Igncom1 wrote:
Is the trait not transferable from the hero ability?

Did you read the linked thread.

I'd like to see race unique weapons.

Cheers, that solved it and made it easier to read.

Think they linked "deflection" to "kinetic" and "absorption" to "laser" in the localization regardless of what weapon type is being deflected/absorbed? I wonder if it's the text only, or if the module actually absorbs lasers in-game. Will test later

If race/culture weapon/tactics is implemented then it would br nice to unlock countermessure tech for the race who recieve the extra damage/effect it cause. Newly unlocked countermessure tech could be staggered with some 10% protection increase for each lvl.

Hupailija wrote:
5) Suicide ships, These are really deadly in any kind of combat. Imagine seeing fleet of fighters charging towards your Capitalship... or think about what was most deadly weapon from Rebels armies against Empire in Starwars.

Now you're making me nostalgic about Homeworld....good ol' kamikaze scouts!

plainoldandrew wrote:
Fighter Bays: each projectile represents a single fighter craft or a squadron which once fired does it's amount of damage continuously at a given interval until intercepted (by flak or a 'defensive fighters' module working one the same continuous principles, intercepts until destroyed)

I doubt there's a way to make the damage from a weapon span multiple 'turns', but multiple phases is doable. You can have a kinetic weapon which appears to fire continuously but has a high turns-to-reach, I think. That would give defense modules time to 'shoot it down'. Seems like the kinds of customization we can do with deflectors are really limited, though.

What about trying to represent smaller craft as weapon modules on larger ships. something like the following:



Fighter Bays: each projectile represents a single fighter craft or a squadron which once fired does it's amount of damage continuously at a given interval until intercepted (by flak or a 'defensive fighters' module working one the same continuous principles, intercepts until destroyed)



then you could have a tactic card which controls the release of fighters, do you set them loose early on for maximum effect? or release them as a finisher when the enemy has no opportunity to counter them by releasing their interceptors or targetting them with their weapon systems (also tactical cards)

I agree that it's good idea to try to forget all about realism when one speaks about spacefights... or we can continue this conversation 10k years to future from this moment. (probably have to add 1 0 more and hope that mankind doesn't destroy before getting there).





When / If we think what weapons there will be on use in future we could start to look at history:

1) Cannons, these have been on use for 700-800 years now (atleast from Mongol times) and they are still one of the most reliable weapons.

2) Rockets/Missiles, almost as long invention than cannons.

3) Technology Warfare, way more important in future than now, even more important against spaceships. Sadly there is no way to represent this in almost any 4x game.

4) Minigun like weapons, have been in use since first chokonu



one weapon which I really miss from games:



5) Suicide ships, These are really deadly in any kind of combat. Imagine seeing fleet of fighters charging towards your Capitalship... or think about what was most deadly weapon from Rebels armies against Empire in Starwars.

IIRC the Russians fired a 23mm cannon in space without any ill effect.



That crazy ivan wouldn't work, but there're all sorts of crazy electronic/radar/heat countermeasures out there. It shouldn't be hard to come up with some plausible-sounding 'soft-kill' measures in the x-ray/ultraviolet/gamma ray/baryonic/neutrino/scyfiwidget areas. If we get access to ship models or those card animations or whatever, we can have ships deploy towed decoys or do a "Prairie Masker" style effect. I like the Mass Effect-style heat oriented combat & the heat sinking for stealth too - opens up the possibility for a card which gives - to weapons but decreases the enemy's accuracy or some such.



Hard kill we have miniature rockets, various kinds of lasers, EFPs, directed energy/particle beams, energy shields of all kinds, reactive armor, ablative armor, far-out physics (micro black/wormholes, mass bending), hacking the warhead, entropy, atomic dissolution, the whole shmorgasborg.



So the technology is there - you can model space combat however you like. A snarling dogfight on in all axis and orientation around massive capital ships like Star Wars. Lurking submarine hide-and-seek like in "Balance of Terror". WWII naval combat like homeworld.

We humans actually got some space tactic experience from the the "crazy ivan" period during the cold war. Submarines hunting and targeting eachother just using sensors and using heat layers to hide. Crazy ivan was a tactic used by the russians as they got bad sensor suit for detecting mostly US subs as they tailed them. So the russian Captain randomly turned 180 and full speed tried to scare any followers. The epitate was ofcorse invented by US captains that experiensed this Tactic.

Have you played Eve Online? That game feels more like a submarine simulation than spaceship simulation.



Going to next address couple problems what you will meet in space but not in water:

If missile has engines and it uses those it accelerates, in water water itself along with gravity does reduce this and eventually may even stop missile. In space missile won't slow down but instead continue accelerating. More reliable missiles in spacefight are those which doesn't have guiding system and engine than those which has, just because vacuum works differently.



Spaceship which has engines behind of it also needs engines infront of it wants to slow down it's speed in vacuum. (notice spaceship launched from earth usually use planet to slow down their speed) This also means that any kind of quick movement is impossible...



