Combat doctrines and few suggestions

[Skilin]

Hello,

I would like to write a few words on current state of combat mechanics and possible strategies and point few possible ways how could our beloved game evolve.



Me and few of my friends have played some battle scenarios with quite simple rules. We defined battlespace, how much credit we are allowed to spend on our fleets and have a simple mission goal to take and hold randomly choosen sector.

We tried quite a few classic sci-fi modus operandi for space combat. In the end we come to the conclusion that Starmade have most similarities with Honorverse (http://honorverse.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page). So Ill explain basic fleet doctrine we found most effective.

Same as todays naval combat the first objective is simple: to detect the enemy while avoiding detection. Since radars are quite powerfull in game at the moment radar jammer shows up to be cruicial, same as use of scout ships. In perfect scenario you detect enemy fleet, power up the jammers and charge them. Moment of suprise is in my opinion way to powerfull in curret state of game but Ill get to that later.

Now you get to the "real" combat". There are two possibilities how to destroy enemy ships. We called it the "pierce" and the "smash". Pierce tactic is to use AMC to penetrate enemy shield, slice through the hulling and blow up the core. Since your enemies wont be sitting ducks its not as easy as it sounds but with a moment of suprise and concentrated fire you can destroy huge ships in few seconds. Smash is not so elegant but much more spectacular. Use AMCs to disable the enemy shield and over-flow then enemy ships with missiles and just watch the boom.

Heatseeking missiles is the only way to go at the moment. Guided take way too much time lock, and dumb-missiles are just plainly dumb.

Very important is manuevering and it will take quite a lot of time to get your fleet coordinated. We find out that bast formation is spiky column. Why that ? The spike-ship or point-ship is going to take the most of the damage and its simply better to completly loose one ship rather than divide damage to and have two or three crippled ones since missiles do alot of damage. There we get to cloud tactic, since there is no ammunition its very demanded to have as many missiles in air as possible. So there will be a swarm (cloud) of flying missiles around your ship/fleet , you manuvering to get to the point where you can penetrate enemy shield and when you do, missles will easily destroy enemy ship and in the same time you try to hold your formation while crazily flying aroud. Its quite a mess

To sum it up:

What I found absolutly useless: repair ships (if they can not re-create destroyed block absolutly useless, even as possible AI controlled drone), turrets (if the AI would be fixed in future there is possibility of using them in fleet combat, I imagine ship covered with extremly heavy turrets which can replace curret classic spear like AMC), guided missles, dumb missles, small ships in general (with proper AI they could be used in great number as drones but so far the bigger the better)

So now I can get to the suggestions.

Ill begin with the maneuvering. This issues was in several other topics so Ill write simple. No "shift" emergency break, momentum is momentum. Make thruster orientation matter, there shouldnt be same acceleration in all directions.

Ship constrctuion. Buff the hull, at the moment its only decorative block. The core need a overhaul. So far you have targeting diamond on the core which makes it extremly vulnurable. Targeting diamond in my opinion should be on geometrical center of the ship not on the core. Size of the core should scale with the size of the ship. So bigger the mass the bigger core should be (it makes sense that you need more computer power for bigger ships) eg. for a 200-300 mass ship you should need like 3-6 core blocks for working core. And for bigger ship I would like to see possibility of auxiliary core (same as auxiliary command center in today naval warfare). It will automaticly teleport you to auxiliary core if the main is destroyed and you can continue fighting with your ship.

Missiles.

Alpha and omega of proper space warfare. Add ammunition, and for that ammunition you would need "storage" block (effects ammount of possible ammunition) that will be connected to "feeder" block (effects speed of reloading) which will load missiles to launchers. Dont make specific launcher for missiles types.Make one universal and by the shape we construct it, we could feed it with different missiles size. For missiles, make system of missiles carrier and warheads which we could combine, eg. short/medium/far distance, heatseeking/guided/dumb, slow/fast for carriers and for warheads anti-shield/anti-hull, low/high damage, low/high blast area. Of course the price of different missiles will vary. This could make small ships matter, you could build small fighter and load it with 2-4 extremly expensive nuclear warheads which could effectively damage big ships.

