Revert to System HP with reactors as Critical Zones

[Nosajimiki]

So the general chatter on discord, is that reactor HP is not a good replacement for system HP because it it makes ships too hard to kill. Here is an example of a random ship with minimal armor, that I knew where the reactor was that I tried blasting at close range. As you can see, I pretty much had to turn the thing way past the point of swiss cheese to overheat it. The issue is that the reactor is 1/20th the size of the ship you are aiming for so most "hits" are actually misses from a killing the target perspective. This is compounded by battle damage to the reactor where once it take a lot of damage, it becomes a bunch of floating pieces that make it even harder to hit.



One of the big influences behind reactorHP was the new Recon/Stealth system. To my understanding, the idea was to create a system where there would be a critical target to aim for when using a recon ship. Havening seen both systems side-by-side now, there has been this idea floating around about going back to sysHP since it helped make damage to a ship more meaningful, but to put much more sysHP (like 1000ish) into reactor blocks to make them critical hits to give recon a reason to be.

 

[OfficialCoding]

yup i do not like reactor hp. they should go back to structure HP.

 

[EricBlank]

This seems like a good idea actually. In combat terms though, that ship was effectively "disabled" long before it overheated. Perhaps if before overheating there is a stage where AI must decide whether or not to surrender, flee, etc? The reactorhp could decide if the ship is "destroyed" and the structurehp could trigger a decision making process. Allow players to press a key under those conditions to signal that theyre surrendering, too, frankly typing "i surrender" in chat and hoping theyre even paying attention is a lot to ask sometimes. Guess thats throwing around extra ideas, though.

 

[Ithirahad]

I'd much rather have individual subsystem HP... Fights have gotten too long, this I can agree with, but I think I'd rather make soft kills and disables more viable, than just make it easier to overheat things again.

 

[Nosajimiki]

I'd much rather have individual subsystem HP... Fights have gotten too long, this I can agree with, but I think I'd rather make soft kills and disables more viable, than just make it easier to overheat things again.

Disables would make fights take even longer and result in a LOT of draws if you do not first address the inherent difficulty of a "kill". While I do like by system HP mechanics, there needs to be a kill point before most or all of your systems are crippled or the fight will just last until no one can fight any more.

 

[NaStral]

This seems like a good idea actually. In combat terms though, that ship was effectively "disabled" long before it overheated. Perhaps if before overheating there is a stage where AI must decide whether or not to surrender, flee, etc? The reactorhp could decide if the ship is "destroyed" and the structurehp could trigger a decision making process. Allow players to press a key under those conditions to signal that theyre surrendering, too, frankly typing "i surrender" in chat and hoping theyre even paying attention is a lot to ask sometimes. Guess thats throwing around extra ideas, though.

This would be acceptable as long as there was some kind of positive indicator that the ship was disabled and that nothing would truly work. As it is, even with the reactor being broken into pieces, a player or AI can still control it which is rediculous.

Ultimately Nosa’s suggestion is the appropriate way to go with this.

 

[MacThule]

So many people criticized the 2.0 reactors as being too fragile, too vulnerable. Particularly with the stabilizer streams. Holy hell was raised about it, as I recall. Now they're too tough. Looks like it, as well, from the pic.

the reactor is 1/20th the size of the ship you are aiming for so most "hits" are actually misses from a killing the target perspective.

I disagree - most hits are still going to be hits.

When you hit a weapon system, shields, thruster or any other system, it does still contribute to killing the target.

It renders the target more vulnerable by reducing it's capabilities. This makes it easier to target in on the stabilizers and reactors. It is easier to kill a ship with reduced shields, firepower, speed and maneuverability.

I imagine this could be balanced without reintroducing SHP by making stabilizers and/or reactors a touch more fragile.
[doublepost=1525750744,1525750511][/doublepost]Is it possible that players simply have yet to adjust their play style and expectations to the new weapons?

For example, perhaps it just needs to be a standard to outfit ships with a good close-range, high-output weapon specifically designed for doing a coup de grâce on disabled ships. Bombs, maybe.

 

[Nosajimiki]

So many people criticized the 2.0 reactors as being too fragile, too vulnerable. Particularly with the stabilizer streams. Holy hell was raised about it, as I recall. Now they're too tough. Looks like it, as well, from the pic.



I disagree - most hits are still going to be hits.

