Tempest's Idea Dump: "Soft Kill" HP System/Shatter Effect

[Tempest]

I've been thinking about an alternative HP system, basically you grind a ship down until it becomes effectively useless. This idea revolves around an exponential loss in system effectiveness, assuming we define a "system" as the amount of energy gen or stores/shield gens or capacitors/weapon blocks you have on your ship.

Say your ship has 100 energy generator blocks that have a generating power of 1000e/s combined (yes I know the math is off), you lose 1 to enemy fire, bringing the overall effectiveness of the system down, to roughly 99%, you loose 4 more, 90%, from there the loss in system efficiency or functionality increases exponentially until you reach a point where the system is "disabled", i.e. having 50 generator blocks still attached to your damaged ship, but they generate no power.

The concept is hard for me to explain, partially because I'm not good with exponents, and I don't have a graph to go along with it. The example is somewhat abstract, only showing the concept, without any hard math. Also comes the unresolved problems of how to make it so a person doesn't just enter build mode mid-battle, place another generator block, and have the disabled system "reset".



The second idea is a cheap one that doesn't deserve it's own thread. The "Shatter Effect" would work a bit like punch-through and a shotgun. Basically, a projectile would hit an object, "shatter" into a number of secondary projectiles, with the damage of the original being halved and then divided between them. The secondary projectiles, while traveling through the inside of the ship, would experience high resistance from armor and extremely high resistance from shields, for balancing purposes. However, a sufficiently large projectile could shred the innards of another vessel.


As stated, both ideas are a bit abstract, feel free to give some constructive input, and help build on these ideas.

 

[WaffulMann]

That would be nice.

Also, I would like for generators grouped together to generate more energy, so you can choose between:
1) big generator lots of energy but can and will explode upon enemy fire
2) lots of small generators that generate not a lot of energy and still will explode but one explosion will not affect another


Shatter effects, like tank shells? Nice idea.

 

[jayman38]

+1 to shatter effect. I think that's a great idea for an effect. very similar to another idea someone had for a bouncing weapon effect. This one seems better and more "realistic" or at least more useful. To keep from being too similar to other effects, maybe it should only split/shard if the target block gets destroyed. Essentially, I see it as being just like punch-through with two half-damage punching bullets/lasers/missiles going in random directions. This might even be a good idea for the new Damage Pulse projectile. (The devs are figuring out how to improve the Damage Pulse weapon now.)

I am a fan of the idea of catastrophic explosions, so I think instead of exponentially reduce system effectiveness as components are destroyed, exponentially increase the chance of a catastrophic explosion that damages multiple of the remaining blocks of that type. You still kind of have the problem of in-combat repairs resetting the exponential damage, but I actually consider that somewhat realistic as a valid tactic. Maybe a server configuration option to pick between the two very different damage ideas.

 

[Dragleones]

I really like the concept of explosions. Instead of damaging the remaining blocks of that type I can think about a simple way to do it:

System blocks (Power-regen/Power-storage/Shield-regen/Shield-Storage/Weapon-modules/etc) would deal a percentage of their health or just flat damage to all blocks in a certain radius or to aligned blocks when destroyed.

I dislike big chain reactions destroying half of a ship when you only damage a few blocks, but with balanced damage numbers of the explosion (around 1%-5% of the block health (...or even less)) in a radius of 5 blocks this would mean that if you destroy multiple nearby system-blocks you would reach a point where you destroy whole chunks of the attacked ship.

 

[blurb357]

what is it with all these new members!

 

[jayman38]

what is it with all these new members!

Make a good game, and they will come. /fieldofdreams

 

[Tempest]

what is it with all these new members!

I've actually been a lurker since before the time of beetlebear. I've never cared to register an account or post until recently though.

 

[jath]

Question: Why disable mid-battle repair? It happens ALL THE TIME in the movies and TV, and it's not like they can repair all 15-40 blocks before getting shot at again...

It might get them one more shot, or the chance to escape. If they are needing to repair mid-battle, they are probably in dire straights anyway. There's really no reason to disallow it.

 

[Tempest]

The issue is that it would "reset" the exponential loss values, buffing the power of that system back up just for placing one block, while not truly fixing the whole system.

Perhaps astrotechnobeams could be used to actually "fix" the system.