Recognized Qualitative vs quantitative balance.

[sgallaty]

I've been drafting and thinking about this post for a while and I am going to try to make this as clear as possible without throwing too much controversy into it.

The premise of the statement that I intend to make is thus :

"There are situational and qualitative considerations which prohibit comparing and balancing weapons based on any one factor, especially flat damage dealt."

Because of that, the current system which is tuned based on every weapon type exclusive of secondary considerations giving the same qualitative factors is guaranteed to be out of balance.

I posit that the following statements are true :

a) A weapon which fires and does not require locking on or even facing the target, and delivers significantly difficult to avoid payload whose typical hit ratio is 100%, is qualitatively advantageous in many ways not limited to the fact that it won't ever miss, is useful against any opponent and can be fired while showing any surface to the enemy, in the case that one surface has damage. Furthermore since the damage is delivered in many smaller sections, there is less 'overkill' or damage lost to waste on blocks that are destroyed - in effect giving it a built in punch through.

b) A weapon which must be aimed at the enemy, and has a slow travel time which renders it both highly vulnerable to point defense and cannot be used against moving targets is one of narrow situational usefulness.

In my above examples, "A" is a swarm missle, and "B" is a dumbfire rocket. Both do the same damage per second but the functional return per block investment makes B worth a minor fraction in terms of the real world effectiveness of 'A'.

The summary of my argument is this :

The reason why the perception is that "swarm missiles" are the only way to go, is that there is no quantitative counterbalance to their qualitative advantages. It's not just a perception, it's a practical reality.

That said my suggestion is thus :

Sit down and realstically evaluate :
the practical DPS of a given weapon system in various circumstances.
the situational usefulness of the same weapon
the actual cumulative effect in damage of the weapon (tertiary factors)
is the weapon self guided?
is the weapon lock-on guided?
does it move fast?
does it require leading the target, or keeping a weapon on the target?

Take the above factors for every weapon combination, and sum them up and then alter the base line damages on a scale that takes the quantitative advantages (and disadvantages) into play.

To this effect my suggestions would be :

Halve the damage per block of any weapon which has a guidance system.
Fast missiles should be short range, slower ones long range. You have X fuel to burn, however you do that.
Give a damage boost to weapons which have to lead a target
Give a damage boost to short range, and inaccuracy / imprecision
Rework the dumbfire rocket to be a 'torpedo' Slow, unguided, twice the damage per block ( but hard to get to the target)

With dumbfire rockets set up as torpedos, smaller ships could use them against larger ships as 'bombers'

 

[Orphaniel]

I believe there are some balance factors you may be overlooking in terms of the swarmy missile.

Namely: have you ever tried to use the swarm missile in an engagement where you have allies present? Allies that you would prefer not to mangle and destroy needlessly? I'm not expert on weapons (more of a builder) but the swarm missiles in my experience are almost hilariously reckless in their application of collateral damage.

Secondly, when a missile is shot down by point defenses, it detonates on the spot, which often detonates other missiles flying the same trajectory in turn.

While I definitely agree that some weapon options could do with the proverbial kick in the buns, and weapons such as lock-on missiles and swarm missiles could do with a bit of prodding, I just wanted to bring to light some aspects you may not have considered, I agree with you overall.

 

[sgallaty]

I didn't mean to suggest that swarm missiles didn't have situational disadvantages, only that a comparison which only considered base damage without the other relevant factors that contribute applicability of that base damage are not themselves entirely valid.

 

[Panpiper]

I didn't mean to suggest that swarm missiles didn't have situational disadvantages, only that a comparison which only considered base damage without the other relevant factors that contribute applicability of that base damage are not themselves entirely valid.

The point is that your post is pointing out the situational "advantages" of swarm missiles, expecting people to conclude that they are therefore overpowered. It is those very situational "disadvantages" that you have omitted from your analysis that balance this. Swarm missiles are WORSE than useless in many situations and it is precisely this that compensates for their strength in other situations. The downside to swarm missiles (targeting randomly, including friendlies and neutrals who then could turn enemy) is so severe that in many circumstances it would be better to be unarmed than to be armed with swarm missiles. If you nerf swarm missiles, you will render them so undesirable that you might as well remove them from the game.

There is one context in which swarm missiles make sense for a player; that is where a player is alone in their own home system where they do their mining alone and have no faction mates nearby to back them up. In that situation, a solitary player defending themselves, swarm missiles are great. I think it is an absolutely wonderful balance feature that gives the player in that situation a weapon system that gives him an advantage. Otherwise PvP griefing might well reign absolutely supreme.

With regard to your castigation of seekers in general, you omit the extreme downside to seekers that they can be shot down. No other weapon system can be stopped cold by an active countermeasure like missiles can. THAT is the balance mechanism that compensates for their lock on advantage.

