Antera wrote:
I'm gonna release one later.

I believe that I shall wait for this new version to come out before starting playing again

I started modifying battle cards, here's the original descriptions that I've labeled and placed in the same order as your HCBattleCardDescriptor in case you wanted to chuck them in



BattleCardDescriptors.zip



(Just noticed the name is probably a bit misleading - these are the localization strings ready to be pasted into String_HC, not the actual battle cards)

Antera wrote:
Currently what I'm thinking is to make all the standard cards have equal trade-offs, so you have to trade performance in some area to gain performance in another. I'm also going to make more of them un-counter-able or counter-able by a specific card.

My suggestion here would be instead of removing the counter effects, is to use the "Countered" section of the battle cards and make them have the standard or lesser card effect

This way if you 'out-maneuver' your opponent you get a bonus to your fleet, and they may have a less effective maneuver. This does not stop the other fleet from performing their maneuver completely - that part just doesn't make any sense currently



I wonder if we can make the combat a little more interactive and have cards with a prerequisite that another card was previously played... not sure if we can bend the system that far or not

That way you could have reactive battles:

Un-countered [EvasiveManeuvers] might unlock [SneakAttack] for your fleet (extra damage unless the opponent counters [SneakAttack] with [Bogeyonyour6!])

[OverloadWeapon] might unlock [They'reonCooldown!] for the opponent (counter-attack)

Countered [EnergizeDefense] might unlock [BraceforImpact!] for your fleet (uncounterable defense)



Although even if that's not possible, it does give me ideas for a semi-reactive combat (or at least add some flavor!) -

Battle cards that really only take effect IF they are either countered, or counter

[BraceforImpact!] - uncounterable, standard: no effect, counters offensive, on counter -50% damage taken

[WeAreYourFriends...] - defense, standard: BlockAttack Self, counters nothing, if countered +100% damage dealt

After playing a few more games with lasers, it -appears- like shields are absorbing damage per ship per beam weapon per round

Combats involving MR or SR beam weapons that should have been dealing far in excess of the shield absorption were doing 0 damage (literally hundreds of points of MR or SR lasers against just 30 points of shields would result in 0 damage, even when I dropped absorption dramatically down to 5 - that still wasn't enough and I had to reduce the absorption waaaaay down to 1/2/3/4/5/10 on the tech levels(and drop SRB damage by 2 points per level)

Playtests of lasers seems to be ok now, probably slightly less effective than ballistic but in the ballpark of useable



Current shield stats I'm testing with:

TL1: Absorb 1, Defense 50

TL2: Absorb 2, Defense 57

TL3: Absorb 3, Defense 67

TL4: Absorb 4, Defense 78

TL5: Absorb 5, Defense 93

TL6: Absorb 6, Defense 102



SRBeam damage pushed back one tier (tier1 now 5 damage, tier2 7 damage etc)



Even at this level, I think they might need a combat card that negates shield absorption for them to really compete as an effective weapon (modified EMP card)

Alternatively Ballistics need to be re-worked with deflection in, so all 3 weapons can be countered by defense

At the moment there is little incentive for anyone to run weapons other than ballistics when there is the chance that beams and missiles will do nothing, while ballistics are guaranteed damage



[edit]

Testing with deflectors bouncing 1 shot per level, so far so good - you now have to switch from ballistic against ships that have stacked deflectors (or go SR for the burst shots), switch from lasers if they stack shields (or go LR beam for high damage), and switch from missile if they stack flak (or go MR torpedoes)

Each line now has a counter, and a way around if you -really- want to go a single type



Also fleets with a mix of ballistic, laser, and missiles are much more viable as an all-round fleet (not optimal, but definitely not sucky)

@AKLV, that's strange error, hopefully I'll remember it for the future (hahaha); I load my mod by using the auto-launch so I don't always notice if they're showing up on the mod page or not.



@notu, this is what I got from the devs:

Order of operation for application of damage:

1) Interception test (only used by missile but could be used by other weapons too)

Flak Interception >= Missile Evasion * (1+ Turn before Reach) * Random]0;1[

2) Deflection of projectile (only used by deflector but could be used by other weapons too)

3) Damage Absorption (only used by laser but could be used by other weapons too)

4) Application of the damages left regarding the defenses.



They also said shield damage absorption is supposed to be per round. I remember doing preliminary tests where gattling damage is quite a bit lower than shield absorption and damage was dealt by using nosebreaker. (this was pre-Auriga) I'll have to run some test later on this. If the absorption formula changed, it may be a bug as the new patches never mentioned a formula change.



As for deflectors, I avoided shot bounce because it renders railguns useless. Even if it is a high level railgun against a low level deflector, which doesn't feel realistic to me.



