thoughts - the source of all problems and disbalances

[Suicide Junkie]

How about one sided battles?
Having weaker or leaky shields, and a greater dependence on armor which must be repaired after combat could also have a big effect. If combat were to generate lots of damaged or crippled ships on both sides, then a slight advantage wouldn't result in a routing.

[Krsqk]

In my experience, one-sided battles rarely result in great numbers of damaged ships. Many/most players use compact formations which allow concentrated fire on a few targets, rather than spread out fire. If one player concentrates fire and the other doesn't, the spread out player will die. He will constantly lose firepower, while the concentrated player stays consistent throughout the battle. The exception is if the spread out player has vast numerical superiority (which results in concentrated fire on a different scale).

Two reasons concentrated fire is so common on PBW are 1) it works , and 2) strategic combat tends to use concentrated fire.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Krsqk:
In my experience, one-sided battles rarely result in great numbers of damaged ships. Many/most players use compact formations which allow concentrated fire on a few targets, rather than spread out fire. If one player concentrates fire and the other doesn't, the spread out player will die. He will constantly lose firepower, while the concentrated player stays consistent throughout the battle. The exception is if the spread out player has vast numerical superiority (which results in concentrated fire on a different scale).

Two reasons concentrated fire is so common on PBW are 1) it works , and 2) strategic combat tends to use concentrated fire.

This is why we need area effect weapons and collateral damage. Currently there is no 'downside' to packing your ships together in ranks like Napoleonic-era soldiers and mowing down the opposition with concentrated fire. If one weapon could hit several ships that were close together, and if a ship blowing up could damage other nearby ships, there would be counter-tactics to this method of slaughter.

As far as mounts are concerned, yes, these are what have rendered Emissive Armor almost useless, and broken a lot of other features of the game. Torpedoes are also nearly useless in SE IV due to the fact that any once-per-turn beam weapon can be made stronger by a mount and just as effective at breaking Emissive Armor as a torpedo would be...

I think that the idea of having a penalty to-hit for larger mounts instead of a bonus is a good idea. We also need to scale-back the degree to which mounts increase weapon power. It's one thing to have larger weapons with larger damage in the same proportion. The original reason for mounts was simply to decrease the number of wepaons that large ships had to fire in combat and so speed up combat resolution. But the VERY large bonuses in size/cost to damage dealt out is a real problem. Moo II actually offered a LOWER ratio of size/damage output for the 'heavy' mount. Remember? Some testing of new proportions for mounts is in order.

[ December 04, 2002, 02:13: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Suicide Junkie]

In my experience, one-sided battles rarely result in great numbers of damaged ships.

That is my point exactly.
If battles were made to GENERATE lots of damaged ships, then there would be less problem.

This can be done with leaky shields and armor, where finishing off a burning, crippled hulk takes a significant amount of firepower. If that firepower could be better used disabling another ship or two, the player who concentrates fire will be at a disadvantage.

Think of a situation where one player concentrates his fire on the enemy. He vaporizes one ship in the time it takes his opponent to reduce three of his ships to half capacity.
If decent strategies are in place, those cripples can be left behind, and out of range, while a new set of ships are crippled.
Player 1 has lost no ships, but has 6 ships out of comission. Player 2 has lost only 2 ships!

Now, when both players are dishing out damage in the cripple strategy, both fleets will be crippled first, and then the survivors will weakly duke it out, or be crushed by the remaining undamaged ships from the victorious side.
Either way, both players take a lot of damage.

[PvK]

I know I keep tooting my own horn, but most of these things are dealt with in Proportions mod. The new armor types provide emissive effect that is not shot off immediately, as well as "leaky protection". Costs of small ships are signifigantly less than larger ships, thanks to QNP and reduced prices for required components, and so on.

The main difficulty when you adjust all these things though, is that programming the AI to use them effectively becomes a major chore. The AI assumes that biggest is best unless you really work to make it build mixed forces. Of course, I tend to think the AI will never be as interesting as human players anyway, but still, it is good to have a semi-competant AI for when players miss turns or an independent splinter colony breaks off, or whatever.

PvK

[Taera]

still, consider this, if current Large mount was put for Battleship, Huge for Dreadnought and Massive for Baseship *only*, would it make the game better?

(tactical game hell, though)

^ for this, just maybe make the damage-to-size increase ration 2:2 instead of 2:1.5

[Krsqk]

Setting damageze to 2:2 would be effectively the same as setting it to 1:1. It negates one big advantage of mounted weapons--more damage in less space (proportionally). The advantage of mounts would be higher damage per shot=maybe first kill; disadvantage would be you miss, you waste all the damage. With unmounted weapons, you'd do less damage per shot, but have more chances to hit.