Stealth_Hawk wrote:
Because if you successfully deploy Fleet Shield when your enemy has long range weapons, they just got screwed.



I'm just not sure: what is the point of having three different kinds of weapons that do the same things?

Because people are mistaking complexity for depth, sadly.

Igncom1 wrote:
As some one who has spent a lot of time modding, I disagree on the basis that denying something straight off like that is really stupid.





As an idea it might have not been unique, but your sarcasm makes me not want to take you seriously.

The irony of this statement given the flippant tone of your reply is really something. Both of his points were valid. Long range weapons that just plain bypass defenses would be goofy unless they do a fraction of the damage they do now. You'd never *get* to short range if the long range weapons ignore defenses.



And the idea that short range beams would do something different than short range kinetics or missiles is the entire point of the discussion. What would they do? Fundamentally any short range weapon has to be stronger than its long range equivalent in some way to make up for the fact that you need to get to short range to use it effectively. That's true no matter what. Exploding the number of weapon modules in the game doesn't change anything when all of the short range ones work essentially the same way. It's just complexity for the sake of complexity.

Because the short range beams serve a different function, higher damage, when pitted against a tougher enemy ship could mean the difference between killing it and not.

Then what, long range beams? If they're loaded up with shields, anything else is going to work better than beams no matter what range you're shooting from. If they're not, it any beam would be effective. It's the same thing as it is now with how the defenses work, only with more stuff piled on.



It'd work the same way without the explosion in complexity. If you want to use a short range but stronger weapon, use the new kinetics. All the weapons use the same mechanics now anyway thanks to the other changes. Adding more short range weapons is just duplication of function.

Tridus wrote:
The irony of this statement given the flippant tone of your reply is really something. Both of his points were valid. Long range weapons that just plain bypass defenses would be goofy unless they do a fraction of the damage they do now. You'd never *get* to short range if the long range weapons ignore defenses.

I had been awake for over a day, So I apologize for the tone.



A better suggestion would be to have a chance at bypassing shields, and yes doing a fraction of the damage.

And the idea that short range beams would do something different than short range kinetics or missiles is the entire point of the discussion. What would they do? Fundamentally any short range weapon has to be stronger than its long range equivalent in some way to make up for the fact that you need to get to short range to use it effectively. That's true no matter what. Exploding the number of weapon modules in the game doesn't change anything when all of the short range ones work essentially the same way. It's just complexity for the sake of complexity.

Then help suggest something that works differently, because it it actually quite easy to get to melee range when you are out of the destroyer age and the majority of players who still have problems with it are the ones who play the multi-player min-maxing.



Weapon types in will simply expand upon what the default weapon types do.



Lasers are accurate, but do low damage.



Missiles are very damaging, but are easily countered.



Kinetics fire many shots, but are inaccurate.



So if we build upon them (Or change them) we could have some fun.

Then what, long range beams? If they're loaded up with shields, anything else is going to work better than beams no matter what range you're shooting from. If they're not, it any beam would be effective. It's the same thing as it is now with how the defenses work, only with more stuff piled on.

The change to defences are going to ensure that defences aren't a diamond edge counter to anything, so even if an enemy has shields, deflectors and flak, you can still do damage to enemy ships, but just not as much as you would by using something else.



The problem with the current defences is that it is all or nothing, you do tons of damage, or none at all.

And that's stupid, and is why we could only have 3 weapons, but now with defences being more of a buffer we can expand on our ways to do our damage in the combat phases we prefer the most.

It'd work the same way without the explosion in complexity. If you want to use a short range but stronger weapon, use the new kinetics. All the weapons use the same mechanics now anyway thanks to the other changes. Adding more short range weapons is just duplication of function.

Ok then, how do weapons all work the same when say, compared to how they used to work?



That's a rather knee-jerk comment to make from information we have never seem and it looks like to me you just made it up.

Igncom1 wrote:


Then help suggest something that works differently, because it it actually quite easy to get to melee range when you are out of the destroyer age and the majority of players who still have problems with it are the ones who play the multi-player min-maxing.

Well... for short range beams, what about something like a heat ray? That's a weapon that fires a beam and locks on, doing increasing damage the longer it's locked on. By time it got to short range it'd be pretty effective, if it didn't miss in the earlier phases.



