So for my first mod ever, I have attempted a modest, but hopefully worthwhile endeavor:
Many people have complained about the balance of the current ship roles, especially that if you load up a ship with defense, it will draw all enemy fire, allowing ships with nothing but weapons to dish out sweet, risk-free punishment. The reason for this in my mind is because the battle behaviors for various roles are written from the wrong point of view. They are written according to how you want your opponent to respond to your ships rather than how a smart opponent would want to respond to your ships. So, when you make a tanky ship, of course you want your opponent to attack it, but your opponent has no real reason to attack it as it poses no real threat.
That preamble is just a long way of saying that I rewrote the battle behaviors of all the ship roles so they respond in a way that makes more tactical sense. Load your ship up with armor? Now that ship will be low priority. All weapons and no defense? That ship is now a prime target. I also changed it so ships will tend to to target ships of similar size, so your capital ships won't waste their massive attack values over-killing a drone, and your small fighters will concentrate on targets they can eliminate from the battlefield quickly.
New priorities are as follows:
Attack ships (Interceptors, Assault Ships, and Capital Ships)
Prioritize attack ships, then support, then defense ships, then stationary ships
Prioritize ships around the same size
Defense ships (Guardians and Escorts)
Prioritize attack ships, then defense ships, then support, then stationary ships
Support ships
Prioritize attack ships, then defense ships, then support, then stationary ship
Stationary ships (Starbases, Shipyards, and Upgrading Ships)
While the cost of this is some diversity in behavior, I think this creates more interesting tactical puzzles and it more heavily favors a balance of at least two of the three categories of fortitude, threat, and value.
The mod is located here
Thank you in advance to anyone who tries this out, and please leave feedback, positive or negative.
Wow this sounds awesome. Watching my capital ships go after drones while ignoring carriers totally made me cry. Such blatantly failed design. However since the player has control over the designation of the ship, whats to prevent me from making attack ships and labeling them as Support (so they dont get attacked first), and having some tanky ships that arent full defense but still more heavily defended and labeling them as attack ships? Or does this mod somehow see through that and look at the actual setup of the ships?
This mod assumes you don't manually give your ships roles. If you do, it is pretty easy to game. I based it on the roles that are automatically assigned based on the threat, fortitude, and value scores.
this is a problem with the combat system imo while you should be able to set the behavior your ships take ( roles) this should not control the way your opponent responds to your ships they should still treat your ship as if it had the auto assigned role
If you build a slow heavy armored ship and call it an interceptor thats fine it will try and "rush" over to the enemy however your opponent should recognize it as a defender and ignore it unless its in combat range
Ensign ricki :sir theres a ship coming for us it has low weapons and high armor i think we should ignore it for now and focus on more dangerous targets
Captain Sam: this is why your an ensign and im a captian look it has interceptor literally written across the front of its hull, there must be something wrong with your equipment. Focus all weapons on that ship and fire
If everything targets attack ships first don't defence ships become almost pointless?
If it went attack -> defence -> support then they would be useful for defending the support ships but as you've got it they only thing they do is defend support from other defence ships and stationary ships.
It depends on what you call a defense ship. Now ships that are mostly defense with no offence and no support are pointless, because they pose no threat. But ships that are balanced and tilt just a little toward the defensive end will get to dish out a ton of damage before they get targeted. This is also why everything but the attack roles targets defensive ships second. I'm sure people will find optimal strategies, but I think this mod favors balanced ships that have just enough offence to fall into the attack category or just enough defense to fall into the defensive category.
As androshalfoc points out, the problem really stems from the fact that your ships' behaviors and your opponent's behaviors toward those ships are dictated by the same attribute. If these two were separated, then more possibilities would open up. It would work better if your ship had 2 attributes, one that you designate that decides what it targets and one that is based on the modules that are attached, that decides what targets it.
Another change I thought might be interesting would be to change the interceptors so they use a defensive maneuver instead of an attacker and start them a little further back. Ideally this would get them to stick close to the capital and support ships rather then racing out on the vanguard. A possibility that might add value to more defensive ships would be to give either escorts or guardians the attack maneuver and have them target support first. The idea being that they can take the beating it takes to charge through the battle lines and hit the most vulnerable targets. Any thoughts?
I appreciate the feedback. And really, your post has got me rethinking a bunch of things about how combat works in GCIII.
It's your mod, and I agree its abstract but I always imagined the defence heavy ships acted sort of like aegis cruisers, a specialist at shooting down incoming missiles so that other ships could focus on their speciality.
Me too. Skipping defensive ships in target list makes escort ships pointless. Think of a modern carrier group. The carrier itself is basically a defenseless sitting duck while being simultaneously the most powerful ship when it comes to power projection. Which is why you have the carrier group. Its escorts handle the defense and the incoming enemies leaving it to do what it does best: attack.
Or, if you want an even older analogue: The classic "archers guarded by pikemen" formation. The archers are very good at long range offense but suck in defense. The pikes have a very limited offense but excel in guarding the archers. I'd say combining them into a single formation is just good tactics and not at all "poor design or a bug in the combat system".
Of course, you have created a mod so there really is no point in arguing against. If the mod makes a fun game suiting your taste then it's a good mod. I'm merely pointing out the consequence of the modification i.e. it cripples the function of escort ships. If that's an acceptable price then all is well but do note that that is indeed the price you pay.
