Indeed, As a point of reference, my other mod messed with things like armor (I make defenses weightless, but 1 to a ship) and made it to be as important or more so to the survival of a ship.



It lead to wars of attrition as the number of fleets in blockades escalated quickly, and I attempted to compensate for this by giving player weapon boosting tonnage bonuses to create (Big gun ships) at extreme cost and by making defenses deteriorate when going into medium and melee phases to simulate defenses being weakened over time.



It kinda worked and leads to wars where battle cards are more important then most advantages, making the tension in battles almost terrifying and exhilarating.



Not that I am advertising my own mon on another page, but If you do take a stab at the combat system and want that type of feel then /#/endless-space/forum/37-modding/thread/15823-igncom1-s-totally-unbalanced-mod-the-sequel! maby even just check the modded files if not give it a game or two....or three he he.

Thanks, I'll give it go.

I think we should sooner or later put something together together.

Igncom1 wrote:
Indeed, As a point of reference, my other mod messed with things like armor (I make defenses weightless, but 1 to a ship) and made it to be as important or more so to the survival of a ship.



It lead to wars of attrition as the number of fleets in blockades escalated quickly, and I attempted to compensate for this by giving player weapon boosting tonnage bonuses to create (Big gun ships) at extreme cost and by making defenses deteriorate when going into medium and melee phases to simulate defenses being weakened over time.



It kinda worked and leads to wars where battle cards are more important then most advantages, making the tension in battles almost terrifying and exhilarating.



Not that I am advertising my own mon on another page, but If you do take a stab at the combat system and want that type of feel then /#/endless-space/forum/37-modding/thread/15823-igncom1-s-totally-unbalanced-mod-the-sequel! maby even just check the modded files if not give it a game or two....or three he he.

That makes sense. One of the reasons I haven't touched health / armor yet is that with the changes made so far, a lot of battles already conclude as a draw. This is especially the case if tech levels are fairly similar or ship designs are particularly well suited for one another. It has made our games a lot more fun. I fear if I boost armor right now - it will literally lead to wars of attrition. I'm pretty happy how things play right now - there are some other aspects I'd like to work on (like AI..) but I await more game changes before doing too much in that area. A lot of effort made at this stage can be wasted long-term.

v1.4.2 released:



Added defense bonuses to Engine modules to make the higher ones more viable in Ship Design.

Did you update the AI-Ship-design-templates accordingly?

Aye, I have had to update this previously as well to ensure they use the 'new' weapons and defense modules.



The AI is generally pretty good with those, certainly fielding more interesting fleets. I'm not sure how far the AI can be pushed though as it's limitations are largely driven by how combat works in Endless Space. The rock, paper, scissors mechanic leads to difficult situations for the AI as they can't easily make a decision of what a 'good' design would be. Best we could do is create them in such a way that they make designs which veterans would consider the 'best' multipurpose ships. The AI is never going to be fantastic at hard-countering you unless they somehow manage to focus specific fleets at specific opponents and build up their forces accordingly - as well as deploy them on the correct side of their empire.

I think Incom1's modifications to ship-design have the best potential to prevent the main-problems I have with the ship-combat-system. Unfortunately they also limit your freedom in that way.



With engine giving dodge, I could also imagine giving the smaller hulls dodge aswell. And bigger hulls more armor maybe or more tonnage.

@Ail - that's similar to how Space Empires (4?) did it I believe. It makes total sense for smaller ships to have a higher evasion chance and bonuses to accuracy - with bigger ships providing more tonnage and protection.



One of the things that bugged me a little was the fact that tonnage per CP becomes LESS advantageous as the ship classes increase, rather than more - due to how tonnage modules work. This is one area I might address, though in return a smaller vessel needs to provide different benefits which make them viable end-game choices.



In an absolutely ideal world - a perfect fleet should have a large flagship (dreadnought), 2-3 escort vessels (cruisers) and then a bunch of picket ships (destroyers). Each playing their own roles. This would be easier to accomplish if Flak worked fleet wide as you could create destroyer hulls with a huge bonus to Flak and/or point-defense. Ah well, the game has a long way to go with addons/expansions, so we've barely touched the surface of what we will end up with eventually. (Both with and without mods)

It was so even in Master of Orion 1.



It had really, really vast differences between the ship-sizes.



Small ships had only 3 Hitpoints in the beginning and 27 with the best armor.

Huge ships had 400 in the beginning and 3600 with the best armor.



The best weapon did 200-1000 damage. It was absolutely useless against swarms of small ships as it would be total overkill to use against them. But they were great agains big ships and colonies because those usually had very strong shields which this weapon was great at penetrating.

On the other hand you had weapons with 4x16-30 Damage. They could barely scratch Huge ships as those absorbed 20 Damage per shot with the best shields.

