Possible Design Change. Add your views (beating Stacks)

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21

Personally I don’t like the idea of stacking. Like it’s been said, it’s not in line with what the game’s all about: big, epic space battles. Stacking is a bit too much metagaming for me. I really like ricmadeira’s suggestion.

I also feel you shouldn’t be able to stack during deployment. Maybe some overlap, but not directly on top. Fighters could be an exception.

As for area of effect, I think it’s a cool idea, particularly the detonating cores, but it has to be done well. Obviously larger cores would explode larger. Basic missiles and torpedos shouldn’t have very large AoE if any at all. Energy weapons could have some large AoE’s as it’s all si-fi anyways, but “physical” (ie, detonating cores and missile hits) wouldn’t have a blast as it’s space and there’s no air to blast. What you could have for those types of explosions are shrapnel explosions, where parts of the ship fly out at high speed and could potentially hit a craft on the other side of the battle area.

22

There are some really exciting ideas in this thread! I’m liking the splash damage weapon - maybe a big gratuitous single-use nuke that needs 2 weapon slots! - and the idea of forcing an engine (with a separate space station unit).

Exploding powerplants would be a blast (ho, ho) and if there was an order for ‘maintain fleet separation’ then the vital ships could keep themselves sensibly apart, while still allowing the player the choice of bunching for suicide runs. And maybe add a repulsive tractor beam as a counter to suicides?

23

I like both of clifski’s ideas, for the same reasons as many other commenters.

I think there’s another possible solution that hasn’t been discussed before: make stacked ships easier to hit.

The way it could work is that when a missile or projectile (or even a beam) misses one ship, it might instead hit a different nearby ship if it the two are close enough together. This would encourage a deployment that was more spread out so that enemy fire can’t hit secondary targets if it misses its intended one.

This might be hard to code, of course. I’m not sure how much actual collision detection is done in the game as it is (rather than bullets and missiles knowing that they should miss without caring about their actual position). It may also be hard to find the right balance between concentrated fire and concentrated (stacked) targets.

There might also need to be AI targeting updates to make effective fighting possible with this sort of change (e.g. orders about targeting enemy ships that are close to friendlies to avoid friendly fire), but I think it could add an interesting dimension to fleet deployment.

24

That’s pretty brilliant and goes back to the marble throwing model. The more mass there is, the easier it is to hit.
When you fire into a crowd you are going to hit somebody.

25

beams bounce off shields… might hit someone else

core explosions - if they have an exponential falloff instead of just inverse square, they could do massive damage to ships right on top… but little to ships right next door.

26

Most of my ideas have already been posted :slight_smile:

I think it’d be more visually fun if fighters get tossed about by explosions & splash damage than destroyed by 'em. Maybe unarmored fighters get popped while armored ones take a light hit and go tumbling out of the blast zone before regaining control?

If shields take half damage (or even less for reflecting shields?) from splash & explosion effects, that’d be a good enough reason to spread your ships out.

I also like the idea above that shots that miss one ship might hit another overlapping ship.

27

I’m not so sure I like the power plant idea. I think you guys are overlooking the fact that many players will then just create ships with a few engines and lots and lots of power plants to rush the enemy and be easily destroyed…thus doing more damage with their massive explosion than if they had had weapons anyway.

The second reason I think this is a bad idea is because it HIGHLY encourages long range weaponry over short range weaponry. Currently, one of my most successful tactics is to load up cruisers and frigates on short range lasers and rush in under heavy fire of the enemy fleet’s huge beams and plasma cannons making it to the safe place under the minimum range of their big weaponry (and yes, my cruisers stick their noses and weapons under the enemy shields). If this death explosion change goes through it would just punish players who use this or similar strategies rather than the cliche (and lengthy) long range bombardment tactic.