You could well assert that such point defense countermeasures are relatively ineffective, and that would be true at the moment. However that is solely because the game is still in alpha and many kinks are still being worked out. Point defense is meant to be more effective than it currently is in game, and with a few more patches, it will be. Also, many servers increase the maximum ship speed, thinking they are making the game better for the players, failing to realize that by doing so they make it exponentially harder for point defense to do the job of shooting down missiles. The fact that missiles then are imbalanced is not the fault of the game but the fault of the server that deliberately monkeyed with game parameters so as to create an imbalance.

 

[sgallaty]

The point stands that they cannot be compared on the basis of flat damage alone, as there are other qualitative considerations that must be taken into account.

The question is not "is this particular weapon situational?", but rather as I said "how effective is this weapon in the various situations that it is effective?" and the consideration is the sum of those effectivenesses.

 

[CyberTao]

Did you know, Swarm missiles are the only missile you can upright outrun? They move at 99% of server speed, therefore are the only missiles you can outrun. They also like to cluster together, so a good spray of PD renders them dead.

You are suggesting changing the dps (and hopefully changing the power costs to be inline with it, else dear God). While it might initially sounds like "bombers", what it might realistically means is capital ships nose ramming other people and unloading at point blank, because those weapons are the most efferent, damage wise. DPS should only be adjusted in extreme cases of balance concerns (like the old nukes), for all else, Speed, Radius and Range are your values to tweak for better balance.

Something you failed to notice however, not everything is 100%. My latest missiles use 25% beam support, giving them some of the speed and damage/reload, and the ability to lockon. All you have to do to gain "Lockon" or "Swarm" is attached the corresponding computer as a slave. You don't even need modules. 100 missiles blocks + 0 beam gives you what is basically the default missile with the ability to lockon, so long as the computer is present.

 

[sgallaty]

If you energetic posters could take a moment from your strident strawman defense of swarm missiles and stop to think ;

"Is there any situation where dumbfire missiles have the same situational usefulness?"

You would be instead addressing the point I attempted to make.

This isn't about nerfing swarm missiles in particular, only in bringing to light that undeniably there are qualitative considerations which must be taken into account to factor balance.

ou are suggesting changing the dps (and hopefully changing the power costs to be inline with it, else dear God). While it might initially sounds like "bombers", what it might realistically means is capital ships nose ramming other people and unloading at point blank,

I am all about situational advantages. So in my mind that sounds great. A weapon which requires position to effectively use? That right there you've described a whole generation of evolution of gameplay improvement, because you've also introduced a whole genre of emergent gameplay such as ships to run interference, positional combat, escorting etc.

You think you're arguing against me, but you're making the points I wanted to bring up.

 

[CyberTao]

If you really think rammy, greify, no-skill-needed-cause-its-fucking-point-blanks-just-tank-the-damage-because-we-dont-need-as-much-room-for-weapons-all-in-shields-praise-Allah will get much support, you may be missing something.

The reason all weapons have the same dps (minus nukes) is so that all weapons are equal, and thus it's really up to how you are building to decide what weapons to use. As soon as 1 weapon becomes obviously better, everyone in factions (or just PvP in general) will use it, because it is more bang for your buck.

 

[sgallaty]

I would and have argued that some weapons are already 'better' at least situationally because the quantitative comparisons aren't enough.

 

[Lecic]

Some weapons need rebalancing, yes, but making dumbfires even slower is not going to make them useful.

Swarmers are extremely powerful, and I believe disabling friendly fire for them is an option. If not, people will just fight solo with swarmers. If you don't think swarmers are powerful, I suggest you look at Blood and Steel.
Who were some of the most powerful contenders? Spartan-089 and Sven_The_Slayer. In fact, I'd say if not for the invincible station in the center drawing nearly all the missiles (something that would be significantly less common in non-tournament combat), the final round of saturday would have been Spartan vs Sven, with the winner of that taking down Thryn. After all, pretty much the only reason any team beat a swarmer build was by using the station as cover.

Point Defense, even with proper AI, is not going to be sufficient against swarmers. There's just too many missiles.

Secondly, when a missile is shot down by point defenses, it detonates on the spot, which often detonates other missiles flying the same trajectory in turn.

I'm pretty sure the only thing that can destroy missiles are cannon shots.

 

[Orphaniel]

You may well be right, it's just something I've noticed happening, but it might have been a sort of built-in 'give' where the single cannon shot detonated a bunch of missiles.

 

[sgallaty]

This is not and was never intended as a specific call to nerf anything, but rather to bring to focus that an analysis should be done taking qualitative factors as well as quantitative factors.

