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I started thinking over General System Design and Game Balance due to the new thread about Power Reactor Systems.
I don't want to post it there, because it has become a bit too off topic i suppose.
Ship Classes:
The general idea is, that there is no perfect ship. You need ships of different sizes and designs working together, so all your needs are served.
The two extrema of the spectrum:
small ship
- short fly range for fighters, but possible long range civil transport ships, or mid range cloaked ships (see the concept of fuel)
- maneuverable
= hard to hit
- able to hit distinct targets (hit accuracy/probabilty determined by ship mass. See AI Accuracy)
= good accuracy against all ships
- short range scanning
- cloakable/jammable
large ship:
- long fly range (e.g. carrier)
- mobile gas stations (onboard fuel refinery and small mining ships, to harness resources in nearby sectors)
- easy targets (you can’t miss a ship this big)
= definite radar signiture
- more dump and brute damage (AI accury low, so shotgun cannons are necessary)
- long range scanning (power intensive)
- susceptible to local shield failure
LOCAL SHIELD FAILURE: small ships have to pose a thread to big ships, so big ships need to come along with smaller ships for protection. This can be archived by allowing smaller ships to penetrate shields locally. That is, only the ship, that is able to hit one specific area of the ship (e.g. r=3m) in a long enough time (e.g. 15-30sec) (requires the necessary ship-mass-depending weapons accuracy, so large ships wont be able to do that. And it would necessarily be either a beam or cannon weapon), the particular attacking ship will be able to penetrate the shield at that specific area for a certain duration until it has to start over. We could have a designated effect system for that, called “Local Shield Cancellation Effect”, that only makes sense to equip on small ships and which would have a very short range. (All {beam,canon}*{beam,cannon,pulse,missile} combinations with Local Shield Cancellation Effect could still work as usual, with the only limitation, that the effect range is much smaller then the weapons range, so it can still be a viable weapon for general combat) . This would also result in a situation, where small ships can hide in blind spots of big ships, where the onboard turrets of the large ship can’t reach them. Another reason the large ship needs smaller ships for self-protection. This way small ships, if lucky enough, could trigger events over all systems (see “Events over Systems”), if they penetrate the hull on the right spot deep enough to hit cetain blocks of a system.
REACTORS:
low risk l-reactor:
- need specific fuel l-fuel or refined l-fuel
- use l-fuel by directly mining a resource block (less efficient)
- use refined l-fuel produced by h-reactors linked to l-fuel-refineries (most efficient).
- if damaged, it just stops working
(- low max of e/s)
high risk: h-reactor
- relatively small (e.g. 70% percent of a small ship, and 10% of a larg ship => less likely to be hit on a big ship)
- if damaged, and the damage is not being handled, it will result in a catastrophic explosion (Achilles heel of large ships, when small ships use Local Shield Cancellation Effect and are lucky enough to penetrate deep enough and the right spot of the ship to cause damage to them.)
- need a specific fuel h-fuel (small amounts last very long and produce a lot of power).
- Produce refined l-fuel with h-reactors. H-reactors connected to a l-fuel refinery produce a x-time bonus on l-fuel generation. (or you just need h-reactors, because of the power consumption of l-fuel refineries. Linking them does not have to be a condition)
- you should still be able to build a low mass ship with h-reactor, such that you can have long range travel or cloaking, but with the tradeoff, that you probably immediately explode, when hit
FUEL related BLOCKS:
l-fuel = l-fuel resource blocks
refined l-fuel = x-times the range of l-fuel
l-fuel refinery;
h-fuel = can only be used by h-reactors, which will very slowly consume it.
Fuel-tank = which could actually just be cargo blocks linked to the reactor, so you can use rail docking and a auto-pull on reactor blocks, to fuel up automatically, when docking.
Fuel stations for low risk high range travel might become a nice addition to this game. The (automatic) refilling of them could be part of the trade network functionality, so factions can have dedicated mining/fuel production facilities, that refuel the faction wide or public fuel station network.