Thirdly, I just want to say that yes, sci fi movies and shows have taught us that high energy alien tech goes BOOM!..but in real life power plants- no matter what they are nuclear, coal, wind or water turbine- If they fail they melt down or just grind to a halt…no going NOVA. My counter offer for a death animation would be more of a release of the stored energy, rather than a large explosion. Something like this…
youtube.com/watch?v=UVF3iC_v … L&index=42

Lastly, if you do add the death explosion, and it is based on number and respective lvls of the power plants, please put a cap on it, much the same like the efficiency caps on other systems such as shields. Maybe maxing out the explosion damage at 4 pwr plants. No one wants to see 3 of their own ships go up as a reward for finally destroying the enemy’s over-shielded (and thus overpowered) cruisers.

also, you might think about exempting fighters from such damage, as they have to be close to (or on top of) the enemy ship by necessity.

*Edit- instead of having a huge death explosion, another option would be to make the debris of the ships hull collide with other ships nearby. This would work to damage stacked or nearby ships, and furthermore it wouldn’t have to be collision detectable forever…you already have a system in place where debris and hull drift off into the background slowly, so no need to worry about creating a permanent wall of debris. Also, this would give a logical excuse to exempt the fighters from damage, because they realistically can be believed to be quick enough to dodge or fly through the debris of massive space hulls.

-found a video where electricity is emitted during death explosion. (around 9:30 mark) Also you can see the effect of colliding with space debris in this video (although this ship is colliding with its own broken off bits before its death) For the most action, watch from the 7:40 mark. youtube.com/watch?v=SP4A6H2TrbI

28

The problem I am seeing with area of effect weapons is that ships will not intentionally target the gap between two ships. Thus the explosion needs to be big enough to envelope half a Cruiser in order to hit one next to it. Otherwise it is only useful against stacked or very tightly packed ships. Such huge explosions could only be justified with very expensive, high requirement, super weapons. Possibly for a Battleship class ship? Smaller AOE missiles/rockets would need an intentional scatter applied to them, so that the small explosions can hit multiple enemy ships. Of course, any super weapons must be unable or very difficult to be shot down. Otherwise, cunning stack masters would add several anti-missile weapons to their ships to ensure that the impact never happens.

If you want to add the necessary physics coding, perhaps one race can have some kind of goo gun? A big blob of goo that splatters on the target and nearby ships when it hits. Then it causes damage for a short period as it disintegrates the target.

29

Random chance to have an explosion create a black hole could be fun. I would put the toggle switch on that though.

30

Stacks are inherantly slow.

I suggest a new long range weapon which has a significant increase in damage the further it travels, and almost no tracking speed. This way it will only hit stationary targets and targets that move to engage, even slightly, will generally evade the weapon. Giving it a very large minimum range also increases one’s ability to rush it.

This will require no additional coding - just an additional weapons module.

Edit: If a stack uses this weapon, it’s only dangerous against other stacks. At the moment stacks are dangerous because they have access to weapons that are dangerous to non-stacks and non-stacks do not have a weapon against stacks.

EditEdit: There is a problem in that a ship using this weapon will, probably, come to a halt at its designated range and get wtfpwn3d by the same weapon as its speed drops off. This weapon could be used by having three ships set to escort each other in a triangle - this causes them to ‘waltz’ in circles.

EditEditEdit: This could result in ‘Waltzing Stacks’. This could be a lot of fun! A waltzing stack ‘chain’ breaks apart whenever one member of the stack is destroyed, or when ships get close enough, however.

EditEditEditEdit: If you had to add in a ‘dodge’ mechanic to go with large slow non-guided missiles, ships with engines can’t dodge. A large slow unguided missile, especially with AOE, will murder a stack.

31

There’s a lot of good suggestions in this thread that will solve this issue, but I’ll add my 2 cents to it too. =)

  1. Ships cannot be stacked during deployment phase.
    Accepted, no structure of one ship is overlapping with the other.

    Not Acceptable, the ships are clearly clipping into one another.

  2. AoE damaging weapons. Maybe not so much beam weapons, but perhaps them as well. Rockets and Missiles make good sense, but beam weapons (that penetrate shields) can possibly cut right through a ship and hit an object on the other side of the beam-impaled vessel.

