Recognized Diminishing returns design

[sgallaty]

We all know the numbers behind weapons. They are out of whack right now.

My suggestion is that all effects, and all cumulative systems employ diminishing returns.

In oversimplified terms, the first weapon block I add to a weapon gives me 100% contribution. The second gives me 90%. The 10th block I add gives no benefit. Those aren't real numbers, but the idea is that it should be possible to set a reasonably asymptote on the max power of any given system.

The same would go for defensive effects such as ion used for shield resistance. Rather than a flat 1%, 2% ... 90%, the curve would be a log curve and after 35%-40%, the costs would double and triple to get a single more point of resistance.

The point of all of this is to allow you as the designer to have some expectation of how damage will be bracketed.

 

[Jaaskinal]

The developers don't seem to want this because of scalability.

 

[Criss]

The developers don't seem to want this because of scalability.

Source?

To the OP, watch this! These are my thoughts exactly.

 

[Jaaskinal]

Source?

To the OP, watch this! These are my thoughts exactly.

Sauce is everything slowly being converted to flat rates/very slowly diminishing returns. Weapons used to have funky equations that resulted in lots of small outputs being the best DPS wise against shields, but then that got knocked down to each weapon block having 5dps. Thrust used to care about box dim, now it's just a slowly diminishing return upon block count. Shields have pretty much always been a slowly diminishing returns.

Also, when I say slowly diminishing, I mean it, aside from thrust which is ever so slightly noticeable when you make *larger* ships, I've never really felt constrained by them diminishing.

 

[Criss]

Sauce is everything slowly being converted to flat rates/very slowly diminishing returns. Weapons used to have funky equations that resulted in lots of small outputs being the best DPS wise against shields, but then that got knocked down to each weapon block having 5dps. Thrust used to care about box dim, now it's just a slowly diminishing return upon block count. Shields have pretty much always been a slowly diminishing returns.

Also, when I say slowly diminishing, I mean it, aside from thrust which is ever so slightly noticeable when you make *larger* ships, I've never really felt constrained by them diminishing.

Yeah, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that there were better systems. They switched weapons to a flat rate because they were introducing tons of new possibilities with a new system. That doesn't mean it's balanced yet. Thrust using box dims is terrible. I wouldn't want that. It probably changed because that was probably a bit restrictive on smaller ships. And according to the post a few months back, they have plans to redo thrust mechanics again.

That's not a source btw. That's an inference. If the dev wrote down here that there was already a better plan or that what we wanted wasn't going to work, I could take that seriously.

People complain about missiles being one of the few viable weapons. How default beam range is too short. How damage pulse is never used. They have a lot to do in order to get some balanced gameplay. I don't see why we can't consider what the OP said might be a solution when nobody else is providing possible answers, including the devs.

 

[sgallaty]

My only goal is to get the devs to think about what their 'top end' target should be for DPS for a given weapon set under ideal circumstances so they can envision and design around it.

With the way things are right now, there's no sensible math that can be done on balancing defensive armor, because nothing defends against 50 mis / 50 beam / 50 over. If you could defend against that with damage soak, you would be invincible and that's impractical too.

 

[Jaaskinal]

That's an inference.

seem

yes

 

[CyberTao]

The Devs seem keen on making all styles of ships viable. Meaning you would be allowed to build as big as you want, with no restriction or funky functions to get in the way. The 5 dps per block flat rate is more or less here to stay, shown by how vigorously Cal defended it.

If the block count is the same between 'fleets' (A large ship with 12k mass vs 2 6k mass), then they will be comparable stat wise. If you want to add a curve, or otherwise make it so 2 6k ships > 1 12k, then that'd be something we'll see as an option in the config (Just like how you can adjust thrust and shield scaling).

 

[Criss]

I don't see why you aren't concerned. We hear often enough of the complaints about weapons and hull.