Vacuum doesn't mind about weight, this has probably mentioned several times and this affects to almost everything.



Space is cold place, it gets colder the more you are away of systems. I'm not sure whether anyone has tried to fire gun in a temperature of 1K or what happens then. I just know that material tends behave weirdly when we reach to those temperatures. And I'm not sure whether anyone likes liquid spaceships :P.







There are load others things which takes outer space spacefights to completly different level than say seafights (actually air fights are closer... it's just that even air tries to oppose movement what vacuum doesn't do (oh and of course you can't crash to land in spacefight)).

So the russian Captain randomly turned 180 and full speed tried to scare any followers.

If you try to do this in outerspace

a) turning takes quite long time (of course you can have better engines but how to stop rotation then? by having enough engines in opposite side?)

b) accelerating to full speed in one direction would rise your speed to really high. (again because nothing opposes you). This is one of the "paradoxes" in flying vacuum, you always need better engines to slow down / stop moving forward than you need to accelerate to given direction. In case someone wonders why I am speaking about acceleration and not speed... engine is basically mechanism which boosts force affecting behind you so that you can accelerate (and in earth keep that velocity) to wanted speed.

Well, I have spent a few hours trying stuff, and I have not found much which both (a) worked, and (b) seems interesting. I have added a fleet tender (repair) module for UE, a smaller seed module for horatio, and changed UE and Sophon so that they are better, and worse respectively, at invasion.



Since you can't mix weapon effects, I was only able to vary the rate of fire and damage of weapons. Without also modifying the graphics, this seems pretty uninteresting. I tried a "rail gun" type kinetic which has low ROF but high damage. Unfortunately, deflectors operate per projectile. So, all the high damage projectiles get stopped and the result is not very much damage. I tried high ROF and low damage. That is nice, but really who cares; it is not different enough to be interesting. For beams, low ROF and high damage does work; with either lower or higher speed, it looks kind of interesting. I made a spinal mount laser: 10x tonnage, 1/2x ROF, 20x damage. It is sort of fun to see one small beam hit a destroyer and blow it up, and if I could add a big, powerful graphic it would be interesting. But since it is still the same basic damage, again who really cares.



So, I have had some success with interesting support modules, but no real success with interesting weapons. Any suggestions?

Copperwire1632 wrote:


Like .... take the Hissho - they are angry birds in space who get real worked up when they win or lose. I get that they fly stuff well. What else do birds do? They see real well (maybe an improved sight radius tech?), come with built in maps (early access to "green" movement?), and sometimes like to decorate their nests (an extra approval improvement with some defense value?). All of the above would add flavor/uniqueness without messing with the "dangerzone" - which to me is making it easier to get those bonuses stacking.

They are really more pterodactyl's the birds.

davea wrote:
Well, everybody has a "risk threshold", and I guess we have now established mine is "medium high" but not infinite. I don't mind changing a variable that affects every race by a lot, as in my recent change to 4x reduce the amount of science gained from trade. But, when adding toys to one race, I don't want a situation where suddenly that race is way better. Each race (except sower) has exactly 5 unique/moved techs. Sower has 3, but 8 "modified" colonization techs. So I wanted to keep a zero sum. Also, some of the racial techs really are useless; I think you would agree the tundra tech movement is pretty useless for sower without adamantium.



I'll try the repair modules on UE; you are right there is more synergy. I'll see if there are some useless racial techs on UE also. And then I'll try adding things to other races too.



Hissho: I am stuck, because I really want to give them high evasion (which is not moddable today) and then fill them up with kinetic weapons.

Horatio: cheaper pop transports and a Star Trek inspired "Genesis Project" terraform.

Sophon, or maybe Craver: big, long range high damage weapons; stand off and kill from a distance

UE and Sophon: put more teeth into Feeble/Fearless Warriors by giving +% to invasion *attack*

Ref: Sowers - It's hard to decide which is more useful; ~5 turns less research to terraform to tundra or a bonus to planet types you should have already terraformed to lava/desert by that depth in the tech trees. Honestly, I think the improved colonial rights is the best thing they got.



Brainstorming on it, I think the key is finding things that will compliment the "story" and "theme" of a faction without compounding their strengths too much.



Like .... take the Hissho - they are angry birds in space who get real worked up when they win or lose. I get that they fly stuff well. What else do birds do? They see real well (maybe an improved sight radius tech?), come with built in maps (early access to "green" movement?), and sometimes like to decorate their nests (an extra approval improvement with some defense value?). All of the above would add flavor/uniqueness without messing with the "dangerzone" - which to me is making it easier to get those bonuses stacking.



In the same sense, to me the "dangerzone" with UE is making an econ victory easier. I think adding a repair vessel option would fit "story" (honestly, I think it would fit any space-faring empires story), "theme" (they seem very 40k to me, big armored ships need big armor repairs), and maybe breath some life into using armor cruisers and battleships rather then just dreads in the late game.