Just a coincidence, but a long time ago, as a young sailor handy with those new things called computers, I worked on the proof-of-concept Aegis cruiser, which wasn't even a cruiser, just a big support ship with an Aegis system replacing most of the super structure as a research tool. It was an old and clumsy ship, but even using prototype unarmed missiles, the system occasionally knocked the incoming supersonic drone missiles out of the air by direct contact. That was impressive test results.
I find your analogy quite appropriate. The escort should be primarily shooting anything smaller than it is and work its way up.
Back to OP. This is fascinating work. I play very peaceful games, so I wouldn't be a great tester for this mod. However, I like where it is going and admire the cleverness of the approach. I am hoping the devs steal any of the concepts here they can, or at least make it even easier for this kind of work to happen. Sooner or later, I am going to be itching for a fight.
As you said, this is a mod, if you don't agree with the goals, then don't use it. I am just trying to address one of the most frequent complaints I see on the forums.
However, your pikemen/archers actually illustrates perfectly what is wrong with escorts as is. Right now you can build "pikemen" with only shields and no pikes. If I have a bunch of archers and you have archers and these pikeless pikemen, right now my archers will bury arrow after arrow into your pikemen's shields while your archers rain death upon my archers. That archer/pikemen combo is only good tactics because of how phenomenally stupid my archers are behaving. This mod is meant to make sure your pikemen have to have pikes are able to charge and stab my archers.
The basic system is a bit weak, tbh. It's a nice concept but in practice it's not great. Vanilla currently offers a system whereby the best fleet actually mirrors an MMO raid group - a tank or two, a support or two and a bucketload of DPS. 'Escorts' should be the majority of a fleet, not the one or two ships with a metric ton of armour strapped to the front. It feels incredibly gamey.
What I'd like is for the way ships are given roles to be changed. First, I'd ditch the 'defend' priorities, and just let ships target down the targeting list. Escorts should defend capital ships by killing things that want to kill capitals, rather than by catching bullets til the DPS is ready to kill the attacker. Then I'd just let you pick the role, since it's really just assigning the ship a target priority list. Ships fire at the highest thing on the priority list that's in range. This would encourage including a bit of defence on every ship, and including a wide range of roles in every fleet.
It'd also be nice to see roles that actually take the ship's armament into account - I like to see my short-range ships blazing toward the enemy, but I want my long-range boats - even the tiny ones - to sit back and hammer the enemy with missiles. But presently, any small well-armed ship is likely to be an interceptor. My bombers are interceptors. This is like using your archer is a swordsman to charge the pikes.
Alas, this is all beyond the reach of a mod, as the game picks the AI's ship roles based entirely on it's internal logic (even though it has a 'roles' stat listed in the blueprint defs, and the player is allowed to choose them). Modding the targeting lists is pretty much all we can change. So frankly, it's good that someone is doing it - he might find a great balance for it.
Oh, I do agree with your observation that the current way the escort function is implemented is a bit silly. The proper simulation would be to allow the enemy's attackers to target your attackers which would be just basic common sense to do (as you rightfully note) and then have escorts actually trying to protect them with a fleet-wide combined defense network e.g. ECM, point-defense-lasers, anti-missile-missiles, ray dispersion clouds, kinetic blockers, force fields etc. what have you, instead of the current "you can't target anything else until you have killed me".
The current system is a lazy and cheap way to code the "escorts guard capitals" outcome. The problem is that this implementation forces your mod to sacrifice the escort function to make the targeting prioritization more sensible. Which is ok if you think the latter is more important than the former. I think that what I'm actually wanting to say is that you shouldn't have to need to do that. The correct solution would be to make the escorts work like proper escorts should work. Which is, of course, something that we can't mod and that would have to come from SD. Hence I completely understand what you are trying to do and why.
It's just that I like having a way to simulate escorts while also liking your idea of improving the target system and these are incompatible, for no fault of yours. I'd like to have both escorts and more sensible combat target tactics but I can't see any way to mod it so that both are preserved. Which is dumb. It should be otherwise.
And now I'm rambling.
No worries, happens to me all the time.
The truth is, there's only so much that can be done with the tools available. I am playing around a bit with how big an impact the attack vs. defense maneuver has to see if I can figure out a better feeling for defensive ships. I may end up going in and manually changing roles in the blueprints too to try to get the AI to make ships that make more sense. Right now though, the role system, and how it is by default tied into the threat/fortitude/value system is a pretty big handcuff. This mod loses some of the rock/paper/scissors aspect that I think is supposed to be baked into the base game, and I'm trying to figure out how to get at least some of it back.
You might be able to do something with expanding upon the fleet-wide defense-boosting components that are already in the game. I don't know that it'd work well, especially since defenses deplete and don't regenerate, but it'd probably do a bit to encourage fleet diversity and give players a reason to bring specific counters into play, at least if the fleet statistics update mid-battle to reflect that the ship carrying the +25% PD fleet-wide module just blew up (I don't know if they do or not; even when I bother researching the Augmented Defenses lines, I rarely bother equipping ships with the components, and even more rarely bother building any, and I don't recall ever watching a fight in which such ships were involved to see if the defense numbers change when the ships carrying the components die). If bringing along a few interceptors to kill your support ships can make it a lot easier for my missile-armed capital ships to brute-force their way through the PD of your capital ships, I might just have a reason to bring along some interceptors, and you might just have a reason to include some guardians to counter my interceptors.
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