Tying hull condition to damage

You could make a passive ability reducing damage, etc that activates on a certain # of hull damage quite easily.

This is actually kind of a rough subject. The 'Downward Spiral', or so it's called in video games, is as a general rule not the most fun thing to experience. It is an example of where folks give up realistic gaming for the sake of having more fun; fighting into an endless I keep doing worse and worse funnel of destruction isn't nearly as neat as both competitors slugging away at full steam for the duration of their lives.

well there is a another point ... now you are forced to focus all the fleet on individual ships, if there would be performance degradation due to dmg, spreading the dmg across the fleet becomes viable

Currently your forced to focus fire, so seems this would help that problem. But I could see it being frustrating.

The `downward spiral' or 'slippery slope' is exactly how RTS games generally work though. Lose that first colony, or first decent battle, then you're at an economic or military disadvantage, and assuming the enemy knows what they're doing they leverage that and your defeat is inevitable. Having this kind of behaviour in ship combat too doesn't sound like it would really change the nature of the game.

DancingWind suggests that performance degradation due to damage would make spreading fire across a fleet a viable tactic. I think it's actually a bit more complex - instead of focus firing on priority targets until they explode, one would instead focus fire on priority targets until the were damaged enough not to qualify as priority targets any more, due to their degraded combat effectiveness. So still focus fire, just a lot of half dead burning ships floating around being useless in the middle of a battle. I think this might be a pretty cool mechanic: if you're attacking a fleet, do you concentrate on completely destroying ships (at the cost of wasting firepower on effectively worthless targets) or concentrate on reducing the enemy fleet's net dps output by only shooting ships until they are ineffective, which could risk the enemy being able to repair their entire fleet back up to full strength with no casualties if they are able to force you into a retreat.

One idea that might promote spreading fire across an enemy's forces would be some kind of 'suppressing fire' mechanic. The basic idea: ships that aren't being shot at have all the time in the world to carefully aim their shots, while ships that are attempting to weave through a wall of fire are going to be a bit more rushed about aiming and consequently have somewhat reduced dps. Say if a frigate was experiencing X damage per second or more, it would count as being in a suppressed state, and its damage output would be reduced to some fraction of its normal unsuppressed output. Damage reduction due to supression could be coupled with shield mitigation, for example.

With some kind of mechanic like this, appropriately tweaked, the optimal strategy might be to keep all of the enemy's high dps output ships under supression fire, while focus firing on one of them with the remaining ships not needed for supression duty.

thoughts?

Yes, but unless they're mobility-killed, ships that have been beaten to the point of uselessness can get away, repair, and return to fight another day. It adds another aspect to this.



Ships don't move in combat, computers control everything, shields absorb incoming damage as long as they can. Thus, no suppressive fire.

Well, if you wanted to make it harder for damaged ships to retreat and repair, just tie in the engine speed to the hull condition too. A ship at 50% health would move half as fast. Of course, I imagine that would screw up fleet movements, since a fleet only moves as fast as its slowest ship (I think), but since cap ships are much slower than everything else anyway, I don't know if that would really mess it up.

It's correct that performance degradation removes the incentive for focus firing. This is why I implemented a critical hit system in my own mod that can temporarily degrade performance when hull damage is taken.

Imho it improves gameplay.

You could also write a system that degrades performance when a ship has received damage, but I'm not sure if you can restore it again as the ship is repaired (unless the finish condition damage received takes negative numbers for damage...)

Having certain ships good at killing another certain type of ship reduces the incentive for focus firing, and Sins includes that mechanic.

As for suppression fire, highly damaging but not killing ships would not work. I would just send in repair droids to restore my combat effectiveness while I actually blast your ships into the nearest star.

I think the best option would be to literally remove the ability to focus fire. You should be able to set your ships to attack a certain type of ship in a certain area, but you should not be able to designate a target without the command ship.

Sweet idea.

Oh by the way, I would be pissed off if I could not evacuate damaged capital ships. What kind of science fiction movie features the amiable but hardcore crew of your favorite space federation ship about to make the jump to lightspeed but being destroyed because their ship was too damaged to make the heroic escape? Think Millineum Falcon. What if the empirial cruisers had actually damaged the hyperspace device, and Han had died. Lame.

No it doesn't - it incentivizes you to focus fire certain types of ships against the type of ship they're good at killing, one at a time.


Unless I destroy your repair ships first.


You pretty much never want to remove control from a player. AI in general is going to have to get a lot better before we can rely on it for stuff like this, otherwise you're going to be yelling at your screen saying "No you idiots, shoot the other one!"


