I’d like some area affect weapons that are specifically intended to be anti-fighter.
i’m thinking the game mechanic for simplifcation sake, could be a weapon that fires defensively and creates a puff (immediate ae damage) and leaves a ring that expands (the shockwave) that if a fighter comes into contact with, applies a damage effect. as the ring gets bigger, the damage decreases?
range would be 200-400, so this would be weapon that can be included on AA support craft.
I’d very much like the ability to alter a weapon’s damage percentage vs frigates / fighters / cruisers as a modding option. It would allow for good anti-fighter weapons that don’t also do sickening DPS against any cruiser that loses enough armour.
Surely flak weapons with low penetration values would be a great anti-fighter counter while being not much good at anything else. And also heaps of fun.
I have more or less skimmed this, so I hope I am not repeating anything. The area of effect could be interesting, but shouldn’t it be variable depending upon shielding? Most of the weapons that manage to damage shields are explosive warheads, lasers, plasma, etc. On the other hand, most of a ships explosion would be shrapnel. Kinetic materials. I would guess that shields capable of stopping plasma etc would shrug off most kinetic effects. On the other hand, a ship without shields wouldn’t. The other point in regards to shields are the power plants. When a ship explodes, a power plant does not necessarily go critical. The intact bit that went spinning off to the left could hold the still active/deactivated remains of the power plant. Could make for an interesting land mine effect for future contacts on that area. Either way, I think that the plant should not necessarily blow. If it blows, damage should be assessed upon level of power plant. A smaller plant would probably contain less of whatever material. Or the reinforced plant would be less likely to go critical. Were it to go critical, dependent upon which core is being used, a certain level of AoE damage should be assigned. If the plant does not go critical, maybe a random mine could be generated. If the plant does not go critical, ships hit by debris should not suffer damage unless they are unshielded. If they are unshielded, size should be taken into account.
A weapon can have low penetration, but still be amazing at destroying ships. As long as you have a few weapons that can take down a ships armor quickly, you just need weapons with high DPS to destroy the hull.
This is true. I think that Area of Effect is actually a possible way around this. Right now, anti-fighter weapons must be rapid-firing because they miss so often. If they had a substantial blast area though, they would hit much more often, and even be able to damage several fighters at a time if there were many of them swarming in a small area. For balance they could then fire at a lower rate, bringing their DPS down to a reasonable level. They wouldn’t be exceptionally effective against larger targets because an explosion of, for example, 100m in diameter would usually hit only one cruiser or frigate at a time.
I think putting area of effect explosions on a small number of other weapons, like megaton missiles, would also be good to encourage spread out formations. A big nuke would do typical anti-cruiser damage, but totally devastate any closely escorting frigates and fighters. Similarly, an area of effect weapon with a weak shield disruption or ECM effect could be very effective against frigate swarms.
In which case a lowish damage and/or rate of fire (so, DPS), would even further restrict the weapon to anti-fighter duties.
Not quite seeing as a fighter’s only defence is speed so a low damage weapon that hits 90% of the time will shred fighters up in an instant. Also the relatively short range of flak weapons would mean that it would be useless in an offensive role.
Maybe if the armour penetration was basically nothing it would be a reason to put a little armour on fighter.
I think this could be great as an effective weapon against fighters with stupid high speed. If fighters actually had a reason to take armor rather than multiple engines, than they wouldn’t be so boring.
Let the AoE weapons damage fighters but also add to the fighters the AI to prioritize moving away of the area.
That way, not only fighters would normally be unharmed, but you also allow tactics like using tractor beams to keep them in place while the AoE gets them.
This way also produces the extra virtue of “AoE expansion speed” to the AoE weapons and the need for enough speed to dodge it, for the fighters.
The ship death AoE sounds great. I haven’t noticed it in-game yet (just started and using 1.10), but I love the idea.
I also think something like flak cannons are a must. Very limited range, damage, and penetration, but high speed with some kind of AoE consideration. Basically a weapon that is great against fighters but nothing else, making it a very situational choice (vs. a weapon that’s moderate against fighters but also moderate against larger ships). You may even want a few variants: ones with such limited range that they are really only useful for single-ship self-defense, but make the ship nearly immune to fighters (at the cost of making the ship good for much anything else), and one with greater range that can help protect other ships, but doesn’t fire as rapidly and hit as often, merely reducing the effectiveness of fighters to take out the protected ships.
For the former scenario (self-immunity to fighters), I imagine a ship who has a single, specialized support role, such as repairing nearby ships, lobbing plasma half ways across the battlefield, or painting targets for other attack ships. In this case, the support ship wouldn’t be able to support many weapons, so it would need some kind of self-defense, but not enough to defend against everything. You could have it reliant on the ships it’s protecting to give it protection, but there comes a point where a ship is so specialized that it’s basically useless (it does one thing really well, but that one thing is only rarely useful).
Some other ideas for AoE weapons:
People may be annoyed at me for even considering posting this but uh… isn’t space a vacuum? Where there is no medium for a pressure wave to travel through there can be no pressure wave. Therefore in space a grenade would only be deadly as shrapnel. Moreover I believe it wouldn’t be able to ‘explode’ without oxygen to react with, which is a given in an atmosphere but not in space.
