When an enemy ship is crippled, shouldn't they move slower as well and make it more difficult for them to get away? As it is, crippled just disables their guns but they can still fly at max speed to escape (or at least it appears so). I feel it would be better (and a tad more realistic) for them to limp along after taking that much damage.
Hello! Part of the purpose for the crippled state was to give capital ships more of a chance to get away in severe circumstances and make retreats more viable, but I can definitely see the argument for realism, and we're always open to suggestions and discussion
I have a small suggestion to solve the issue.
To enable crippled ships to partially turn on Warp engines, using antimatter to accelerate. Or fly at a slower speed but saving antimatter
I would say a crippled ship should move at around 50% of it's original speed, basically in limp mode until repairs are made. That would make it more than "just another health bar" and give it more meaning, still allowing for increased survivability and a chance to escape but costing you for allowing your ship to get to that point rather than beginning your retreat before you get to crippled status.
I've been on the fence regarding the crippled state overall.
They removed the capital ship limit for sins2, which I really like. They added in the crippled hull concept, which I also like.
If the idea is to help players learn when to retreat, why not attempt to bake it into fleet behavior? If a ship reaches a specified % of it's HP (or is crippled), it will attempt to retreat to the nearest friendly gravity well. Similar to how garrisons have the [hold]/[offensive-roam]/[defensive-roam] toggle, why not have a fleet setting (advanced menu) that toggles between [withdraw wounded]/[hold fast]?
How about Sub components?If the guns are crippled you lose guns, if engines then engines, etc.We have physicality projectiles and larger ships can take hits for smaller ones. Seems like components is a natural extension.
Per my own tastes I'm not inclined to dive to a subsystems level of detail (for targeting). I'd prefer to have the systems get randomly disabled as the HP drops. The final 500HP would see the ship alive but derelict/adrift; it's salvageable if an external source repairs it - but its own passive regeneration is disabled alongside the rest of its weapons/abilities/engines/phase drive. Of course, I'd also prefer this apply to all ships/structures, not just capital ships/structures.
This being said, if this approach came at the cost of reducing the number of ships that can exist at a given time - I wouldn't make that trade. I prefer massive maps with max players and ideally a hundred or more planets with maxed player supply.
As for projectiles being physical, only the missiles can be blocked right? I don't think the other weapon types can be.. (note that I've not verified this, so I could be wrong).
I've mused at the idea of having components themselves be destructible; e.g.
..but I've yet to convince myself that something like this would benefit sins2 (or mods) given the time/energy needed to realize it.. There are consumable items in the game, but nothing like what I've pondered.
If we have a system in place where the ship goes derelict then the AI would need to change to utilize salvaging mechanics otherwise they're just going to blow it up every single time because they won't stop shooting just because it went derelict.
So we're talking about some updates to the AI behavior in order to facilitate this.
Agreed as a repair mechanic would add a bit of complexity and micro to the game that I don't think the devs wanted (pretty sure I read awhile back they were trying to minimize micro). I'm not really a fan of micro intensive games as I find it exhausting and tedious to be micro managing your fleet, which is a reason I really enjoy Sins because the micro is minmal.
I'd be perfectly fine with reducing the speed of the ship when it gets to crippled as well as having it's weapons disabled as they currently are. That shouldn't require much if any AI tweaks.
I wouldn't advocate for the AI to stop shooting a derelict - I wouldn't. If the ship happens to "survive" then it does, if not then it doesn't. I'd see it added as tribute to something realistic. Of course, having a crippled ship behave like it's crippled would go against the reason they added it..
It would be more impactful early game though, because you'd need to keep a pair of repair ships around lest you risk having a stranded capital ship. In the off chance that capital ships/titans/starbases get unique wreckage models it'll make for cool looking battlefields. Having the occasional derelict ship mixed in just means you can salvage it. It wouldn't be a common occurrence.
Regarding micro, I'd also prefer to keep it minimal.
I think several of those suggestions could work well. While I appreciate the design intent, the "hidden" health bar makes the system inherently intransparent and will do difficult for newcomers to grasp.
What I'd suggest:
On the whole, I'd think these changes would still meet (most of) the design intent to give newer players a helping hand in preserving their critical assets, while increasing transparency of how the system works.
I suppose one more radical alternative could be to make shield and armor the main health bar. As soon as they are depleted, assets enter into crippled state and the current hull points act as the "second chance". Or get an increasing probability of being crippled, in relation to % of hull damaged. Sounds like that would require a lot of stats rebalancing and not sure how it would affect factions differently, so maybe not desirable at this stage. Though would be a much simpler system.
Edit: also, while more granular damage models or mechanics around it would be attractive, I don't think they fit well with a game of Sins' scope.
