Having a damage range could indeed have interesting strategic implications. Do you go with a dependable weapon or with one that is less reliable, but with a larger damage potential? It could actually be as simple adding a new attribute to weapons, damage spread, and assigning a percentage value to it. Then vary the damage by this percentage.
A weapon that does 50 damage with a spread of 10% will do 45-55 damage. A lightning gun (not as accurate as a bullet) might do 30 damage with a spread of 90%, dealing 3-57 damage per hit. A fighter with 5 damage and a spread of 20% does 4-6 damage. Still not very effective against the Death Star, but that’s the whole point: fighters kill fighters and frigates, they are not expected to take down the DS. Well, usually they are not…
More important than damage range is the shield and armor penetration range. A critical hit is just a hit that has a higher penetration than usual. It makes sense to put a spread on this as well, as it helps to keep critical hits realistic. The fighter might hit frigate armor at just the right angle to cause some internal damage, but a cruiser armor is thicker than the fighter itself, so a critical against a cruiser is still unlikely to make a dent in the cruiser armor.
Again, the penetration spread can signify reliability. A high-precision guided missile will pretty much go where you tell it to. There are no surprises, good or bad, so it has a low variance. Penetration 40 with 10% variance could be a good value. The equivalent of a mini gun puts a lot less effort in precision, but relies on lots of projectiles to have some of them hit. A high variance, perhaps 50% or 90% makes more sense. Armor penetration 30 with 90% variance is effectively 3-57. Against a heavily armored cruiser with armor 50 it will miss 47 out of 54 times, but it actually does have a chance. The reverse is true, too. Against a frigate with 20 armor, it will still miss 17 out of 54 times because it is not reliable. Contrast this with the guided missile, it will never ever hit the cruiser, but it will always hit the frigate.
The nice thing about adding damage and penetration variance is that it takes the critical hit concept that’s passive and hidden and makes it into a visible property of the weapons. It suddenly becomes an active part of the game, something you take into account when choosing weapons. Having a high armor value really means you can ignore dogfighter figters, but bombers are still a threat to you if there are bombs that have the potential to penetrate your armor.
This could be very interesting. Giving each weapon a range of penetrations would be an interesting way to make the penetration vs resistance matching less of a sharp cutoff and more of a gradual one (which has been suggested in several other threads). It could also be a way of differentiating some modules from each other (for example, a Cruiser Beam Laser might have a shield penetration of 18-24, allowing it to occasionally damage Fast Recharge Shields while a Cruiser Proton Beam has 16-20, so it will never do so.
The only danger I see with your idea is that there might be a lot more stalemates without critical hits to gradually wear down the resistances of strong armor tanks.
My suggestion would be, that rather than have critical hits ignore armour penetration, a critical hit merely increases it (double? treble?). While vastly boosting the amount of armour a weapon can penetrate, it won’t allow fighters throwing pebbles to penetrate 70+ armour on a cruiser. Rightly so too, there is no circumstance under which a low power weapon like a fighter laser will penetrate the entirety of the thick armour of a capital ship by luck alone.
You clearly haven’t watched any of the Star Wars movies recently. I can think of at least four times that a small ship takes out a capital ship or massive space station (and I may not be remembering them all). I agree that it’s not exceptionally realistic, but Clifski’s made it clear that the space battles in movies like those are a big part of the inspiration for GSB.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with fighter weapons being able to do some minor, slow damage to heavily-armored cruisers. After all, the term “armor penetration” is misleading - crits aren’t actually penetrating that super-thick armor, they’re just managing to damage it slightly. Which seems perfectly reasonable to me; enough small laser blasts and eventually you’ll melt anything. I think the rate at which fighters work through cruiser armor is currently too high, but in principle I think they should be capable of it.
I’m quite the Star Wars fan actually, but that movie like many others comes under the category of “ships designed to look good on film, not practical”. Star Destroyers and such ships quite obviously don’t have anything resembling armour plating. Once you’re through their shields, you’re blasting into their main hull, making huge explosions and sending stormtroopers flying with high pitched screams. Why? Because it looked good. How boring would Star Wars have been if laser shots plinked pathetically off a Star Destroyer’s hull? Pretty boring I think.
Let’s also look at episode 5’s battle on Hoth, Snowspeeders blasting away at AT-ATs to no effect. Sure, the snowspeeders pack lighter weaponry than, for example, an X-wing, but they’re firing at ground based armour, with gravity constraints limiting defensive capability. Spaceships have no such limitations and as such could easily mount metres thick armour, rendering them largely immune to all but other capital ship weaponry.