I also don't think you should speak for Cal, considering he had to redo crafting twice because of players voicing their opinions on it. I am voicing a concern. I genuinely think this could solve imbalanced gameplay. I do find it imbalanced. In the video I posted earlier I was attacking the same ship I was piloting with incredibly small weapons. Do you know how much space is left to fill inside that ship? I could double it's mass with weapons alone. How is the health system going to solve the fact that I can blow anything away? They would have to come up with something that us players have not thought of. I would be rallying behind a health-based change and not this thread if a health-based solution came about.

I'm not really sure how where the 2 6k > 1 12k came from. This suggestion does not make one ship better than another when they are comparable masses. A diminishing return on weapons mean that one can focus on firepower, another can focus on armor, one can focus on speed. But they can't have all 3, which is something I see happen with the current system. 2 out of those three at least.

Sven the slayer had insane amounts of firepower in the blood and steel tournament. He was also incredibly hard to kill. His ship was less than or around 300 meters long and dishing out the damage that I would expect from a ship three times his size.

 

[CyberTao]

I would expect

You build your ships in a certain fashion. Good for you that it also works with how the game currently works. Adding diminishing returns would just redefine standard ship ratios, not add diversity. I respond to you because you post that video around with almost certainty that it is better, when the reality is that is just how you prefer it. Remove all the fluffy interior, and you basically got our average fighter or drone. It's a system based on fighters.

Diminishing returns were removed when we got the new weapons. It was a way to prevent waffleguns since you could now gain the same damage in 1 group as you did in 50. Followed by the addition of a power penalty for having multiple groups, it made effects more appealing. Adding diminishing returns would just take us back to waffleguns being the most efficient way to spit out DPS, removing the use for punch or pierce entirely.

 

[Criss]

You build your ships in a certain fashion. Good for you that it also works with how the game currently works. Adding diminishing returns would just redefine standard ship ratios, not add diversity. I respond to you because you post that video around with almost certainty that it is better, when the reality is that is just how you prefer it. Remove all the fluffy interior, and you basically got our average fighter or drone. It's a system based on fighters.

Diminishing returns were removed when we got the new weapons. It was a way to prevent waffleguns since you could now gain the same damage in 1 group as you did in 50. Followed by the addition of a power penalty for having multiple groups, it made effects more appealing. Adding diminishing returns would just take us back to waffleguns being the most efficient way to spit out DPS, removing the use for punch or pierce entirely.

Alright, I need you to explain some things.

I am almost positive that the thread was created before the OP saw my video. It's also garnered a bit of support in previous threads. Just because I prefer it does not mean it's wrong. I prefer it because it can work.

What is a waffle gun. I don't know what that is.

It is most certainly not a system based on "fighters", or what you would consider a fighter. It is a system that grounds our grossly oversized weapons to a more realistic scale. I've stated this a few times. I will state it again. I DO NOT WANT SUPERWEAPONS ON EVERY SHIP. There should be an incentive for building an interior. There will be with the health update. Cal told me this himself. But that doesn't solve the weapon aspect.

That's why I used the more realistic weapon size. Was it perfect? No. I should have killed the ship faster. Was it better than blowing it away in 1 shot? You bet your ass it was! Combat that revolves around actually breaking down the systems of a ship is exciting. It's not exciting when I can guarantee a kill after shields go down.

As for the old weapons, the ones before we got the new system; The reason a small weapon could get the same damage as a large one was because of the sliders. I could give my one cannon block massive amounts of damage and have a terrible setup on my larger array. There was more to that then just the diminishing returns.

You're also thinking of this diminishing return being applied in a completely different way than what we are suggesting.

The way (I presume) it worked in the past was basing it off weapons size, it's block count. The more blocks you add, the less damage per block we get. That is not what I am suggesting.

As for what I am proposing; take a ship's mass. Determine a number based on that ships mass that should be comprised of weapons. 10% for example. 10% of a ship is comprised of weapons. Depending on the size of the ship, the 10% in weapons will scale. When it comes to reaching the "sweet spot" for maximum efficiency, it's a static value. When you start going over that value is when you loose efficiency. It is not based on weapon size. It is based on the ratio between a ships mass and how much of that mass is weaponry. Having a ship filled to the brim with weapons will still have more firepower than the same ship with optimal weapon sizes. It doesn't make either one better. They have strengths and weaknesses now.