I hear you when you say that "dumbfire missiles won't get more useful if they were slower" but what I hear is you saying "They're already useless, I can't imagine using them in the ways I use other weapons if they were slower"

That is precisely where the opportunity to design comes in - where you can add usefulness and add factors to balance things in ways that make the game more interesting and enjoyable.

I didn't want to turn this into a "this is how I tell you to fix it" post, and I'm not that guy so please just take these following as an off the top of my head example of what you could do here -

Let's say we were going to talk about missile/cannon - which right now makes a fast firing missile which is basically a faster firing useless version of the regular missile. I say useless because if you add a pulse computer or a beam computer you have the same dps but it'll hit the target 100% of the time unless it's stopped.

Qualitatively speaking, there is no circumstance where it's better than any other weapon since you can fire a guided missile without a lock just as well.

So you're giving up a major qualitative bonus for - no practical benefit.

So instead, my suggestion is to make it desirable somehow. What can we do to make the weapons comparably useful in their specific circumstances without causing imbalance problems? Well, that's what a game designer does with everything. "How does this work holistically?"

So - here's my short stab at a holistic solution. Given that I don't want to create something that creates a secondary problem, I want to add some checks into it.

Missile/Cannon
Name : Torpedo
Damage basis : 2x (this weapon has a damage / energy and block ratio 2x the norm)
Behaviours :

• when it is initially launched, it only has the velocities of the ship that launched it
• it takes 2 seconds to arm, and if it collides with a target before that time, it will be damaged and not go off
• from the point that it is launched, it accelerates at a fixed rate for 10 seconds. 10 seconds after it exhausts fuel, it disarms and self-destructs
• the tubes in a torpedo cluster must all be made in a straight line. the only dimension that gives the weapon power is the direction it faces
• the sum of the power of a tube is n-1, where n is the length of the line. rows of torpedo tubes perpendicular to the facing give no benefit
• each time the torpedo is depleted it must be manually reloaded like a jump drive. docking reloads them automatically. this can happen with a logic circuit as well. it sends false when depleted, and asserting true to it causes it to reload. it has power drain when loading, no power drain when fired.
• when a torpedo is not thrusting, it does not identify as a 'missile' to missile defense systems. thus, it must be manually targeted or accidentally targeted by system that target all. this means it's to a firing ships advantage to launch from outside the acceleration range.

so, there you go. off the top of my head - I 'm sure I've overlooked a few things but that's a set of rules that taken together give you

• a new role
• a use for a weapon combo that's useless now
• situational advantage
• difficult to abuse in ways that have been mentioned

This is the discussion I am trying to get the devs to have with one another. I want them to look at their weapons with a pencil in hand and say "hm, you know everyone's using this. How can we make other weapons situationally useful too?"

 

[CyberTao]

But what if I already use Missile+Cannon? Because I do. The cannon slave denotes faster reload, part of what makes the master/slave system easy to explain is that all slaves have a common effect. Cannon is speed, Missiles are widespread, Beams are range, and Pulse is Damage.

The reason I use Rapid fire btw, is the lower power-cost per missile. All weapons require the same power regen, but faster firing ones don't require nearly as much storage, letting you add a bit to other systems. Used enmasse with a swarm of drones, and it can overwhelm a player and PD, since it is a missile per output every 3 seconds.

It's not good at range cause of the speed of it, but it's fine for fighters and other ships on the small-scale, people just like the lockons because A) bigger crater, B) locks to the core and C) lets them use other weapons as it recharges. Add in the high alpha and it's effect on combat, and you got why people use /beam and /pulse.

Your suggestion also makes me think of Sleeper Missiles, the proposed "5th" missile type that was to be brought with MineLayers.

 

[Orphaniel]

That sounds like an absolutely badass weapon, but a bit complicated and singular outside the simple range of the other weapons, as Cybertao said. Still, I think when the time comes to spice things up such a thing certainly has room to exist. Perhaps in the rather defunct Missile + Pulse slot?

 

[EtherEel]

I would also add (to the OP'er) that Beams and Cannons need an innate "blast radius." This would render missiles less advantageous and be more in keeping with the effects the we see and love "in the movies" (which is where all our Sci-Fi inspiration comes from.)

 

[Lecic]

I would also add (to the OP'er) that Beams and Cannons need an innate "blast radius." This would render missiles less advantageous and be more in keeping with the effects the we see and love "in the movies" (which is where all our Sci-Fi inspiration comes from.)

A scaling blast radius (and projectile size) with weapon damage would make beams and non-rapid cannons more useful. It'd also make the game look a lot cooler.

 

[Orphaniel]

Very yes. that is absolutely correct, single block damage, regardless of how quickly appliedor how much it punches holes just isnt enough even on small ships.