Why not have powerplant explosions cause movement rather than damage?
That way when one ship goes up, it pushes all the other ships away?
I just had an idea for an simpler/alternate fix (not that I don’t want to see area effect weapons, core explosions/kamikaze ships and more!)
How about increased hit chance / increased damage whenever a unit overlaps with another (effect increasing quickly with more overlaps). This would simulate ships not being able to maneuver/dodge properly, making them easier to hit and more susceptible to damage. Easier to hit is easy to justify - many ships in the same spot mean you can’t dodge properly. Taking more damage could be justified by normal ships actually don’t suffer maximum possible damage since their movement helps reduce impact/etc. Plus, you could also add a chance for significant damage from collisions once you overlap too many objects - collisions could also impart some extra speed to the ships involved and knock them out of the stack.
Why not a sustained damage AOE weapon? Something which creates a small area that lasts for a minute or so, and inflicts damage to any ship within the cloud every second. It deals with the lack of engine problem, and at the same time discourages stacking since it means your entire fleet is getting hit with a single weapon.
Space napalm in other words. Or nano-minefields, acid payloads whatever.
As it was mentioned on this page, its really simple. Just dont allow stacked formations on the deployment screen. If the ships overlap then make that an invalid position. I dont think making every weapon have an AOE effect will help the balance. Sure, im all for AOE weapons but dont change the balance so drastically to fix one simple thing.
Yes pirat0r!
If the problem is that you can create physically ‘impossible’ formations, then my initial thought is that the solution should not be a counter-balance to an impossible tactic, but an outlawing of it. The obvious option is collision detection for ships. I imagine that collisions aren’t included in the game because they would be annoying and because there would be a lot of congestion.
How about saying you can’t shoot through your own ships? That way the weaponry you can bring to bear is limited by the extent of your front line, but your ships don’t jam each other up.
There is a MUCH larger problem with ‘Stacks’ than the non-pretty formations.
The problem is this:
Heaviest armour everywhere + at least two nano repair modules on a cruiser with one engine results in a ship that can withstand the full and mighty firepower of the insidious Arc-Welder challenge for nearly a minute.
Stacks are hard to take down because, generally, they have CRAZYGOOD armour.
We need armour to have decreasing effectiveness, or altenately for armour plate to give less of a bonus to a ship the bigger it is, or, ideally, both.
Edit: My current ship will stand up to the Arc-Welder’s fire of unending doom for 35 seconds in 4.0 time.
or a maximum armour mass per hull? (structure can only take so much) … so some hulls can take several plates where others can only mount lighter ones.
or cost-per-plate goes up with the current amour?
balancing balancing… not something i’m good at, so only a suggestion.
anyway - what’s wrong with having a ship that can resist an arc-welder? (to be honest, i’m just assuming this is a vanilla challenge).
Arc-Welder, to the best of my knowledge, is the first serious Stack attempt. It’s three heavily armoured cruisers with anti-fighter guns, and something like 75 000 points in frigate torpedo spammers. The second you get into range there is this BLISTERING stream of torps flying at you.
It is also a little unbalanced, because it’s defeatable with cruiser torpedoes and some fighter layouts.
Look for the Arc-Welder challenge and give it a try!
Edit: Also, this ship is effectively taking AN ENTIRE FLEET’S FIRE SIMULTANEOUSLY. That can’t be right.
ahh. i see now.
This fleet and this design aaalmost kills Arcwelder. Unfortunately they snag on the cruisers and it gets pretty endless, but with three ships that move right into range, it gets to 100/28 reasonably fast.
If you want to try it, copy the design code into a .txt in your ‘ships’ folder, and the deployment into a .txt in your scenario8 folder, both in mydocs/mygames/gratuitousspacebattles!!!
Design:[code][config]
name = imperial praetorian - stackbuster
guiname = Imperial Praetorian - Stackbuster
hull = Imperial Praetorian Cruiser hull
cost = 4214
[modules]
0 = cruiser powered armor,
1 = cruiser_nanorepair,
2 = cruiser_nanorepair,
3 = cruiser_nanorepair,
4 = cruiser_nanorepair,
5 = cruiser powered armor,
6 = cruiser powered armor,
7 = cruiser powered armor,
8 = cruiser powered armor,
9 = cruiser_engine V,
10 = cruiser crew IV,
11 = cruiser powered armor,
12 = cruiser powered armor,
13 = cruiser powered armor,
14 = cruiser power III,
15 = cruiser_laser,
16 = cruiser powered armor,
17 = cruiser powered armor,
18 = cruiser_engine V,
19 = cruiser_engine V,[/code]
Deployment: [code][ship0]
shipid = 1
name = Velius
design = imperial praetorian - stackbuster
pos = 872,1486
quantity = 1
angle = 90
behaviour_0 = ATTACK_FIGHTERS,-1,0.10,300.00
behaviour_1 = ATTACK_FRIGATES,-1,0.99,400.00
behaviour_2 = ATTACK_CRUISERS,-1,0.15,421.43
behaviour_3 = CO_OPERATIVE,-1,0.00,0.00
angle = 90
[ship1]
shipid = 2
name = Statius
design = imperial praetorian - stackbuster
pos = 869,1079
quantity = 1
angle = 90
behaviour_0 = ATTACK_FIGHTERS,-1,0.10,300.00
behaviour_1 = ATTACK_FRIGATES,-1,0.99,400.00
behaviour_2 = ATTACK_CRUISERS,-1,0.15,421.43
behaviour_3 = CO_OPERATIVE,-1,0.00,0.00
angle = 90
[ship2]
shipid = 3
name = Ursus
design = imperial praetorian - stackbuster
pos = 874,1856
quantity = 1
angle = 90
behaviour_0 = ATTACK_FIGHTERS,-1,0.10,300.00
behaviour_1 = ATTACK_FRIGATES,-1,0.99,400.00
behaviour_2 = ATTACK_CRUISERS,-1,0.80,800.00
behaviour_3 = CO_OPERATIVE,-1,0.00,0.00
angle = 90[/code]
Quick note - the other half of the problem with stacks is that they self-repair faster than they take damage. I suggest a delay between damage recieved and self-repair activating: you can’t start repairs until you get clear of the combat zone!
