Wait, targetable systems was considered and dismissed?
/sadface
Is this supportable in engine through some sor tof legacy code? I really, really, really doubt it would be but that would be so amazing... If you devs uh, wanted to let us modders tweak around with that...

I think less is more with this concept. Engine overload would be pretty sweet, some AoE effects when ships explode might be nice... But the more types of things you have happening the more chaotic and crappy everything gets. If you introduce this much random chance the game becomes less predictable, and without semi-consistent predictability you can't have strategy.

This would be so very difficult to pull off with current modding capacity. 'chance to occur' things are rough to pull off. But I think that this could be a really amazing idea to tinker with.

Kryo, if you felt like talking with some of the fellas about opening up more event-style triggers in the buff system, the modding community could do amazing things... I think the current buff system is very powerful, but it suffers from a limited selection of end conditions, and a limited number of triggering factors. just a little bit more power and we could have the sort of sandbox that thousands of people would pay real good money for... *wink*

Personally I dislike this idea. I don't like combat, at a certain point, having such randomness added to it. As it is weapons fire is already somewhat chance-related with how weapons have a miss percentage. I don't think we need another aspect of probability included, especially with such catastrophic potential. It degrades the fundamental strategic nature of the game.

It is an interesting idea but i think you need to sell it better and make it a little bit more realistic and practical.

First of all, there shouldn't be any critical hits at all until shields are at least 50% or maybe even a little bit less than that. It just doesn't make sense that there would be any critical damage when in the game itself all damage goes to shields first and then to hull (excluding missile going through shields, and for balance reasons that is why crits should probably happen at 50% mark). Then you can start having a low percentile of crits (where the shield doesn't block all the damage and you start to take hits).

Practically, I don't think anyone likes 'big' random chance. In alot of games, they use dice, and there is random chance but it is per battle and generally the odds are reasonable and the rules are very strict so the player 'KNOWS' what he is getting himself into and what he can reasonable expect. No one wants a single practically impossible random occurance in a 2-hour game to decide everything.

If you lose because of economy, or fleet placement, etc. then fine. It is your fault and the reasons for it are clear. But if you lose because of a random unbalanced fluke then that sucks.

So all of the percentile chance that you are doing should be extremely low until the ship is basically in the red (less than 30% hull remaining). Then it is more reasonable for people to accept and knowingly accept that their ship is now in the red and could experience critical failures, etc. The same thing for the opponent. It is reasonable and predictable.

In addition, you could make each individual ship chance have a different percentile chance of critical failures. Small scout ships have high chance, while heavy cruisers are built better/sturdier and have a much much lower chance. Capital ships have the lowest percentile chance possible but then maybe the critical failures that could occur are considerably more catastrophic.

Corv

People seem to keep gathering from my original post that their ships will be there full health one second and then gone the next. That's not what I'm going for at all. The dominant and/or well micro'd force should always win.

Let me clarify again, this system will be random but predictable. If you let a ship with low health get pounded on, something bad will happen. The standard death animation will still be the standard . What I'm trying to do, at the core, is add some variety and effect to the death of a ship every once in awhile.

The RTS staple of a certain type of unit dieing in the exact same way, each and every time, is just bland to me. Very, very bland. Almost every game gives it a new animation, but in the end it does the exact same thing. I want to see some variety . I want to see a weapons cache hit; turning the ship into a fireworks factory. I want to see an engine explode; creating a deadly blast field. I want the death of my hulking capital ship to not just be another myriad explosion in space every single time. It must have effect once in awhile.

As far as the modding goes it looks like the tools have an onchance and minhulldamage condition. That should do fine for this type of mod. I just have to figure out how to get them to work. heh

Thanks for the posts. They help me think.

Wow. I've read your first post and I love the idea - though I haven't really played Company of Heroes.

Although I think some effects sound pretty drastic and extreme, having such variations for unit deaths would be simply awesome.
Also, from a different point of view, it's kinda realistic: Just like some battleships were destroyed after just one lucky hit that cleanly penetrated the armor and hit the ammo storage, there were some cases in history when a ship was almost completely raped by enemy ship artillery before finally sinking.

Simply put: You, sir, are awesome and I really hope you can make it happen in Sins (or find someone who can help you with that).

In order to decrease micromanagement give ships crew skill points(let them handle it), the higher the points the less of a chance for catastrophy. Add more research subjects to increase skill points.

Add new dialog so whenever something happens you'll know quicker

This sounds like a good idea just needs some work and thought

It's a rough draft

I primarily am just hoping a developer will read this and think: "Oh, that's a cool concept."

Planting seeds ftw.

I like it, Sins combat is extremely boring and long to me, I'm so used to the quickness of Starcraft and the fun of Company of Heroes. I can't play Sins anymore till I find a decent mod of people changing around the combat to make it faster.

This though is one thing that would get me back into playing Sins, granted it doesn't speed up combat as these effects wouldn't happen till ships are almost dead anyway. But it does add something to the bland combat that I would definitely start to enjoy it again. And those critical system failures (the deathblow ones) I'm all for, as long as they do stay around the 10% HP mark, and of course there always the chance it won't happen anyway. =P

This is very interesting, mind telling me how you do all this? im working on a mod myself and i really want to know how to raise the chance for crit hits involving fire n the like.

I for one think it's a really cool concept. Probably bad for balancing but I'd definitely have fun with it.

Wall of Text Warning

Reading through this forum, Kryo stated that targetted (spellcheck?) subsystems as a concept was rejected as it would cause too much micromanagement. In my, granted quite limited, experience, it adds a great deal to the game.
For example, Homeworld 2, one of my favourite RTS games. A pair of Battleships warping in front of your mothership and starting to carve the hull apart is bad enough. When each disgorges a vast number of Bombers which systematically annihilate Engines, Fire control Centres and Manufacturing plants in the mean time, the concept moves from a survivable skirmish to one of those circumstances where only '... oh bugger' is really appropriate.