This is proving to be quite an interesting thread of suggestions, It feels like everyone has different ideas they want from the crippled state, but most do want some sort of change from it
1. Revert to a single health bar for hull points. When it reaches 0, the asset is destroyed.Maybe but we've been having a lot more fun since crippled was added. My opinion at this stage is we need to improve signaling and teaching the concept (e.g. tutorial). This isn't the only system (and more coming) that have the same issue.
2. Activate crippled state at a suitably low hull point level. If the point is to offer a chance of retreat, I guess at least 33%?That's effectively how it works. If your capital ship has 100hp its crippled hp is 50. So when you reach 33% of your total, you enter crippled state.
3. Maybe make crippled hull points a separate health bar, for even better transparency. Something red or otherwise prominent in the bottom left.Considered but not enough room, especially on the smaller icons where you are dealing with really tight single pixel situations.
4. Increase total hull points to compensate for a crippled asset losing offensive capabilities, and to make retreating in crippled state more feasible.This is effectively already the case. Ships were rebalanced to compensate for the cripple state. Even if we did this again not sure how it solves any of the concerns noted.
Maybe - and I accept some criticism on this - increase ship speed, maneuverability, and jump drive charge rate. Immersion explanation: all auxiliary power diverted to "get us out of here".We'd have to think through the side effects more but immersion is broken for my personal taste: e.g. "Why not use this all the time when you are out of combat and just trying to get somewhere fast?"
Prominent visual and audio cues that ship has entered crippled state. I think Sins 1 had a "our capital ship is heavily damaged" alert.Already planned, just not in yet. The vocal line would be something like "Our capital ship has been crippled and weapon systems are offline!". This would be immersive and teach the player right off the bat.
Include an auto-cast toggle per qualifying asset that it should auto-retreat, if it enters crippled state. Set toggle to auto-cast by default. That should increase survivability for new players while giving more experienced players granular control whether they want to risk it.Not a bad idea for the advanced menu for players who already know the system but new players might be wondering why the ship is not doing what they last told it to do or wonder why its moving away at all so we just shifted the potential confusing problem to a new one.
1) I'm a fan of keeping the Hull, Armor & Shield bars as they are now.
3) I'm a fan of unhiding it still. I don't see an issue with the visibility for the smaller pixel situations. Wouldn't the lack of green (hull) serve as the more visible indicator anyway? I wouldn't expect crippled health to display entirely like hull/armor/shields.
However, if it stays hidden, then there's still a large part of me that wants to see crippled spread to the other units (for consistency) - even if's just a a generic value set by the unit class; i.e. 100 for corvettes & civilian structures, 200 for frigates, 300 for cruisers
I'm unclear what you mean in 3. You said "the lack of green (hull) serves as the more visible indicator. To me that means there is a blank bar. How is that more visible than the blank bar now flashing red?
Those other units are too weak and TTK is so low that it rarely ever be noticed. Even if it were noticed (perhaps with a heavy cruiser) we also didn't want to add the micro advantage of moving small units to safety during crippling thus increasing the APM to be successful. This led to internal discussions about auto-retreat (and other options) but they have their own set of problems. One could argue the APM case with capital ships and titans however there are by design going to be far fewer of them. Given the number, your investment and customization of them, and general 'fun toy' sense of them, we leaned towards cripple and the option to try and save them over the APM concerns. Finally, just like abilities, item slots, etc, we wanted this feature to help indicate that capital ships and titans were more special.
If weapons are down that narrativly opens up more power to be used elsewhere. Assuming retreat is the goal, it stands to reason that in a crippled state the ship would shunt all power to engines.
Internally, teams dedicated to combat systems are now focused on damage control so so level of increased survivalabilty could also make sense. Perhaps health goes down slower once crippled because teams are reinforcing the hull in key areas.
Increased turn rate, speed, and jump charging make sense. Additionally jump should occur regardless if other ships are ready so they don't wait on each other.
As far as visuals, more health bars is rather counterintuitive as if one bar shows full (crippled hull points) and another shows 33% (actual hull) that could lead one to believe they have some reserve health when in reality they don't.
Crippled should have a visual in game component (a damaged ship state, like a radiation leak, or forcefield flaring to indicate hull breaches are being closed up through use of shield, etc) and a UI component that is consistent with what we have, perhaps the hull bar flashes with a red outline to indicate it's reached a cripple state.
Don't stop! This is a good train of thought. Outside of combat why don't we have more power to speed and jump charge rate?
This would just generally be a nice feature. Ships transiting safe space faster would be nice.
From the narrative stand point, ships have a buffer for power to shield and weapons, once that buffer is full, actively generated power can be shunted to non combat functions.