Han was smart enough to get the hell out of there before the Imperials blasted the Falcon's engines to pieces. That's why he spent so much time running from Star Destroyers. The longer you stay in battle, the bigger the risk that you'll be too badly damaged to retreat.

I don't think it's something suitable for basic frigates. In truth, it'd be a LOT of work (and a LOT of CPU cycles!)for something you're not going to see. Why? Because your attention isn't on the damaged frigate. It's on your economy, your structures, and your capital ships.

It would be unsuitable to have to weed out your crippled frigates to keep a fleet moving quickly. That is a major annoyance that shouldn't have to require player attention. I definitely wouldn't want a major fleet to suddenly be running 1/3 speed because a single ship nearly died, and then to play "Where's Waldo?" to find it, remove it, and realize I've been outflanked in the meantime.

Capital ships are the perfect targets for such a mod. They are massive, have long enough lifetimes for the effects to MATTER, and are often the focus of attention. If a severely damaged capital ship suddenly lost speed/abilities/weapons, you'd definitely be more cautious about them getting into thick fights.

I don't disagree on the potential for annoyance (except on the CPU cycles point - does reducing ship speed take up more CPU somehow?). However, if you set it up so that a damaged frigate will still move as quickly as a healthy capital ship, you're never going to have a situation where a major fleet is moving slower because of damaged frigates.

So, does anyone know of an easy way to make this happen? Would you have to individually modify each ship to apply a passive ability, or is there a way to do it globally?

Do we have the ability to add global scripts in the editor?

How many times has the Enterprise been so messed up it can't jump to warp? "I CAN'T DO IT CAPTAIN, I DON'T HAVE THE POWER!" IT happens like every episode and every movie they're engines are so heavily damaged they can't run so Kirk has to make up some sexy way to win any ways. IT creates tension, though I don't think it would in a game like this unless you where playing with /just/ capital ships.

No.

Unfortunately, I think you can add only up to 4 abilites per ship, so that means each capship would have to sacrafice an ability if you were to add a passive damage/disabled ability.

So this might be something we'd need the full mod tool package to pull off properly, then?

You'd need a fixed UI to implement it if you didn't want to be limited to 3 ability slots.

Critical hits, and enemies being under fire being less effective than enemies not under fire are pretty much why people don't 'focus fire' in real life. There's a greater chance of hitting critical systems and protecting your own ships if you're distracting enemy ships with your own fire.

Normally with anything, it's not about "Whittling away" HP, it's about getting in that ONE good shot. In tank battles, a single shot or two ought to kill a tank- reload times and other factors mean focus fire is often a waste. Battleships with torpedos, cannons, fighter planes, even people all operate the same way.

Even in FPS you see things going the same way- people don't focus fire on each other, it's essentially a team game where you focus your attention on tracking multiple targets.

However, HP without performance degradation doesn't really reflect the advantage of multiple target tracking or anything similiar. Just think of how many abilities that were supposed to be useful (Phase Missle Swarm, Dreadnaught's level 6, Destra's damage radius) if damaged ships that were under fire actually were less effective.

Anyway.

I think you could fix this with adjustments to shield mitigation- make it an instance calculation over damage accrued over seconds rather than a simple additive over a minute or so, and raising the 'damage limit' greatly.

That way when say, a capital ship is firing at something, shield mitigation doesn't go up. When it uses an ability like missile barage, mitigation also doesn't go up. Bursts like 200 damage or 600 damage in a single hit don't trigger mitigation, but something like 600 damage continuously applied over 2-3 seconds does.

However, whenever an entire fleet pours fire onto something, it then goes up drastically, and then decreases when the focus fire ceases almost immediatly.

Or, instead of being based on damage, why not just read off how many ships are targeting a single ship and basing mitigation off of that? It can symbolize a ship going 'defensive' and being particularly difficult to hit, much like Han Solo trying to escape from the Imperial Fleet in ESB.

That's exactly how it works now.

I like the idea.

It would make repair bays MUCH more effective.

-- Retro

That's exactly how it works now.
>>>>

Wrong.

Shield mitigation is based on Damage taken overtime. So a cobalt's shield mitigation will quickly reach maximum after a single kol fires at it for a couple seconds. Or heck, even another cobolt.

Wait a sec - if the only thing holding this back is the UI not being able to show it, what difference does it make if we see the icon for a passive ability?

the ui and code is set up to only have 4 abilities