Improved armor model thoughts

[Nodachi]

Has anybody tried a mod along these lines? See any balance / other issues?

I've tried something similar but when I put the emissive ability on the hulls I went with Hull Size/100 for civilian ships (colony ships and transports), (HS/100)*2 for military ships, and (HS/100)*3 for bases. To help keep smaller ships useful (and for balance) I added to each ships defensive bonus ( an additional + 80 for an escort, +70 for a frigate, ect.) I then added the same amount as a to hit bonus for each ship. This makes it so that two ships of the same hull size have an average (or normal) chance to hit each other but a dreadnought has an extremely hard time hitting the escort that can pound him at will. I compounded these things with high combat move bonus for smaller ships that decreased with size.

In my play testing this system seemed to balance everything out nicely and you wind up with a lot of useful specialized ship designs of varying sizes throughout the game.

Comments?

[boran_blok]

Hmmh, something for SEV maybe or SEVI i'd think you could also make small ships armored like hell, as in a small flying (floating?) piece of metal sith a little crew innit

[Emperor's Child]

Nodachi said:

I've tried something similar but when I put the emissive ability on the hulls I went with Hull Size/100 for civilian ships (colony ships and transports), (HS/100)*2 for military ships, and (HS/100)*3 for bases. To help keep smaller ships useful (and for balance) I added to each ships defensive bonus ( an additional + 80 for an escort, +70 for a frigate, ect.) I then added the same amount as a to hit bonus for each ship. This makes it so that two ships of the same hull size have an average (or normal) chance to hit each other but a dreadnought has an extremely hard time hitting the escort that can pound him at will. I compounded these things with high combat move bonus for smaller ships that decreased with size.

I like this approach, this is going in an interesting direction.

But upon reflection on your concept I think I’d make a small change: A ship's agility should not really give it that much advantage to hit. The speed of a guns's tracking and computing / processing capability (aka: fire control system) is what gives them the ability to hit smaller / faster moving targets. With your approach the big ships would never have a chance at hitting small ships, which is actually a characteristic of their GUNS, not the hulls they are mounted on.

Alternate Solution: Give the Guns, not the hulls, the plus to hit. Give the normal, un-modded guns a large bonus to hit equal to the defensive bonus of the average small ship (frigate). Give the larger guns comparable minus to hit that you are presently using for the cruiser hull in your example (for the large guns) or Battleships (for their guns) or to Dreadnaughts (for massive guns) to represent their slower tracking and difficulty in hitting smaller ships.

I think that this would lead to more variety in capital ship design. Large guns would be good for killing other large ships, but perform poorly against small escorts. Small guns, on the other hand, would be good for dealing with escorts, but not well suited for handling the larger ships extensive ability to absorb damage (with the emissive armor).

This would lead to several interesting design considerations: You could put in only large guns on the capital ships and risk being vulnerable to smaller ships (and would probably want to have smaller escorts to deal with the smaller ships), a mix of large and small guns (the classic navy approach of main and secondary batteries) for a take-all-comers design, or you could go all small guns similar to the “flack cruisers” of WWII for a ship that is deadly to smaller ships but as much of a threat to larger ships.

Thoughts?

[Suicide Junkie]

1) The AI may have some difficulty with mounts that have downsides. They will always use the last mount in the list.

2) Beware the overpowered Stock mounts.
I suggest, as a maximum, +50% damage/kt on your very largest mount.

3) In carrier battles mod, I have the weapons range from around 2kt to 50kt, with only a +50% damage/kt modifier on the biggest ones. Accuracy bonuses range from +40% to -20%
As a result, the smallest mount is good against missiles and small fighters, while the middle mounts are good general purpose, and the largest couple mounts are required for damaging shielded ships (due to the higher damage per hit vs leaky shields and armor).

[Emperor's Child]

AI wouldn't use anything but the big guns, yeah, thought of that once I posted. Sigh, would need an AI re-design to work correctly. Too bad, I rather liked where this was going as far as weapon mix and encouragement to use a mix of ship sizes. The AI design drags you back to the big ships = big guns routine and a focus on building large ships.

[Suicide Junkie]

Not nessesarily.
You could make special copies of the mounts for AIs, that only fit on specific sized ships and are last in the list.

You still can't get two different mounts on the same ship unless the mounts are component-specific, but you could still get medium mounts on big ships.

[Fyron]

Take a gander at Deathstalker's Mount Mod for all sorts of crazy mount ideas. It has the AI tending to use specific mounts on specific hull sizes.

[Emperor's Child]

Imperator Fyron said:
Take a gander at Deathstalker's Mount Mod for all sorts of crazy mount ideas. It has the AI tending to use specific mounts on specific hull sizes.

Actually, I'm playing a mod that uses them at the moment. But what I was trying to do is perhaps impossible: Get this dual-mount issue working in a way that would not impact the "standard" AI design. I'm pretty sure that the concepts discussed above would work pretty well, it's just that they would need lots of overhauling of AI build profiles to make work correctly.

One problem is that the AI's themselves normally only build bigger and bigger ships... they construction files would ALL have to be changed to force a mix of ships to be built.

Secondly, the AI ship design routine is not really set up to select a "main" gun and then a "secondary" battery. You could tell the AI to select from several weapon options, and then gear certain of the mounts to work as "main guns" on one type and then "secondary guns" on the other, but this does not "scale" easily to multiple races since it is possibly some races will select weapon options that you have decided are only available as "main" weapons, or the reverse.

I guess you could come up with a small mod on your own: You could force the AI to build ships with a mix of main guns and a secondary battery without a great deal of work. You would need to add a new weapon that does what you want as a secondary battery weapon for the AI (say, based on the old reliable gun profile), and then add that to all AI files and construction routines, and add a mount mod that only applies to it.

It comes down to this idea is workable in certain situations, but would not work well across the board.

[Phoenix-D]

Emperor's Child said:
AI wouldn't use anything but the big guns, yeah, thought of that once I posted. Sigh, would need an AI re-design to work correctly. Too bad, I rather liked where this was going as far as weapon mix and encouragement to use a mix of ship sizes. The AI design drags you back to the big ships = big guns routine and a focus on building large ships.

You can fix that by making the mounts researchable. Then, only have the AI research the specific mount its going to use.

[Nodachi]

Emperor's Child said:
AI wouldn't use anything but the big guns, yeah, thought of that once I posted. Sigh, would need an AI re-design to work correctly. Too bad, I rather liked where this was going as far as weapon mix and encouragement to use a mix of ship sizes. The AI design drags you back to the big ships = big guns routine and a focus on building large ships.

There is a way around this but it requires some serious work from the modder, a well-done AI_DesignCreation.txt and AI_Construction_Vehicles.txt. With these two files you can really fine tune an AI to only build what you want it to build. It will still use the last mount listed but you'd be able to force it to use a better mix of ships.