Missiles anti-measure. I would like to see it divided into 3 types of anti-measure. Anti-missiles, quite simple idea and with combination of the missiles types as I wrote above you could make fast missiles which will directly destroy one missiles, or send one expensiver which will have huge blast radius and destroy several at one strike. Eletronic anti-measure, this will be divided into onboard and outboard. Onboard measures will try to confuse the enemy missile (eg. it will reprogram it to fly back on ship which fire the missile in the first place, turn down some cruicial system: heatseeking missile will lost its power to seek heat and will fly like a dumb missile etc.) and outboard will be classical drones which will act as a decoys. The last line of the defense could be classical Flak cannons (build as turrets), with high rate of fire trying to hit enemy missile just before they hit your ships.

For gameplay, make some sort of fleet comand option, like fixed formation where you set up a formation and only the lead ship will decide where formation will fly. Tweak littlebit minimap so it gives you more infomation.

And of course ramming and collision damage but I am sure that this has been pointed out before.

Ive got few more insights but its already way too tl;dr so Ill add them later.

 

[MrFURB]

Combat theory and combat balance is one of my greatest interests in Starmade.



Your insight to scouting is correct, having a stealth ship have eyes on the enemy is an enormous advantage because it allows your fleet to maneuver behind the enemy and make use of an enemy capital\'s reduced agility and usually reduced rear armor. A head-on charge against the enemy is a battle. A charge at the enemy\'s rear is a slaughter. The moment of surprise is an advantage that is well earned but at the same time too powerful. Giving shields a higher capacity can lengthen fights and make them more fun, as instead of having the first person to open fire automatically win you could have big dogfights, bomber chases, and capital ships slugging it out. Surpirse should give you a huge advantage, but it shouldn\'t end a fight on it\'s own.



I like the idea of directional thrusters. Small fighters that don\'t have directional thrusters should have a low base strafing speed compared to their forward top speed and acceleration. This gives them a more classic fighter-esque feel when they\'re being piloted, while clever pilots can add a bit of mass via direction thrusters to their craft in return for more mobility when strafing.



I like your suggestion on missile systems as it gives nearly unlimited flexibility (I can imagine a gunship with a missile launch mechanics running from it\'s front to it\'s rear launching enormous torpedoes) but it seems a bit too complicated for the common newbie. I\'d love for it to be in game in some way or another.

 

[Xiphon]

Starmade needs a lot of balancing, and I expect there will be a lot of content added before it\'s ready for official launch. You have a lot of good observations here. I have been thinking similar things. An amunition system for weapons that don\'t fire energy makes sense.

 

[Magix39]

Where is the +1 button when you need it.

I would like to add the missle idea might be a tad complex, but if applied to other weapon systems and standardized (any system that uses a type of ammo), I think it might be a great boon. At least it sounds cool!

 

[Skilin]

I am glad that you like my suggestions.

There is a littlebit language barrier, I am not familiar with term \"tad complex\" but I assume it mean over-complicated. Well, every complex game have solution for this problem. The learning curve, we can divide missile crafting to varoius tiers and levels so the new player wont be overwhelmed with so many possibilities.

On element of suprise topic I ment exactly what MrFURB wrote: \"Surpirse should give you a huge advantage, but it shouldn\'t end a fight on it\'s own\"

For other weapons in game:

Energy weapons. I do like how AMC work, I read in few other topics that there should be a star-trekie beam like weapon. I think its not neccesary when you can make AMC that shoots so fast it does make same effect as a constant beam. What would I change is only graphical animation. When you achieve some defined level of fire rate the animation will change to beam like effect. Also classical AMC effect is quite ugly and would deserve imrpovment.