GSB doesn’t need realism, nor does any other sci-fi or fantasy game. But it does need suspension of disbelief, nothing in the game should make me say “um, what?” through puzzlement at an event that makes no sense, even in the context of a game.
Oh and for the record:
Episode 1, droid control ship, destroyed by N1 starfighter which basically cheated using the “good guys” loophole.
Episode 4, Death Star, destroyed by X-wing, also basically cheated with the silly exhaust port shot
Episode 6, SSD Executor, destroyed by A-wing, silly really, destroyed by destruction of the bridge. Are they saying there were NO redundant control systems elsewhere in a 17km ship?
Episode 6, Death Star II, destroyed by Millenium Falcon, another “good guy” cheat really. A ship sized hole leading to the middle of the station. Right. So after the first being destroyed by a tiny hole a torpedo got into, they make another, but with a hole a whole SHIP can fly into.
So, 4 capital ship kills by fighters, all successful kills as a result of being the good guys in the movies
Indeed, perhaps subsystems of certain types need to be vulnerable through armour. Shield generators for instance? Engines too. Components which would logically be external. The ship’s generators, crew modules etc. would all be inside the armoured core of the ship. Similarly turrets would be armoured to hell and back.
Grab a laser pen. Shine it at a tank. See how long it takes to get through its armour. It’ll crumble from old age before you even get the paint off it.
I don’t disagree with you about how heavy armor would be entirely impenetrable to light weapons. I just think that GSB isn’t intended to have that sort of realism, precisely because it is aiming for battles like those in Star Wars and other fairly cheesy movies.
By the way, I think my favorite movie scene featuring armor non-penetration is at the very end of Saving Private Ryan. (I suppose that link could be considered a spoiler of sorts; you have been warned.)
That analogy makes no sense. Laser pointers aren’t weapons, and as such aren’t high-powered enough to melt anything. Presumably a weapons-grade fighter laser would be powerful enough to melt whatever material ship armor is made of, just not a lot of it in one shot. Now if you want to argue about the state of chemical and materials engineering in the GSB universe, I guess you could do that.
Anyway, realism goes out the window if it’s in the service of good game design. I think having fighters be able to successfully harass even heavily-armored cruisers is a good idea. Again, they’re too good at it right now, but in principle I think it’s fine that you can’t make a ship invulnerable to fighters.
the GSB fighter lasers are standard issue scifi blaster guns. these are in everything from Halo to The Fifth Element… whatever they are called in their fiction, they shoot bright bolts that explode whatever they hit. Heat? Bla bla bla who cares. xD
I think it would be good if the crits that happen when a ship that normally can’t penetrate armor resistance gets a hit anyway (which is how laser fighters kill heavily armored cruisers through attrition) do damage to ships systems instead of armor. That way a bunch of small weapon fighters don’t get to a critical mass of armor damage and then suddenly reduce the ship to a melted pile of slag and instead get lucky shots that might knock out weapons, tractors or even shield generators. This would make light fast fighters less of an instant death threat to cruisers and more of a dangerous annoyance. That way armor that’s “too strong for blasters” can keeps it’s strength and still have a meaningful vulnerability.
That’s not a bad idea at all. It seems a little counter-intuitive at first, given that weapons and such are more “valuable” than armor, but I’m sure it would actually drastically increase cruiser longevity vs. fighters since they wouldn’t hit that deadly tipping point after ablating enough armor.
Ok, take an mp5 and shoot at an abrams tank. No matter how many times you shoot it the overall armor of the tank isn’t going to be reduced by enough to make subsequent bullets fired from that mp5 penetrate the armor. This doesn’t mean a stream of bullets couldn’t damage some important component like the tracks or periscope and reduce the tanks effectiveness.
Ultimately arguing this by analogy or on the basis of what’s “realistic” is pretty fruitless; we should probably let it go at this point. The real question is, are crits good for the game, either in their present form or some modified system? Everything else is just us being argumentative nerds. :-p
It’s not about realism as much as being consistent with genre expectations that I’m concerned with. Arguing by analogy is just a way to reframe a discussion in a new reference, a fallacious technique in a debate about real world issues. But we’re talking about space ships blowing each other up here! It’s all analogy.
Yes, crits are good for the game.There should always be at least a small chance that the lucky solo fighter pilot might take a lucky shot that drops a massive cruiser or at least disables it’s tractor beams / missile defense / plasma. However in their current implementation they are not working well in both the game-play and cinematic sense. There is this tipping point effect that occurs once armor hits a certain level which makes fast lasers way too powerful against cruisers and it is counter-intuitive to our expectations of how a fighter should be dangerous to a cruiser.
