Alright folks, it looks like I finally have some spare time, so I\'m going to continue where I left off with concern #2 on my list here: http://star-made.org/comment/76722#comment-76722
2. There is a major lack of rock/paper/scissors action going on. Currently, fights are rock vs. rock with the harder rock winning. Not healthy for variance of playstyle at all.
This is mainly a content/balance issue and as such there isn\'t a quick fix for it that doesn\'t require a lot of updates from Schema, so it\'s a problem that may take a little while to deal with. This issue stems from there being ONE optimal way to do something in any given situation.
Need a weapon? AMCs. B-but what about missi- No. AMCs. That\'s it.
Similar are the arguments of shields/hull/cloak and small/mid/large sized ships. Other ways of doing something exist in the game, but aren\'t a worthwhile investment of your valuable mass and money.
Likewise, in order to counter someone with a lot of AMCs and shields, there are a lot of options given to you... But the most convenient is always MORE Shields and MORE AMCs. I\'d like that to change. Want a missile boat that can make an enemy simply disappear? Go for it. Want a ship that\'s primary purpose is to siphon energy away from the enemy, rendering him helpless? Go for it!
Here I\'ll post a set of brainstormed changes to game mechanics or numbers in an attempt to add a fair bit of variance in combat engagements:
Shields: Add an additional base 50 shields per shield block on a ship. Leave regeneration values as-is.
This is a rather big change for larger ships. I feel that large ship combat is done in different phases, being shield, hull, and internal. The shield phase is the most important, as it\'s the only phase that provides a complete omni-directional and non-leak-through barrier to damage. Therefor, giving large shield arrays more oomph in a way that doesn\'t affect the diminishing returns is a good way of making sure large ships are capable of defensively dragging a fight out for more than ten seconds without taking irreparable damage. This change becomes worth less as you have fewer shields (Which are more efficient in the first place) so it doesn\'t mess with the already decently long combat times of smaller vessels.
Hull: Remove armor rating from hulls. Normal hulls have 400 HP and can take up to 100 damage per hit. Hardened hulls have 800 HP and take up to 100 damage per hit.
Reduce the price of normal hulls to be a tier above common blocks (ten credits each) and hardened hulls to be a tier above that (100 credits each).
This change gives hull a true purpose and specialty but doesn\'t ruin their effectiveness as decorative blocks... In fact, it enhances it.
Instead of remaining a secondary HP based barrier to shields, which are infinitely more useful and versatile, hull now protects in a different way by truly absorbing the shock of multiple attacks before finally giving away from repeated abuse.
Hitting a shield with a massive AMC will shred it. Hitting armor with it will only deal 100 damage, requiring four precise hits on that single armor block to get rid of it and hit what is behind it. For 10 credits, that\'s not bad at all. For a premium you can double the length your armor protects you via hardened hull. Both the normal and hardened hull are cheap enough to make realistic use of, even in a stretched economy, although hardened hull will begin to milk your pockets dry if you are placing them with jazz hands.
The downside to hull is that they are a 1-time use deterrent to damage, whereas shields will regen over and over again. A good array of missiles will not only damage large swathes of hull plating, but will also immediately rip apart whatever is behind the hull as damage leaks through, making missile arrays an effective counter to the per hit protections hull provides.
It\'s best to think of using hull as turning an enemy shot into 2.5 credits.
Stealth (Both visual and radar): Cloaking will be ineffective against targets closer than 400 meters. Radar jamming will be ineffective against targets closer than 200 meters. Both effects are combined into a single system with an energy cost of 125 energy per block per second.
Right now cloaking is too effective when it is useable, and completely ineffective when it isn\'t. As the most involved way to avoid having your ship blown apart, true stealth (both cloaking and radar jamming at the same time) takes a bit too much specialization, even from smaller craft. Radar jamming, however, is something achievable by most small and medium sized vessels, and is just as useful as cloaking under certain circumstances. By evening the gap of accessibility and power between the two options by combining their effects we solve both the problem of stealth relying on radar jamming to be useful and the problem of every warship under a certain size being able to radar jam (which is a huge deal, considering you can only pay attention to 1/6th of your surroundings at a time) without being designed to.
A small reduction in the energy upkeep of achieving \'true stealth\' rounds out the changes by ensuring that stealth craft can mount enough other modules to be able to suit a purpose reliably.
Weapons that can quickly output a lot of damage will chew through shielding. Weapons that can damage multiple blocks will chew through hull. Quick reaction time and diligent chasing will disable stealth.
Antimatter Cannons: Add a tiny cone of fire, only noticeable at greater than ~500 meters. For every block in an AMC array, add a 0.1% reload rate multiplier and a 0.2% damage multiplier.
It is almost universally agreed that drilling to objectives in combat is currently too easy. A tiny cone of fire will make sure that drilling is much more difficult at longer ranges, even against an immobile target.
As for the reload speed and damage changes, those are basically intensifying the last changes to AMCs. Slower reload speed the larger you get, but more damage to counteract that. Super-massive AMC arrays will act like real artillery with noticeable refire times and may sometimes miss but will reward hits with an insane amount of damage to shielding.
Missiles: Increase base reload rate of small missiles. Increase radius of all guided missiles by 50%. Increase radius of dumbfire missiles by 100%. Increase average speed of all guided missiles to 100% of server.cfg max speed setting. Increase average speed of all unguided missiles to 200% of the server.cfg max speed setting.
Alright, these are some pretty big changes, but the idea behind them is simple.
I believe that the current missile radius is in fact in error, as it was said in the update when missiles were last changed (back when you could literally delete a planet with a deathstar worth of missile blocks) that the damage will now calculate on different phases, with each successive phase having a different radius and damage only having limited breakthrough, so that a missile impacting against a wall will leave more of a dent-ish crater than a semi-circle crater. I believe that right now only the first phase of damage is being calculated.
The accuracy on missiles is pitiful because their speed doesn\'t scale up with the speed of their environment. Play on a server with a max speed of 50 and missiles will be far more reliable than a server where the max speed is 75 or 100.
Utility: Between the beams, pulsators, AI, and dis-integrators, I think I\'m going to need a second post to think this one through. I\'ll be back with more tomorrow, but go ahead and fill me in on your opinions of the states problems and solutions, as I don\'t regularly post my brainstorming.