What would I like to be added is energy coil block.You would charge it and then you could use stored energy to increase weapon power for small amount time. You would be abel to define that you want for example 30 second buff for you weapon or to release all stored energy in one huge blast. With this system we could get classic sci-fi death-rays but with high flexibility of construction. Of course stored energy in coil will decay over time so it wont work as second energy tank.

I think we dont need any more weapons mechanics. Of course there should be higher variety of weapon like energy weapon which will be effective on diffent things and some level up weapon blocks which will do more damage but not a new type of weapons with new mechanic. Since, what we could add ? Projectile weapon ? In space ? Naaah. Cybernetic attacks on ships computers ? Maybe, but thats not really a weapon mechanic.



AI Drones.

I know this will require great amount of coding and programming, but I would like at some point want to see really good feature which will allow players to be able to create and set up their drones. To create mines with proximity triggers, attack drones, scout drones and much more. Most important on this would be to create clear and flexible interface. We are back at the learning curve, basic drone AI block would have only few options and when player will progress through the game and get his hands on advanced technology he will access more and more advance options of setting up his drones.

 

[MrFURB]

Right now the two primary weapons are AMCs and missiles. The AMC is the DPS tool for getting as many points of damage dealt in as short a time as possible, while the missiles are more of a utility tool.

This is two-thirds of what I call the triumvirate of sci-fi weapons; The sustainable energy weapons (Lasers and their ilk), the high-damage but expensive to fire projectile weapons (Like the MAC guns from Halo\'s lore), and the smart/guided missiles and rockets that deal burst damage over a large area rather than continuously.

Since energy-based weapons run off of a seemingly endless supply of energy regeneration you can constantly use them without any regard to wasting ammunition. The downside to this is that the maximum firepower you can get off of an AMC is directly tied to your ship\'s power level. Any more and you are crippling yourself.

Projectile weapons wouldn\'t require energy, but instead draw ammunition from some source. Each shot from a projectile weapon will cost resources, but should be more powerful than an energy-based weeapon. Projectile weapons shouldn\'t have the same damage-to-mass ratio as AMCs. A physical projectile system should weigh more, else the ONLY limitation a projectile weapons system has over an AMC is the munitions required.

Missiles are in a weird place right now. They are pretty powerful tools if you know how to time them against the fall of a target\'s shielding. Their problem right now is their speed. They are far too slow to catch up to anything, even a huge target with minimal acceleration. You\'d have to launch missiles right ontop of the enemy to hit them. Missiles should be as fast (If not faster) than the average speed fighter/bomber. To balance out their usefulness on smaller targets I recommend making them less agile and turn slower so they are effectively \'dodgeable\' for small ships who know what they are doing and pay attention.

 

[Skilin]

Yes, I do agree with your \"triumvirate\" of sci-fi space weapons. But there is a catch. Projectile weapons were only used in sci-fi where they did not mastered energy weapon technology and when they did, they just replaced it, for example StarGate.

I though littlebit about it after you post it and I changed my mind. They could be implemeted. I give myself a question, what role of projectile weapons should have ? Logical answer would be ship which doesnt have enough energy and ship which will fight only for limited amount of time. Answer: The fighter-drones, which could work perfectly with this system. Use all energy for speed and shield, shoot out your shit (bullets/missiles) and return to mothership for recharge/reload. Also could be used on huge transport ships which have no problem with cargo space but doesnt have reactors big enough to support energy weapons.

There is tiny catch. What reality based projectile weapon would space craft use ? Railgun, of course, with highest velocity, acceleration and kinetic energy it is best possible projectile base weapon. But here is the catch, it uses eletric energy to fire, so basicly its a energy weapon of course this can be easily solved by adding new \"gunpowder\" which will be x-times stronger then our suplhur based one.

But back to original topic. How should combat doctrines evolve? I really want to see huge bonuses for cooperations among players, at the moment its just a pack of people shooting in same direction.

One idea could be connection of anti-missile measures among whole fleet, so that you will cover your comrades even when the missile isnt guided to your ship. And make use of auxiliary ships (this could be done by above mentioned ammuniton system and proper reapir ship).