So lets apply what I am suggesting to some values.
A 100 mass ship will have 10% of it's mass comprised of weapons. That's 10 blocks.
A 1000 mass ship will also have 10% of it's weapons comprised of blocks. That's 100 blocks.
Lets give it a static value of damage. This scales as it does currently, linearly with weapon count.
The 100 mass ship does 40 damage, the 1000 mass ship does 400 damage. The damage scaled as the ship size did, so long as it stayed at 10% doing 4 damage per block. This is the total output for all weapons on the ship, regardless of group size.

Quickly, lets take into account how fast this damage could kill another ship. Let's say at 10%, these weapons can take out 20% of an enemy ships hull of similar size. It would take 5 hits from the 100 mass ship to kill another 100 mass ship. One shot takes out 20 mass at 40 damage. The weapon can take out twice it's own mass. That is 1 mass per 2 damage applied.

When a ship makes 70% of it's mass out of weapon systems, what happens?
The 100 mass ship now has 280 damage if done linearly and would be capable of taking out 140% of the enemies total mass (if it is fighting another 100 mass ship). That's a ship and a half worth of damage. But with a diminishing return we can get 150 damage roughly (example). 150 damage will only take out 75 mass of a 100 mass ship. In order to one-shot the enemy, they would have had to dedicate 70% of their hull to weapon systems. Again, this system is based on mass composition, not weapon size.

If the 100 mass ship attacked the 1000 mass ship and it had 70% of it's mass dedicated to weapons, one shot against the large ship would result in 7.5% of it's hull being lost. That little ship is not going to be "more powerful" just because a diminishing return is applied to it. The two ships are still not comparable. It would take 14 shots to completely destroy the 1000 mass ship. In that time, the 1000 mass ship can take out 2 100 mass ships with 1 shot just with it's 10% weapon composition. This of course does not take into account moving targets, turrets, etc. With an efficient weapon, the 100 mass ship only takes out 40 mass of the 1000 mass ship, which is 4% I don't know about you, but again, these ships are not comparable. The 100 mass ship will be overpowered everytime, no matter it's weapon composition against the larger ship.

The point is, this system does not let small ships in any way compare to something that is larger than it. The larger ship will always have more firepower. I hope you can follow that. Nobody likes math problems. This isn't just something I prefer. I gave an example, and did some basic math for the system right here. I've put thought into this. Frankly we can't alter the static values for damage or armor anymore. The devs stated this. All we can do is adjust how much a weapon actually puts out. Basing that on mass composition seems like an ideal way of igniting some thought to how players want to approach combat.

 

[CyberTao]

different way than what we are suggesting

"We", the way OP suggested it was completely different from yours. He talked about a decrease in the dps for every block after the 1st one placed, as well as a increase in power cost for every passive block placed.

Since you don't seem to know, a wafflegun is a series of outputs aligned in a checkerboard pattern, designed around maximum damage per bullet. In the old version, 250 blocks was enough to get 400 damage per bullet, enough to 1shot HH. So ships made massive arrays of 250 blocks per group, since adding any more to that group was pointless. Those guns took advantage of the ideal group size and chewed through ships without equal, and some of the major factions had waffleguns so large it would make our current missiles look tame.

That part of the argument was more directed at the OP though, not you.

There should be an incentive for building an interior. There will be with the health update. Cal told me this himself.

The advantage of Interior is 2 fold, empty space and extra hull. The HP system promises to make hull more valuable, and since interiors are normally lined with it, it makes sense to assume ships with interior will get some benefit. The Empty space helps in reducing damage from missiles, since instead of juicy systems, you are hitting blank space and armoured hull.

This could easily be mimicked without building an interior, in the form of bulkheads and layering.

Determine a number based on that ships mass that should be comprised of weapons.