When you hit a weapon system, shields, thruster or any other system, it does still contribute to killing the target.

It renders the target more vulnerable by reducing it's capabilities. This makes it easier to target in on the stabilizers and reactors. It is easier to kill a ship with reduced shields, firepower, speed and maneuverability.

I imagine this could be balanced without reintroducing SHP by making stabilizers and/or reactors a touch more fragile.

You are sort of right, but there is the confounding issue of new shields. If two forces of similar ability were to clash, they would both start taking damage long before getting a kill, meaning all those hits are disabling both ships extending the fight even further as weapons, thrust, and chambers become inoperable and all the synergy built into your ships weapon systems goes out the door.

If my ship were taking similar damage to the above ship, there would be no coup de gras except for maybe hoping out of my ship to pistol whip the other pilot

 

[MacThule]

I see. That is a problematic issue for many encounters...

So at some point pilots should be competent enough to determine that a draw is inevitable and either withdraw, call in backup, or resign themselves to a long, tedious slugfest. I'm not necessarily keen on the results of combat being defined by arcade sensibilities of "win/lose/draw" if they are naturally becoming a bit more plastic.

The function of combat now would seem not to be purely to resolve 1v1 duels in an easily scored way. Perhaps that isn't directly relevant to a ship being ridiculously too hard to kill with reasonable effort, but in terms of keeping the current system and making reactors more fragile over renewing the all-some-none SHP system I think it's relevant. Some players love SHP because it gives them concrete numbers they can game and gimmick in equations with weapons. The new system seems to render that sort of approach to gaming inoperable in many cases.

 

[Ithirahad]

Disables would make fights take even longer and result in a LOT of draws if you do not first address the inherent difficulty of a "kill". While I do like by system HP mechanics, there needs to be a kill point before most or all of your systems are crippled or the fight will just last until no one can fight any more.

...Or until it isn't worth it. If this were just a deathmatch-style game like Crossout's normal battles or whatever, I'd fully agree and just say, "yeah, we just need to go back to system HP". If offensive/defensive fights over objectives like planets along with things like piracy will be the main driver of combat, though, I start to question the idea of hard kills being the primary win/loss mechanic.

 

[EricBlank]

Thats definitely an interesting perspective, yeah. And in terms of military strategy, it is almost a more enlightened one in that way; you should focus on breaking your enemies will and capability to continue fighting, not necessarily on their total annihilation. Their military assets, once disabled, cannot be used to defend their mining infrastructure or prevent you from turning their systems into a minefield, preventing them from collecting resources to replenish that fleet.

The problem then is partly with AI, which dont know how to give up, now matter how totally screwed they are. They will literally headbutt you if they cant shoot you, because they wont go home. Forcing them to overheat is the only way to end the harassment.

 

[NaStral]

The problem is. Fighting a proper war against another faction is going to be a huge mess. It’s going to degrade into people cluttering each other’s home sectors with busted zombie fleets that don’t necessarily work in any meaningful way but continue to shuffle around and annoy forever.

You could just keep piling them in to hatefuck your enemy through performance degradation knowing full well even the best possible station defenses on the home base will be woefully unable to kill them fast enough.

 

[MacThule]

That's a pretty expensive strategy.

 

[NaStral]

It doesn’t matter how expensive it is. It will happen. It will bring misery and cries for reform,if people even bother sticking around. It’s even more of a massive waste of time than space fights in Empyrion that drag on for an hour and a half before a ship loses all it’s weapons and someone finally decides to retreat. Unless there’s some serious fixes, this system in its current form will result in most players giving up on combat after they realize it takes too much time to kill a simple 1.2k pirate with a 38k turret boat.

If armor and shields were improved by about 30%, some in combat shield regen were allowed and weapons’ horrible across the board accuracy problems were fixed, along with a 100% volatility of the reactor after falling to 50% It MIGHT be ok. But having any sense of structural integrity thrown out the window in favor of just one system just feels dumb and makes you feel like you’ve expended far too much effort for far too little a result.

 

[MacThule]

It doesn’t matter how expensive it is. It will happen. It will bring misery and cries for reform, if people even bother sticking around. Unless there’s some serious fixes, this system in its current form will result in most players giving up on combat after they realize it takes too much time to kill a simple 1.2k pirate with a 38k turret boat.

