There was a time when I thougth capitals where just to easy to kill and should be made more powerful. A capital agaist a bunch of smaller ships would get destroyed. I wanted that list ditch cap the AI makes to mean something.
I have been playing the BSG mod and have decided that deleivers just what I want. That last ditch cap is something the smaller ships should stay away from. It could hold its own, well unless it trys taking on another cap of course.
It works awsome, however, I would not want this in the regular sins game. I still like a small buff so you could see them more often, but not the the scale it is in this mod. When a fleet of 20 ships jump in with the cap and all you got is a cap and couple of ships your screwed, makes sense to me. Now say he jumps in with 20 ships and all you got is a cap. Okay still should be screwed depending on the ships.
Seems like in the BSG mod dude jumps in with 20 ships and you got a battlestar hes the one screwed. While I do enjoy it. Thats perhaps a little to powerful.
I just want some balance between what we got in sins and what we have in the mod. I would like to see capitals fulfill flagship roles.
All I'd ask is that it was based off incoming DPS rather than simply scaling linearly.
The nice thing about the little formula I gave above is that once damage drops off, the mitigation levels out to baseline again anyway, while the higher it gets, the faster it drops if the DPS is cut off. Also, computationally inexpensive. I'm a big fan of that fact.
it could also be a factor of how much damage/how many ships are firing at once. i mean, 67% mitigated from 100 damage (per second whatever) means there are 33 units of damage incoming and being effective
however, 33% effective fire from lets say 1000 is 330 units of incoming damage per second whatever.
bottom line is the more ships you have, the more effective focus firing will be regardless of mitigation
maybe there could be some sort of defensive penalty applied to FF-in ships, i.e. you are a LF staring (and shooting) down an enemy LF, the enemy LF turns 170-180 degrees to focus fire at a cap behind him. you are now firing at the enemy's rear shields. maybe do more damage?
im not saying its a fix but it could be implemented as another thing to consider?
The reason mitigation makes it more effective is because ships automatically regenerate shield. So if you have 100 damage and only 33 units make it through, but a ship is repairing at 5 shields/s (this is an arbitrary number i pulled out of my behind) then you're only doing 28 dmg. Where 1000 damage lts 330 units make it through, but the ship is repairing at 5 shield/s which leaves you at 325 dmg.
EDIT ( maybe it's just the shield regent hat's the problem hahah)
Another way of looking at it is that if all ships in a fleet are not being attacked except 1, then the total shield regeneration of that fleet is only 5 shields/s. If you attack every ship in that fleet then it is increased by the factor N (number of ships). So in a 100 ship fleep the regeneration rate is 500 shields/s. If you attack every single ship at the same time, you are wasting 495 damage points of damage lost to shield regeneration.
TheRezonator: Yes, the setup you suggested is the reason mitigation doesn't counter FF at present.
What we're suggesting is that 100 damage per second would mitigate 40% of the damage, whilst 1000 damage per second would mitigate 80% (Or something like that, I just pulled those numbers out of my ass). So the more fire you lay into a ship, the more damage it resists. Of course, focus fire still has its place - 100DPS at 40%mit is 60DPS effective, wheras 1000DPS at 80%mit is 200DPS effecitvive - the unit you target will go down three times as fast, which coud well be a crucial asset in a fight... But if you just wanted to kill things in general, spreading the fire out would probably be more efficient.
I note that this is the desired goal. What you described is what we have at present. *shrug*
dead-on, this post. only, I'm not sure if 80% would be enough. in some instances advent come pretty close to that value already with 65% or so on caps, plus 6% from culture and 4% from shield tech. not so sure here.
The numbers themselves listed were pulled out of my butt; they're open to modification. Mostly the values were chosen for the ease of math they provided in an example situation.
And really, 80% mitigation is pretty darn heavy. Where the mitigation falls over at present is that the current mitigation means that the Advent inevitably hit that cap anyway... so you may as well keep on shooting anyhow. Were proper mitigation present, I daresay that 80% would be huge. As the above post suggested, you'd be spending 10x the firepower to kill something 3x as fast. Which is workable, but still pretty borderline.
Isn't that how mitigation works right now? The only difference is that your method climbs at a slower rate and maxes out sooner?
Or is it based on total damage recieved?
Current mitigation is based on total damage, yes.You gain +1% damage mitigation per 10 damage recieved, and drop 1.25% (IIRC) per second.
So, if I deal 20DPS, your damage mitigation will slowly climb from 15% to 60% without any extra help at all. If I deal 200DPS, your mitigation will still climb, and merely hit the cap faster. Either way, it'll still climb to the cap, and hit the cap - and once the cap is hit, you may as well focus fire because it'll be mitigated by the same amount anyway.
