[Feedback Needed:] Area-Of-Effect Weapons

i don’t think you can make cases based on reality! :slight_smile:

if you were - certain AoE would be the best ship-killer in the business. sandcasters. (or rail-gun fired walls of ballbearings cf. homeworld)
but exploding ships wouldn’t be. the inverse-square law makes anything non-focused in space (that isn’t stellar in nature) negligable at greater than very short distances.

[of course, those distances are measured in metres… and in this game, ships are often <100m separated … which would also be virtually impossible in reality! grin]

AOE Ship Explosion:

I am guessing it would be relatively easy to code the following effect: Ship is now considered destroyed -> little explosions (like the module damage explosions) all over the ship -> glowing, pulsing red glow emanating from the ship, possibly defining blast radius -> all fighters and other ships within blast radius gtfo -> ship goes boom and any fighters still slow enough to get caught in the blast take heavy damage or are destroyed, other ships take token damage in some way -> fast concussion wave pushes fighters and frigates (much like it works now) spiraling out of control

AOE Nukes, Mines, etc

I think this would be a cool effect but might be hard to balance. Maybe make these a one-shot weapon. Maybe give them their own targeting settings (e.g. cruisers with large health). But this may prove difficult. My idea of a cool new weapon is a space mine that floats off in a direction and if something besides a fighter hits it, it does AOE damage. This would be a limited weapon with maybe limited ammo.

AOE Anti Fighter

This would be a nice addition but based on the current code hierarchy, what would stop people from spamming the flack to kill frigates and cruisers with AOE? This would be something to consider. I don’t think you can make a weapon that only works on a specific ship, can you? Maybe flak will have a 0% shield penetration that way only fighters and unshielded ships would be affected.

If required, sure. In terms of weapons that only damage fighters, or damage fighters more than frigates and cruisers. That’s quite easy.

I’m definitely leaning towards an AOE for ship explosions, and maybe a totally separate new AOE flak cannon that only really damages fighters.

Maybe make ships blow up as they normally would most of the time, but have a chance to detonate catastrophically (big AoE type thing), with larger ship types having a greater chance to do so.

Adding in big gamechanging chances like that makes the game less predictable, and battles less consistent. As this game is largely puzzle/design based, it should be possible to predict the outcome given the deployments/ships/orders with a high degree of accuracy. The current chance values even out over any decently long/large engagement, but with only 20 ships on the field, ships having a small chance to explode would be too unpredicable.

AOE ships explosions are off on missions. Togglable in challanges. A bit of randonmess would make things more interesting in challanges :stuck_out_tongue: It’s like strategical cruiser in EVE Online taking down two battlecruisers. Almost impossible but possible!

Can area damage taken be increased by a ship’s mass and decreased by its speed? That way, fighters and fast frigates which tend to stack on their own wouldn’t be overly penalized, but dropping a stack of 5 .08 speed tank designs is a clear risk.

Basically, fighters can easily outrun debris that would be deadly to a big, lumbering cruiser.

Yes its a good point. A big lumbering ship is just going to have to suck up the damage, whereas in theory fighters can just dodge it.

Fighters are also more susceptible to smaller debris. So a Cruiser may be damaged by large chunks it’s larger hull would mean the shotgun effect of millions of tiny debris wouldn’t be a concern but if you’re sitting in a small fighter sure you can dodge the larger parts but if you’re too close to the blast radius you’re going to get showered by the pellet like effect.

So I’d suggest something a bit ‘different’.

Two levels of AoE.
‘Close Radius’ where smaller ships that are closer to the initial explosion are more likely to get torn to shreds by smaller shrapnel.
‘Outer Radius’ this is the same as ghoti’s suggestion where the bigger the ship the more likely you are to get damaged by the larger debris.

So say for example ships within 25-50px of the exploding ship are considered close while 50-150px are considered far.

If an AoE weapon (or ship detonation) deals a straight damage figure, depending on the figure it will either obliterate all fighters it hits, or not even tickle a cruser. Possibly even both - it might obliterate fighters and barely tickle cruisers.

But if the maximum damage dealt to a ship by a single AoE is capped at a certain percentage of the hit ship’s original hit points like 10%, then a powerful AoE can do meaningful damage to a cruiser and a fighter without making either obsolete.