Ahh... bounty! There's a legit issue that's fueling the upset over this for sure. Can't get pirate booty and can't even salvage kills unless they're actually killed.

Ok, that totally makes more sense, cause it seems like issues of people sending in waves and waves of hundreds of ships have many other ready solutions besides bringing back the old SHP so people can get back to min-maxing and then complaining about how the systems create OP metas. So there is definitely need for a correction to hit better balance.

Honestly though... this outcry echoing here from Discord sounds like yet another effort at turning back the new reactor dynamics that break min-maxing, just like the tempest over S2.0 in the first place. That may be cynical of me, but it's my honest reaction because there are just... so many other approaches besides dropping the new reactor HP system and rolling back the past half year of work. Some minor adjustments to reactor vulnerability that everyone assumed would be too fragile to begin with anyway ("OMG - it's coring 2.0!!!") seem to be the most sensible first steps in addressing the dynamic. Changes to the effects of weapon currently in development seems like another approach that follows far, far more closely than a major rollback. Those, at least, should be attempted before abandoning a new system in development.

Because I doubt that the overall new weapons dynamics are even compatible with SHP at all. There appears to be a cohesive, comprehensive vision at work here based on all the years of testing, observation, feedback. An evolving strategy for handling combat in a unique game of this sort. I don't think the individual elements of Systems 2.0 are a hodgepodge being slapped on top of the old system in a way that keeping elements of the old system wouldn't completely ruin the interlaced dynamics of the new systems.

Even if SHP is compatible with the new systems... I think it's safe to assume (based on history to date) that Robin won't abandon the new reactors at the first hint of imbalance without first at least attempting some sort of adjustment or vision-compatible work-around as part of the development and testing process.

How is it that either way (too fragile, too tough), it's an impending catastrophe than can "only" be fixed by rolling back to the old dynamics? You mention a turret boat. What about a ship with manual heavy weapons that can effectively target a reactor? Does that still fail to make kills in reasonable time at 30:1 mass ratios or is that an extreme example? How did we go directly from people talking about reactors being too vulnerable and armor being too ineffective and new shields being too ineffective to this? Isn't this toughness a direct response to the mass of the player feedback we've seen?

Most importantly, why is it believed that the only solution is a rollback of S2.0 to bring back SHP when the dev weapons haven't even been tuned yet?

After the course of events surrounding the 2.0 rollout, I'm very skeptical of any 'absolute' evaluations of the current dev build as being somehow utterly inviable. There are typically many good ways to solve any given problem. Weapon output and reactor fragility can be adjusted until a good balance is reached before even considering more drastic solutions, surely.



EDIT: LMAO - Not 3 minutes after I post this comment expressing my doubts over the "necessity" of abandoning RHP in favor of returning to SHP in order to balance 2.0 combat echoing in from Discord chatter, I get this hilarious dash of salt on my profile page from someone not openly involved in the discussion... but apparently watching and quite invested. Love it!

 

[NaStral]

Another concern is that there is no overheat condition for entities without reactors so shed turrets and docked entities won’t have any natural way to vanish on thier own or be properly destroyed without being manually salvaged via build mode. All this clutter is not going to do any servers any favors. The only appropriate response would be to reduce the overheat time down to nearly nothing to try to compensate.

 

[Dire Venom]

Further changes to systems and entity damage are certiantly needed eith the new system.

If you nuke a weapon array for 80% of it's blocks surely the rest wouldn't break off into 10s of miniture weapon systems and keep firing:?

I would like to see induvidual system groups being able to be disabled perm/tempt and having their own system HP. Armour touching the system group could also give it some resistance to damage.

Just spitballing XD Would like to see something be improved in regardd to system HP and defeating ships.

 

[Nosajimiki]

Another concern is that there is no overheat condition for entities without reactors so shed turrets and docked entities won’t have any natural way to vanish on thier own or be properly destroyed without being manually salvaged via build mode. All this clutter is not going to do any servers any favors. The only appropriate response would be to reduce the overheat time down to nearly nothing to try to compensate.

Yes, this is the biggest issue IMO. As is, huge debris clouds of turrets and stuff would littler servers in 1.0. This mechanic will result in entire ships becoming the clutter: things too damaged to be worth salvaging, but not functional enough to be used again. This would force frequent server resets.
[doublepost=1525790286,1525790190][/doublepost]

Ahh... bounty! There's a legit issue that's fueling the upset over this for sure. Can't get pirate booty and can't even salvage kills unless they're actually killed.

