Hupailija wrote:


Amoeba I hate this race, mostly because I just can't understand it. Therefore I am not thinking it :P

Perhaps modules that give bonuses based on diplomatic status?



Unified Defense (Power mod):

+8% efficiency to all defense modules on ship per faction at peace, up to 3.

-6% efficiency per war

25 tons



Trade Traversal Engines (Civil mod)

+2 on ship per cooperation agreement

+3 on ship w/o weapon mods

+.5 (needs 2 to take effect) on fleet per cooperation agreement

50 tons



Allied Assault (Power mod)

+12% damage to all weapons mods per alliance, up to 2

+6% Fleet damage

-12% damage in war with another alliance

-15% damage for every war over 1

30 tons

This isn't possible, no matter what you do you can't affect to enemy fleet.

*unknown sentence detected, do you want to a) ignore b) try again c) abort*



Tactician skill does it, and so does one battle card. I was hoping if more people look, we might find a way.

Grubsnik wrote:
I found a few errors in your calculations. My besides the first deflect miscalc, I think you swapped intercept and intercept avoidance around when doing the math. At least for the original calcs.

Cheers, doesn't necesssarily change the point but I really approve correct values. (and I wonder what I was thinking when I did give false ones)

Hupailija wrote:
it would still be too powerful.



3 examples:



Weapon which fires 300 bullets, each does 1-2 damage, has interception avoidance of 100:

Absorb 200: you take 100-400 damage

Intercept 200: you take 299-598 damage

Deflect 200: you take 0 damage Actually, you take 100-200 damage



Weapon which fires 1 bullet, does 300-600 damage:

Absorb 200: you take 100-400 damage

Interception 200: you lower damage by at average 50%. At average damage taken is 150-300 1 round traveltime means you get 200 > rnd(1-100), so you always get 0 damage.

Deflect 200: you take 0 damage



Weapon which fires 1 bullet, does 900-1800 damage, fires once per 3 turns:

absorb 200: you take either 0 or 700-1600 damage

Intercept 200: Each turn bullet travels you lower chance for it to hit you by 25%, together it's approximately 60%.. you take 300-600 damage at average. the check is (200 > rnd(1-400)) => 4 chances at 50% ~= 94% chance to intercept. That is, if I understood the calculation for interception correct

Deflect 200: you take 0 damage.

I found a few errors in your calculations. My besides the first deflect miscalc, I think you swapped intercept and intercept avoidance around when doing the math. At least for the original calcs.

a.



Singularity cannon : A heavy weapon module that uses a mass to graviton conversion in the centre of an enemy fleet. Applies lower damage to every ship in a fleet that increases in damage with higher numbers of craft. A late game destroyer destroyer.

davea wrote:
It seems that in several of the last patches, weapons have been rebalanced to be more the same. For example, lasers were the most effective so they were nerfed, flak was too effective so it was nerfed. Now the weapon tree feels too generic to me. In other games, there were "interesting" weapons, like spinal mount weapons with huge damage and low rate of fire for capitol ships; neutron weapons that did crew damage but allowed ship capture; etc. Most of these things probably aren't moddable today.



a. What are some ideas for interesting ship weapon mechanics? (Let's stay away from ground combat for now, that is a whole diferent project).



b. What are some "hooks" we can use to mod weapons today? AFAIK we can only change values on the three weapon types, and we can only put one defense in each module.



c. What are some hooks we could request from the dev team, to make more interesting weapons? I have requested access to fleet evasion (reduce enemy accuracy) to let more battles get into short range. What else would help, which doesn't involve re-inventing the whole game?

a.

Swarm Missles -> Low damage but more then one missle per Salvo.

Unguided Warheads -> Less Accuracy but faster then other missles

Armored Missles -> Need more space but takes more than one flak hit to intercept



EMP Canon -> No hull damage but reduces the effectivity of Enemy beam/missle defense.

Microwave Canon -> interferes with enemy targeting reducing accuracy

Overloaded Laser -> needs one turn for cooldown but destroys enemy modules.



Mass Catapult -> Very high space consumption but can not be countered by def.

Ionized Loads -> reduces shield/missle defense effectivity

Explosive projectiles -> Less projectiles per salvo but higher damage

Grubsnik wrote:
You don't have to tweak the tonnage. You can just add

$(ClassShip,ShipClassSmall1)

To a module and it will be disabled in the designer for ships who aren't in the proper upgrade path.



Sorry for being late to the party with this intel, got the idea a few hours ago and only had the time to test it just now.

Looks like i spoke too soon, apparently you can just add the weapon to the legal ship-types and then swap to an illegal ship-type. The game won't let you add anymore of the forbidden modules, but ones already equipped get to stay.



So you could get the forbidden weapon into a new ship design, but never retro-fit it into later editions.

iblise wrote:
Hupa, if you can crack this issue that has been driving me insane... and you haven't told me! I've tried what you've suggest every different way I can think of and it always fails. Put your money where your mouth is xD and show me your magic!

I will tell you whether it works or not as soon as someone has tried swarm engines in Endless Dream

It would be cool to see weapons that function sorta like the gravity spells in final fantasy where it deals % based damage.

Obviously by it's nature it would be very effective against battle ships and dreadnoughts. Not so much for destroyers.