  3. Powerplant detonation. If you played Master of Orion 2… remember the quantum detonator special? Well it doesn’t work very well in a suicide fleet because any one suicide ship will chain reaction and destroy another suicide vessel… and another suicide vessel, et cetera. Your suicide fleet would blow itself up before getting close enough to the enemy.
    If this does get implemented, it should open up a variety of special power plant modules. Standard power plants which have a chance to detonate if the module is reduced to 0%, and also when the ship is destroyed. Armored/self contained power plants. More expensive for slightly less power, but extremely low % for detonation if module is reduced to 0% or when ship is destroyed. Highly unstable power plants: guaranteed detonation of power plant on reducing to 0%, a chance to detonate ANY time the power plant module is damage, prone to power fluctuations that may interfere with powering the ship’s drives/weapons/shields, but cheap.

Basically you have standard middle of the road power plants, blows up sometimes but not regularly. Expensive well protected versions so you basically don’t have to worry about your expensive ships blowing each other up. Cheap but highly unstable and unpredictable power plants that could be used for suicide vessels, but have enough draw backs that suicide fleets are extremely easily countered if anticipated (far too vulnerable/self immolating).

  1. Penalties for ships too slow/with no engines at all. You’re shooting an immobilized object in space with highly a advanced targeting system able to calculate firing solutions in a 3D environment. Ships firing on immobilized targets have 100% chance to hit with any and all weapon fire. To be clear, there’s a difference between immobile and stationary targets. Immobile ships have no power at all, no ability to maneuver or react to incoming fire. Stationary ships still have power, and can possibly use thrusters to engage in at least some evasive maneuvers.

Example of immobile: A ship with no engines. A ship whose engine modules have been completely destroyed.
Example of stationary: A cruiser firing at maximum range while not advancing towards the enemy.

  1. The X-Com Solution:

youtube.com/watch?v=oC1HlRG_iA8

In case it’s not obvious what’s happening in this video… an object (poor sap in the back) not being specifically targeted is being hit by fire aimed at the power suited soldier. The target is missed, but because there’s another object behind the target, that object is hit by the ‘miss’.

What does this mean? Beams that fire at a range of 770 always travel this distance. The only reason they don’t is…
A. Beam is reflected off of shields(in this case the beam may continue the entire distance of 770, or perhaps a shorter distance, in a tangent)
B. Beam is fully absorbed into the armor of a ship.

In other cases? They miss, and continue onward to potentially hit other targets. They hit their target, punching right through to continue to strike other targets in the path of the beam. My one, single beam weapon suddenly has potential to hit all 100 of your stacked ships all at once.

This type of ‘aoe beam’ weapon is especially relevant for ‘super lasers’. A planet destroying death star laser should cut right through a ship… and into the ship behind it… and the moon behind that.

  1. Penalties/friendly fire for stacked ships. Weapon fire traveling in the vicinity of allied vessels have a chance to damage allies. Or these weapons fire slower to take into cautious gunners attempting to not engage in friendly fire. Or these weapons are less accurate for the same reason.

I think the bottom line is there are a lot of ways to go about solving this issue as seen throughout this post, but once you choose them, balancing them with actual math and calculations so they perform their job of ‘breaking stacked fleets’ while not causing other problems is the goal.

How about choosing the solutions you (cliffski) want to use/like best from this thread, and once we know which you plan to implement and which you don’t, we can start talking about actually implementing them in game to see how these ideas work together?

32

I’ll chime in on area effect weapons - my only addition is that beam weapons actually have an AOE equivalent - firing the beam for a while and slicing across multiple targets. You can actually see this effect (although probably a miss animation) when big beams are shooting at fighters - the beam will slice back and forth through the cloud trying to hit those tiny fighters. Beams could track through multiple targets (dependent on their tracking speed rating perhaps?), making it undesirable to stack since the slowest and most powerful beams could hit all the enemies in a stack without moving much, whereas only fast tracking beams could hit multiple targets if they’re spaced out.

33

I think maybe the fix for overlapping ought not be so overwhelming. Exploding powercores and area weapons sure do disencourage people from stacking ships, but they are like additional gratuitous features with their own implications that need to be debated rather than something that is really targeted towards fixing the stacking problem. I like one earlier idea, that stacking would reduce the rate of fire, representing of ships’ being too close and blocking each other from their targets, as the most straight forward solution.

