[Discuss] Ships and Combat

[Kloopy]

I've not even brought up this idea in PATeam yet, but it's an idea I've had. Come to think about it, I'm not even sure wether it's already been suggested. If so, apologies.

Basically,what I think would be fun is to have the same basic ships we have now, but to extend the research tree slightly to allow upgraded ships.

So for example, you might be able to build the Harpy (MkI). But after researching "Ion Drive Propulsion" you have available to you a new ship called, Harpy MkII. This ship would have slightly improved agility and therefore a better outcome in battle. A further research could well be "White Lasers" which enables slightly improved firepower for Harpy MkIII. Personally I wouldn't go more than 3 itterations through each ships development.

This idea could be expanded to changing the initiative of a ship, the hitpoints, perhaps (I'm against this one though) even the class of ship they target.

You may well be thinking that this could just well be trippling the number of ships in the game. However, the catch I suggest is on all scans and combat reports, basically everywhere apart from your production and fleet screen, all people will see is the general ship name.

So I may be sending 1000 Harpy MkI and 400 Harpy MkIII, but if my target scans me, all they see 1400 Harpys.

This would help stop the situation where all battles are predictable, it would make people have to think a little more and should stop the alliances from being so mechanical in the way they defend. I could see it adding alot to the tactics players employ and I know I'd find it a bit more fun.

Now; someone tell me where the problems in my idea lie.

Kloopy

[orichalon]

I like. Not much more to say really... I like it.

[Banned]

This idea will be shot down in about 5 minutes. It probably requires recoding of the combat/scans/ship systems.

Which, unless it's a big change round, are no-nos.

I do have to admit to liking the ideas a bit. The tech-trees would have to be rebalanced, naturally. In my opinion introducing some actual tree-dependancies might improve the viability of this idea. For example, mark 2 ship research relies on getting at least Fleet Analysis (see, you need to be able to analyse hostile fleets to customise the harpies) or sometihng like that.

[mist]

this isn't the first time this idea's come around, so shooting it down isn't particularly tricky

firstly, it requires a rewrite of combat, and makes the engine significantly more complicated.

however, the largest problem is it's effect on the balance of the game. this is easiest to explain by example:
imagine a fighter upgrade which costs 100K metal and 50K crystal for a 5% upgrade. for this you can also, so the story goes, but 100 fighters. anyway, if you're a totally new planet then the upgrade's useless as you'd gain nothing. however, if you're a well established planet with, say, 10K fighters then you'll gain a benefit equal to 500 fighters - 5 times what you'd have been able to buy with the resources. obviously there's a point where it's equally viable to get both (2000?). however, the problem in this scenario is that it's the big boys who are the beneficiaries and it's hard enough for the small player anyway.

so, what to do?
well, the obvious solution to this is to make the thng cost more if you're bigger. this might even introduce some tactics to when you upgrade. however it's still going to give a bigger benefit to the big planets, as they're going to be building more ships in the future.

in order to solve that, you have to up the cost of the actual ships as well. in this case the upgrade's either worth doing, in which case everyone does it, the game's totally uniform and it's a waste of time, or it's not worth it and it's ignored. overall, all that coding has no effect at all

seems a lil pointless really

-mist

[Linkie]

When reading through Kloopy's suggestions it seems to me he means you should still be able to build the MkI fighter, or atleast, keep the MkI fighters you already have, so the upgrade cost will not have as big effect as you want it to mist.

Secondly, to make upgrades worth while you could change the profile of the ship, like Kloopy suggested new targets, new classes (I don't think this particular change is a good idea) and so on.

I quite like the idea, but it will need alot of people thinking through and planning it for a very long time, before it can even be considered to start being tested.
And after that it will have to be coded into the game and so on, so I really doubt this is a change that's possible to make in the next couple of rounds.

[Rc mayhem]

if you want to make it harder for large planets then introduce hanger costs, greater for the number of ships and the tech level of the ships. Suppose this will be shot down as well though but still..... I like kloopys idea btw but it makes attacking extreamly hard, so making the game harder for ppl who dont attack every night ot find a good target and land without losing most of your fleet

Cm

[Tactitus]

Originally Posted by Linkie

When reading through Kloopy's suggestions it seems to me he means you should still be able to build the MkI fighter, or atleast, keep the MkI fighters you already have, so the upgrade cost will not have as big effect as you want it to mist.

That's the way I read it too, but certainly it needs to be clarified. There are a number of ways it could be handled: allow building of both old and new, allow building of only new but keep existing old, or allow building of only new and upgrade all old automatically. I think the first two offer more "texture." The third is a bit dangerous in that you can get an arbitrary number of ships upgraded for a (presumably) fixed cost.

Except for the scan wrinkle it's really not much different than the existing researches leading to new ship types. Adding more ship types ought to be simple enough although proposals to add more ship types usually get shot down for various reasons (ultimately the hassle of keeping track of umpteen discrete ship types--combat reports get too long, production and fleet screens don't fit on a page, etc).

The scan wrinkle is interesting and it might be worth considering in and of itself. Imagine some of the existing scans returning only ship class (FI, CO, FR, etc) instead of actual ship type.

[mist]

i don't really see the point of doubling the number of ship types in the game, just to add ships that're pretty much like ones that exist anyway...

-mist

[Cochese]

We suggested this in several betas going back quite a few rounds....when races were added, and Petru & co. took them from 6 ships each to 12 (r7 was it?) with special pods and all that good stuff.