Further, one of the mods for Supcom is a modular damage system. This is a great thing. Few things are more amusing that carving the arms off an attacking force and watching the chatlog light up as the enemy commander rages at you. Micromanagement heavy, perhaps. Rewarding and deeply satisfying, unequivocably.

Fallout 3, I believe, is intended to have a 'modular' targetting system in a similar vein to those stated, which looks very amusing. 'Look, your arms off!' 'No it isn't.' 'What's that then?' springs to mind. If someone was/is working on this mod, or will be, please don't drop it. It'll be a good thing, and players will love you for it. I'm not great but I can model basic-ish things in max and maya, if you need such things done, and i offer my services as such.

much love

I'm just trying to mod the deathblows themselves right now, using chance on death occurrences. I'll start problem solving the critical hit system when I get them done

It'll still be awhile though
I r newb @ modding


Thanks. I agree it will need a lot of balancing but, it should make the combat a lot more interesting once it is done.

P.S. Thanks to the mod community for answering my questions.

did this mod die?

Not quite. I'm just busy working on my other mod atm.
My goal is to get my visual mod nailed down and then work on my gameplay mod.

My development team consists of one sleep deprived person modding 38-56 hours a week.

On top of that I'm not even paying him.

Lost, love the idea. it adds some realism to Sins (not too much I hope) and adds a little variety to the ordinary Ready, Aim, Fire tactics used all too often. An idea would be specialized ships designed to cause critical hits on enemies. While expensive and incapable of causing any decent amount of damage to an enemy force by themselves, when combined with other ships in an armada they can really cause some havoc with the enemy. There would be a slight increase to the possibility of a deathblow, and a moderate increase to the less severe effects, such as shields and weapons. The reduced fire rate crit hit could be called "Damaged Coolant Systems" BTW. Damaged wouldn't be the same as destroyed systems, but the damage requires a reduced fire rate or the weapons overheat and explode, and no ship commander wants that.

I agree that something has to be done to fix SINS' addiction to logistics over strategy...

How about a null unit at each planet that has it's four abilities designed to carry out as much of your original plan as is possible.

The null unit would be indestructible, and invisible (or masked as a piece of debris or a small spacerock, and would use empty spots of the Large/small/mainview/HUD icons so that it doesn't show up on radar as anything important...

It's four abilities would make it so that the more shield damage it has, the more likely it will lose all it's shields, and the more hull damage it has, the more likely it will explode, etc...

If you need more than four abilities then simply make two or more null objects at each planet.

The null object can be entirely implemented as I have laid out, the only thing to do is to make the abilities do what you want...

(I suggest a null object INSTEAD of using planet abilities, as some planets use their abilities and you would want one object to apply to all gravitywells equally)

lol, I'll give that route a try when I get back to this mod.
I actually was using planet abilities and a massive chance on death buff chain.

Optimally I'd like to completely get rid of the whole "unit reaches 0 hp and dies" thing. I'd much prefer a system where a unit accumulates damage until a lucky shot finally ends it. AKA: Super Smash Brothers style. This would allow some regular irregularity in the gameplay as not every unit would have the same life cycle.

I'm looking forward to the day I can have a lone surviving capital ship limp out of a gravwell at 126% damage.

no offense but in the end it doesnt matter and adds nothing to the game.
It simply averages out over time and unlike in CoH there are a lot more units involved in combat which arent so fragile so u wouldnt even notice the effect.
Its just a lot of work with nearly no impact on gameplay.
There are other ways to make combat more interesting.

I personally love the idea! As long as a disabled weapon can be repaired after the battle, cuz i'd have to have a lv. 10 kol without weapons in an enemy galaxy.
But otherwise, i love the idea!

Such as?

Ramming. Who needs criticals when you can go foamy at the mouth and scream "RAMMING SPEED" at your monitor in the heat of the battle!

The idea with critical sounds nice, I hope you can pull it off, though I personally don't see how.
Just keep in mind it works both ways... and you could lose a precious high-level battleship fast to a freak streak of criticals... that's statistics for you. Always coming back to bite you in the arse.

lol, exactly! Monotony is the antithesis of fun.

uff thats alot of stuff u wanna add...

looking at in from a few angles, some show a nice improvement, some show it to be a to large change, in other words, we'll get 2 seperate games.

i totally agree on the "shoot unit X until HP == 0 and dies" being a lil dated, but it's also the most "fair" and easyiest method


right now i doubt this wil do any help in later stages as alot of people just focuss fire on ships killing it with 1/2 shots.


if you were to add this then another factor must be implemented.. namely, not being able 2 focuss fire.... now doing so would result in a situation where all ships just fire randomly upon the enemy, so if a capital ships flees with 1 hp health u cant order any ships 2 take down the last hp

to compensate for this we could add an ability (or special "cruiser") in the game, 1 based on the same principle for all races..
this ability would allow the ship having the ability to command nearby ships (20???) to fire on a specific target


as i see this this would both help improve the original SoaSE + your thought on the CoH method (wich shows lotsa promise if alot of balancing is "re"done)

S_o_L

New abilities or cruisers should be made in order to speed the process of ships recovering from their critical hit or recovering at all(in case of the happening of a non-0% HP kill). Ramming is already a tactic: martyrdom  

Well Martyrdom is a tactic. However, I think he means taking a Marza or Kol and shoving it through a frigate. Now that would put TEC's armor plating to good use.