Ok, that totally makes more sense, cause it seems like issues of people sending in waves and waves of hundreds of ships have many other ready solutions besides bringing back the old SHP so people can get back to min-maxing and then complaining about how the systems create OP metas. So there is definitely need for a correction to hit better balance.

Honestly though... this outcry echoing here from Discord sounds like yet another effort at turning back the new reactor dynamics that break min-maxing, just like the tempest over S2.0 in the first place. That may be cynical of me, but it's my honest reaction because there are just... so many other approaches besides dropping the new reactor HP system and rolling back the past half year of work. Some minor adjustments to reactor vulnerability that everyone assumed would be too fragile to begin with anyway ("OMG - it's coring 2.0!!!") seem to be the most sensible first steps in addressing the dynamic. Changes to the effects of weapon currently in development seems like another approach that follows far, far more closely than a major rollback. Those, at least, should be attempted before abandoning a new system in development.

Because I doubt that the overall new weapons dynamics are even compatible with SHP at all. There appears to be a cohesive, comprehensive vision at work here based on all the years of testing, observation, feedback. An evolving strategy for handling combat in a unique game of this sort. I don't think the individual elements of Systems 2.0 are a hodgepodge being slapped on top of the old system in a way that keeping elements of the old system wouldn't completely ruin the interlaced dynamics of the new systems.

Even if SHP is compatible with the new systems... I think it's safe to assume (based on history to date) that Robin won't abandon the new reactors at the first hint of imbalance without first at least attempting some sort of adjustment or vision-compatible work-around as part of the development and testing process.

How is it that either way (too fragile, too tough), it's an impending catastrophe than can "only" be fixed by rolling back to the old dynamics? You mention a turret boat. What about a ship with manual heavy weapons that can effectively target a reactor? Does that still fail to make kills in reasonable time at 30:1 mass ratios or is that an extreme example? How did we go directly from people talking about reactors being too vulnerable and armor being too ineffective and new shields being too ineffective to this? Isn't this toughness a direct response to the mass of the player feedback we've seen?

Most importantly, why is it believed that the only solution is a rollback of S2.0 to bring back SHP when the dev weapons haven't even been tuned yet?

After the course of events surrounding the 2.0 rollout, I'm very skeptical of any 'absolute' evaluations of the current dev build as being somehow utterly inviable. There are typically many good ways to solve any given problem. Weapon output and reactor fragility can be adjusted until a good balance is reached before even considering more drastic solutions, surely.



EDIT: LMAO - Not 3 minutes after I post this comment expressing my doubts over the "necessity" of abandoning RHP in favor of returning to SHP in order to balance 2.0 combat echoing in from Discord chatter, I get this hilarious dash of salt on my profile page from someone not openly involved in the discussion... but apparently watching and quite invested. Love it!

I believe it is the best way, not the only way, because it allows for a kill of attrition AND for critical reactor damage.

 

[EricBlank]

Another concern is that there is no overheat condition for entities without reactors so shed turrets and docked entities won’t have any natural way to vanish on thier own or be properly destroyed without being manually salvaged via build mode. All this clutter is not going to do any servers any favors. The only appropriate response would be to reduce the overheat time down to nearly nothing to try to compensate.

Maybe structure and reactor hp can both function side by side to determine whether an entity overheats. If the reactor is below 50%, the ship will always overheat, if the structurehp drops below 25%, the further damage will spread to the reactor whether it was hit directly or not, causing an overheat once it fails.

If it doesnt have a reactor, it automatically overheats when taking damage below 25% structure hp. This also would apply to s1.0 ships

 

[Ithirahad]

Ahh... bounty! There's a legit issue that's fueling the upset over this for sure. Can't get pirate booty and can't even salvage kills unless they're actually killed.

Perhaps that should be dropped, then. Replace it with a system where admins/Schine can put down special non-player-obtainable Loot Container blocks in specific AI ship designs (freighters, flagships...), and make the loot inside them better than just random blocks. Maybe even have Loot Containers destroy half of their loot if they are broken by ship weapons rather than a player torch. Also, set up a system where enemies will attempt to retreat and despawn if their fleet takes too much damage. Encourage boarding or whatever, not grinding.