in title card so you could size up quick as draco18 was mentioning.

[tadrinth]

(On the other hand, if you're trying to find something that's good against "this ship I'm looking at now" you have to hold 4 or 5 different numbers in your head: armor thickness, power usage, engine strength, albedo and mass)

Well, hopefully for most ships, there'll be one really obviously extreme value, and you just go get the ship that counters that.  Maybe two extreme values for weird hybrid ships. 

[narb79]

Maybe letter ranks instead of numbers  A.B,C,D,E, that take those values in to account/

just spitballing, just trying to think of a quick way to size ship matchups up when attacking or defending

[tadrinth]

Maybe when you hover over a ship, the sidebar highlights all the ships of opposing factions that counter that ship?

You could simplify it, and I had been monkeying with translating the hull types and damage bonuses from AIWC into a set of defense tags and weapons that ignore those defense tags, which I think could be simpler and easier to eyeball.  Others wanted a more simulationist game, though, and I got stuck trying to represent things like the difference between 'light' and 'ultralight' without it getting super complicated.

Again, though, I think the right solution here is to just make sure that every ship can be summed up well enough that you can intuit the counters.  If a ship boils down to 'slow, but kills small fast ships from far away', then you know immediately what it counters: small fast ships!  And it's slow, so it's countered by ships that boil down to 'kills big slow things'.

The intuitions also need to be conveyed, or they don't do anything for anyone.  What the heck does Polycrystal hull mean in the fictional world of AIWC?  I played hundreds of hours of AIWC, read almost the entire wiki for it, and I don't think I ever had any freaking clue what the heck Polycrystal means, it was always just 'that hull that bombers are made out of so they counter fortresses'.  Then I tried to figure out what the heck was going on with the hull type and damage bonus system, and that's when I finally realized that Polycrystal is fragile but extremely low radar profile (to block missile locks) and also ridiculously heat resistant (to block the Flame Wave shots of Fortresses).    Is that even what was intended? No idea, so far as I can tell the hull types are not explained anywhere.  It's not even consistent, because Hydras do full damage with a Flame Wave attack to polycrystal hulls.  But I think if it was explained that way, and the fiction kept consistent, I think it would be easier to intuit counters.