Now where things get interesting is where is it going to be a:



A% damage to current health: Very strong towards ships at/near full health, but gets less effective as enemies' hp goes down, and by itself, non-lethal.

A% damage to maximum health: Strong in all situations, but to prevent it from being op, either a low base damage or single shot. (like missiles).

As well as the targets could be individual ship health, fleet wide, shield health as a total, or per module.



And, instead of of getting multiple weapons for the corresponding module number the effect is stacked on one. (more punch in one shot, but more likely to get blocked too).

Say you put two modules on a ship that deal 5% damage to current health, instead of getting two weapons that do 5% damage to current health, you get one weapon that deals 10% damage to current health.

Hupa, if you can crack this issue that has been driving me insane... and you haven't told me! I've tried what you've suggest every different way I can think of and it always fails. Put your money where your mouth is xD and show me your magic!

Hupailija wrote:
Deny traveling through wormhole from empire and add it to engines, should solve problem.

Requires one to edit engines and take couple unlocks off.

Igncom1 wrote:
You could make it % based, but I feel that may create more problems then it solves.

Lowering the reflector procent the higher damage a single shoot do? Can that creat more problem?

davea wrote:
*unknown sentence detected, do you want to a) ignore b) try again c) abort*



Tactician skill does it, and so does one battle card. I was hoping if more people look, we might find a way.

Oh dear, now you are using my weapon against me ... anyway this indeed is hardcoded.



in this case I choose c and wait for developers to allow us to access to paths we can't right now.

swedewolf wrote:
In space yes but weapon and tactics derives from planet of origin. Before reality of space battles klonk you in the head

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".

Or, to actually make starbases immobile?

Deny traveling through wormhole from empire and add it to engines, should solve problem.

Requires one to edit engines and take couple unlocks off.

Can you find a magic way to decrease enemy accuracy, or an equivalent effect?

This isn't possible, no matter what you do you can't affect to enemy fleet.

I was hoping that it would be possible to affect every empire but sadly it seems that even thats not possible.







Basically what the way he described does is that it allows us to point to direct point inside of xml... helpful and nice but still it doesn't let us do miracles.

Heh, I'd actually prefer a way to make only ships with the correct level of engine able to transit wormholes and simply not grant that to star bases.

Grubsnik wrote:
You don't have to tweak the tonnage.

You are a fount of useful information! Can you find a magic way to decrease enemy accuracy, or an equivalent effect?



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



Or, to actually make starbases immobile?



/#/endless-space/forum/37-modding/thread/15703-questions-how-to-make-a-starbase

davea wrote:
If you wish to continue there in parallel, that is fine, but I do intend to pursue these ideas. I like the idea of DN-only modules. Today we can only accomplish that by making the tonnage very large. Something like a spinal mount laser could have 20x the tonnage of a laser (roughly 180) and 25x the damage, for example. So it might barely fit in a cruiser, but it would be a bad idea. Unfortunately today we cannot mod different graphics, but this is the kind of thing I was looking for to make the weapons a little less symmetric.

You don't have to tweak the tonnage. You can just add

$(ClassShip,ShipClassSmall1)

To a module and it will be disabled in the designer for ships who aren't in the proper upgrade path.



Sorry for being late to the party with this intel, got the idea a few hours ago and only had the time to test it just now.

Igncom1 wrote:
You could make it % based, but I feel that may create more problems then it solves.

it would still be too powerful.



3 examples:



Weapon which fires 300 bullets, each does 1-2 damage, has interception avoidance of 100:

Absorb 200: you take 100-400 damage

Intercept 200: you take 299-598 damage

Deflect 200: you take 0 damage



Weapon which fires 1 bullet, does 300-600 damage:

Absorb 200: you take 100-400 damage

Interception 200: you lower damage by at average 50%. At average damage taken is 150-300

Deflect 200: you take 0 damage



Weapon which fires 1 bullet, does 900-1800 damage, fires once per 3 turns:

absorb 200: you take either 0 or 700-1600 damage

Intercept 200: Each turn bullet travels you lower chance for it to hit you by 25%, together it's approximately 60%.. you take 300-600 damage at average.

Deflect 200: you take 0 damage.



And now when we have seen how much damage deflect reduces in every case, lets see what happens if we change it to procentual:



Weapon which fires 300 bullets, each does 1-2 damage:

Deflect 30%: you take at average 100-200 damage ... ok, this is just twice as good than absorb

1 turn to arrive, weapon does 300-600 damage:

you reduce damage by at average 30%, this means that you take 200-400 damage.

3 turns to arrive, weapon does 900-1800 damage:

you reduce damage by at avererage 30%, this means that you take 600-1200 damage.



And now comparision:

30% deflect 300 bullets: 100-200 damage 1 bullet per round: 200-400 1 bullet per 3 rounds: 600-1200

200 absorb 300 bullets: 100-400 damage 1 bullet per round: 100-400 1 bullet per 3 rounds: 700-1600

200 intercept 300 bullets: 299-598 damage 1 bullet per round: 150-300 1 bullet per 3 rounds: 300-600





Curious I started with trying to prove why precent based is still too powerful and ended to prove how important good interception value is.

swedewolf wrote:
Can the deflector calculation be adjusted by damage lvl? Like high damage overwhelm it.

You could make it % based, but I feel that may create more problems then it solves.

Can the deflector calculation be adjusted by damage lvl? Like high damage overwhelm it.