Fuel will only be consumed, when the ship is being moved, or systems need power over there baseline.
(Shield generator need more power, when shields are hit. Weapons systems only need energy when fired) So a parking ship will not consume any fuel.
AI ACCURACY depending on SHIP MASS/RADAR SIGNATURE STRENGTH
small ships have a low radar signature or very low to no signature at all if using jammer/cloaking systems (strength of radar signature as a factor in hit-probability, cloaked ships can’t fire without going back to jammed or normal radar signature, whereas normal > jammed > cloaked = 0). Maybe the dectection radius of larger ships is also higher for scanners.
Since small ships are fighting a close-range ship to ship combat, and they are able to compensate the low radar signature of their smaller opponents via visual feedback of their pilots and high maneuverability of their ships, they are able to track and follow their target more reliably, hence having more accurate shooting/higher hit probability for all on-board weapons and turrets. The bigger the ship, the higher the penalty on accuracy/hit probability, hence the need for more shotgun-like weapon systems, to target smaller ships. Non-shotgun-like weapons configurations of beams, cannons and missiles will still be very powerful besides their lesser likelihood to hit small ships, where those unlikely hits are still devastating, but remain very effective against larger entities like other large ships, stations or any other large structure in general. Having no accurate turrets on big ships, will also result in a much lesser missile based combat situation, since big ships need shutgun-like weapons do fight smaller targets, small ships will use more canon and beam based weapons to fight each other and especially larger ships to shut down some their systems. small ships will have good hit accuracy against all targets. if the difference (mass of attacking ship - mass of attacked ship) is a positive number, then the bigger the number the larger the penalaty on hit accuracy.
Generator Design
Generators are usually structures, that don’t stretch across the whole ship. They are delicate constructions in a dedicated compartment. Although it should be possible to distribute them and have fail-safes, there should be a strict trade-off between group-size and block-efficiency.
Capacitor Design
Capacitors should follow the same although less stricter trade-off, so you can have multiple power banks or shield capacitor banks, … across your ship.
Power Conduits
Supply power to all systems (weapons, shield, power banks)
Distributed design require a more complex network of power conduits, which are susceptible to damage and need to be shielded and strategically placed. To make the in-battle computation easy enough, a simple model could be, that each time a power conduit gets damaged, there will be a penalty for power generation (not capacity) of x% (e.g. 25%) in the first t seconds (whenever one block gets damaged, but not as sum of all damaged blocks) and after that time it will remain a penalty regarding the amount of conduits out of the total were destroyed. That should prevent you from filling up your ship with power conduits, and force you to consider the trade-off between a higher resistance of larger power networks and the increasing attack surface. On a large ship, the likelihood of hitting a power conduit would be still much lower.
So if all conduits get destroyed you have a 100% permanent power regeneration penalty. If 10 out of 100 are being destroyed, you have a 10% penalty).
General System Design and Events over Systems.
Each System has a Core, that defines the system. If the core gets destroyed, the whole system is destroyed aswell. So cores need to be protected very well. To each core you link control terminals (multiple terminals for redundancy) and the system specific modules. If a module linked to the core is damaged, an event occurs, which forces you to interact with the consoles linked to the core. If those consoles are damaged, you can’t use them and can’t interact. A core is a {primary weapons computer, a l-reactor core, a h-reactor core, a shield generator core, a power capacitor core, a shield capacitor core, thruster engine core …}. All cores have at least two states {on, off} available to basic logic and sometimes numerical values that can be detected via sensors. Some cores, {Weapon core, Shield Core, Shield Capacitor Core, Power Generator Core, Power Capacitor Core, ….} have an additional state ‘overheating’. When they overheat, you have t seconds (e.g. 30 seconds) to reboot them, or they will blow. The amount of damage they will do to the rest of the ship depends on their size and their category (h-reactors blow the whole ship, power banks blow like you smartphone
, weapons systems blow depending on how much damage they could inflict). The output of the core is either true or false, so you connect logic blocks to it to get its current state and to trigger a change in state. The third state ‘overheating’ can only be tested by using a special sensor. That is a sensor block linked to a special ‘overheating-state’ block instead of activation modules. If such a sensor is quipped it will also inform the pilot via a message/countdown. To reboot those systems you need a special console. Normal consoles just turn those systems on and off. But if you connect a console to the core and to a overheating-state block, you can trigger a reboot. It will also reboot, if the system is not overheating. A reboot will reduce or disable the effect of the system for a predefined period of time (maybe proportional to the size of the system aswell) and in between reboots has to be a 'cooldown' of serveral minutes. So in principal you could create a ‘state-block’ for each additional state and link terminals and sensors to them and the corresponding systems to sense or react to each of those states. Consoles can be part of a logic circuit, that allows you to built automatic response systems.
