[Dev Asks] Combat, Weapons and Addons plan

So I feel we need a deeper weapon / addon rebalancing.

First I think we should agree/discuss on the basic: what choice the player can make in engaging, and how this could drive synergy with the way we can design ships. => I think that due to the precise nature of voxel damage and the fact that each systems / turret exists precisely inside ships, it would be a shame to not base the combat on that. This is what voxel game are about! And this is what I started to see in my small playtest. To me that means you have a choice on what you target:

System: slowly make enemy ship weaker
Turret: make enemy ship less dangerous for you.
Hull: try to get a hull kill or heat kill (if we keep those) At the end the best choice depend on each ship, and can change during combat. Do you guys see other options?

=> In short: we have either small system sniping (like turret), large system damage, or hull damage. These strategy requires:

System => piercing damage (we need to pierce through hull to get to the system) and precision. To get high piercing you need high damage at the same spot, so large shot are best.
Turret/ weapon =>High precision. High damage not required (actually more shot will have a higher % of hit)
Hull => medium damage, small precision. If damage is too high you will pierce through the ship.

So in light with this, I want to do the following set of change and also want to clarify the use / rational of each addon.

Some key points: 1) Firing time: I want it to be driven by addons. We could consider making the small laser fire faster than the big one though, seems okay to me. 2) Barrel length. I already changed foot on this. I think I might want to reverse to the initial of more length = more effect. (current is more length = more precision, make sense from a look perspective but less from a game-design one) 3) Beam: beam are clearly op, but that can be fixed in various way. I was planning on having a range dropoff. Also beam are good at heat but weak at hull killing. So for the same power/heat if we manage to fix laser they wont be the go-to weapon anymore! 4) repair will be a thing. Especially for small ship, once your turret is snipped you are dead atm, so we need a fix 5) exit condition: in case you manage to take down a lot system and the enemy is crippled I wont make the player have to destroy the remaining hull, it would be too time consuming. So we could have a surrender of some sort. 6) turret speed. For now they move really fast, but heavy and long weapon will be slower to turn! (depending on how big is your rotator too)

Barrel addons: 1) Gatling: I will get back to a constant firing rate (no burst). Increase DPS at the cost of precision. Good for Hull busting! 2) Sniper: no change in philosophy (we will tweak values). Good for system sniping 3) Recoil: so this one I want to change it completely to make it a good piercing barrel. This would fire bigger shot, at a slower pace. The opposite of the gatling! We might increase precision, we shall see. I think it works visually also, as this is the kind of weapon inspired by destroyer of old, and you want to see them firing big fat laser! 4) The heat one. As the recoil this one is not really useful. With the new side addon it would on the other side do a great combo! 5) I also wanted to add a gimbal addon, just to let you know (likely post ea) => I think this should cover all our use cases.

Side Addons: 1) Overcharge drops the volley mechanic to make bigger shot. Easier to understand, as the volley for non-integer is confusing 2) Supercharge, heat / hull damage. The big change in the philosophy would have them produce large amount of self heat, but at no additional power draw. As it is power and heat being proportional on each system, it dont allows from some depth, so I need to introduce correlation like that at one point. It will combo well with the heat barrel! => adds a bit more depth. Otherwise building addons is too similar to simply building more weapons.

Other change: 1) Projectile shape: longer have more range. Larger are more powerful! So each barrel fire a slightly different laser. 2) System chain reaction. So I wanted to buff system kill. I think it was a bit weak when I tested it, it was not really a thing. So I propose that each system destroyed has a chance to destroy a neighboring system. It adds a bit of luck which is always funny. Sometime you just get one system, sometime 2, sometime even more. I like it also because that gives me one axis to make stats booster once I introduce Ship Mods and Crew Skills.

Thats it... This is a pretty complex topic, but we will get through it! Cheers

I agree with your opening points - we have such a great system here because we build the ships ourselves it would be a terrible shame not to use it! Systems - when hit, they should not function and slow the ship down as you say. I also think that system hp should be included in the calculation for total ship hp and should count for a large percentage of it. Individual blocks don't matter much when destroyed, but if you lose a system you should lose a large chunk of your overall hp too. I like the idea of them exploding and damaging other systems, that makes system placement and armour much more interesting!

