GSB2 Design: Modules

GSB2 GSB2 Gratuitous Discussion
21

Once again, my immediate reactions to … various parts. For bits I don’t include, you can safely assume that I concur with them as they are presented.

One additional characteristic: Torpedoes should definitely be heavier than other types of missile; I would suggest that the smallest ship able to carry a torpedo is a gunship, as I assume gunships will be a bit less prone to “slow = instant death” than fighters.

How about this as a weakening factor: shields and armor have a resistance, and weapons have penetration for each; however, instead of “penetration < resistance = useless”, how about it reduces the damage by a set proportion (50%? 75%?) as a way of further stratifying the weapons beyond anti-shield/anti-armor/anti-hull?

For instance, suppose we have an anti-shield weapon with low penetration that deals 100 damage. Against higher resistances, it drops to 50 damage. Next to this, we have a high-penetration anti-shield weapon that deals 65 damage. The first weapon will be more effective against the lower-resistance shields, the second more effective against high resistance, but neither is entirely useless at any point (at least against shielded ships). Armor could follow a similar scheme.

I would add one exception: any shield with 0 natural recharge (I’ve modded a few and found they can make for an interesting option) cannot recover even if a repair module is present. Maybe factor in the shield’s natural recharge rate somehow, so that a faster-recharging shield will also recover faster with a given repair module?

Is it possible to avoid resetting the missile’s fuel when it gets turned around? That particular quirk in GSB1 makes the Parasites’ scrambler ungodly powerful in a lot of setups.

Would this type of beam also be able to boost the efficiency of a shield repair module to bring a collapsed shield back up faster, or would it be restricted to ships with active shields? Personally I would prefer the latter.

I think this should be restricted to whichever ship classes can mount carrier bays - at the least, nothing below a cruiser should be able to handle this type of projector.

This should be coupled with a new order (similar to Cautious) that sets a fuel limit that triggers a return for refueling, so the player can avoid having a group of quick fighters that get massacred because they always drop to “empty tank” speeds on the front lines.

The fighter capacity of carrier modules will need to be balanced carefully - while any truly massive fighter swarm should effectively require at least one dedicated carrier dreadnought, It should be possible to provide a reasonable fighter screen for your ships with either a smaller dedicated carrier or a scattering of carrier modules throughout your larger ships.

Should fighters be required to report to their original carrier bay for refueling (as long as it is still functional), or can they refuel at the closest opportunity? The second scheme could allow for a situation where as the battle grinds on, fighters become less effective as they have to travel farther for refueling and returning to the battle since the closest carriers are out of supplies.

Would these only affect refueling speed, or would the tanks instead/also affect how many fighters the carrier ship can refuel before its supplies are exhausted?

A suggestion that may or may not be a total nightmare to code, but I’ll throw it out there:
Frigate: Footprint Magnification System. Similar to a decoy projector, but projects a cruiser hull (randomly selected from the race’s available cruisers each time the FMS fires up?) over the frigate mounting it, affecting the enemy’s targeting choices. Unlike a decoy vessel, a ship mounting a FMS is still armed and so can draw fire from the Rescuer and Retaliate orders.

One thing to consider: a higher variety of module types will also require at least some hulls to have a corresponding increase in total module slots. It feels very restrictive to have every hull force a choice between, for example, support modules or defense modules, with no room for including both capabilities at lower concentrations. Obviously not every hull has to have the capacity to be everything, but it’s also less than ideal to have no hulls capable of multi-purpose loadouts.

I am really liking the shape of GSB2 as it has coalesced so far. :slight_smile: I hope we can all be of assistance in making it the best game possible.

22

Good point re: the shield projector. I’ll make a note of that.
Even in GSB1, as I recall fighters will always head to the nearest carrier to repair. I’m planning on the refuel mechanic working using the same system. They go to the enxt furthest if the nearest is full, as I recall.

23

Penetration and damage are not the same, or rather should not be. The “hull” damage is the actual damage done, shield penetration is the ability to get through shields, and armor should be the ability to penetrate armor.

I might have a difference between reducing shields, and penetrating sheds (more later).

A target has shields, so if the shield penetration is below the shield’s strength, the shot is blocked. If the weapon damages shields, then it could reduce the shield strength vs further attacks (some weapons might never damage shields, others might have crappy penetration, but reduce shields, makes for more variable weapon types).

Any shot that gets through then attacks armor. If it cannot penetrate, it does no damage. I think in general armor should not be reduced, period. You can shoot a billion BBs from an air gun at a tank, and you will never damage it, ever. If a shot has a penetration that exceeds armor, then it does the hull damage.

24

I have been chewing over this one for awhile and I agree with my fellow veterans, having break points in the Penetration will help with the Variety.