So the general guideline behind designing ships is risk management, such that risk becomes proportional the the 'power' of a particular system within an corresponding event system. having powerful weapons, shields, reactors and such, will result in a high risk high gain gamlbe the larger the ship gets, such that those risk need to be mitigated by assembling a fleet of ships in different sizes to balance weakenesses and strenghts. it's not simply 'the larger the better' anymore.
=> fuel consumption will force large ships to use high risk reactors
=> efficiency considerations will benefit fewer reactors of bigger size
=> overheating smaller h-reactors can still cause alot of damage to your ship
=> reactors can be relativly small, but their overall position in the ship is generally a question of risk mitigation. one reactore close to another can cause a chain meldown. systems within the explosion radius of the reactor, which is a function of its size will get destroyed.
=> system size < distance between systems < system explosion radius, such that the amount, efficieny, power, position and type of system becomes a cornerstone of trade-off based ship design
=> system design will be more concentrated (no long lines of reactors modules, since damage to a module can cause overheating)
=> turned of reactors can't overheat
=> l-reactors can be short-term fail-safe reactors on larger ship
=> with luck david can defeat goliath, if goliath doesnt bring his smaller brothers
I don't want to post it there, because it has become a bit too off topic i suppose.
Ship Classes:
The general idea is, that there is no perfect ship. You need ships of different sizes and designs working together, so all your needs are served.
The two extrema of the spectrum:
small ship
- short fly range for fighters, but possible long range civil transport ships, or mid range cloaked ships (see the concept of fuel)
- maneuverable
= hard to hit
- able to hit distinct targets (hit accuracy/probabilty determined by ship mass. See AI Accuracy)
= good accuracy against all ships
- short range scanning
- cloakable/jammable
large ship:
- long fly range (e.g. carrier)
- mobile gas stations (onboard fuel refinery and small mining ships, to harness resources in nearby sectors)
- easy targets (you can’t miss a ship this big)
= definite radar signiture
- more dump and brute damage (AI accury low, so shotgun cannons are necessary)
- long range scanning (power intensive)
- susceptible to local shield failure
LOCAL SHIELD FAILURE: small ships have to pose a thread to big ships, so big ships need to come along with smaller ships for protection. This can be archived by allowing smaller ships to penetrate shields locally. That is, only the ship, that is able to hit one specific area of the ship (e.g. r=3m) in a long enough time (e.g. 15-30sec) (requires the necessary ship-mass-depending weapons accuracy, so large ships wont be able to do that. And it would necessarily be either a beam or cannon weapon), the particular attacking ship will be able to penetrate the shield at that specific area for a certain duration until it has to start over. We could have a designated effect system for that, called “Local Shield Cancellation Effect”, that only makes sense to equip on small ships and which would have a very short range. (All {beam,canon}*{beam,cannon,pulse,missile} combinations with Local Shield Cancellation Effect could still work as usual, with the only limitation, that the effect range is much smaller then the weapons range, so it can still be a viable weapon for general combat) . This would also result in a situation, where small ships can hide in blind spots of big ships, where the onboard turrets of the large ship can’t reach them. Another reason the large ship needs smaller ships for self-protection. This way small ships, if lucky enough, could trigger events over all systems (see “Events over Systems”), if they penetrate the hull on the right spot deep enough to hit cetain blocks of a system.