And there even were some special weapons that did like 5 or 10 Damage to all ships nearby. Great against the small ones, useless against the biggies.

I will say that my current mod is very flawed.



I am still having problems with the balance and the way different weapons do damage compared to the effectiveness of the defenses, But it is a problem I am (slowly) working on.

I'd really love if one could mod the formulas that calculate how much damage a ship does when shooting at another one. This would allow for a complete revamp of the combat-mechanics without having to find tricky workarounds for balance-problems that just don't really seem like they can be avoided (neither by devs nor modders) with the current damage-calculation-model.

I am sorry I have not tried the mod. How does it handle defense for engines? Does it generate flak and shield graphics in the tactical view? The dodge capability has been requested for long time but does not exist:



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

Ail wrote:
It was so even in Master of Orion 1.

Ahh yes, good old Moo1. The only downside with the game was the Heroes of Might and Magic style 'stacking' of ships. I never really liked that, Moo2 was much more enjoyable as a result as each individual ship mattered a lot.



You are right though, moo1 did indeed have this already. The way it handled tech levels and hitpoints/armor/weapons was very enjoyable, in my opinion. (Same with Engines, Shields, etc.)

Ail wrote:
I'd really love if one could mod the formulas that calculate how much damage a ship does when shooting at another one. This would allow for a complete revamp of the combat-mechanics without having to find tricky workarounds for balance-problems that just don't really seem like they can be avoided (neither by devs nor modders) with the current damage-calculation-model.

I couldn't agree more Ail - it would make a huge difference if we could mod the combat-mechanics in a lot more depth. Who knows, at some point we might be granted with a lot more hooks to work with and even the ability to insert some custom formulas.

davea wrote:
I am sorry I have not tried the mod. How does it handle defense for engines? Does it generate flak and shield graphics in the tactical view? The dodge capability has been requested for long time but does not exist:



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

For Engines I've opted for a percentage increase davea - since Engines don't fall under 'defense' modules I felt like it would be too much work giving them individual deflect, absorb and intercept abilities. It works exactly like the Power/Support Module which boosts defenses on a ship, though obviously with different values based on the Engine size. I'd very much prefer if we had more specific combat mechanics to play with. E.g. dodge/evasion, hit-chance (like the computers in Moo), proper Shields which absorb damage, proper armor which reduces damage, armor and shield penetration, and the ability for individual components to get damaged and/or destroyed in combat, removing their benefit from the ship immediately.



The latter is the most complicated as it doesn't work like that in the engine, anything else the devs could create hooks for even if vanilla doesn't contain it. Obviously not priorities as they have plenty of work to do on the game and the addons, but giving modders more toys to play with would lead to more diverse and interesting mods and as a side-result to more exposure and longevity for the game. (Some total conversions will benefit, if not require such hooks to really accomplish the total conversion.)

OK, so if I have no flak and the fastest possible engine, I still get destroyed by missiles. That is one of the only implementations available, sadly. Nobody used my hissho battle cards, but I was able to add battle cards with evasion:



/#/endless-space/forum/37-modding/thread/15796-released-hissho-evasion

Well if the bonus is a % based one, and you have no base flak protection then no wounder.

davea wrote:
OK, so if I have no flak and the fastest possible engine, I still get destroyed by missiles. That is one of the only implementations available, sadly. Nobody used my hissho battle cards, but I was able to add battle cards with evasion:



/#/endless-space/forum/37-modding/thread/15796-released-hissho-evasion

The method you used there was the first route I explored. The downside I found was that whilst a reduction of accuracy on the enemy is what I want to achieve, I only wish this to occur to the ships targeting the ship with the engine on it. The accuracy debuff unfortunately applies to the entire enemy fleet - which means that if one of your ships has an engine and the rest don't, all of them would benefit from the 'evasion'. It was contrary to what I was trying to achieve and would add up to high values too quickly in larger fleets.



If there was a way to debuff only the ship firing at the ship with the engine and only whilst it's firing at that ship, we would have 'true' evasion. We live in hope.

Good point. The biggest limitation to general modding is what we have called "scope modifiers". There are very limited ways that objects can affect each other. The evasion ability is "from my hero, to your fleet". As you point out, what I implemented is "from my fleet, to your fleet" which isn't really what I meant. What we want is "from my ship, to your ship which is attacking my ship". Maybe in a future release they will generalize this so that all these relationships are possible.

Couldn't have put it better myself. There should really be a scope that involved ship A attacking ship B - as this is clearly used to determine hits and targeting. We're just missing a hook for modders. (Or there is one and we don't know about it as it's not used in any of the existing code visible to us)

It does not exist, because the dev team has commented multiple times that my evasion request is "somewhere on their todo list (but not near the top)".