Each Weapon comes with the following Stats
Shields - Penetration Rating and a Effectiveness Rating
Armour - Penetration Rating and a Effectiveness Rating
Hull - Effectiveness Rating against Hull

2 Tier: Weapon Damage System

Weapon Fires and Hits Target

If Hull, Proceed to Damage has been Dealt
If Shield or Armor is hit:

  • If Weapon Penetration(WP) is Less than Defence Resistance(DR) then Damage is Reduced by a Factor (WP/DR)
  • If Weapon Penetration is Equal or Greater than Defence Resistance then Full Damage

Damage has been Dealt:
Modify Weapon Damage by Effectiveness Rating

While you still have a case where Every weapon can damage anything, the damage potential is further reduced which means ships might survive a little longer. A Break Point could be introduced where if the Damage is below 5% (for example) then no damage is dealt.

The downside with all this, it still might be to Complex for new players.

So to help the New players, we introduce something in the options menu of “Beginner Mode”. If this is enabled, the game does not take into account Penetration ratings and hence you have a quicker more explody game. Should you disable this option, Battles will be slightly longer (still explody) as ships defences will hold longer.

Thoughts - (apart from this is a real deep rabbit hole ?)

25

“Will you take the red module, or the blue module?”

26

I think it might not be too bad for new players because of this new mechanic where some damage is always being dealt regardless of penetration. Players who want to dig deeper and ask WHY their phasers do such poor damage against ship X can then investigate and discover the mechanic. Hopefully a more polished tutorial and help system and post-battle stats system this time around will make this less of an issue anyway.

So the system would work like this:

Ship fires weapon with Damage 50, shield effectiveness 100% armor effective 50%, hull effective 0%. Shield penetration is 10, Armor penetration is 20

Target has Shield resistance 20, armor resistance 15

Because shield penetration is below resistance, the damage done is halved, so we are dealing 25 damage. Shield effectiveness means we deal the full 25 damage.
The enemy only has 20 shield points, so the shield is taken down, leaving 5 points to hit the armor. armor pen is 20 which is high enough so the full 5 make it to the armor. Armor effectiveness is 50% so 2.5 damage is applied to the armor.

How does that sound?

27

Sounds good to me :slight_smile:

As for an extreme case where you have an armoured Dreadnought being pestered by a Fighter, Maybe this is where you have the No effect Kick in, for example:

  • The Fighter fires a weapon with Damage 5
  • Shield effectiveness 100% armour effective 50%, hull effective 0%.
  • Shield penetration is 5, Armour penetration is 5

Target Dreadnought has Shield resistance 20, armour resistance 80

Because shield penetration is below resistance, the damage done is now at 25%, so we are dealing 1.25 Damage. Shield effectiveness is still 100% so we deal the full 1.25 damage. Yeah its gonna take awhile to chip away at the shields but they will get there.

Later, Once the shields are down . .

Because armour penetration way below resistance, the damage done is now at 6.25%, so we are dealing 0.31 Damage. Then we have to reduce it further due to the armour effectiveness so its now 0.15 Damage.

Therefore any damage that is less then 1 is No Effect. If the Fighter scores a Lucky Shot than the damage dealt is 1. . .

Speaking of Lucky Shots, In GSB 1 the Lucky shot ignored Penetration Values (IIRC) - in GSB 2,maybe the Lucky Shot is not modified by Penetration values ?

28

I would personally prefer the game just list the damage numbers for armor, hull, and shields separately, so you’d have 50 shield damage, 25 armor damage, and 0 hull damage, rather than telling me that the weapon does 50 damage but is 100% effective against shields, 50% effective against armor, and 0% effective against hull. It’s the same information, yes, but telling me the percentages means that I have to do a bit of math before I know how much damage weapon A does against defense B whereas telling me the actual damage values gives me that information immediately; additionally, the math in this example is not hard, but if there’s a weapon that does, for example, 51 damage and is 37% effective against shields, 15% effective against armor, and 107% effective against hull, I’d have to break out a calculator in order to figure out what that does (and yes, I know that this example is a bit odd since I chose not to make the weapon 100% effective against anything).

It’s also not saving you any space here, as you have 1 line for theoretical damage, three lines for effectiveness, and two lines for penetration, whereas simply stating the actual damage values gives three lines for damage and two lines for penetration. I tend to feel that more compact ways of presenting (or storing, in the case of the contents of the module file) the same information are better, if it doesn’t reduce the clarity of the information presented, but other people may feel otherwise. Of course, when displaying the information in-game, you could just eliminate any effectiveness percentage lines that are equal to 100%, but that may be more of a headache to code.