Once combat is initiated the buffer allows shield and weapons to come online near instantly but in combate, replenishment is slow because active power generation is shared between all systems.
When crippled all power is shunted to escape systems.
Thus you move faster as you would when not in combat and when crippled and its internally and mechanically consistent.
As far as showing people, perhaps there can be UI elements that are grayed out to indicate that this system is being stored in the buffer such as the shield bar being muted in color. But I don't think that's actually necessary.
If the ship has an animation of the shield springing to life that would serve the same function.
But ultimately this doubles as a quality of life feature (your ships move faster when not in combat) and explains a way the crippled move faster system
I don't think this would be a good idea. This would result in ships in "crippled" state being able to outrun ships that are not, meaning if you don't IMMEDIATELY blow up the "crippled" ship before it turns and runs, you won't be able to catch it. As it stands currently, a valid tactic is to cripple the ship and then move on to bigger threats until they are dealt with and then finish the cripples off. If the cripples were faster than the other ships and auto retreated, then you'd have to focus them down until they explode otherwise they'd get away for sure.
Auto retreat isn't a bad idea, but making the ship increase it's default speed I don't think would be a good move.
I thought the "single pixels" was referencing to either this:
or this:
The 2nd image is hard to see without being zoomed in, otherwise I'm not sure where single pixels come into play (at least for my computer)? I loaded up my last save (symphony patch) and sent a cap to its doom to verify that the bar flashes for me, so there's no bugs. The flashing bar is nice, but I kinda... didn't notice that till I looked for it (I don't normally watch that closely).
My aim wasn't to allow the other ships to be save-able with micro - it's purely for aesthetics. I'd find it highly entertaining to see a couple random ships "escape" from a bad engagement that are sitting crippled at the edge of a friendly gravity well. If survivability is an issue then I'd end up setting the crippled hull to 100 for corvettes/frigates/cruisers/structures. To me, it wouldn't make caps/titans/starbases any less special as only they'd have a meaningful quantity of crippled hull points. (my own headcannon being that they are made with the intention of getting focused fired by enemies & so have redundant systems & whatnot, whereas the other ships are more mass-production and weren't spared the resources needed to increase their crippled hull points. If you make it, then yay, if not, well..)
Now I want to make a mod that adds a component for vasari orbital labs.. The component would be an evolution to the marauder's aura that impacts the gravity well - increasing allied ship speed & slowing neutral/enemy (if possible).
Thank you for your considered and detailed response, Blair, and for the others' further contributions. I generally accept those points and it's reassuring to know that most of them have been considered already.
On the auto-retreat toggle, maybe this could be part of more comprehensive options for fleet-level control, e.g. how far ships veer off their positions to pursue targets, more general "retreat when damaged" settings, level of focus fire and targetting priorities. There was an interesting thread a while back on this. If such fleet-wide behaviour were a more prominent thing, it wouldn't get lost as easily by new players.
Another idea: could crippled state instead be an ability? Bit similar to Sins 1's Eradicata unyielding will. Essentially, it activates upon "death", adds x hull points, maybe a brief period of invulnerability (?) but disables weapons and activies. And has a looong cooldown to prevent repeat firing. I appreciate it wouldn't work quite the same way as the current solution, e.g. around dipping flexibly into and out of crippled state. But if it were a fixed ability, it would presumably be more transparent to new players. Could be renamed accordingly e.g. "emergency repair protocol".
Why did I drop invulnerability into the mix? Well, late game, crippled state makes little difference. Against a higher level Ragnarov medium-strength starbases and cap ships still go down quickly. Kind of intended behaviour because that titan is a dps beast. But just an idea for surviability beyond early game. Not married to it.
Regarding the auto-retreat behavior toggle.... I'd be okay if it's limited to AI-players only (flag would be set by either AI type and/or AI difficulty). Seeing a badly damaged ship attempt to flee the battle would be funny & it's something realistic to me (wounded attempting to retreat). I can see where that'd annoy the micro-type players though..
In the spirit of making things more accessible I wonder if the fleet icon could be modified into something akin to the garrison settings toggle? The fleet icon isn't hidden & could have it's artwork change to indicate mode. Would also let players identify which fleets auto-retreat & which ones do not (assuming some fleets are sacrificial). This is just a musing, but I wonder if it'd address the concerns Blair mentioned?
I'm wary of adding invulnerability as a common feature. As for late game crippled making little difference, isn't that where some of the fun comes into play? I tend to take losing my oldest caps personally.. resulting in the offender's empire being reduced to a bunch of shattered planets before I end the game. With how easy it is to replace caps late game (and them starting with bonus levels) it seems odd to want to make caps even harder to kill. I'm only looking at this from a PvE perspective though, maybe I'm blind to a PvP need?
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