REACTORS:
low risk l-reactor:
- need specific fuel l-fuel or refined l-fuel
- use l-fuel by directly mining a resource block (less efficient)
- use refined l-fuel produced by h-reactors linked to l-fuel-refineries (most efficient).
- if damaged, it just stops working
(- low max of e/s)
high risk: h-reactor
- relatively small (e.g. 70% percent of a small ship, and 10% of a larg ship => less likely to be hit on a big ship)
- if damaged, and the damage is not being handled, it will result in a catastrophic explosion (Achilles heel of large ships, when small ships use Local Shield Cancellation Effect and are lucky enough to penetrate deep enough and the right spot of the ship to cause damage to them.)
- need a specific fuel h-fuel (small amounts last very long and produce a lot of power).
- Produce refined l-fuel with h-reactors. H-reactors connected to a l-fuel refinery produce a x-time bonus on l-fuel generation. (or you just need h-reactors, because of the power consumption of l-fuel refineries. Linking them does not have to be a condition)
- you should still be able to build a low mass ship with h-reactor, such that you can have long range travel or cloaking, but with the tradeoff, that you probably immediately explode, when hit
FUEL related BLOCKS:
l-fuel = l-fuel resource blocks
refined l-fuel = x-times the range of l-fuel
l-fuel refinery;
h-fuel = can only be used by h-reactors, which will very slowly consume it.
Fuel-tank = which could actually just be cargo blocks linked to the reactor, so you can use rail docking and a auto-pull on reactor blocks, to fuel up automatically, when docking.
Fuel stations for low risk high range travel might become a nice addition to this game. The (automatic) refilling of them could be part of the trade network functionality, so factions can have dedicated mining/fuel production facilities, that refuel the faction wide or public fuel station network.
Fuel will only be consumed, when the ship is being moved, or systems need power over there baseline.
(Shield generator need more power, when shields are hit. Weapons systems only need energy when fired) So a parking ship will not consume any fuel.
AI ACCURACY depending on SHIP MASS/RADAR SIGNATURE STRENGTH
small ships have a low radar signature or very low to no signature at all if using jammer/cloaking systems (strength of radar signature as a factor in hit-probability, cloaked ships can’t fire without going back to jammed or normal radar signature, whereas normal > jammed > cloaked = 0). Maybe the dectection radius of larger ships is also higher for scanners.
Since small ships are fighting a close-range ship to ship combat, and they are able to compensate the low radar signature of their smaller opponents via visual feedback of their pilots and high maneuverability of their ships, they are able to track and follow their target more reliably, hence having more accurate shooting/higher hit probability for all on-board weapons and turrets. The bigger the ship, the higher the penalty on accuracy/hit probability, hence the need for more shotgun-like weapon systems, to target smaller ships. Non-shotgun-like weapons configurations of beams, cannons and missiles will still be very powerful besides their lesser likelihood to hit small ships, where those unlikely hits are still devastating, but remain very effective against larger entities like other large ships, stations or any other large structure in general. Having no accurate turrets on big ships, will also result in a much lesser missile based combat situation, since big ships need shutgun-like weapons do fight smaller targets, small ships will use more canon and beam based weapons to fight each other and especially larger ships to shut down some their systems. small ships will have good hit accuracy against all targets. if the difference (mass of attacking ship - mass of attacked ship) is a positive number, then the bigger the number the larger the penalaty on hit accuracy.
Generator Design
Generators are usually structures, that don’t stretch across the whole ship. They are delicate constructions in a dedicated compartment. Although it should be possible to distribute them and have fail-safes, there should be a strict trade-off between group-size and block-efficiency.
Capacitor Design
Capacitors should follow the same although less stricter trade-off, so you can have multiple power banks or shield capacitor banks, … across your ship.
