Starships in the sequel

[keith.lamothe]

Thanks again for all the support on the Kickstarter. Most of my writing-online time is absorbed by the updates over there, but I hope to shift more back this direction so I can do some actual discussion of potential design changes.
First, I'd like to go over some ideas for the always-available human starship roles in adapting them to the new situation and keeping them interesting.
So here are the types in classic, and some notes relating to the sequel:

In Classic

Flagship
Classic: Primarily there for munitions boosting your fleet.
Sequel: Area-limited munitions boosting is going away in the sequel (in favor of rarer but planet-wide boosting) and so these would be going away. In fact we're using the Flagship name for a different, more prominent unit (your "secondary" Arks, basically).

Zenith Starship
Classic: Short/medium-range brawler.
Sequel: I'd like to move away from having the humans always start with non-human ship names, but we want to keep the role.

Spire Starship
Classic: Medium/long-range lancer.
Sequel: Ditto on the names.

Raid Starship
Classic: Fast, sneaky, shoots through forcefields.
Sequel: That last mechanic is something I want to eliminate from the game (in favor of stuff that's good against shields) but the rest of the role is good.

Leech Starship
Classic: Reclaims enemy ships.
Sequel: Reclamation is on the fence in the design, so this isn't in the initial set of units for the sequel.

Plasma Siege Starship
Classic: Medium/long-range aoe super-bomber that's good against forcefields.
Sequel: In general this is good, though it has a checkered past (Dreadnought, then there were the useless antimatter bombs, etc).

Bomber Starship
Classic: Fast, short-range kicking-down-the-door sort of starship.
Sequel: Good role.

Riot Control Starship
Classic: Modular, lots of engine-damage weaponry, can mount forcefields, tractors, and (at mk 2) tazers.
Sequel: Awesome and fun utility role, though modular stuff is not in the core budget (mainly due to needing lots of UI work to not be so fiddly as before) so this wouldn't be in there. But the Spire goal has the budget to bring back modular stuff, and it looks like we're hitting that goal so I'm planning on bringing this role over.

Cloaker Starship
Classic: Cloaked ship that cloaks other nearby ships. Very useful for operating behind enemy lines.
Sequel: Cloaking is changing a lot, and operating cloaked stuff behind enemy lines will be a much more time-limited thing, but this role can be adapted to provide longer-than-usual protection from enemy detection.

Neinzul Enclave Starship
Classic: Carrier-like unit that produces its own drones that function as an excellent "buffer" against enemy forces (clogging targeting queues and generally raising chaos) while doing some damage.
Sequel: Ditto on the names; more to the point these are pretty OP (though less so after all the revisions). I'd rather counterbalance them than nerf them more, so I'd like to take them out of the core set and into an option-in-the-lobby thing kind of like the plan for the Spire (you start with an extra thing that lets you plant the other thing that makes these things, etc).

Scout Starship
Classic: Really big scout.
Sequel: Scouting is changing a lot (partly because cloaking is changing a lot, and partly because scouting has long had some very fiddly bits) so a lot of this one's roles are no longer relevant. You won't need them along with your fleets per se for in-system intel, and picketing is being replaced with something else for long-term intel.

In the Sequel

After several days thinking through the above roles, nomenclature, and modularity making it back in, I came up with this harebrained scheme

There are three main points:
1) Combine the above roles into a smaller set of more evocative themes
2) Have the names reflect the higher-tech levels being significantly larger, as opposed to fleet ships that basically just get higher-power and/or better-minituarized components with maybe a slight size increase
3) Make use of modularity to make these more flexible than fleet ships, and to have more trade-off decisions than "just have full caps of all available starships"

Lines:

Assault
Defense: Armor
Speed: Fast
Main weapon slot(s) can hold:
Needler Battery. Short range, high rate of fire, anti-armor
Fusion Rocket Battery. Medium range, high rate of fire, anti-structure
Fusion Bombs. Short range, medium rate of fire, anti-structure

(Note: generally speaking, dps is higher for weapons with shorter range and/or lower rate of fire)

Siege
Defense: None (Structure)
Speed: Medium
Main weapon slot(s) can hold:
Siege-Plasma Torpedoes. Long range, low rate of fire, small aoe, anti-shield
Heavy Beam Cannon. Medium range, medium rate of fire, can blast through targets to others, anti-structure
Siege-Plasma Cannon. Short range, low rate of fire, medium aoe, anti-shield

Sniper
Defense: None (Structure)
Speed: Medium
Main weapon slot(s) can hold:
Railgun. Infinite range, low rate of fire, anti-structure
Guided Missile Launcher. Long range, low rate of fire, anti-evasion
Gamma-Ray Laser. Medium range, medium rate of fire, anti-evasion