As for combat cards, I was going to try to implement a warp interdictor card, which require an interdictor component to be present and only blocks retreat (no other effect). I want avoid the use of counter effect because it has a tendency to turn the game into one of chance. Too much like rock paper scissor.



Lastly, I actually dislike having a combat system that allows a mix fleet to be competitive as it greatly decrease the amount of though that players will put into their fleet composition. Putting together mix fleet is a no-brainer; requiring players to use multiple fleet of different composition to excel force them to strategize and prioritize.

Antera wrote:
They also said shield damage absorption is supposed to be per round. I remember doing preliminary tests where gattling damage is quite a bit lower than shield absorption and damage was dealt by using nosebreaker. (this was pre-Auriga) I'll have to run some test later on this. If the absorption formula changed, it may be a bug as the new patches never mentioned a formula change.



As for deflectors, I avoided shot bounce because it renders railguns useless. Even if it is a high level railgun against a low level deflector, which doesn't feel realistic to me.



As for combat cards, I was going to try to implement a warp interdictor card, which require an interdictor component to be present and only blocks retreat (no other effect). I want avoid the use of counter effect because it has a tendency to turn the game into one of chance. Too much like rock paper scissor.



Lastly, I actually dislike having a combat system that allows a mix fleet to be competitive as it greatly decrease the amount of though that players will put into their fleet composition. Putting together mix fleet is a no-brainer; requiring players to use multiple fleet of different composition to excel force them to strategize and prioritize.

It looks like damage reduction is applied before damage absorption - when I updated the spreadsheet formulas for that it seems to reflect what's happening in-game at least. Whether or not that's -meant- to happen I don't know

I ran some very simple in-game tests 1 ship vs 1 ship with 5 top tier pulsed lasers vs 2 shields ending with 0 damage, which should only be true if their damage was reduced before absorption (defensive cards were countered)

To get the balance right, I had to reduce the shields armour rating, and could then bump up the absorption. I'll upload the modified spreadsheet a bit later in case you're interested in having a look.



I also thought the railguns bouncing didn't sound right, but if an entire range of lasers and missiles can be completely negated, why shouldn't one of the ballistic also be?

So I changed the ballistics to be the other way round:

SRB - Assault Cannon: fires large projectiles in rapid succession. While potentially devastating to ships, the assault cannon lacks the projectile speed to effectively track moving targets at range, and may bounce off deflective armour.

MRB - Autocannon: fires a burst of explosive projectiles with decent target tracking. Balanced (etc...)

LRB: Railcannon: accelerates projectiles down multiple long barrels to incredible speeds. The railcannon must wait for the barrels to cool between shots, but the extra time allows for the most efficient tracking system. Poses a serious threat even to heavily armoured targets.



With the cards I totally agree with you in principle in that we want to avoid random rock-paper-scissors, but there is a little more to it than that at the moment - if you take the time to analyse their fleet composition, you can often predict what card they might play and act accordingly.

In practice I find the cards have a fairly small overall effect in most combat unless the two fleets are balanced, and when they are balanced it adds the chance you can come out the victor if you play your cards right instead of both fleets either destroying each other or doing nothing.

I think that removing the counter effect entirely will remove the most interactive part of combat in endless space. Without it, combats will be completely pre-determined based on number crunching rather than allowing for the "star wars" effect of a bit of luck and some good planning allowing a smaller fleet to still have some effect and come out alive.





I would have to disagree with you regarding fleet composition - I would argue that building 1 fleet of only ballistic, 1 fleet of only laser, and 1 fleet of only missile and throwing them at what ever encounter guarantees you victory is the easy path.

I would say creating a mixed fleet is like the difference between a drinkable cocktail (or coffee if you don't drink), and a great cocktail. Yes, anyone can create a mixed fleet, but not everyone can get the mix correct. However -anyone- can create a singularly armed fleet, and they will all be equally as good.



By the way, please don't take my disagreeing or tinkering as me trying to tell you how to run your own mod - I would not still be playing the game if you hadn't uploaded your mod!

You should of course just take on board what you want, and ignore the rest

I can message the dev and see if the game formulas were changed. (You should too since they pay more attention when more people message them) Would have done it yesterday if the forum isn't lagging like crazy, takes me a minute to load any thread this past week.



My counter argument for railgun deflection is that you could deflect railgun with any level of deflector since railgun always have does one projectile at all tech levels. There's no way to say compare the penetrating power of railgun to deflecting power of a deflector and assign a probability of deflection. Which decrease incentive to develop higher level deflector. My prefer solution to balancing kinetic is to simply up defense. Which in a way is like upping the stopping power of deflectors. (in a very gross, average kinda way) I also favor using single parameter where possible to perform balancing because I think that's where devs went down the wrong path when trying to re-invent the combat system for Disharmony. They started adding too many variables.