Edit: Basically, by using repair, armour starts working a LOT like shields. I, personally, don’t like that.
They’re not just shields, but infinitely-repairable shields. At least shields go away once they’re down.
When you destroy an armour module, it stays destroyed. Unfortunately this can take a LONG time to happen.
Ah fair enough, I only saw the mention of shields going down permanently and assumed armour might be different.
To stop armour-repairing stacks, how about something that reduces the maximum armour value of a module? It could be eaten away by acid, or nanobots or whatever, but if combined with either a gradual effect or permanent AOE it would really put the bite on a stack.
With regard to armour repair. If a steel girder is vapourised, it cannot be ‘repaired’, it can only be replaced. Thus it doesn’t make sense that armour can be forever repaired.
How about, when armour takes damage, it loses hitpoints as normal, and also loses a percentage of that from its maximum hitpoints? Which is pretty much what the previous posted has said. But I would like to see it as a standard effect from all weapons.
I need to say up front that I just got this game yesterday and therefore I clearly do not understand a lot about the game at this point, so take these thoughts as such.
Well, this may work but it raises a few questions. First, would it effect fighters within the radius (friend and foe), as they may not be able to handle too many splash damage hits. Second, also would it affect friendly ships or even the ship that fired the weapon?
That sounds interesting and fun, but it raises another question in my mind. I am not sure if the ships are controllable to tell them to stay away from a dying ship. As yet I have not found the way to this. So, to have a huge end of life explosion when you cannot control your ships would be frustrating for the user. However, if they can be controlled then it may be a neat feature.
Could you use your dying ship in a suicide run to create major damage to the enemy vessel when it blows up?
Well, I have not stacked ships on top of one another but I have observed that “pushing” all of your ships to the top or bottom of the formation screen will give a very similar effect. It is much more likely that your ships will concentrate fire on the same ship. Again, because I am new I am not sure if you can tell your ships which target to fire upon.
I wondered if having a grid in the Formation Layout Screen would help solve this issue?
This would allow say 4 fighter groups in a grid space, 2 of the larger ships, and 1 of the very large ship class in a given grid.
This would stop stacking and stop pushing all ships to one end of the Formation Screen. It seem like a simple solution to the stacking issue, but not for the in game fighting itself.
Anyway, these are thoughts from a person that has owned the game less than 24 hours, but has been able to win by putting all ships to the top or bottom of the formation screen.
EDIT: What about a weapon that fires into a group of ships and pushes them apart and makes it so they cannot fire while taking place? This weapon would only take effect if there were at least three ships within the blast area of the weapon.
To balance stacks I would suggest adding area-of-effect mechanics determined by weapon stats. I think this is better than a generic across-the-board AoE mechanic because it allows for another spectrum of tradeoffs: just like you need anti-fighter or anti-missile weapons if you want to deal with those elements of an enemy fleet, you should need anti-swarm/stack weapons to deal with those (but a wider range of weapons-you-would-bring-anyway should fill this role). I think stacking to some degree should be a valid tactic, but easily countered if overdone (like excessive fighter or missile swarms).
I like the idea of ship explosions doing AoE damage, not so much for balancing against stacks but just for the gratuitous coolness factor.
It may be necessary to reduce the damage of AoE against fighters otherwise they might become far too easy to counter or just ignore (i.e. they only get to blow up one cruiser and the shockwave kills them all); you could say that they get mostly carried along the shockwave of a big explosion and moved more than damaged.
Perhaps we could get some benefit from killing two birds with one stone. I think a lot of us would like it if our ships could move while they fight, to allow frigates to take advantage of their modest speed to dodge slow tracking fire, like plasma. The basic code seems to exist- fighters already do this. If we allowed other ships to have circling behaviour, thus keeping constantly on the move, plasma and the slower missiles would have a much smaller chance of hitting. You could make this a choice on set-up- ships set to keep moving would circle at the range set for engaging that unit type. If you chose to leave your ships to fight stationary once in range, then you would be much easier to hit, but it’s easier to keep a sold formation.
So a fleet keeping on the move would beat a stack, but a slightly more spread, coherent line formation would beat a less coherent, mobile mass. Skirmishers beat shield wall but lose to battle line.
While this might seem counter-productive with an eye to beating stacks, it might allow for some more interesting tactics. Currently fighters are able to slip inside the shields of a ships, yet when two ships are within each other’s shield radius they don’t get the bonus of shielding each other, if for example one’s shield is taken down.
If shields take damage whenever a shot goes through their radius this might do two things: keep support frigates alive a little in a toe-to-toe fight, they’d gain the support of their supporting cruiser, this might help reduce the tendency for people to go to either end of the hull spectrum; it would also mean that a stack’s shields would go down very quickly, pretty much every shot would damage a shield and it would start taking damage very quickly.
Just spotted a ‘Keep Moving’ order is in 1.04. Curse me going away for the weekend!