Is the trait not transferable from the hero ability?

Igncom1 wrote:
Their ships could come with some natural deflection of missiles, kinetics and lasers to increase their survivability.

Well, they could come with some natural interception of missiles, absorption of beams, and deflection of kinetics. That is true. But that is not what I want. I want them to *evade*. I may fake it, just to move on, with interception and absorption. The goal would be to survive to the kinetics phase and then rip you apart.



/#/endless-space/forum/37-modding/thread/15686-how-to-implement-decreased-accuracy-on-enemy-fleet

davea wrote:


Hissho: I am stuck, because I really want to give them high evasion (which is not moddable today) and then fill them up with kinetic weapons.

Their ships could come with some natural deflection of missiles, kinetics and lasers to increase their survivability.

Copperwire1632 wrote:
Is there any reason you have to remove the existing racial techs (which are some of the little flavor in the game)? There are two ways to balance games, really; you can nerf things until everyone is equal or you can give everyone cheese until they are equal. Cheese is usually more fun.

Well, everybody has a "risk threshold", and I guess we have now established mine is "medium high" but not infinite. I don't mind changing a variable that affects every race by a lot, as in my recent change to 4x reduce the amount of science gained from trade. But, when adding toys to one race, I don't want a situation where suddenly that race is way better. Each race (except sower) has exactly 5 unique/moved techs. Sower has 3, but 8 "modified" colonization techs. So I wanted to keep a zero sum. Also, some of the racial techs really are useless; I think you would agree the tundra tech movement is pretty useless for sower without adamantium.



I'll try the repair modules on UE; you are right there is more synergy. I'll see if there are some useless racial techs on UE also. And then I'll try adding things to other races too.



Hissho: I am stuck, because I really want to give them high evasion (which is not moddable today) and then fill them up with kinetic weapons.

Horatio: cheaper pop transports and a Star Trek inspired "Genesis Project" terraform.

Sophon, or maybe Craver: big, long range high damage weapons; stand off and kill from a distance

UE and Sophon: put more teeth into Feeble/Fearless Warriors by giving +% to invasion *attack*

Hupailija wrote:
Reality of spacebattle? As in throw small rock and destroy entire fleet at once



Problem is just that when we are dealing with space everything is really slow and really big.

Easiest way to destroy other ship in space is somehow throw small rock towards their ship... even better if you can get bit more velocity to that rock.



What is bit strange on Endless Space is how kinetic weapons accuracy/damage lowers the longer you are from opposing ship. Damage should rise and accuracy should be exactly same than it was in start.

You really can't do any evading manoevaurs in space and that bullet will go straight (though both ships does create small gravity field even in space, and since ships are quite heavy and big that field is probably bit larger).









but tbh idea of spacefight is something what we just can't realistically think due to (as far as I know) no one has tried to fight in outer space yet.



Though I agree that race/culture define what weapons we use in space. We (humans) would probably use "kinetic" weapons and "missiles".

We humans actually got some space tactic experience from the the "crazy ivan" period during the cold war. Submarines hunting and targeting eachother just using sensors and using heat layers to hide. Crazy ivan was a tactic used by the russians as they got bad sensor suit for detecting mostly US subs as they tailed them. So the russian Captain randomly turned 180 and full speed tried to scare any followers. The epitate was ofcorse invented by US captains that experiensed this Tactic.

davea wrote:
@ copperwire, thanks for the honest feedback. I have not played as sowers in a while. I agree that sowers already have some uniqueness; do you think most players would agree sowers AI does poorly? ("More poorly" than it plays other races, I mean?) There was a discussion thread a couple of weeks ago about that, but no one race stood out as being played poorly. I would guess hissho is played worst, because they only shine if they are continuously invading.



It is easy to assign these repair modules to any other race; do you feel these modules are interesting, and we could get better synergy on another race? This is just the first of several changes I plan to try out.

Honestly, I think the main reason the AI does badly is the terrible design of the default faction. If you want a better look at why, try starting a game with default Sowers and look at your turns to pop growth. Slow ships does not help either - and hurts the AI worse because the AI will never build engines on anything but a scout.



I like the idea - if you look back its one of the things I suggested. Is there any reason you have to remove the existing racial techs (which are some of the little flavor in the game)? There are two ways to balance games, really; you can nerf things until everyone is equal or you can give everyone cheese until they are equal. Cheese is usually more fun. Maybe you could try giving it to UE - there might be some use for it with HP tank fleets. Defense based fleets tend to die or not, and most healing occurs in combat rather then out of it.



I'd lean towards the old "Game Expansion Model" - give every faction something that makes them cooler, and use how cool a toy you give each faction as a way to balance the factions a little. As I remember, there was less forum drama back when we had "expansions" full of new toys rather then "updates" that are at best 50% nerf.