Exactly. We have tractor beams, why not repulsor beams? They could shoot individual fighters out across the board a ways, but I don’t know if that would be too useful given that they come in rather large packs. However such a beam could be useful in the context of boarding pods, pushing them away so they can’t latch on. It might also work for torpedoes.
This leads me to thinking about crew as a resource… Neutron beams that bypass armor (but not shields) and kill crew would be evil and the armor tanker’s worst nightmare as his gigantic armored beast floats idly along with no one left alive aboard. And what about biological weapons… penetrator missiles that release horrible viruses that over time kill the crew.
To balance fighters and create and incentive to do more than just maximize speed:
Keep the current anti-fighter guns with a reasonably high tracking speed that will hit any torpedo bomber, or pretty much any fighter with armor.
Add a very short range, low rate of fire, low DPS, ZERO AP flak gun with high tracking and small AOE. This would be very good for swatting fighters out of the sky if they are swarming around you (or the cruiser you’re escorting, if you’re a frigate), but would be ineffective against torpedo bombers that have armor and/or stay at range.
Feedback: I’m not sure the reactor explosions do much to control stacking. They do help, but you need several kills for it to have any sort of impact. And you won’t get many ship kills if the other guy is stacked in a wall and you arn’t. So the effect is just that ships die faster in wall vs wall fights. xD
Thoughts: I think even tiny AOEs (like 50 meters) on certain weapons would go a long way. Really heavily stacked fleets have overlapping shields and if the AOEs hit every shield near them then it will hurt stacking a lot.
Different AOE weapons that either only effect fighters, or only effect frigates and cruisers, seems like the way to go to me.
Flak guns could be very necessary step to balance very fast fighters (if the engine stacking limitation doesn’t fix it), which they’d hurt a lot since said fighters can’t have any armor. They could have very small area of effects, but they’d fire out in a cluster in order to hurt swarming fighters.
Nukes, gravity bombs, what-have-you would probably have a limited radius where they could actually damage heavy ships. Nukes couldn’t send out shrapnel (it’d all be molten) so they wouldn’t hit fighters, and any ship worth its salt has to be shielded against long-term stellar radiation already. Therefore, they could have only small effective areas of effect, enough to hit a couple cruisers or a handful of frigates if they’re all packed in close. These weapons would be more heavily armored than regular missiles, but slow. They might also be made of anti-matter / plasma / whatever that isn’t solid enough to be effected by anti-missile defenses.
These AOE weapons should have high crew requirements (for missiles) or high power requirements (for energy-based) so that having a lot of them on a ship would require a lot of design sacrifices, extra crew quarters / reactors, smaller secondary weapons, and probably high cost.
There should be cases where a tightly packed fleet of frigates and/or cruisers is a good idea, as well as fast and evasive fighters, but there should be counter, and area of effect weapons could be it.
Having had a chance to playtest the AoE damage from large ships exploding, my opinion is that it’s very frustrating. Maybe this is because other AI problems are causing my ships to fly over top of enemy ships, but it’s devastating when my cruisers loses all armor because the cruiser it just destroyed blew up. Ships that should have easily lasted through upcoming waves on survival mode were crippled because of this.
Knockback is a neat effect with little impact on gameplay, but core explosion AoE causes serious damage that the player is unable to avoid. I vote to get rid of it.
On the other hand, if you want it to still be gratuitous, a shockwave that ripples away from the ship would be cool. It shouldn’t have any actual effect on the battle, just treat it as a visual effect. It would make destroying a huge ship that much more satisfying without the risk of interferring with the game.
I’m not sure what stacking you referred to that you wanted to discourage. Perhaps there are others ways this could be avoided? Some kind of collision detection or limitations on ship placement. I don’t know enough to say, but the negative effects caused by ship destruction AoE seem to be serious enough that a different method is needed.
I should make clear that I’m not discouraging AoE weapons. I really like the idea of a flak cannon that has been mentioned multiple times: something with limited range that hits fast ships not because of fast tracking speed but because of a small amount of AoE. I think AoE could be used in other ways too. My only complaint is the specific ship destruction AoE that causes damage to nearby ships.
I (respectfully) disagree. I like the damaging effect of ship explosions… systems damage makes sense. Maybe it could be relatively powered down a little… or made more random (maybe sometimes they just break up and don’t totally blow).