The system described sounds reasonable to me. I’m not entirely certain about having the penetration < resistance be a flat multiplier; perhaps it might be better to have the multiplier be something more along the lines of (0.125 + 0.25*penetration/resistance) when penetration < resistance, so that there’s an advantage to having a penetration value closer to the resistance value even if it doesn’t quite defeat the resistance? Although that might cause difficulties in giving feedback on weapon performance, since we don’t necessarily know the resistance values of the opposing side’s ships.

29

I am not quite keen on the idea of

.

I am in the firm belief that at a certain point a ship should be invulnerable to a weak weapon system. Fighters unless armed with something specific to damage a Capitol ship - no matter how many there are - should do nothing but fly rings in frustration. This was somewhat applicable in GSB 1 as Fighters were next to useless until they slid under the shield.

The same goes for defensive weapons designed for fighters/small craft should have almost negligible effect on a larger craft. Conversely a weapon designed against Capitol ships should be next to useless against small craft by the mere fact that it just can’t hit them.

I also do not like the ablativenes of the armour - both in GSB1 and how it is sounding here in GSB2. I would much prefer armour to represent an invulnerability or at least in some way reduce the actual damage continually through out combat without just disappearing into the nether.

Also I believe Aeson’s suggestion of just numbers instead of percentages should be looked into - I know I don’t want to pull out a calculator every battle.

And if you are worried about new players unable to understand the system - play out the Tutorials in a manner that shows how certain weapon systems operate against certain opponents.

Berny[edit]
The image I had apparently no longer works at the website - that website is
http://www.wrecksite.eu/docbrowser.aspx?87
Even 5 Decades later the Bismarck’s armour looks like it could take a beating.
The original comment above was directed a view along the deck near the turret, and perhaps will later work.

And here is a link to wikipedia where the USS Monittor and CSS Virginia where unable to defeat each other’s armour.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Monito … r_1862.jpg

Hopefully by posting the links I won’t krunk up these websites either.

30

This is more of an aesthetic issue, but it’s always irritated me when a weapon would appear to be blocked by a shield, but the damage indicator would say “armor -X” (X = whatever damage is done) or whatever. It took me some time to figure out that that meant that the weapon was piercing the shields and doing damage to both the shield and the ship. To me, it would make more sense if in such cases, the weapon physically kept going. When striking the shield, it would say “shield -X” and keep going to strike the ship for whatever remaining damage it does to the rest of the ship. Of course this doesn’t happen in cases when the shield is strong enough. You guys get what I’m talking about, right?

About the penetration always doing damage, I think that it makes sense. When you toss a single small rock at a person, it won’t do much of anything. They’ll be somewhat annoyed, but that’s about it. But when they are repeatedly pelted by lots of people it becomes much more effective. (not that I’m condoning throwing rocks at people, I just thought it would be a good analogy)

By the way, Berny, is that image you linked to supposed to show something? All I’m getting is a blank white page.

31

Yes there is something wrong and am attempting to edit it as we type.

Berny
Also Editing other post

32

Depends on what the mechanism of the penetration is. If it’s just causing the shield generator to overload and blow out a nearby section of the hull/armor, rather than actually penetrating the shield bubble, then there’s no reason for the weapon to be shown to penetrate the shields.

It makes sense within certain limits. Any reasonable number of 0.50-cal machine guns will not do to do any appreciable amount of damage to WWII battleship armor in any reasonable time frame. A 5" field gun shooting at the same target, however, could possibly cause an amount of damage worth noting in a reasonable amount of time, especially if a decent number of such weapons were firing at the same target. There’s a reason why you use one weapon instead of another against a specific target, rather than saying ‘enough 0.30-cal rifle bullets will sink a battleship.’ Yes, enough could possibly do it, but it’d take an incredible number, to the point where you’d probably be better off getting in rowboats and trying to storm the ship than trying to sink it by shooting rifles at it. The only reason why strafing heavy warships with light weapons such as WWII fighters carried was effective is that there was typically vulnerable stuff - unturreted AA guns with exposed gun crews, windows on the bridge, searchlights, wireless antennas, RADARs, etc - which was not protected by the armor and located somewhere that a strafing fighter could hit. If you wanted to sink the ship, you still called in the bigger guns - torpedo bombers, dive bombers, level bombers, your own heavy warships - rather than spending all day expending extraordinary amounts of ammunition to chip the paint off the ship’s armor.

33

From my own post in Master Wishlist:

  1. Equipment requiring more than one slot, so that ships will have various bundle slots depending on their size and build. These would have crossover capability, so a Cruiser for instance could have one bundle-slot consisting of two hard-slots together which could either fit two Cruiser-class weapons or one Dreadnought-class weapon.