Power Conduits
Supply power to all systems (weapons, shield, power banks)
Distributed design require a more complex network of power conduits, which are susceptible to damage and need to be shielded and strategically placed. To make the in-battle computation easy enough, a simple model could be, that each time a power conduit gets damaged, there will be a penalty for power generation (not capacity) of x% (e.g. 25%) in the first t seconds (whenever one block gets damaged, but not as sum of all damaged blocks) and after that time it will remain a penalty regarding the amount of conduits out of the total were destroyed. That should prevent you from filling up your ship with power conduits, and force you to consider the trade-off between a higher resistance of larger power networks and the increasing attack surface. On a large ship, the likelihood of hitting a power conduit would be still much lower.
So if all conduits get destroyed you have a 100% permanent power regeneration penalty. If 10 out of 100 are being destroyed, you have a 10% penalty).
General System Design and Events over Systems.
Each System has a Core, that defines the system. If the core gets destroyed, the whole system is destroyed aswell. So cores need to be protected very well. To each core you link control terminals (multiple terminals for redundancy) and the system specific modules. If a module linked to the core is damaged, an event occurs, which forces you to interact with the consoles linked to the core. If those consoles are damaged, you can’t use them and can’t interact. A core is a {primary weapons computer, a l-reactor core, a h-reactor core, a shield generator core, a power capacitor core, a shield capacitor core, thruster engine core …}. All cores have at least two states {on, off} available to basic logic and sometimes numerical values that can be detected via sensors. Some cores, {Weapon core, Shield Core, Shield Capacitor Core, Power Generator Core, Power Capacitor Core, ….} have an additional state ‘overheating’. When they overheat, you have t seconds (e.g. 30 seconds) to reboot them, or they will blow. The amount of damage they will do to the rest of the ship depends on their size and their category (h-reactors blow the whole ship, power banks blow like you smartphone
, weapons systems blow depending on how much damage they could inflict). The output of the core is either true or false, so you connect logic blocks to it to get its current state and to trigger a change in state. The third state ‘overheating’ can only be tested by using a special sensor. That is a sensor block linked to a special ‘overheating-state’ block instead of activation modules. If such a sensor is quipped it will also inform the pilot via a message/countdown. To reboot those systems you need a special console. Normal consoles just turn those systems on and off. But if you connect a console to the core and to a overheating-state block, you can trigger a reboot. It will also reboot, if the system is not overheating. A reboot will reduce or disable the effect of the system for a predefined period of time (maybe proportional to the size of the system aswell) and in between reboots has to be a 'cooldown' of serveral minutes. So in principal you could create a ‘state-block’ for each additional state and link terminals and sensors to them and the corresponding systems to sense or react to each of those states. Consoles can be part of a logic circuit, that allows you to built automatic response systems.So the general guideline behind designing ships is risk management, such that risk becomes proportional the the 'power' of a particular system within an corresponding event system. having powerful weapons, shields, reactors and such, will result in a high risk high gain gamlbe the larger the ship gets, such that those risk need to be mitigated by assembling a fleet of ships in different sizes to balance weakenesses and strenghts. it's not simply 'the larger the better' anymore.
=> fuel consumption will force large ships to use high risk reactors
=> efficiency considerations will benefit fewer reactors of bigger size
=> overheating smaller h-reactors can still cause alot of damage to your ship
=> reactors can be relativly small, but their overall position in the ship is generally a question of risk mitigation. one reactore close to another can cause a chain meldown. systems within the explosion radius of the reactor, which is a function of its size will get destroyed.
=> system size < distance between systems < system explosion radius, such that the amount, efficieny, power, position and type of system becomes a cornerstone of trade-off based ship design
=> system design will be more concentrated (no long lines of reactors modules, since damage to a module can cause overheating)
=> turned of reactors can't overheat
=> l-reactors can be short-term fail-safe reactors on larger ship
=> with luck david can defeat goliath, if goliath doesnt bring his smaller brothers
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