Shield
Defense: Shields
Speed: Medium
Main weapon slot(s) can hold:
Spider Laser. Medium range, medium rate of fire, engine damage
Spider Shotgun. Short range, high rate of fire, engine damage
Additional equipment slot(s) can hold:
Auxiliary Shield Generator. Boosts shield strength.
Tractor Beams. Short range, no damage, immobilizes targets (which makes evasion ships take full damage, among other things)
Tazer. Point-blank range, large aoe, low damage, paralyzes targets (ditto on evasion)

Stealth
Defense: Evasion
Speed: Fast
Main weapon slot(s) can hold:
Railcluster. Short range, medium rate of fire, knocks targets back
Paralyzer. Short range, medium rate of fire, low damage, paralyzes targets
Plasma Bolts. Short range, high rate of fire, anti-shield
Additional equipment slot(s) can hold:
Cloak Booster. Cloaks nearby allies, slows down tachyon detection of self and cloak-boosted allies
Tachyon Array. Detects cloaked enemies.

Sizes: Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, Battleship
These would be instead of Mark levels, since unlike fleet ships the more advanced versions of these are much larger than the less advanced. So instead of a Mk3 Assault Starship you'd have an Assault Cruiser.
We might wind up doing the mark level thing anyway since it's more universally recognizeable than the hull sizes, but I find the hull sizes more interesting than the mark numbers, so running it by y'all.
Generally speaking, the three "offensive" lines (Assault/Siege/Sniper) would have 1 weapon slot per size level, so Frigates would have 1 weapon slot and Battleships 4.
The two "utility" lines (Shield/Stealth) would have 1 weapon slot and 1 equipment slot at Frigate, up to 2 weapons slots and 3 equipment slots at Battleship.
We could add small secondary guns that are always the same, just for moar dakka, but that would probably just clutter things up

For handling the modularity itself, I'm thinking:

On the UI:
- the build menu is a vertical sidebar on the left, with one item per "Line" (so 5, for these starships)
- mousing over one of the lines would expand four smaller buttons to the right, one for each of the size classes
- mousing over one of the size classes would expand a row under that, with one item for each template
- those templates would be a lot like classic's, with a certain number of predefined ones for the obvious roles
- and there'd be a "+" button on the end of that list of templates, and clicking that would open up something to let you pick what goes in each slot for that new template, as well as (optionally) let you name that template
-- a similar process would work for editing an existing template
- other than that, clicking a template would work like clicking a non-modular ship in terms of queuing it for construction
- when you have one of these ships selected, the action menu will include a list of applicable templates and you can click one to reconfigure the ship to that template

And mechanically:
- these modules wouldn't be "other ships bolted onto the parent ship" like they were in classic, but they'll be EntitySystem objects like the weapons in Starward or Bionic
- so these won't be "built" after the parent ship, but rather will already be fully operational when the ship comes out. Also, the ship itself won't need to have a "base" gun as in classic
- shield generators (i.e. forcefield generators) will need to work differently: the ships will need a "shield" health that is separate from the "structure" health that all ships have, and the modules will just increase the max shield health rather than being their own generator
- switching templates needs to have some kind of cost to avoid excessive cheese; right now this seems reasonable:
-- For weapons, they start with a full reload timer
-- For auxiliary shield generators, they start not providing any shield health
-- For tractors/cloak-boosters/tachyon-arrays, they don't function for 5 seconds


Anyway, thoughts?

[Draco18s]

Looks pretty solid to me.

[Tridus]

The design sounds pretty good, overall. I have a hard time picturing some of the specific guns and how they vary from some from of the other guns (anti-structure X vs Y on the same ship, for example), but that will probably make more sense and get tweaked once it gets to testing, so I'm not worried about it.

Obviously I'm stoked that Riots are coming back in some form, and that the concept is being expanded to all the starships. That's super awesome. I'd expect Carriers to function similarly only with drone slots instead of weapon slots, where you pick the kind of drone you want and out it goes. They should be hived off because being able to give drones to more ships will lead to more drones, and we know where that goes.

On the size names vs marks, I prefer the size names because we are talking about relatively few and progressively larger ships, so it makes sense. That said, the marks are consistent with the rest of the game, so that makes sense too. Guess what I'm trying to say is that I prefer the size names, but won't be overly bothered if it goes the other way.

