Combat Mechanics

[Gregstrom]

Originally Posted by pydna

Another thing I've been thinking about is multiple targetting. Say for instance my vessel has three weapons pods I have two of them set with attack standoff orders and one set with defend orders. This means two are blasting away at the enemy and one is trying to shoot incoming missiles. I don't know if will work but something to think throw into the mix.

It's an interesting idea, but if fleets get sufficiently large I could see it turning into a MM hell of epic proportions.

[jars_u]

I agree with Gregstrom that sounds like MM Hell - I think SE resolved this nicely by having point defense weapons whose only function/ability was to fire on incoming missiles etc. - this affords the strategy without the Hell I think and also I believe to more realistic - you wouldn't fire on a cruise missile with a 16 inch gun etc.

[pydna]

Very true Jars_u, but you could also have a short range interceptor missile.

It would have a longer range than point defence but much shorter range than an Anti Ship Missile (ASM). This would would allow Ships with screening orders to shoot down inbounds that weren't necessarily targeting them.

Already there are several design strategies players could employ.

Do I build a large ship which has a mixture of point defence and interceptor missiles + ASMs and Beam Weapons??

Or do I build two classes of ship. One large ship with limited point defence, ECM and Targetting systems lots of ASMs plus a second lighter vessel which is fitted mainly with Interceptor missiles and given screening orders. Essentially you're building a Battleship and Escort class vessel.

[jars_u]

Originally Posted by pydna

...you could also have a short range interceptor missile..."

I think this can still be resolved with the weapon characteristics themselves without the need for independent orders for individual platforms. The greater the range of the defensive weapon the slower the rate of fire along with the corresponding size and resource consumption. This would still allow players to design role specific ships.

One of the things I wasn't crazy about in SE 4/5 was that while an abundance of weapons choices existed the differences between them were often not significant enough to justify researching one over the other. For example the point defense beam weapons and point defense cannons were fairly interchangeable.

[pydna]

I think one thing the designers may want to consider is look at the effects they want to achieve.

For defence you could have the following I'm borrowing from Real Life navies.

Point Defence (short range missile interception)
Missile Interceptors (medium range missile interception)

Electronic Countmeasures (affect missiles tohit chance)
Chaff/Flares (affect missiles tohit chance)

I would suggest that given the "function" of the last three (ECM,Chaff and Flares) is the same you would just lump them as one piece of equipment (Counter Measure Systems). Now obviously you could have better grades (Grade 1, Grade 2 etc) but you get the idea.

Same goes for point defence and interceptor missiles. Again, you would have multiple grades (Point Defence 1, 2...n)

The main point is you don't get cluttered with lots of gizmos that do the same thing.

[jars_u]

Originally Posted by pydna

...Point Defence...Missile Interceptors... Electronic Countmeasures...

The main point is you don't get cluttered with lots of gizmos that do the same thing.

SE4/5 modeled each of these effectively I think but my concern with weapons in general was besides the incremental upgrades (version 1, 2, etc.) some of the actual distinguishing characteristics of the weapons was to me too minimal - been a while since I played either but off the top of my head a uranium cannon, beam cannon, and meson cannon were all very similar. The meson cannon was a little lighter, the uranium cannon required you to budget for ammunition (vs energy), and the beam weapon had a slight range advantage. Torpedo weapons were always better then missiles but the variances in Torpedo's too subtle of a nuance. I don't want to have to study weapons tables (Excel spreadsheets) looking for +1/-1 calculations - just think the advantage/disadvantage of one or the other should be more well defined for building and strategy.

[pydna]

One thing a friend of mine came up with (over 10 years ago) was a pen and paper space campaign/combat system.

Nothing too unusual about that except one of the neat ideas it had was players could custom design there missiles.

It was very simple I won't bother going into details unless people are interested but it was a lot of fun not only designing your ships but also designing the missiles. It added loads of depth to the combats very little in the way of extra design time.

Anyway more food for thought.