Such a thing does exist, I remember Cal talking about how shields were made to be 11 times more than the dps of any weapon. Weapons and shields were designed to be a 50:50 split, adding in power and ignoring thrust, it was more or less 1 weapon block per 1/1 shield capacity/regen per 4 power reactor.
There was a ratio, it just didn't penalize people who wanted to build their own ships their own way arbitrarily. The reason it doesn't work is partly weapon scaling, partly high alpha damage.

Your system does not account for the alpha damage part either. 400 dps becomes 6 000 damage every 15 seconds (Cannon+Pulse). Hull would still be useless as in the current state of the game, it would just slow down its destruction. But at least you made hull survive getting 1 shotted with ships less than 1k mass if you use 10%.

The only weapon that will have that 400 damage per shot though, is Cannon/-, which has a reload of 1. Even the basic dumbfire missile will take out 7.5 blocks of advanced hull per shot. Missile/Beam will get 15.

Now lets bring that into reality, cause I seen one of the 12k mass ships used in B&S up close. With it's size, 3 layers of hull at most before it started to cut into it's stats too much due to dimensions. So 3 times the armour plating, but can carry 12 times the dps, and systems are squishy. Remember that Systems and Hull are not interchangeable, so unless people scale their armour thickness with their ship, it's not going to work as you plan it too.
People will invest more in shields (to avoid the cost of repairs, unless shipyards will only need power to repair destroyed blocks) and once they are down, you still get a potato wrapped in tinfoil.

Spoiler: >Tin Foiled hat moment

When you think about it, the best shape for having thick armour and still having good internal volume is kinda... cubish in nature... aint it? I'm not going to start screaming about deathcubes, but I expect the PvP ships that will depend on HP will look rather boxy indeed, and benefit from it.

No one knows how the HP system is gonna work, we just know you wont be able to core a ship, hull will be important, blocks will still be breakable, and there won't be a secondary HP shield before blocks will break. We can take guesses, but it's better to not just assume things and make plans for them.

As a final note;

he had to redo crafting twice because of players voicing their opinions on it.

That was because a great deal of very vocal people agree it needed to be fixed and changed. There is a difference between 1 person going around spreading his videos to everything that looks relevant about a system he have had for a while, and a great mob of people complaining about a change almost immediately after it was added.

 

[Criss]

That was because a great deal of very vocal people agree it needed to be fixed and changed. There is a difference between 1 person going around spreading his videos to everything that looks relevant about a system he have had for a while, and a great mob of people complaining about a change almost immediately after it was added.

That doesn't change the fact that the weapon system has been imbalanced since it was introduced. Players were used to it because for the most part, they still get that ship-wide destruction very easily. That didn't change when the new weapon system came out. I did some testing. Which nobody else is doing apparently. And I'm not talking about casual combat experiences. Like I said, I don't want superweapons. But that is what we have. That's why I demonstrated with smaller weaponry. There needs to be a way to penalize players for going over the top. Combat is boring. It consists of taking down a shield and making sure your missile system is ready. Most of the players in the B&S tournament used heat seekers consistently. Ships covered in turrets managed to survive more than one barrage. That was pretty much the extant of every battle. Regardless of tactics, they used the same weapons and ships were lost quickly after shields went down.

Keep in mind that was just an example to demonstrate how the system scales. If it were implemented, every system in the game would need adjustments.

I received this comment on the video from Calbiri.

"Damaging a ship to the point of it exploding will be the final stage of course, but there will be other levels of damage that affect your ships performance before that final stage. Also, tentatively, armor won't count towards the ships hp, though systems and plain hull should. "

Now if what he says is correct, then there are stages to disabling a ship. I would find it hard to experience these stages if weapons can kill ships so quickly. If the health update can address that then I will be satisfied. You and I both have the same assumptions as the what the health update will do to the game as you stated above. As it stands I can't see that being a complete fix for the issue. IF it does however, then there would be no need to change weapons. That's why I'm suggesting this.