34

I’m not a big fan of either of those solution simply because with the lack of control over the AI we have, ships are going to stack up eventually even if we don’t tell them to. We also would lose some of the functionality of formations imo.

I think the best solution, though probably not the easiest for you, is to make every ship required to have a certain amount of speed AND that ships can’t be touching during placement

35

The ORIGINAL Master of Orion (Get off my Lawn! :slight_smile: had a weapon that would stream its damage. (I think it was a graviton beam.) If the weapon had enough damage to kill one ship in the fleet, it would pass onto the next ship in the fleet and damage that one. This process would repeat until the energy in the beam weapon had gone to zero, or until the entire fleet was destroyed. For instance, if you hit a fleet of five 20-HP ships with a 50 point graviton beam, here is what would happen.

Ship #1 would take 20 damage and be destroyed. Graviton beam strength is now at 50-20, or 30 points.
Ship #2 would take 20 damage and be destroyed. Graviton beam strength is now at 30-20, or 10 points.
Ship #3 would take 10 points of damage. Graviton beam strength would be reduced to zero.
Ship #4 and 5 would be untouched by that shot.

36

I really like both suggestions. The lack of AOE weapons currently seems a little odd, and apart from the coolness of flak (who doesn’t love it?) could go someway to distinguishing plasma and missiles a bit more effectively, and I definitely agree with Omnitronic - explosion can’t tell the difference between friend or foe!

The powerplant splash damage also sounds a good idea, the current sfx makes it look like there should be damage; that said maybe you’d need an order to include a minimum separation distance? It would be annoying to lose a few ships because of stupid AI. The damage and range of the blast would have to be balanced right, but I’m not sure you’d see a chain reaction, so far I’ve found that I’ve mostly had at most one or two badly damaged ships that might be susceptible. Also the suicide frigate idea would be quite fun, and it’s hardly likely to be an effective tactic: 500/600 points for a one use weapon? One problem would be fighters, maybe they could ride out the blast wave?

Minimum engines also sounds like a good design, but maybe it could be done on a per/hull basis? That way you can still have space stations at some future point/mod, but a frigate hull would then be required to have at least one engine, and maybe more depending on which hull. It would provide a nice way to differentiate the hulls further.

I like the lightning weapon idea, but I do worry that something like that would need to dissipate quite quickly before it ends up bouncing around indefinitely Maybe it should all ships in the area in the same manner as AOE, not just enemy ships? That would then make provide a further incentive for spacing your ships.

37

Seems like a lot of ppl have already put-in great suggestions. I can’t read through everything due to time, but I’ll add to some votes.

AoE, yes. Explosion knockback, so-so.

Stacking, maybe I don’t mind limited stacking, but it shouldn’t be complete stacking.

In a somewhat related note, has anyone mentioned ‘ramming’ or ‘suicide attacks’?

38

My $0.02, core explosions and such may mean that commands like escort need to be reworked since the escorting ship will spend at least some time on top of the escorted vessel and it doesn’t seem fair to punish people for using a command. In fact the simplest way would be to just make it impossible to do it in the deployment screen since once the battle has commenced it’s less likely that the ship will stack up, at least in my experience they almost never stack much if they didn’t start that way.

39

More stackbeating:

Stacks have as their primary elements:

1 - They are immobile. - Obviously.

2 - They focus all the power of the fleet in one area. - Obviously.

3 - They are the ultimate swarm. - Huh? Well. Swarms rely on their ability for multiple ships to engage a single ship and avoid retaliation. The math is obvious - Death star has 70 guns, rebels have 700 ships, it will take at minimum 10 rounds of shooting to kill all those rebels.

These are issues well known in real world combat and ‘stacking’ was better known as ‘the shield wall’, and the way ‘the shield wall’ stopped being a valid tactic was the bow - volleys focussed on one area dealt damage to everything in that area. However, this wasn’t area of effect damage - this was ‘misses hit things that they didn’t aim at’. The issue of concentrating power in a small area has also been expunged by real world explosives, but, also, more significantly, human wave tactics really came to an end with the invention of the machine gun - a weapon that allows one soldier to engage ten soldiers simultaneously, effectively.