For the battle cards, I highly recommend making and publishing your own set. I really only plan on making a very simple set of cards, in part because I get tired of choosing from too large or complex a selection and will likely not include too big a selection in the final release.



We can agree to disagree on the fleet composition issue. I just find it more strategically meaningful to require the use of multiple fleets of different composition depending on the opponent. I think this also more closely reflect real-world combat where battle groups tend to be tailored to opponent where possible prior to sending them into combat.



I don't plan to finish HC until the end of the month since I've been busy IRL. There'll probably be balancing/compatibility updates but nothing major after this next version. However, once the next version is done, everyone's welcome to perform their own tweaks as well as combine HC with other mods.

Antera wrote:
My counter argument for railgun deflection is that you could deflect railgun with any level of deflector since railgun always have does one projectile at all tech levels. There's no way to say compare the penetrating power of railgun to deflecting power of a deflector and assign a probability of deflection. Which decrease incentive to develop higher level deflector. My prefer solution to balancing kinetic is to simply up defense. Which in a way is like upping the stopping power of deflectors. (in a very gross, average kinda way) I also favor using single parameter where possible to perform balancing because I think that's where devs went down the wrong path when trying to re-invent the combat system for Disharmony. They started adding too many variables.

Yeah the forums have been running like a legless pig..



Ideally we'd just have an armour rating, and an armour penetration rating on weapons, with the armour rating degrading after enough damage... but that would be too easy

However to move to a single parameter, I think it needs to have a similar effect across the weapons - either use defense, or deflect/absorb/intercept, but not defense on 1 and absorb/xacc on the others

I don't think you'll be able to balance the weapons if you use damage reduction on one set, but nullification on the other two



Also, I probably should have posted that aside from a description change I changed the projectile counts

SRB: 1 shot, reload 4, 72-271 damage (TL1-TL6)

MRB: 2 shots, reload 9, 35-131 damage

LRB: 4/6/8 shots reload 14, 12-23 damage

So I've used what we've been given to create a crude armour penetration method with projectile deflection



I agree with you in a real-world scenario on fleet composition, but in a game that just tends to have fleets stacking whatever is considered the 'most powerful' weapon - and in this case without the deflection on ballistic, they win in most cases. With the base mod, I went through a normal AI 8 player game using only LR ballistics on every ship design, and lost very few battles even against overwhelming combat rating, even against tank ships

By introducing the deflection, it actually promotes your idea that you must try and tailor a fleet to the enemy - no longer can I simply stack ballistic and overcome every foe, high deflection WILL stop my fleet instead of my fleet winning the combat a little slower



I think people should be able to happily play together in the same game where one can build fleets completely tailored to each opponent, and another can build more versatile fleets ready to handle attacks from several fronts.

Here's the modified values I've been working with for weapons and defenses (I haven't touched fighters; my friend said they seem to be working ok, although the AI doesn't seem to take any point defense)

I updated the simulation side so you can now check combats on 3 different scenarios at a time, each with inputs for number of ships, weapons per ship, avg defense modules per ship, and dropdowns for targeting tactic and type of ships

(so to replicate the 3 you had, just enter 1 gun 0 modules 1 ship CP2, 1 gun 4 modules 1 ship CP2, 1 gun 8 modules 1 ship CP4 as the 3 scenarios all with nosebreaker)

At the moment they are set for small/medium/large scale battles ranging from 10 light scouts to 5 heavy dreadnaughts

It's not a full simulation in that it doesn't account for lost shots due to overkill or cards, but it seems accurate enough for balancing at least the weapon potential



I've included a switch to change shields from armour first to absorption first, but so far in all my game tests armour applying first calculations still seem to be more accurate (haven't PM'd about that yet)



Your original laser calculations were a bit off, as you totaled the damage for the entire 60 rounds then deducted absorption - absorption takes effect each round (every 1/2 second); as such it's simply not possible for 1 gattling laser to ever penetrate a shield by itself (your calculation shows it doing 190 damage vs 4 shields and 79 vs 8)



HC balance -edit.zip

Wow, talk about in-depth analysis, and here I just play the game. Just wanted to thank you for this mod, I really like the way the tech tree is set up. I've combined HC, AGED and IA with some of my own mods and it makes for a very fun game.

notu wrote:
Your original laser calculations were a bit off, as you totaled the damage for the entire 60 rounds then deducted absorption - absorption takes effect each round (every 1/2 second); as such it's simply not possible for 1 gattling laser to ever penetrate a shield by itself (your calculation shows it doing 190 damage vs 4 shields and 79 vs 8)

Thanks for the work!