  2. Instead of an armor class (AC) negating all damage, a different way of calculating armor would be better imo. It should be damage reduction up to zero damage, so a beam laser would always take something away from the total armor, while the puny pulse lasers of a fighter’s cannon would stay at 0 indefinitely. Let’s say a cruiser tank has AC: 80 and “damage sponge” of 500. A laser beam has 50 damage and 70 armor penetration. Instead of relying on random “lucky shots”, an algorithm reduces the damage to 2 damage to the armor (or something else that is balanced), and 70 penetration damage to the “damage sponge”. Next shot the AC is 78 and there is 430 damage left before penetrating the hull, consequently the next hit will do more damage to the armor (72?). A lightly armored ship would have an AC rating of 40 and DS 250, and then the beam laser would do, say, 10 damage to the AC and 80 damage to the armor. Cliffski would of course have to balance this properly :stuck_out_tongue:

I changed some of the wordings to suit this thread.

MODULES

There is one thing that bugs me about GSB1, and that is that so many of the modules are useless in a competitive sense. It is especially the weapons that do good damage to both shields and armor that are uncompetitive.

Take the Quantum Blasters ,for instance. They are cheap but not cheap enough to allow you to have significantly more ships on the battlefield than your opponents. Their shield and armor penetration are both inferior to Cruiser Lasers and any beam or pulse laser weaponry, and their range is inferior to Plasma and Fast Missiles. The same goes for Lightning Beams, Fusion Torpedoes, Rocket Launchers and Nuclear Missiles, among others - they are nice for a bit of fun, but it would be better if they were relevant choices when creating challenges and when facing difficult battles.

Due to the lack of damage potential, Quantum Blasters could fire twice as fast, for instance. The same with Lightning Beams thanks to the extremely short range.

34

Armor would not be “used up” I think, like melting layers. Weapon make discrete holes, and the only change for diminished armor is one round/shot hitting the exact hole make by another.

35

Heeeeeey GSB2 thread has brought me back from my (god knows how long) slumber (It was far to exciting to miss out on), The only two mainly aesthetic things that ever bugged me about GSB where:

-Fighters can shoot 360 degrees around them; while a small niggle it always bugged me that no ‘dogfights’ ever happened where I could follow one fighter around and see him chase and gun down someone in-front of him! I mean I always assumed weapons go on front for such small craft and (excluding exceptional designed craft ) some wouldn’t be able to fit a 360 turret on a fighter frame? (granted introducing cones of fire would be more work/balancing but would look awesome and be 100% worth it, probably)

-Weapons fire from you only hits the underside of the enemy ships; something I managed to ignore for a large amount of game time but once sighted peeved me off a little, particularly clear when you watch missiles arch in towards an enemy and proceed to disappear under them with a random following explosion (its a small problem but I like impacts!) agreed its pretty miss-able in big fights but I was always the one to be following projectiles all the way to their target through the chaos of a battle to see if they could hit their satisfying explode-y mark!

Can’t wait for GSB2 :smiley:

36

Completely agreed with this, and every thing i could read at all GSB2 topics (specially Astros feedbacks, awesomeness!)
Sorry for the short and widespread post!

37

Firing arcs are indeed now supported. Missiles didn’t always go under did they? I’m pretty certain they don’t now, anyway :smiley:

38

Awesomeness multiplied by sheer coolness! :wink: GSB2 takes another step towards a bright future.

Gotta insure that firing arcs are varied enough to be useful while not making them require too big a slice of the ever-diminishing AI pie. I’m confident an effective compromise can be reached.

It’s kind of you to say so. :slight_smile: My sincere thanks, Praetors.

39

Regarding shield / armour penetration, my point of view is that the current system for shields is good (ie. shields block 100% of damage if the penetration isn’t high enough), but I think using that same system for armour feels weird.

I found it strange an unintuitive that armour can suddenly go from preventing 98% of damage to preventing 0% of damage, with nothing in between. But the main thing I found weird was that armour modules have a profoundly different effect depending on whether you have just a couple of them, or lots of them. (If you have just a couple, then they are effectively just some added hull points; but if you have lots, then they suddenly start preventing damage from a variety of sources.)

The fact that the effectiveness of armour modules changes so dramatically when you start stacking them is unique. Maybe that makes it interesting for gameplay and balance - but I’ve always felt a bit uncomfortable about it. I feel that intuitively armour should reduce damage as a smooth function of armour penetration, rather than the current binary situation of 98% prevented vs. 0% prevented.

40

How many times do you have to shoot a bb gun at a tank before it does any damage? How many times do you shoot a .50 cal at the same tank before you penetrate? How about 20mm? The answer is that none will ever get through. A round with almost enough energy might spall. The real thing in space would be energy delivery. You could almost penetrate, but deposit HEAT. That would slowly build up. A low power laser constantly on a ship might eventually make it uninhabitable, even if it just warmed the hull slightly. Armor is actually tricky to get right.