That said, I like area effect weapons, and I like space ship explosions… but both would be damaging because of their shrapnel and EM radiation pulse or both. Flak cannons, frag missiles, and EM missiles (nukes would function this way in space, since there would be no pressure wave) are all things that make sense to include. Especially flak cannons because they are so cheap. I also like the idea of having big capital class cannons that lob AP shells. Such weapons would be extremely cheap probably pretty effective against armor, but also be very heavy due to all the ammo and not be able to repoint too quickly because their assemblies are so large.
Eh, it’s just a game. I don’t think there’s much reason to get too concerned with realism. After all, there’s no air resistance in space, so ships shouldn’t have a top speed, just an acceleration characteristic. I don’t think we’ll be seeing Newtonian physics, though. :-p
On topic, I still don’t like the idea of AoE weapons in the game as it stands. I keep losing ships to kamikaze cruisers in survival mode thanks to AI pilots who don’t know it’s dangerous to sit right on top of what amounts to a gigantic bomb. (To be precise, the enemy cruiser goes up, it takes out an armor module, and suddenly my armor value is < fighter armor penetration… and that’s all she wrote for that ship.) Very frustrating.
It’s interesting that you mention ‘newtonian’ physics (i.e. real physics)… because why not? Most times the reason we are given in the gaming universe for not having real physics is that it’s too complex for players to understand them and plan their moves effectively. Well in this case that particular point is moot because we don’t control the ships at all. It would be pretty neat to watch fighters given realistic physics: Bab 5 anyone?
Still the only thing that concerns me with flak is the critical hit code. Apparently I am hearing this is why fighter swarms with weapons that shouldn’t dream of being able to damage a cruiser can crit it’s armor off and turn it to slag. So I’d want the flak, to have zero crit chance unless it’s hitting fighters and then it would have maybe double crit chance.
This also has me thinking about the problem with fighters, why not drop the crit chances of fighter weapons for anything but other fighters… unless they are using a dedicated anti ship weapon, such as a torpedo or fusion bomb or something similar. I still like the idea of missiles with armor destroying nanytes, there’s no reason why fighters couldn’t have these too. I am not thinking the nanytes should be overpowered or anything, maybe if someone has armor repair and is hit with 3+ armor nanyte missiles than that could roughly disable that repair… but for a while crit chances against that armor could possibly double giving laser fighters a chance to hose it.
One annoying thing I’ve noticed from the AOE explosions in survival mode is that often my cruisers will end up losing an armor to the explosion of an enemy cruiser. I had one game that was going well for a while, then two of my five cruisers both lost an armor slot to this in about a minute. This caused the armor value to go from above 8 (the limit needed to not get obliterated by fighter laser canons) to below 8. So both cruisers where quickly taken down after this.
It seems to really discourage the use of short range weapons when you are penalized for doing so. Seems like ships explosions should have an armor penetration value. Something in the teens to low twenties.
Of course this could be a problem of other balance problems, aka fighter lasers canons being amazing against every target in the game right now.
Ship explosions are good and I think they SHOULD destroy nearby fighters, but the further out they get, the less likely they take damage (shockwave tosses them, but they miss the serious damage). Think of it with regard to structural integrity. A small craft will have greater integrity because it needs smaller structural members to support its frame/fewer armor panels etc. The major damage from an explosion is the shockwave followed by the heat/energy. Something smaller will take a smaller percentage of damage as the area of shockwave that hits it will be smaller and it is stronger on the small scale. In this way, just calculating damage by looking at the shockwave strength * area of vehicle cross section will let larger ships naturally take more damage from a large shockwave than a small ship. The heat damage is probably more dangerous to the fighters and less dangerous to heavily shielded/armored ships.
However, with missiles, it should be possible to develop fighters with really excellent anti-missile systems (especially since they swarm) which should allow them to kill missiles without causing them to detonate. That means that as long as you have some anti-missile fighters out there, you should be able to protect them and reduce the effect of AOE weapons on the fighters. Which brings up the idea of allowing mixed fighter groups. Instead of only one type of fighter in a squadron, allow multiple types with multiple preset orders (as discussed elsewhere). Otherwise you just attach two groups to the same ship with the same basic orders, or perhaps you allow the targeting of missiles/torpedoes by ships (let them fire their main weapons at them if they want).
What shockwave? This is space, there is no medium to propagate such a wave. However your point does stand in that the EM energy released from a reactor explosion should immediately sterilize any unarmored fighters in the local vicinity. (this would be a great counter to the super fast armorless fighters BTW)
This is why I don’t have a problem with cruiser booms taking out ship systems: the EM release would likely zap anything exposed. What I have a problem with is the AI clustering my ships together so they all take each other out. No matter what the orders are any captain worth his salt would begin moving away from a friendly cruiser at 30% or less structure given the potential damage.
I wouldn’t worry too much about realism - space is a big place, and likely battles would actually take place over massive distances - hundreds of thousands of kilometers or more. Nukes would be useless for AoE as the energy density of their flash falls off ~ 1/r^2, so their EMP effect would be negated real quick. Missiles would probably be useless. Lasers are likely. But I digress…
Perhaps weapons like EMP blasts than can jump from ship to ship in close proximity, or nukes have affect shields only, or other debuff type AoE weapons would do the trick. AoE nuke can be done as long as there is a sufficient penalty, such as a lower chance to hit, slow travel speed, high weight, or even damage to the target ship, but EMP ships nearby.
Other AoE weapons could be: