Romeo wrote:
Hopefully with the new way combat works, small nimble craft will present their own strengths over the ponderously large vessels. On top of that, I never understood why things like accuracy were not dependent on targeted ship size. If my target is the size of a country versus the size of a station wagon, I'm probably going to have an easier time hitting it. Making small craft nimble would make them riskier, but still fun.

It is though, smaller ships have much higher evasion ratings.

Romeo wrote:
Hopefully with the new way combat works, small nimble craft will present their own strengths over the ponderously large vessels. On top of that, I never understood why things like accuracy were not dependent on targeted ship size. If my target is the size of a country versus the size of a station wagon, I'm probably going to have an easier time hitting it. Making small craft nimble would make them riskier, but still fun.

Ships sizes do indeed have an Evasion Rating that impacts the hit chance.

Evasion is additive on Accuracy, so 20% Evasion reduces a 70% accuracy weapon to 50% hit chance, while 50% reduces the same weapon to 20% hit chance. It is, unfortunately, really un-intuitive for the player, since "50% Evasion" does not mean "dodge half the incoming shots" It also comes with its own set of balancing problems, since raising a weapon's accuracy can mean adding only a few percent damage against big ships, but doubling damage against small ships.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
Ships sizes do indeed have an Evasion Rating that impacts the hit chance.

Evasion is additive on Accuracy, so 20% Evasion reduces a 70% accuracy weapon to 50% hit chance, while 50% reduces the same weapon to 20% hit chance. It is, unfortunately, really un-intuitive for the player, since "50% Evasion" does not mean "dodge half the incoming shots" It also comes with its own set of balancing problems, since raising a weapon's accuracy can mean adding only a few percent damage against big ships, but doubling damage against small ships.

I don't feel like those are balancing problems at all. You can get extra accuracy and get rid of those annoying frigates and their goddamn OP power modules ASAP or you can instead put more guns onto your ship to do more damage to big deadly targets.

Sinnaj63 wrote:
I don't feel like those are balancing problems at all. You can get extra accuracy and get rid of those annoying frigates and their goddamn OP power modules ASAP or you can instead put more guns onto your ship to do more damage to big deadly targets.

When I talked of balancing problems, I did not mean to say that the game is imbalanced by necessity if you use these mechanics. I meant to say that proper balancing becomes more difficult to work out.

As an example, in a multiplicative system (attacker rolls accuracy, then defender rolls dodge separately) it's relatively easy to say "A Cruiser has twice as many hitpoints as a frigate, but frigates soak some extra damage from overkill. So if the Cruiser dodges 20% of all potential hits, the frigate should dodge fitting, getting hit a little more than half as often as the cruiser." However, such a system makes it difficult to easily implement a weapon specifically against small, agile ships.

And additive system, on the other hand, requires quite a bit of work and testing to properly balance, since any change in accuracy or evasion doesn't have a linear effect and varies across target/weapon. However, it makes it very easy to create specifically anti-small and anti-large weapons (high accuracy and low damage, or vice versa).





In any case, the accuracy and evasion mechanics in Endless Space 1 are confusing, though most players do not even realize it. I don't think the game informs you anywhere that the chance to get hit is "enemy weapon accuracy - your evasion" instead of rolling evasion separately. It does not explain "Evasion disorientation" anywhere, which increases the chance to be hit after every shot fired at you until it reaches 90%. And there are two different types of accuracy and evasion bonuses, one applied to the base score, and another applied after.

The basic idea of "Accuracy - Evasion" is not bad if the required work for balancing is put in. But ES: D adds a bunch of other modifiers to both.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
Ships sizes do indeed have an Evasion Rating that impacts the hit chance.

Evasion is additive on Accuracy, so 20% Evasion reduces a 70% accuracy weapon to 50% hit chance, while 50% reduces the same weapon to 20% hit chance. It is, unfortunately, really un-intuitive for the player, since "50% Evasion" does not mean "dodge half the incoming shots" It also comes with its own set of balancing problems, since raising a weapon's accuracy can mean adding only a few percent damage against big ships, but doubling damage against small ships.

I know they did, but the numbers used always so small to me. Small craft still went down in seconds, where large craft could tank the damage like nobody's business. Missiles, for example, should've been high-risk against small ships due to the small ships evasion and the low fire-rate of missiles. However it never actually seemed to apply in-game. Small ships still always died on opening salvo...

Romeo wrote:
I know they did, but the numbers used always so small to me. Small craft still went down in seconds, where large craft could tank the damage like nobody's business. Missiles, for example, should've been high-risk against small ships due to the small ships evasion and the low fire-rate of missiles. However it never actually seemed to apply in-game. Small ships still always died on opening salvo...

That is most likely the result of the aforementioned "Evasion Disorientation" the game never explains. Every shot fired at a ship makes every subsequent shot against it 5% more accurate. So even the most inaccurate weapons (65% accuracy) against a small ship (50% Evasion) would eventually start hitting 90% of the time (the maximum possible hit chance). In fact, doing the math, it would take 15 shots, but I might have forgotten something or made a mistake.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
That is most likely the result of the aforementioned "Evasion Disorientation" the game never explains. Every shot fired at a ship makes every subsequent shot against it 5% more accurate. So even the most inaccurate weapons (65% accuracy) against a small ship (50% Evasion) would eventually start hitting 90% of the time (the maximum possible hit chance). In fact, doing the math, it would take 15 shots, but I might have forgotten something or made a mistake.

It resets every phase though so it can actually be possible to have ships that cannot be hit, I think I was in a game once where one guys faction had the minus accuracy trait and his ships did do vastly less damage due to him missing all the time.

Sinnaj63 wrote:
It resets every phase though so it can actually be possible to have ships that cannot be hit, I think I was in a game once where one guys faction had the minus accuracy trait and his ships did do vastly less damage due to him missing all the time.

Very true, it is easy enough to get oneself into a situation where you're either almost never or almost always hit, which can or cannot be a design problem, depending on the design goals of your game.

However, I have founds that as long as you bring about equal CP or more in ships, and use guillotine, you can usually pour out enough firepower to overwhelm the dodge bonus with sheer number of bullets. I am not sure if there is a cap to Evasion Disorientation, and I believe it actually wasn't in the game at all initially, and only added with disharmony. This whole situation of course just makes kinetic weapons an even better choice, since they create more Disorientation (and potentially allow a clumsy missile in the last turn of the phase to hit.)



In the end, however, my main problem with the combat system is that none of this is every explained to the player (nor is "Interception Evasion" on missiles.)