Combat Revisions

[Leedot]

Royce - The thing is there are a lot of good options for defending your planets / outposts. Thing of building an outpost / colony like building a city or mining facility in real life. By default they don't really come with weapons. If you want there to be more than one turret per planet early on you can do that with mines / energy arrays / missile platforms, etc.

Similarly Colony ships / Outpost ships are more civilian ships imo. If you want them to have greater defense at all times you can fleet them up with some destroyers or some other offensive ship.

I do agree about the starting defense of colonies at least being the same as an outpost though so that's been corrected.

Catswift - Yeah, my RO multiplier was off - should be corrected now. The Trader / Warlord / Researcher balance over all is a separate issue that we'll need to address. The main goal here is to make sure that all the ships are balanced in terms of their strengths / weakness in addition to relative costs.

[Royce]

Royce - The thing is there are a lot of good options for defending your planets / outposts. Thing of building an outpost / colony like building a city or mining facility in real life. By default they don't really come with weapons. If you want there to be more than one turret per planet early on you can do that with mines / energy arrays / missile platforms, etc.

Not a good comparison IMO. A city is not a solitary entity like a planet. Every city built has powerful defense from the start if it is within the borders of a nation with a military. A planet invested in a by an empire existing in a universe where many empires vie for resources would most certainly equip such an investment with at least some defensive capability.

Similarly Colony ships / Outpost ships are more civilian ships imo. If you want them to have greater defense at all times you can fleet them up with some destroyers or some other offensive ship.

I guess my problem is I want things to not only be balanced, but to also make sense. To me the #targets should be largely a factor of size, further influenced by ship purpose (battle, transport, etc.). A large ship (the colony ship appears to be a small planet with a gargantuan ship built around it) would likely have way more than 1 point of fire. It may not have powerful guns, but I guarantee an enormous ship would have more than one. Likewise, a planet would have to have multiple points to attack from on all sides.

I feel like planets and very large civilian and other non-warships need higher targets but should have low initiative and low to moderate attack. I also think the cruiser, dreadnought and energy array (currently an array of 1 gun), need more targets, but whatever, I guess I'm the only one who finds the current numbers very odd

[Leedot]

Yeah, I'll admit that the numbers don't make complete sense if they're taken as literal translations of how many weapons are mounted on a ship / planet. By that same token I'd be surprised if an entire planet only had 10 guns as well.

[Royce]

Yeah, I'll admit that the numbers don't make complete sense if they're taken as literal translations of how many weapons are mounted on a ship / planet. By that same token I'd be surprised if an entire planet only had 10 guns as well.

I'm not sure how else to make sense of target# as a stat other than a representation of the object's number of firing points. If you have any suggestions for another way to wrap my head around it, I'd be happy to hear it so maybe this wouldn't bother me so much I realize this is a sci fi video game, and not an interactive documentary. I don't expect realism of any sort, but a certain degree of logic would be nice. If an orbital contains an array of weapons, it should be able to fire on multiple targets. A capital class ship, not designed specifically as a planet killer, like a dreadnought, should be able to fend off groups of small ships in addition to battling with other large ones, maybe not as effectively as it attacks large ships, but to only allow it to attack one target just makes no sense to me. I guess ultimately I think a ship like a dreadnought should have multiple attack types, one low attack, high target# and one high attack, low target# (possibly with different ship class targeting priorities). Anyway, I realize you are trying not to get too complex, and you're gonna do things the way you want to in the end. I would just urge you to consider making this a little more logical. And that's my last two cents on the matter

[VanderLegion]

I'm not sure how else to make sense of target# as a stat other than a representation of the object's number of firing points. If you have any suggestions for another way to wrap my head around it, I'd be happy to hear it so maybe this wouldn't bother me so much I realize this is a sci fi video game, and not an interactive documentary. I don't expect realism of any sort, but a certain degree of logic would be nice. If an orbital contains an array of weapons, it should be able to fire on multiple targets. A capital class ship, not designed specifically as a planet killer, like a dreadnought, should be able to fend off groups of small ships in addition to battling with other large ones, maybe not as effectively as it attacks large ships, but to only allow it to attack one target just makes no sense to me. I guess ultimately I think a ship like a dreadnought should have multiple attack types, one low attack, high target# and one high attack, low target# (possibly with different ship class targeting priorities). Anyway, I realize you are trying not to get too complex, and you're gonna do things the way you want to in the end. I would just urge you to consider making this a little more logical. And that's my last two cents on the matter

What might be easier than having two different weapons or attack types to deal with capital ships vs fighters would be to have the same high damage attack it has now, make it multiple targets, but only able to target one capital+ ship at a time, and take penalties for attacks against smaller ships, or maybe only able to target fighters/destroyers outside of the 1 big attack. Then just make the penalty against fighters a large one, would have the same effect as a second attack with different damage.

[Royce]

In the first post, it says something about how ships that can attack multiple targets will attack a single target multiple times if only one is available. That's good IMO, but if it's the plan, I don't understand some of the ship descriptions on the spreadsheet. For instance, it says the missile platform is not quite as potent against a single target as the beam array. But wouldn't the missile platform's 10 attacks of 50 damage each be much stronger single target damage than the beam array's single 100 damage attack, like 5 times stronger?

[Leedot]

Royce - No, you're right that description isn't really accurate for the beam array.

[Nateo]

I also thought there were mentions of "effectiveness" against certain types of ships (and planets). Are these advantages all reflected in the initiative/damage/# of attack stats? Or is there an additional modifier for advantageous match-ups?

[Leedot]

In the current system there are specific modifiers, in the new system I've tried to set things up so that all the ships have different strengths based on their stats that make them more or less useful in various situations but they don't have any additional modifiers against specific unit types.

[ThoonHulk]

One of the things I would like to see added is some ability to be notified of incoming attacks and have time to respond to them. This could take the form of a heads up whenever a fleet of a player you were at war with was dispatched towards a system you had forces in. That would allow me to at least meet an incoming invasion force with my ships by reallocating / building forces to counter them.

Another complementary option would be having combat take some predetermined length of time, say 30 minutes per round. Then the attacker can still surprise me, but if my planet doesn't fall immediately I can move forces from elsewhere to respond to the attack. This has the added effect of making warp speed increasing technologies far more interesting, though they would need an order of magnitude adjustment to be really cool.

I just don't think the idea of having to station large fleets at each planet you want to protect, and never move them, is much fun. Orbitals defend at a discount, so that's at least freeing me up a little bit to cover myself and still go on the attack, but I think wars and combat would be far more interesting if I could respond to attacks to defeat them, rather than just counterattack afterwards.