So the laser calculation goes back to what I was saying earlier. Pre-Auriga, this is how laser damage is supposed to be calculated. And it is very much true that a single gattling laser can never penetrate the shield by itself. Using the pre-Auriga combat formula I had inputted values that require the use of multiple gattling to "overwhelm" the shield of the same level.



I got back from Meedoc. He says the combat calculations were not supposed to have changed, i.e. what's in the original spreadsheet should have been the correct formulas. He's going to check in on possible un-intended changes. Until he's done with that I'm a little leery of making further balance changes so I might just keep the next update to only battle cards, +50% hull hp, and any small tweak I see. Unfortunately this mean I might need to do another version once the devs finish investigating. Oh wells, I guess there's no rushing things. In the mean time, I guess let's keep trying different things and see what goes?





@viking74, glad you like it, I had fun making up tech icons and descriptions

Sounds good!

Hopefully you can get some use from the extra simulation sections, I found it handy to quickly test different scenarios and interesting to see how the weapons fare on each targeting method; they are all set so you can just modify the first formula and copy it across to the second and third without changing anything (and obviously you can just paste in your own weapon/armour stats from the original spreadsheet)



Hope you have a great new year, and thanks again for releasing your mod

New versions up!



Includes compatibility fix with the new Vaulter faction and revamped the initial set of battle cards that are available. I'm gonna need more time with the remaining battle cards (tech unlock, race-specific, hero, and so on). I have some new ideas for battle cards that i need to test.



Note that because of new card family organization, Defense cards now have Orange borders. Retreat cards has its own category and the borders are Yellow, the color of cowardice.



Also, I changed the file package to rar instead of zip because rar are more compact and the max rar size this forum allows is 7.6 MB, whereas zip is limited 976 kB. Let me know if somebody can't unzip a rar file.

Any chance to get a merged version of this and your trait mod? Where things like the fighter/bomber weight reduction traits work with your changes to them in this?



Also the carrier hulls are looking a little useless with no bonuses at all.



Otherwise it's a fantastic mod, brilliant changes.

I'm not seeing bombs anywhere on the tech tree and they don't seem to be unlocking with the bomber techs or anything, making planetary bombers useless. Playing a game as Harmony if it's a faction specific oversight.



There's also a few empty techs in the combat tree, and something with a placeholder description I haven't gotten to yet to figure out.

Astasia wrote:
Any chance to get a merged version of this and your trait mod? Where things like the fighter/bomber weight reduction traits work with your changes to them in this?

I'm gonna release one later.

Astasia wrote:
Also the carrier hulls are looking a little useless with no bonuses at all.

Carrier should have -25% fighter/bomber tonnage, which faction's carrier is not showing bonus?

Astasia wrote:
I'm not seeing bombs anywhere on the tech tree and they don't seem to be unlocking with the bomber techs or anything, making planetary bombers useless. Playing a game as Harmony if it's a faction specific oversight.

These should be L5 techs, same techs as L2 fighter (AP bomb) and L2 bomber (AB bomb)

Astasia wrote:
There's also a few empty techs in the combat tree, and something with a placeholder description I haven't gotten to yet to figure out.

That's weird, there shouldn't be any empty techs, if there are the mod may not be loading correctly. Try using the steam file checker, then delete the HC directory, and then put it back in. If that does not work, then I'm a little baffled because that doesn't happen on my computer. Also, you are starting a new game right? The mod cannot be applied to a save game from another mod or from the unmodded game.

Antera wrote:
I'm also surprise LRB is working that much better than MRB. SRB being weak isn't surprising to me because of the HP issue.

MRB were suffering the same fate as SRB, just to a lesser extent

The increase to HP has brought them to expected levels, at least with testing so far

any chance we can combine this mod with some mod that generates much larger galaxy's?

i'm the sort of player who likes to play a single game for many many hours thus the standard game

generator maps are way to small. i hoped to get this working with the "alternativ Galaxy Generator"

but the "alternativ Galaxy Generator" itself gives me strange camera and zoom effects :/

I'm not really sure how you combine AGG with other mods, somebody made some instructions once but I forgot where they are at. Could try posting and see if someone out there remembers how.



If I remember correctly the strange camera and zoom effect has to do with the way the game internal divie up the zoom levels. Specifically there is only so many levels and the most zoomed out level encompass the whole galaxy. I'm not sure it can fixed without hardcode modifications.

Is it possible to merge this with your very good Trait Mod by just copying the files from the Trait mod into the mod folder of this one? As I saw it nothing was overwritten.

Help would be much appreciated.

Thanks !