Or to use ES current mechanics of firing multiple shots: a short range beam that works such that every hit destabalizes the shields slightly, increasing the damage of every shot that hits after. Again by short range it'd be doing a lot of damage, if it was able to connect earlier (so it'd be really effective against low evasion ships). The other potentially neat thing is how it'd interact with Fleet Shields:

- An enemy using fleet shields in long/medium will block the damage, but those shots are still hitting (for 0 damage) and thus still stacking up the effect to make it stronger at short range.

- Your fleet using fleet shields would negate your ability to shoot, and thus lower the damage potential of the beam even in subsequent phases by not stacking up the damage bonus.

The change to defences are going to ensure that defences aren't a diamond edge counter to anything, so even if an enemy has shields, deflectors and flak, you can still do damage to enemy ships, but just not as much as you would by using something else.



The problem with the current defences is that it is all or nothing, you do tons of damage, or none at all.

And that's stupid, and is why we could only have 3 weapons, but now with defences being more of a buffer we can expand on our ways to do our damage in the combat phases we prefer the most.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Tridus wrote:
Well... for short range beams, what about something like a heat ray? That's a weapon that fires a beam and locks on, doing increasing damage the longer it's locked on. By time it got to short range it'd be pretty effective, if it didn't miss in the earlier phases.



Or to use ES current mechanics of firing multiple shots: a short range beam that works such that every hit destabalizes the shields slightly, increasing the damage of every shot that hits after. Again by short range it'd be doing a lot of damage, if it was able to connect earlier (so it'd be really effective against low evasion ships). The other potentially neat thing is how it'd interact with Fleet Shields:

- An enemy using fleet shields in long/medium will block the damage, but those shots are still hitting (for 0 damage) and thus still stacking up the effect to make it stronger at short range.

- Your fleet using fleet shields would negate your ability to shoot, and thus lower the damage potential of the beam even in subsequent phases by not stacking up the damage bonus.

That was the kind of thing I was trying to get at!

Fair enough.

Hmm, I am wondering...



How are you planning to implement the evasion stat together with rigid formations (detailed in a separate post)?

In order for a ship to dodge anything, the ship has to move out of formation. If the ships will have a constant place inside a formation, the graphical result of the evasion stat will be simply worse accuracy against some ships - i.e bad targeting from the attackers.

Igncom1 wrote:
I had been awake for over a day, So I apologize for the tone.

I also apologize for the sarcasm, sometimes it just slips out.

However you are proving to be rather close minded about the idea of including new weapons

I do think there is a difference between being closed minded and just not liking an idea. I don't want to see the combat in ES ruined by a ton of silly modules, so i'm expressing that. If they are going to add modules, they should be functionally different. But, adding in a ton of new modules may make ship building very cluttered and messy.



In the interest of being constructive, lemme try some ideas for this...



Missiles:

Fast missiles: these missiles cover space quickly, so during melee phase flak only gets one round to shoot them down. medium range 2 round, long range 3 rounds.

Note this still uses the old forumula for flak shooting down missiles, which I don't think should be changed, because it's what makes missiles unique!





Beams:

Scatter shot: not effective at all in long and medium, but in melee can hit up to 4 targets.

Tachyon burst: low damage, but disables repair and power modules for the phase.



Kinetic:

I dunno, I always found kinetics a reward for making it to melee phase. Hard to imagine it effective at long range.

The problem I personally find with the current combat system is that you will ALWAYS load up 1CP ships with missiles. You don't even have to focus on researching missile tech, just the first level (with titanium resource) is enough to force other players to always spam flak, otherwise you'll whittle them down too easily. That being said I'm going to without criticism of the long/med/short kinetics/beam/missiles until I can use it. As long as they can keep the ship building area efficient and clean, I don't mind having more modules if they're implemented well.

I eat players who spam missiles ships for breakfast. That strategy is only valid if the other player doesn't know what they are doing, or is already very far behind.



Or are you talking about SP? in which case yea, the AI can't figure out how to counter ships. but that's not a combat problem, that's an AI problem

Affinity wrote:
I eat players who spam missiles ships for breakfast. That strategy is only valid if the other player doesn't know what they are doing, or is already very far behind.



Or are you talking about SP? in which case yea, the AI can't figure out how to counter ships. but that's not a combat problem, that's an AI problem

Yeah I'm not saying it's uncounterable but corvettes/destroyers with tier 1 missiles hurt, so you will always have to have flak ready for it. Their bigger fleets will have beams probably (maybe kinetics) and clean up your remaining ships, unless you have the same battle strategy yourself (having some suicide missile boats and other fleets). That's my experience with MP.