Heat kill - I think I remember Exodist and a few others talking about it, but I believe it would be better to have heat damage stun a ship rather than blow it up. Say it reaches 100% heat, it should have a large debuff on all system stats until it dissipates most (or all) of it's heat, then it carries on as before. Perhaps it could suffer some lasting damage to a random system too. At the moment heat death doesn't feel very different to normal death, and they look identical too. Obviously if you get too close to the sun, you should die regardless though :D

Firing time - We've talked about this a lot, but I still very firmly believe that this should be determined by core length and addons like damage currently is. Core length should increase it, while addons could tweak it further. As you say high precision high damage shots will be needed to take out systems or turrets, if guns with this capability also have a high rate of fire they will be much too powerful. Like shield hp and recharging, the guns with least projectile damage should have the highest rate of fire and vice versa. I also agree that the brick weapon should fire faster than the block weapons for sure.

Barrel length - I agree on this point, it might not work out in practice but it's definitely worth a test.

Beams - Very much need a range dropoff, as well as a firing cone although they should still be very accurate.

Your plans for repair, exit strategy and turret speed all sound good too! Will AI turrets also have some inaccuracy built into them?

I think the best way to balance accuracy is to make the base guns relatively accurate (much more than they are now), but then allow the errors to come from how you fire them like turret movement and AI tracking efficiency. There are many points in the process of aiming where accuracy affects things - Lead target indicator - turret movement - aiming skill - gun accuracy You can introduce errors in how the AI aims, or where the target tracking indicator is so that you don't hit everytime, but it's frustrating lining up a shot perfectly and then missing because of a crazy inaccuracy in the guns - This should be skill based to reward the player for being good at it, it's already hard to hit a moving target at speed so it feels awesome when you do.

You plans for barrels sound good too! Gimbal barrel - This really shouldn't be a barrel, it should be a built in feature for non-turreted brick guns only. The longer you stretch a brick gun core, the less it can gimbal. The reasons why were covered in #1749, but basically you really need that little bit of help to land a shot in small fighter fixed guns because you're flying and dogfighting so quickly. Right now it's very difficult to land a shot because of the huge deadzone the clip in that thread showed off, but even without that it's difficult. Elite uses the same system for it's fixed guns to great affect - you don't actually know it's there most of the time because it's such a small gimbal, but it's vital for fast paced fighter battles. If you make it a barrel, it will be much better than any of the other barrels which makes it a boring choice.

Side addon plans sound good! I also really like the sound of larger looking projectiles for more damaging shots, that'll be awesome. Maybe up the bloom on them a bit too?

I hope this was helpful, and look forward to your reply!

System Damage Agreed. In particular, I agree with Peach's thoughts about systems being affected en masse, instead of on a granular, block-by-block basis. And system chain reactions would make system placement more important, giving even more depth to the build aspect of the game.

Turret Damage Like you described it, this one is very straightforward. It should be kept. As long as it's not too easy to snipe turrets off the enemy's hull, this is fine.

Hull Damage This should definitely be kept, and is one of Starship EVO's strengths compared to other voxel space builders. The alternative tends to result in "zombie ships," which look like they ought to be dead wrecks, but which are still somehow capable of fighting. Space Engineers lacks a Hull Damage destruction mechanic, and this old picture from SE illustrates why it's a problem: 2014-05-15_00049 You can see that the ship being cut in half still has glowing engines on both halves: it's aliiive! :scream: Actually, after this happened the friend piloting it turned the half he was in around, rammed me, and disabled my ship. Without a Hull Damage mechanic, the same kind of thing will happen: ships that in a book, a movie, a show, or most computer games would clearly be destroyed will still be able to fight.

Heat Damage I'm in agreement with Peach on changing heat to more of a debuff effect, for the reasons he listed, but also for another reason: with ship destruction possible from Heat, Heat Damage is a much better choice for weapons than Hull Damage. The floating numbers are gone (which I'm grateful for), but back when we still had them I noticed that Shield Damage and Heat Damage were the same, and I'm assuming they still are. That part is fine; but the problem is that if the weapons that are best at taking down shields can also effectively destroy the ship, players don't have much reason to pick weapons that damage the hull; heat does everything they need. I do like the idea that 100% heat would cause some kind of lasting damage, like there being a rising chance of systems exploding the longer heat is at 100%.

Firing Time I agree with Peach 100% on this one: scaling a weapon up should increase some of its stats, but decrease others, among them firing time. This quote from Peach sums up why perfectly:

As you say high precision high damage shots will be needed to take out systems or turrets, if guns with this capability also have a high rate of fire they will be much too powerful.

One thing to keep in mind is that a higher Rate of Fire makes it easier to hit smaller, faster targets by giving the attacker more chances to hit them. And smaller, faster targets are more vulnerable to more powerful guns. Making a gun do more damage should also make it harder for that gun to hit smaller ships, because otherwise smaller ships are unevenly penalized.