 

[CyberTao]

"Damaging a ship to the point of it exploding will be the final stage of course, but there will be other levels of damage that affect your ships performance before that final stage. Also, tentatively, armor won't count towards the ships hp, though systems and plain hull should. "

I honestly hope that is toggle-able, I hate the idea of systems being worse "because reasons". Honestly, I just want more config options and a guide on how to even use these configs. A recent discovery on my part reveals that apparently every weapon stat is [Value]+1? The base config should be simple and basic (so you can learn the basics), with servers being the ones who add in the optional and possibly complex mechanics.

I have my own idea on how to maybe set up the configs (for personal use), but I don't know if it is even possible to do in the current configs. definitely wont be something for everyone, but I would like the ability to tweak it as such.

That doesn't change the fact that the weapon system has been imbalanced since it was introduced.

Schine is weird, they have a small history of releasing things that were only half of the full feature. Blueprints without the shipyard, crafting without a real shop overhaul, new stations that don't all have their required blocks (shop modules, spawners, proper logic and permissions). Weapons are probably designed around the HP system, just like these others are 1 half of the full system, and feels off because of it.
Maybe the HP update will also include a major change to how Hull works? Maybe the current system is actually pretty close to perfect, but we don't know it because the other part is missing? Missiles will always be effective, but we got PD. Cannons have travel time, and Beams are short ranged. Pulse could probably hallow out a ship if you got close. Armour is effective on small ships that are meant to be fighting at close ranges, but larger ships I would expect to fight at bigger ranges, more time for counter measures. Hits being rarer, but more devastating. I can see the thruster update changing the ranges at which people fight in different sized ships.

I dunno, but there is more to combat then just Weapons and Shields/hull, we got speed, distance, accuracy, countermeaures (PD and effects, hope we get more of those). Fix the turn speeds and thrusters in general, overhaul the turrets, add in AI fleets, and make it so people can't just jump away willy-nilly and suddenly survivability becomes a large factor, and shields/defenses do up. Kep's numbers in another thread roughly proved that higher shield:weapon ratios actually last a little longer then weapon focused ships, so suddenly weapons are getting smaller as well.

There are other factors, most of which aren't added yet at all, so weapons (which may have been balanced for them in their current stage of planning) might actually be fine for all we know. Sure, add the option to do such or similar in the configs, but people tend to complain when things change too much, especially if it involves diminishing returns.

 

[Criss]

I hate the idea of systems being worse "because reasons"

Wouldn't those reasons be realism? I mean, having half your power system getting taken out surely will result in an un-optimal system? If we think of it on a per-block basis it does make sense, but blocks are just the means to portray a larger system in a destructible environment.

Pulse could probably hallow out a ship if you got close

Can confirm. A pulse weapon twice the size of the turrets I tested with beam secondary will clear out entire decks on the Dragoon. It was the first time I even used it and it could lend itself to some awesome battle wreckage. I kinda wished missiles had the same effect just not so widespread. Missiles seem to destroy all armor very easily, whereas pulse leaves behind skeletal bits of advanced armor.

 

[CyberTao]

Wouldn't those reasons be realism? I mean, having half your power system getting taken out surely will result in an un-optimal system? If we think of it on a per-block basis it does make sense, but blocks are just the means to portray a larger system in a destructible environment.

I mean that if I lose power, I want it to be cause my power reactors were hit, not because I lost X% of HP. Might just be me misunderstanding though.

I kinda wished missiles had the same effect just not so widespread

Missiles use a staging system, so the damage is spread out over the blocks within a certain radius, and can only advance to the next stage when all blocks in the last stage are dead. Pulse hits everything in it's range for it's full damage, making it incredibly powerful, and why it's range is so bad. I'm hoping the rail system will allow me to make some form of psuedo-railgun to fire pulse shells, would be hard to hit, but definitely worth it if they get to their mark.

Pulse really had such potential, but the range was enough to set enough people off and I hear it's planned to be reworked eventually.