It was rejected, at the time, because it would basically double (assuming you had 1 upgrade per ship) the size of the database needed.

The idea of a second tech tree/upgradeable ships has been on my wish list for a looooong time now.

Maybe with PA holding it's own (??) the database issue isn't a problem.


Glad you brought it up, I'd forgotton about that little nugget.

[Kloopy]

I'm surprised. I thought this would get torn to shreds.

To comment on the issues of the database size, I'll be pedantic and say it wouldn't double the size at all, but I agree it'd increase the amount of data stored. But to be honest the actual speed decrease would likely be negligable because the tables which store the ships (assuming 3rd normal form is being used) are short anyway, so the indexes won't be big at all. And besides, with PA's lower player count these days, perhaps it's much more viable.

And, to clarify, my intention was, indeed, to allow players to build any of the three models of each ship. As Tacticus puts it, this would be a way to keep the added "texture".

[mist]

but still, what's the point?

if the upgraded ship is better then people will only build that - there's no point leaving them the option to build the crapper one. if it's worse noone'll do the upgrade.

effect wise, this upgrades thingy will mean added complication and lower the odds of balanced stats, as more things have to be balanced, and phases in the game where upgrades will happen taken in to account (yes, i am hopeful that one day there'll be balanced stats).

it's a nice idea, but i see no practical or gameplay value to it, and significant gameplay costs

-mist

[Tactitus]

Originally Posted by mist

but still, what's the point?

if the upgraded ship is better then people will only build that - there's no point leaving them the option to build the crapper one. if it's worse noone'll do the upgrade.

Better and crappier needn't be a simple answer; and also, recall that part of the proposal was to nerf the scans so they can't distinguish between the various upgrades. In that case, there may be some value to building the non-obvious ship (i.e., build cheaper MkIs and hope your opponents assume they're the more powerful MkIIIs, or vice versa).

As I see it, the primary value of this proposal is not more ships (which I agree are probably not necessary, although not the end of the world either), but rather as a way to introduce a bit of uncertainty into the whole scan&calc exercise. To that end, it's important that the actual upgrades be rather small since--by the later stages of the game--they'll be multiplied over large numbers of ships.

Adding some uncertainty to combat is a common PA complaint/suggestion. Maybe there are better ways to do it, but I'm glad to see someone thinking about the problem.

[mist]

scan

calculate value per ship

calculate percentage of upgraded ships

it's not an exact science, but little is :P also, alliances will just send enoguh to make sure that they kill all the harder to kill ships as needed.

imo, more tactics are needed to make combat less predictable, and i'm not convinced that more ship types would do that

-mist

[Tactitus]

Originally Posted by mist

scan

calculate value per ship

calculate percentage of upgraded ships

If the game gives you sufficient value information to calculate the percentage of upgraded ships then that would kind of defeat the whole purpose of nerfing the scans, wouldn't it?

it's not an exact science, but little is :P also, alliances will just send enoguh to make sure that they kill all the harder to kill ships as needed.

imo, more tactics are needed to make combat less predictable, and i'm not convinced that more ship types would do that

Sending more ships is the usual response to greater uncertainty. That's true for hidden upgrades as well as more tactics.

[Kattepis]

I think this idea is pretty cool.
We need more schips at planetarion.
We can start with 2 schips each.

[Kal]

Kloopy's idea could make things more fun, and perhaps add uncertainty but at the same time its a lot of work. One possible thing of interest was if we had a hugely more complex combat system where ships had guns -= maybe upgrades could be different types of guns - e.g. lets say a harpy has 5 guns - what if you could choose what sort of guns they were - emp - subvert - kill. Then have iot sso that for exampe cath gets 20% bonus on emp firepower, zik 20% bonus on sub firewpoer, terran 20% bonus on kill firepower and xan somehting i have not yet though of.

There are loads of interesting possibilites, so discuss

[Forest]

I think, reading suggestions so far in otyher threads pateam are trying to make the game easier for new players.
This is, imo, top huge a thing for new players to grasp.

I think even confident, top players will start to struggle if u add too much.

[Appocomaster]

I have to say that I agree with Forest and mist:/
I think imagination is taking over from what's going to actually work in the game.

[Orion Treet]

Originally Posted by Kal

Kloopy's idea could make things more fun, and perhaps add uncertainty but at the same time its a lot of work. One possible thing of interest was if we had a hugely more complex combat system where ships had guns -= maybe upgrades could be different types of guns - e.g. lets say a harpy has 5 guns - what if you could choose what sort of guns they were - emp - subvert - kill. Then have iot sso that for exampe cath gets 20% bonus on emp firepower, zik 20% bonus on sub firewpoer, terran 20% bonus on kill firepower and xan somehting i have not yet though of.

There are loads of interesting possibilites, so discuss

I think races would be far to similar in that case, instead of the 100% combat dif there is now for some parts the ships that do do seperate things now only have 20% differance so races become almost completely equal.

[demiGOD]

its kinda cool to be "fixing up" your ships kinda like "fixing up" you car by putting aftermarket mods and stuff - putting 'hyper-whatever-booster" shit and upgrading weapons and propulsion and stuff until they become WTFPWN ships... but like everybody is saying, it will require a major overhaul of ship stats and also the balancing factor, also agreed to "doesnt make sense to fix up your ships when you can just make more of the same type" - although it has that 'deceiving' factor in it which might make it even more of a bad thing for the game