In addition to the balance reasons already mentioned, another reason is because otherwise there's little reason not to build the largest ones. That makes the design part of the game shallower: there's no real choice that needs to be made when picking guns, you'll always want the biggest your ship can fit.

Finally, in addition to the balance concerns, bigger guns firing at the same rate is counter-intuitive, and harms immersion. In real life, the bigger a gun is, the longer it takes to reload it. Players will be carrying that expectation over from both real life, and pretty much every game they've played.

Barrel Length That all makes sense!

Beams Yeah, they're definitely OP, but your planned changes to them sound like a good way of fixing them. The range dropoff will be good, especially since their hitscan nature means they'll always be the best anti-fighter weapons; giving beams a range dropoff will protect fighters, especially bombers, from getting flyswatted before they can get close to bigger ships.

Repairs This is a good idea, though it's going to be important to make sure it doesn't happen too fast. But it's definitely good to give the player some way of fixing things during combat; there's nothing fun about defeated or forced to flee because you can't shoot anymore.

Exit Condition Makes a lot of sense!

Turret Speed Excellent!

Barrel Stuff All of this sounds good!

Gimbal I agree with Peach on this; giving all brick guns a small amount of gimbal would be good.

Side Addons These all sound good; the volley thing was a bit confusing, and everyone loves big shots.

Other Changes These sound good too! In addition to changing the size of projectiles, would it be possible to change the pitch of the guns? With bigger, more powerful weapons having a deeper pitch, and less powerful ones being higher pitched?

Additional First, it's really great that the weapons now have an inherent degree of inaccuracy. Space Engineers didn't get around to adding that for a very long time, and it was easy to exploit the fact that guns had no cone of fire. Weapon spread is a keeper for sure. I do agree with Peach that it does need to be toned down a bit -- not removed, just reduced -- and that additional sources of inaccuracy need to be introduced for the AI to make sure it fights on the same level as the player. However, I understand that those might need to wait until crew are added though, depending on if you want Gunnery or something to be a crew skill.

Yes I will link turret accuracy with crew skill. Regarding rate of fire, we already had the debate. Yes a bigger weapon is always gonna be more powerful. I might have to increase the rate of fire for the reason you mentioned, we will see, but I prefer to not do so at the moment. Problem is that if you increase the DPS (bigger block) and decrease the rate of fire, you increase two-fold the laser damage. I feel it might be maybe too much, and making it too well suited for penetrative round, making the recoil barrel redundant. Ie if a 2x laser has 2x DPS and 2X longer shot, then each shot is 4X bigger. When you balance a game I think we have to worry about non-linear relation like that. Remember I want to balance first big ship vs big ship, then see how we could make fighter fit in that, not the other way around. Anyway this debate has been too theoretical, we will see in action for ourself!

Tsuna, I think you think we will be hitting the enemy ship with every shot, this is far from the case. It is more a risk vs reward idea that balances itself out. With each shot fired you are taking a larger risk of that singular shot not hitting the target due to many factors that are out of the players hands including the long reload time between shots. With the system you suggested, I will be making the largest gun I can and add as many fast firing addons as I can to mitigate my risk vs reward. The best damage possible including fast follow on shots makes the weapon system less risky to have yet providing huge rewards on the battlefield.

I did not get around to it today, but I will be putting the turrets on the larger ships and post the recordings for you.

@ExodistSKY1 okay, I said many time I understood your (all of you) point, and you guys kept coming at me explaining your point, again. I got it, but it seems you didnt got mine. Which is to keep it that wat for now, do the other changes and more testing, and then eventually do the the change if necessary given feedback from actual gameplay session.

Understood, I am getting the larger ships ready for the new update to do testing and see how that goes!

one exit condition could be boarding we will have pirates in the game so it would be super cool to have a group of AI try to get into damaged ships to either raid there cargo or strip them of parts or perhaps even a rescue/recovery mission or something

as far as barrels go i still think an anti recoil barrel would be ok but perhaps have it improve accuracy without any range bonus that way i would be much more styled towards accuracy and precision that being said an armor piercing barrel would be fantastic would be nice to see explosive and ion (anti shield / emp?) effects as well out of curiosity what do you have planned for kinetic weapons? will it be similar to the lasers we have now or would it possibly be more like torpedoes missiles and mines?

And what is your opinion about possibly considering adding an even larger weapon base? you mention a few times about having less weapon spam and large projectiles so why not just make another tier to weaponry to keep it simple have it be 4 times larger than a block weapon but still accept the same addons (would need barrels) most ships passed 100m will need something like this in order to avoid multiple weapon spamming to crack those large shields at that size

tsunamayo / Starship-EVO

[Dev Asks] Combat, Weapons and Addons plan #1866