 

[Calbiri]

I'm not setting it to rejected (as i veiw that as a permanent no) but we are not likely to add a diminishing return to weapons. Instead, we are implementing changes that bring armor and ship survival up to par with weapons. The issue is that weapons scale up linearly, but as pointed out by many keen players, armor does not scale up like that due to its locational nature. The current dev build has changes to the HP and Armor of individual blocks, as well as my pushing schema to add in Ship's HP/Armor systems (seperate from individual blocks.) Any further need to create a diminishment of weapons beyond that would probably be best achieved by changes to the power system.


This isn't planned, so don't scream in terror, but imagine if the 1M regen soft cap became a hard cap and we removed the 25 regen per block stat, just saying, consider how many other options there are besides direct nerfing.

 

[CyberTao]

This isn't planned, so don't scream in terror, but imagine if the 1M regen soft cap became a hard cap and we removed the 25 regen per block stat, just saying, consider how many other options there are besides direct nerfing.

inb4 modular weapons up the whazoo.

 

[sgallaty]

What I was really going for and trying to point out was that it was probably valuable to start considering a system whereby damage which is usually localized which limits the possibility of defense scaling, match damage which also needs to be considered a localized item.

I'd rather see a battlecruiser with 20 medium weapons duking it out with another battlecruiser, than what we have today which a mess of massively overpowered weapons burning holes and 1 shotting things like a magnifying glass on an ant, no matter what the defense is.

By localized defense, I'm suggesting that shields not be "the whole ship", but rather a radius around the shield generator. Armor is always localized, and I think you'll end up with scaling problems and counterintutive results if you try to make HP generalized to match the awkwardness of damage being scaled vertically rather than horizontally, as defense and armor is now.

The solution to defeating 'waffle guns' is to make very heavy armor have an amount of damage required to do any damage at all - i.e. reflection. It should be such that a ship of sufficient armor is going to bounce light weapons off of the hull without taking a scratch. Proof of this - you can shoot 1 or 1000 bullets at a tank, you'll never harm it. You'll certianly be dead long befure you do whatever damage you might have done with small arms.

So the totality of my suggestion is this :

1. Individual weapons should have a reasonable asymptote whereby they can't get any bigger efficiently.
2. Defenses should and MUST be localized.
3. Armor should be extremely effective against blast damage, and very heavy armor should require a significant hit to take any damage at all.
4. Rather than always aiming at ship core, weapons should aim at the body of a ship in general. It should be more desirable to have a human on a turret than AI. Truly big ships should improve tremendously from having a large crew.
5. Firing rate with a human operator should be faster than AI on a turret or gun.
6. Disabling capital ships should be more than knocking out one block. There needs to be more 'control blocks' on a big ship. Capital ship battles should be epic slugfests.

 

[Calbiri]

Shield range based on generators runs into processing issues, (distance from each shield block or emitor calculated each time the ships is modified by damage or repairs.)

Although local defenses matter, one must also consider the context of those defenses. A single scout with armor still has armor 1m thick. UNLESS you consider that armor to be plating around a cubed frame. In that same context, one might consider armor on a titan to be only plating on a cubed frame. Its reasonable then to allow a shipwide "armor rating" that protects individual blocks (before the blocks own defenses are taken into account) based on the total amount of armor a ship has. A ship with 1million armor blocks reasonably has thicker armor within that 1m cube of the Armor Block, than does a small fighter with a few 10's of individual armor blocks. Also, as I mentioned, there IS a stat already implemented that if turned on could mitigate damage of explosions specifically against block types, this could be set to active on armor blocks if we feel it is still needed after these other changes occur.

This same logic can be applied to the HP of the ship (either way this would be preferable to the achilles heel that is the ship core currently). The HP system we are planning would have % stages in its HP where various affects could be applied to your ship as damage occurs, regardless of the integrity of individual system blocks (all your shield blocks might remain, but at a certain % of ship HP, shields may be set to fail entirely.

Finally, AI accuracy versus player accuracy is already something we consider and try to keep at a viable ratio, humans SHOULD be better than the AI, however, this is only in regards to aiming, and is only for gameplay purposes. As for rate of fire, I'm not convinced that a player should have a better rate than an AI.