What about scaling defensive items by ship size? If Consider tiny swarms taking out a huge ships. What if defense scaled. For example armor on a tiny ship would be 5 points Def, 6 for small, 10 for medium, 12 for large and 16 for huge.... It would represent more area for armor, or power for shields etc... I win too many battle versus large and bigger ships by virtue of swarming with tiny ships... Has this been brought up?
I don't think defense needs to scale by size per say. After all, because defense works on every attack, effectively adding a lot of defense to a single large ship already gives it a lot more staying power against swarms.
Now I think its a reasonable debate on whether defense is strong enough per module. I personally never put it on tiny and small ships, only on medium do I start to consider it, and then it can be a debate as to whether more defense is really worth the loss of offense.
The other factor is the "overkill scenario". Generally your entire fleet attacks a single ship, assuming it is in range of all ships. If that ship is killed on the first strike, than all other attacks automatically miss. As such, a tiny ship actually soaks a significant amount more damage than its HP would suggest. One way to mitigate that would be to allow each weapon type to fire at a different ship, should the first barrage kill it. This would mean ships with multiple weapon types were more efficient against swarm type opponents, which would be a nice niche for them to have.
yeah i think that the best way to deal with this is to have "trample" dmg that carries over to the next target. a fleet should be able to destroy multiple tiny ships in a round even with 1 weapon type. smaller ships could have higher dodge and accuracy to help even things out too. then a valid strategy for taking out lots of tiny ships could be to increase your accuracy so that you can hit smaller ships more easily, which i think makes total sense. and give beams higher accuracy
Okay I'll bite. What is "trample" dmg?
An ability from Magic the Gathering. Trample is where excess damage from a lethal attack over flows to the next available ship and so on down the line.
I'm not sure the "Trample" concept translates very well to space battles. Once a ship has launched an energy beams or kinetic slugs attack it can't make them retarget. However, I think missiles being told to retarget would be believable. Might make missile ships OP though.
The way you do it is, you run the calculations for how many attacks are needed to take out an opponent, and then have the remaining attacks fly at the next target. We have to remember that the calculations run much faster than the combat simulation, so what we would see on the screen is ship 1 fires all of its attacks on ship X (destroying it), but ships 2-5 fire on ship Y (whereas in the current game, all ships would have fired on ship X, leading to a lot of wasted damage.
If you wanted to take it a step further, you can do the calculation "per weapon type". This gives large ships an incentive to have all 3 weapon types on board, as they could in theory take out 3 tiny ships per round (as opposed to the one they attack now).
Stalker0 - I'll give you that your suggestion would mimic what sophisticated computerized fire-control utilized by a very good tactics officer would accomplish. However, you'd still have to have an overcompensation x-factor since we all know nothing in war goes as planned
I'm not sure about scaling defenses based on size. If you take a colony ship or a battleship, they may both be the same relative size, but they are built for different purposes. This would make their defenses capabilities vastly different.
Its tough to strike a balance between making the defensive bonuses straight forward, but also having enough complexity that its not unbalanced.
The discussion is a good one.
I think another area to look at is around repair rates. One of the issues right now is that in the time it takes a large ship to repair itself (and this is even considering things like repair bays) I could have cranked out an entire fleet of tiny ships.
So in extended fights large ships feel just as "disposable" as tiny ones, they get beaten to heck in a few fights and then they get sent to a planet with a caretaker ship where they will repair forever and a day. At that point, just generating a new fleet is actually a faster way to stay militarily competitive, which is both mechanically and thematically very weird.
Here's one idea to make defenses "work together better". Right now weapons mostly add together to augment damage, in fact multiple weapon types can give you a large increase in damage. Conversely while defenses also help each other, the effect gets very weak after a few points of defense.
What if the various defensive technologies gave "+10% to all defenses" instead of just "+10% to point defense". You would still have the branches that gave you the new modules in the various defenses, but the techs generally improved all defenses. This would help allow defense to keep up with offense a bit better, and doesn't make a defensive route you are on "useless" if the opponent switches weapon types.
Another version of this idea would be a tech that "+100% shield values against Missile/Kinetic attack". Example: 36 shield = +6 defense vs missile/kinetic. With this tech its 36 * 2 = 72, sqrt(72) = +8.49 defense. Aka makes a defense less crappy at blocking other kinds of damage. With the square root concept, that's not generally a massive increase, but its something.
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