Moreover I think that any unarmored fighter should instantly be radiated dead by such an explosion. It doesn’t take a whole lot of armor to stop radiation, but you gotta have some otherwise you are taking a heck of a risk in space… and right now the risk is zero.
If you do that, you’ll have to massively change the balance of fighter speed and armor. Right now, the only thing that keeps fighters from being destroyed is their speed. Since fighters are generally used to swarm carriers, you would basically be requiring them to armor up. Except, as is, fighter armor does little to absorb damage and significantly decreases speed, therefore decreasing the chance to survive against all weapons. Basically, adding this “radiation damage” would force the player’s hand by requiring them to use armor, further limiting their options for fighter builds and severely decreasing the effectiveness of fighters. It might be possible to somehow counterbalance this by making armor weigh less or making other roles for fighters (where they wouldn’t be forced to experience radiation damage).
Well that was kind of the point. To make leaving an empty slot where armor should be or taking two engines to be a risky proposition. The only usable fighter shouldn’t be the two engine single weapon build. Yes, speed is essential, but having armor shouldn’t be crippling speed wise. As it is now there is no reason to ever use fighter armor… why have it when there is no reason to use it?
I agree, there’s no good reason to use fighter armor right now. I agree the answer to this is making it lighter, but irrespective of any other changes (such as the radiation damage you suggested). The tradeoff between armor and speed needs to maintain a balance of “staying alive”, which it currently doesn’t do, and that’s why armor isn’t utilized.
I would like to see a very small AOE on warhead type weapons (missiles/rockets). This does open up the opportunity for missiles that deal area of effect damage primarily (e.g AA fragmentation missiles) and missiles that are intended for bursting open heavy armor (e.g armor piercing missiles).
For AA purposes, I think there are two weapon types that ares missing from the game.
1- ‘Wave Cannons’ that project a solid beam of energy across a wide (but short ranged) area. Imagine a thicker, fatter tractor beam that hits everything in it’s cone of death for a small amount of damage, or alternatively takes continual damage as it burns up for some time.
2 - ‘Gun Batteries’, emplacements of a large amount of very small guns that trade power and range for rate of fire.
Another AA AOE would be variations on a flak cannon, some examples:
Homing Lasers - lasers that arc to strike a moving target.
Burst Plasma - Plasma shells that sacrifice range and power to explode for AOE near the target.
Dark Matter Bombs - Superdense particles that draw in and crush nearby, lighter vessels.
Liquid Explodium - Jets of this stuff is sprayed into space, whereupon it freezes, exploding with small AOE if disturbed by weaponsfire or collisions (eg with fighters).
Point Defense - Can hit fighters too.
Repulsor Shields - Shields that fighters can’t fly under.
Beehive Shields - Shields are made of portions that must be knocked out individually rather than the whole lot collapsing.
Foxglove Shields - Shields that conform to the ship and it’s contours, preventing fighters from flying under, but making the ship more vulnerable to AOE attacks.
Electromagnetic Grappel - A large claw that latches onto and draws fighters to their doom.
Vented Plasma - A flamethrower-style attack with short range but great area of effect. Targets hit but not destroyed could burn up for a short time.
Web Gun - Fires a cluster of shells that are linked together in a small spider-like web, that wraps around a target hit and then explodes.
Belt Fed Automatic 50" shotguns - A weapon that just fires a whole crapload of buckshot into the air.
For tractor beams, I would like to see a vessel caught by multiple tractor beams torn apart.
The problem with splash damage against large vessels (as I see it) is that the vessel is not a flat object, but the AOE would treat it as if it was. AOE missiles should not strike multiple components. In space, there are no particles to transmit the wave of force from an explosion, so impacts from an exploding vessel should be line-of-sight only.
For exploding space hulks, it doesn’t make sense for the ship to go from 0 hit points to explode instantly. I would like to see a vessel reduced to 0 engines go critical and explode, including vessels that started with 0 engines. Vessels with more components that were intact prior to the explosion explode bigger.
OK there are like a TON of awesome ideas here. Love them! I have highlighted my favorites. Excellent job! I love the liquid one btw… that could have the most awesome effect to it… just seeing huge ice crystals floating around, possibly little frozen fighters… hilarious/awesome!