If the maximum damage is a percentage cap on damage rather than a straight damage value, then less powerful AoE effects could be effective against smaller ships (where the cap for small ships is equal to or less than the damage value of the weapon) while less effective against larger and tougher ships (where the damage value falls short of the cap and the maximum damage is not dealt). More powerful AoE effects would technically be equally effective against all ship types, but in real terms a fighter which has lost 10% of its health is still pretty much combat effective (10% either way doesn’t do much to change a fighter’s survivability, they rarely expect to last long under pounding), while a cruiser that has just lost 10% of its hitpoints has problems…

if a ship detonates, damage should (could) be assigned based on the amount of energy the receiving ship gets. a cruiser subtending 90degrees at 100m will take … somewhat more damage than a fighter subtending 5degrees at 100m. but a fighter at 5m will subtend a rather larger angle, and … likely be blown away.

heck, if you want to be really clever - you make it so that ships are shielded by others closer to the blast.

so i’d suggest that a detonating ship has a certain amount of damage - based on engines/power gennies. then, working outwards, ships get a fraction of that damage (based on the angle of the exploding circle they cover) … and for the complex case, the angle that they have LoS to the reactor core (blockable by other ships).

this means:
fighters always take a smaller amount of damage than cruisers - at the same distance.
anything really-close™ will take a ton of damage
damage will drop off with inverse-square, so even slightly spread out formations will be significantly less affected.

I’ve fiddled with settings and done a fair few tests today and got powerplant explosions added to the game. I don’t have other area-of-effect weapons in yet, but they will turn up eventually.
The current system, (for 1.09) uses a nice curved falloff from max damage to zero at max blast radius
max blast radius is the ships total width (so effectively double its size)
Damage is the same as the power output of the ship itself, and the blast waves armor penetration is the same as its damage. Shield penetration is ignored, with the blast going right through shields.
Fighters are unaffected and frigates take half this damage.
We shall see how it goes from here.

I will be looking forward to seeing how you have compensated for the nerf to close range combat strategies and the use of suicide power plant ships…

I am all for AOE ship deaths. I know you want to reduce randomness but perhaps to keep this balanced you should make it random weather the death of a ship will trigger a catastrophic power core failure, perhaps with the chance based on the type of power plant your ship is sporting.

AOE weapons sounds a little unbalancing and they need an obvious down side. I like the idea of accidentally damaging your own ship, or being so energy intensive that they require an unstable power generator thus increasing the chances they will explode when they die.

To give neighboring ships a better chance of not dieing when a ship suffers an AOE death, I suggest having a long AOE charge up death during which all ships in the blast radius are given priority move order to travel away from the doomed ship. The ship could break up normally on death and you could leave some swirling vortex of doom energy at the spot they died. It will provide a good visual indicator of why all ships are ignoring their orders to run away from the explosion.

AOE weapons:

  1. missiles
  2. slow
  3. detonates on proximity; dont need to be accurate; flies in straight path
  4. damages only armor/hull

This would seem as good a place as any to bring up another idea nabbed from various gratuitous battles from SF: the plucky suicide run.

What do people think of an order that is essentially the reverse of “Cautious”? That is, once a ship has taken a slider-set amount of damage, the captain hollers “Raaaaaming Speeeed!” and orders his crew to plow hell-for-leather into the nearest enemy craft?

The ramming craft could receive a speed bonus in exchange for a losing all weapon and shield power (“Divert all power to the main engines!”); damage upon collision could be determined by speed and the kamikaze craft’s exploding power modules, with obvious AoE repercussions. Ships would only be able to ram craft that are the same size or larger than themselves, and fighters should probably be immune to ramming.

The obvious balance issue here is huge spam fleets of kamikaze fighters / frigates with fast engines and high-level powerplants set to suicide at 0% damage, but a balanced and undamaged fleet shouldn’t have too much trouble with this tactic.

I like the current power plant explosion mechanic. It’s easy to explain, and not unbalancing since the cost/crew requirements of power plants scale up MUCH faster than the damage the explosion will do. Sorry everyone, kamikaze doesn’t look viable. I see the explosion as being a nice bonus for close range ships that don’t get as much time to attack, and a penalty for stacked cruisers.

Plus, reactor explosions will let me mod in something very special :smiley:

Here’s my two cents -

Add new power plants and engines that have better stats than existing ones, but are unstable and can detonate if damaged.

That way, instead of changing the balance you have - you allow people to push closer to the edge for a boost.

I’m not too thrilled with the idea of AoE effects in this game as it stands. We just have too little control over ship spacing once the battle is under way. Earlier today, for example, I set up a deployment that had reasonable spacing between each cruiser at first. After the battle got underway, though, due to some flanking activity, my line ended up turning at a right angle and bunching up. One cruiser went up, and its neighbor lost half its armor.

The only real tool we have to manage spacing at present is formation orders, but that comes with its own set of issues and disadvantages, and only lasts as long as your lead ship anyway. It seems to me that we could really use a “maintain minimum distance” order of some kind.

I’ve had a go with the new AOE explosions. My initial impression is… Excellent work! The shockwave looks just right. Eye catching appearance, but not clashing or overly spectacular. The damage seems to be… Just right! But will it really deter fleets that mob together? Not by itself. Future AOE weapons may add the last touch to anti-mob gameplay. The AOE explosions emphasize the need for effective use of formations and escort orders. I like this.

I tested out a suicide ship. It proved too expensive and did too little damage. Excellent!

A ship without any power plants still gives off a shockwave, but no damage. Is this the intended behaviour? Do Frigates do AOE on destruction damage?