In regards to mechanics: I wouldn't let ships change modules in combat at all. If you want to remove the giant guns and put in different giant guns, you shouldn't be able to do that while being shot at and only suffer a few second reload time delay. That's open to pause abuse to switch to better guns based on what you're fighting. Make people retreat to a system where the AI isn't exploding everything and do it there, so it's less practical to do stuff like go to an AI world, wipe out the AI fleet, then switch everything to anti-structure and start blowing up buildings.

[Cyborg]

All my favorite ships/units always end up being called OP.

Otherwise, I don't see any major complaints here. I think getting rid of the enclave might be a bit premature, as your squad mechanic is really made for a ship like this.

[keith.lamothe]

I've no objection to adding an enclave-esque ship in. Call it the "Carrier" line or something like that, and:
- Its internal squadrons take much longer to build
- But they don't auto-attrition
- And they return to the carrier when there's nothing left for them to FRD against (that code is already present in the sequel for AI guard post guards)
- No Neinzul theming

That would be much easier to balance because when your drones die they actually stay dead for some period of time.

And when the Neinzul one comes back in some form, it can have the constant swarms of auto-attritioning things.

[Cyborg]

I've no objection to adding an enclave-esque ship in. Call it the "Carrier" line or something like that, and:
- Its internal squadrons take much longer to build
- But they don't auto-attrition
- And they return to the carrier when there's nothing left for them to FRD against (that code is already present in the sequel for AI guard post guards)
- No Neinzul theming

That would be much easier to balance because when your drones die they actually stay dead for some period of time.

And when the Neinzul one comes back in some form, it can have the constant swarms of auto-attritioning things.

Sounds good. People love carriers. Chaotic battles are fun.

[keith.lamothe]

I have a hard time picturing some of the specific guns and how they vary from some from of the other guns (anti-structure X vs Y on the same ship, for example), but that will probably make more sense and get tweaked once it gets to testing, so I'm not worried about it.

Yea, basically it comes down to whether you want longer range and/or better performance against high-cap stuff, or whether max dps is most important to you. Depends on situation.

In regards to mechanics: I wouldn't let ships change modules in combat at all.

Yea, that's probably the best baseline to start from. Exactly defining "in combat" will be somewhat tricky, though.

[Dominus Arbitrationis]

Exactly defining "in combat" will be somewhat tricky, though.

On a neutral or enemy planet, or if on a friendly planet, has been on the planet for say 5 seconds. The time is a number I pulled out of my hat, so feel free to modify it.

[Draco18s]

Generally I'd consider "in combat" to be "has taken damage or fired guns within the last 30 seconds."

[Tridus]

I'd consider "in combat" to be "is there an AI presence on this planet that isn't cloaked?". If so, everything on that planet is in combat.

It's got the virtue of simplicity.

[Tridus]

I've no objection to adding an enclave-esque ship in. Call it the "Carrier" line or something like that, and:
- Its internal squadrons take much longer to build
- But they don't auto-attrition
- And they return to the carrier when there's nothing left for them to FRD against (that code is already present in the sequel for AI guard post guards)
- No Neinzul theming

That would be much easier to balance because when your drones die they actually stay dead for some period of time.

And when the Neinzul one comes back in some form, it can have the constant swarms of auto-attritioning things.

Sounds good. People love carriers. Chaotic battles are fun.

Agreed. People love carriers, and that solution sounds pretty good.

[keith.lamothe]

Sounds good. Maybe I should put in a description like "Yes, these feel OP. Yes, you should always use them to play optimally. You'll have too much fun to care."

[NichG]

I wonder what the design considerations would be for intentionally making an 'OP mode' designed just for people to blow off steam after seeing a 40 hour campaign come crashing down. It's kind of subtle because you don't want to just do infinite damage or something like that, you want something that feels like its possible to intentionally break things by trying a bit, so it feels like 'you' did it (even if it was just the mechanics being OP).

[Lord Of Nothing]

Slight problem with combat definitions based on the planet:
Wormhole hopping.

Also, will there be dreadnaught sized versions (I.e. Mk5) for the AI?

[keith.lamothe]

Slight problem with combat definitions based on the planet:
Wormhole hopping.

Having the restriction be based on "in combat, or was in combat within last X seconds" would largely help there, I think.

I'm sure there will be exploits, it's just hard to predict what they will be and what will be the least heavy-handed way of dealing them.

Also, will there be dreadnaught sized versions (I.e. Mk5) for the AI?

Probably not in 1.0. Maybe later. In general the idea is that human wormhole-capable shipbuilding technology hasn't progressed beyond the size of the BB hulls.

The AI Guardians could get larger, of course

And the Spire FF will probably be somewhere between the human CA and BB.