My suggestion is to have it at actual DPS, so 20 DPS (No matter how many ships are firing) would result in X%, while 200DPS would result in muchbiggerX%. Thus, mitigation would actually discourage focus firing - the current one does not.
I always thought it was based on total DPS. Now I'm really confused why it was ever based on damage received in the first place.
Weeeell... in a certain light, it is kinda, almost vaugely, based on DPS - if you deal less than, er, 12 damage per second or so, mitigation remains stable (and probably at 15%). And the faster you pour fire in, the faster it climbs (30DPS will raise it to its cap twice as fast as 20DPS, but note that 1. the values I'm listing are smaller than many lvl 1 capital ships deal, and 2: it'll still raise to cap anyway), so if you look at it sideways in a bad light, one could argue that DPS does affect it. And the computations involved are blissfully simple too, which is always nice.
But in actual practice, yeah, it's only very barely based on DPS (AKA: Is it incoming, Y/N? If Y, go up. If N, go down), such that it's simply not worthy of thinking about much.
If you take regeneration into a account though, focus firing would still be more beneficial until you start doing really high DPS. Also, you're kinda working uphill because the larger the fleet, the more beneficial it is to focus fire due to regeneration, but then less beneficial due to (the new) mitigation.
I was going to crunch some numbers with this https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/177320 but it looks like they've taken them down. So unfortunately I can't give any hard numbers to come up with anything.
I'm okay with focus fire being beneficial. Regeneration and Mitigation work at cross-purposes; I'm willing to accept that detail. I'd just like a mitigation system that made the numbers involved a debate at all - at the moment, we've got regeneration and a doesn't-really-do-anything mitigation, which means that focus firing is imperative. *shrug*
OH I see. I think there should be a trade off. You can focus fire, but you do less damage overall. Right now, and even with a changed mitigation, if you aren't focus firing, you're losing.
Exactly.
The problem with shield mitigation is that it takes 2 minutes to down a light frigate with firepower small enough not to cap the mitigation.
Such firepower ( ~10 or 12dps, which is enough to max shield mit) is never a threat to anything. Basically, whatever comes under any serious fire in this game, it always has its mitigation bumped up. Why not focus fire then?
N3rull: Yes, that would be pretty much the exact problem that we'd noted about Focus Fire at the moment, and why I've been advocating that Mitigation % be linked directly to Incoming DPS.
(I don't mind if there's a lag in falloff or the like, but that the core mechanic exist at all.)
The easiest way to do this would be to have shield mitigation fall at a faster rate when it's higher. I don't think there should be much additional overhead to this.
Agreed - or a simple metric so it takes more DPS to raise in the first place.
Both are hardly complex caculations.
Personally, I don't mind the concept of focus firing. To me it makes sense as a tactic, and you see it in lots of other games because of one factor - a unit that is at 5% health does the same damage as one that is at 100% health.
Consider a game like Icewind Dale or Neverwinter Nights 2. It is better to sic all of your party on one goblin at a time becasue that's the quickest way to lower the overall enemy DPS. Sins works on the same principle - a ship or starbase has the same offensive capability no matter what its health (as far as I know) so the quickest way to lower the other fleet's overall DPS is to focus fire on a handful targets at a time.
I think the only way to not use focus fire is not to fiddle with shield mitigation (it seems to me to be a minor factor in battles anyways) but instead to have damage decrease along with health, which makes sense - a ship at 5% health probably has fires all over and everything's broken, so it probably wouldn't be very effective. Perhaps speed and firing rate penalties would be relatively painless to implement.
The other option would be to use a model like the infanty in Company of Heroes. In that game a squad of 5 riflemen is far more lethal than a squad of two, and each member of the squad can be killed. In that case, a choice between taking one squad out entirely or reducing two squads to three units could work either way (though I would still FF). The strike craft in Sins work on this model, perhaps they could add other units to the game that work like this as well.
And as far as Capital ships dying quickly goes.... I find that only really happens when you have a large amount of heavy ships (kodiaks/destras/caps) FFing on a cap. But in two fleets of the same size they would be able to FF on each other, so it wouldn't be an advantage for either player.