As it stands, area of effect damage SOUNDS like it’s going to solve the stacking problem but I suspect stacks will remain a going concern unless reactor damage is added to the mix, and that reactor damage decreases exponentially with range: right on top of the ships it is absolutely lethal, 3 or 4 units outside the collision ring (It seems that collision is handled by a ring shaped bitmap - there’s the POSSIBILITY Cliff might give us pixel by pixel collision, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. Circle radius detection remains the easiest method.) it stops being so lethal.

Basically we have three levels of ‘Are stacks a problem.’

Firstly, Stacks are a specialist form of engagement, and currently require specialist knowledge to deal with: The only major way of dealing with stacks is to examine the ships within the stacks and develop a counter-fleet specifically tuned to that specific stack’s weaknesses. If we consider GSB a game of specialists, this isn’t an issue - we can beat stacks by adding something like the anti-stack weapon I mentioned a few posts ago in combination with other specialist knowledge, like how to form ‘waltizng stacks’ of escorts (which look awesome, by the way!) Occasionally, if a stack isn’t very well built, you can counter the whole stack with ONE ship - this is usually a torpedo fighter. So, there isn’t a big problem!!!

Secondly, Stacks are unfair because their intense specialism means that any generally rounded fleet can’t beat them, and we would much rather see a generally rounded fleet than an intensely specialized fleet. The way to get around this is to play rock paper scissors, but with many more ‘nodes’. For example: A fleet specialized in ‘Rock’ will always beat one specialized in ‘Scissors’, sometimes beat one specialized in ‘Rock’, and never beat one specialized in ‘paper’, and will always lose to one spread across Rock, Paper, AND scissors. Add in stuff like shotguns, paper-cutting hammers and ball bearings… and the game starts getting hard to play by focussing on one or two elements. There is already an element of this but I want there to be more valid possibilities - the major one I want to explore is ‘ship class on ship class’. As it stands, ship classes can be specced out to wipe the floor with each other. I would much rather see a game of cruiser kills frigate kills fighter kills cruiser. Make it so cruisers don’t have effective anti-fighter cover and are dangerous to other cruisers, so frigates can’t easily crack cruisers (a swarm of them can kill cruisers - croozrz r loozrz!) but can kill each other and fighters, and fighters can’t deal with frigates because frigates have good fighter cover, but can kill each other and swarm cruisers with an improved ‘drop the bomb inside the shield’ type torpedo.

Okay, that’s a little bit of a digression, but as it stands I think we have ‘Stand back and fight’, which is your standard fleet of plasma launchers and missile ships, and ‘fight up close and personal’, being a ship that moves forward to engage or blows the hell out of ships that do. In this environment we have a third option - Stack - which beats the other two fleets fairly regularly. We need a fourth option which fleets of the other two sorts can integrate quite easily and destroys stacks regularly. This would be an area of effect weapon that’s really devastating, and encourages generally rounded fleets (if only for the fear of stacks).

Thirdly, Stacks are unfair because they’re obviously a horrible game mechanic and OH GOD WE HATE THEM, so we would much rather change the intrinsic game mechanics to make it impossible to use them. By adding area of effect damage to a dying ship it will make stacks inherantly unstable, and if the damage drops off exponentially, we can have an unspaced stack (although I assure you we will see ‘spread stacks’ appear very rapidly) terminate itself in a glorious fireball which will destroy all ships simultaneously and possibly kill our framerate. GOODBYE STACKS!

I have to admit this stack issue is REALLY interesting.

40

I don’t think stacks were an intrinsic game mechanic. The first line of cliffski’s post:

“Ok, so as should have been predicted, you can build big ‘stacked’ units where you have your whole fleet bunched on top of each other.”

As should have been predicted.

It’s an exploit, unpredicted. It removes formations and their importance in the game. And formations, and ship loadouts, are all you have, once you click ‘Fight’. So you’re getting rid of 50% of the strategy, right there.

Plus, I agree with the other fellow, it looks terrible on the screen. It’s “Gratutious Space Battles”, not “Two Blobs Fighting Each Other”