1 flak kills 3 missiles.

Igncom1 wrote:
1 flak kills 3 missiles.

Like I said it's not uncounterable, I'm just saying that on ships with the lowest survival, there is the most benefit in fitting them with the weapon that does the most damage in the first round.

And you believe that to be missiles?



They have the lowest damage per round in the game, lasers are far better for that role because missiles are better suited to being anti-capital weapons.



But this has nothing to do with the topic.

I second the option to make missiles harder to hit at shorter ranges, maybe not even by a special type - i.e. 3 rounds of FlaK at Long range, 2 rounds at Medium, and 1 at Melee (why not call it Short?) range. It is hard to know quite what to do because I am not entirely certain what the new rules will be. I am going to think of some ideas, though.

I can't make any sense of this formula: Damage done= WeaponModuleDamage *1- Target.Defense/(Target.Defense+ Target.DefMod)



what kind of values are we dealing with here? The defense will always be around 1 no matter what - i.e. defense 100 = 100/(100+0) = 1 or Mod 100 = 100/200 = .5 but the value matters little - if defense is 1 vs. 100 you get the same result )1/1 or 1/2 - so why does the target defense number matter?

Here is my idea for Missiles



Missiles fire once per phase and can be shot down by FlaK/Anti-Missiles each round depending on the range



Accuracy Long Medium Short

Missiles 80% 60% 40%

Torpedoes 90% 60% 30%



Defense Long Medium Short

Anti-Missiles 3 2 1 longer range defenses

FlaK 1 2 3 more of a point defense for closer range attacks



Missile Type Min Max Avg Required

Nuclear Missiles 30 50 40

Nuclear Torpedoes 40 80 60 Titanium-70

Fusion Missiles 80 120 100

Fusion Torpedoes 120 180 150 Hyperium

Plasma Missiles 160 240 200

Plasma Torpedoes 200 300 250 Hexaferrum

Anti-Matter Missiles 300 400 350 Anti-Matter

Anti-Matter Torpedoes 400 600 500 Anti-Matter



ECCM Type

ECM Type None Networked AI-linked AI

Point Defense Lasers 15% 10% 5% 0%

Anti-Missile Phalanx 15% 10% 5% 0%

Networked PD 25% 15% 10% 5%

Networked Anti-Missiles 25% 15% 10% 5%

AI linked PD system 40% 25% 15% 10%

AI linked Anti-Missiles 40% 25% 15% 10%

AI Anti-Missiles 75% 40% 25% 15%



Modifiers

Modifiers apply to % above, so a leader with +50% would make a 50% chance = 75%

forgive me for the way it is set up I did it in Excel and it does not paste well.



Essentially I set up missiles/torpedoes in 4 types - Nuclear, Fusion, Plasma, and Anti-Matter. The Torpedoes require special materials but except for Anti-Matter Torpedoes the rest do not.



Then, you can have Point Defense (FlaK) or Anti-Missiles, with AM being better so probably more expensive - anyway they fire in reverse, anti-missiles 3x at long range, 1x at short and visa-versa.



The types would be standard tech, Networked (where multiple computers link the systems for better fire effect), AI linked, where the computers are self-aware AI with better intuition/reactions, and then finally individual mini-AI in each missile/AM. The tech for the counter applies to the missile as well, so when you get AI linked defenses, you get AI-linked missiles, and that affects the % success at shooting down the missile.



The final note is that all other modifiers of any kind affect these as the base. So, +20% defense does not mean 20% + 20% but instead, 20% added to 20% so in this case, 20% -> 24%

As you can tell - trying to get rid of silly names, for example Wimpy Torpedoes? WTF is with that? These are all terms anyone can understand from science fiction.

Beam Idea - Numbers can change, but to me, beams would be just as accurate at any range, but do less damage at longer ranges, so my idea is:



Accuracy Long Medium Short

Beams 70% 70% 70%



Beams Long Med Short

Laser 10 15 20

Synchrotron Laser 15 20 25

Pinch Guns 20 30 40

Phased Plasmic 30 45 60

Collapsor Beam 60 70 80

Dark Energy Beam 80 100 120

Disruptor Beam 120 140 160

Gluon Disruptor 160 200 240



Shield Type Absorption

Reflective Isotopes 10

Active Mirroring 15

Plasma Fields 20

Plasmoid Shields 30

Quantum Damping 60

Particle Attractor 80

Transformative Shields 120

Ablative Wave Shield 160