Just a few thoughts!
i agree with the point that very damaged ships shouldnt be able to cause as much damage as one that is undamaged. i dont think new units need to be implemented where squadmates die and it lowers the effectiveness, thats not quite sins style, but definitly would like some weapons and abilities go out as health drops. like the Kodiak has 3 large autocannons right? when its damaged maybe it only fires out of 2 or 1, or a Guardian who gets so damaged it can no longer project its shield, or a cap that looses the ability to fire its nano-disasemblers or railgun, or can no longer provide targeting data to the rest of the fleet.
i like this idea alot. im not sure if phase jumping should be disabled or not, then again it would be a very complex piece of technology so not alot would have to go wrong to stop it working. it would make sense but im not sure if it would be good for gameplay
massed bombers also do a nice job of it.
though FFing on each others fleets would still be useful, yeah you would lose some ships, so would he, but i can imagine anyone playing advent or vasari wanting to FF on a mazra real quick, followed maybe by a dunov or akkan? while TEC/Advent would definitly want to focus on an Egg etc etc
like i said somewhere before, mitigation is a good idea, but when you have 2500 fleet supply aiming right between your eyes, theres not much that can stop it
What about if they just eliminated mitigation altogether? I think that would make it alot simpler.
make what alot simpler? i thought this thread was about the fact that mitigation is currently pretty useless for a number of reasons which have been listed above...
so yeah, i dont think removing it would fix it...
look, as i understand it, mitigation is designed primarily to discourage focus firing as the most effective way to fight, and secondarily to increase ships survivability slightly.
however, whichever way you look at it, unless you boost mitigation to max at like 90-98%, focus firing will always be viable and useful.
its like, one ant bite through clothes on a human, isnt lethal, or probably even painful. but get 100 ants, or 1000, and that human starts to dance pretty fast.
even with a 98% mit cap, yeah, its a massive cut (think 1000 units of incoming damage and only 20 units actually having an effect) but by the same page 98% of 10,000 incoming damage per second is still 200 actual damage per second (plus/minus armor effects, weapons types, active abilities etc)
and it does take time to warm up to the 98% mark in the first place...
Really the problem I see with ff and mitigation is this...
Mitigation goes up WAY too fast. It is essentially instant. If you focus fire, the first wave of damage brings it to max miti and everything else is just at 50%... I think it should be more gradual as the computer dials in on the weapon harmonics. Simply put, don't make it go up instantly, but rather have it go up slowly with the cap determined by DPS. Focus Firing SHOULD beat miti as an entire fleet aimed at one ship ought to take it out in one or two volleys... Mitigation prevents this thing that is common sense. If you make it increase at a relatively steady rate (based more on a constant than DPS), you could get something that doesn't do anything to 1 on 1 fights, and mass focus firing more powerful. After all, good luck mitigating damage from fifty cannons as opposed to one single weapon... Make it climb with time, perhaps 3-5% of max per second but have the max mitigation scale to DPS, thus making 30 ships firing something you could ultimately mitigate highly, but in practice you won't have time...
Perhaps this would work, perhaps it wouldn't.. This is the system I have always wished mitigation to be as it is both realistic and also good for gameplay. No longer would miti shoot up when focus firing, but rather would increase slower. Now of course because a large fleet attacking would give a bigger max miti, the mitigation would go up faster because it is going a a % of the current max miti. If you went from ff to 1 on 1, it would slowly fall back down to the one and hold steady....
Hope that all made sense, but if not, I'll explain it in a way that does...
Simply put, 1 on 1, not really all that much of a change...
20 on 1: mitigation goes up but, as you are not dealing a whole lot of damage, it would discourage it.
70 on 1: Mitigation would have no hope of stopping it in real life. You would completely overwhelm the ship and neutralize mitigation completely.
And thus, frigates would die almost instantly while a level ten cap could withstand a quite a few volleys. It makes small ships more disposable and makes capitals more important...
Oh, and don't make ships statistically weaker as they take damage... That would screw up gameplay and though it would add to realism... There is a reason that in FPS's getting shot in the arm doesn't make you drop your gun... If you want a justification in lore terms... Just say that the repair crews are capable of keeping weapons and engines online and only focus on actual hull plating once you are safe...
Ok, I think I may need something cleared up: does mitigation completely nullify damage by a certain percentage? I had thought that it just redistributed damage. As in, 100 damage at 50% mitigation would mean 50 damage to both shields and hull... but from the thread it seems to mean that 50% mitigation of 100 damage would mean 50 damage to shields and 50 into thin air...?
And about my idea RE eliminating mitigation altogether - it occurred to me that IF mitigation is useless/broken, that taking it out of the game entirely might make it more fun.
No... mitigation neutralizes said damage... ex:
100 damage incoming with 50% miti
It neutralizes half of that so your shields only take 50 damage.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
