Combat: Non-Ship Objects

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marhawkman
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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#31 Post by marhawkman »

As for the attack/defense meters.... I'd give the planet one meter, but have combat use it as the base for two meters (something computed in combat and not used or kept track of outside combat). Then have techs that augment one or the other(maybe a few that do both)
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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#32 Post by MikkoM »

Geoff the Medio wrote:Number of remaining orbitals (etc) could be tracked by current defense meter value (assuming such a meter), with the max number possible dependent on the max meter value... but:
* That would mean that number of orbitals is the only thing that can be tracked by current defense meter value, as otherwise you'll have missile bases blow up / disappear when orbitals are shot at, or unrelated damage destroying orbitals (the latter being more plausible)
* If planetary shield strength is also dependent on meter value, then how would it be tracked separately from number of orbitals?
I don`t know if this is a really stupid suggestion, but could the defence meter value be only related to the building/repairing process of the defensive buildings and the buildings/orbitals themselves would be shown separately to the player with each of them having their own damage level and other facts?
Geoff the Medio wrote: Ground troops being important doesn't mean that the ground combat system has to be equal-weight of importance in the game as space combat. I rather doubt it can or should be, as I don't plan on or expect to have a separate ground combat system of any complexity (ie. no ground maps with orders for moving units around on planets). Rather, ground troops would just be a specialized ship weapon for use against planets. Given the importance of planets in the game, this could make the ground troops somewhat important as well, though.
If you don`t expect to have a ground combat system of any complexity, isn`t it then quite reasonable that most of the important battles are fought in space, where the player can use our complex space combat system and really control the battles?

Now the system that you were previously suggesting would make ground attacks always possible when you don`t have a (defensive) fleet in a star system. This would most probably lead to an increased amount of ground combats, at least compared to games like MOO2 and 3, since if you always keep ships in every system your ability to attack another empire or to form strong defensive fleets would most likely suffer considerably. And I must say that I don`t really want to increase the amount or importance of ground combats, trivial or not, if they can`t offer the player the same kinds of experiences and interesting decisions as space combats.
Geoff the Medio wrote:Now, if the civilians actually liked the attacker, and saw the attacker as a liberator, then the "trivial" attack might be something we'd want to be workable, in order to make previous espionage and culture war efforts useful. But this is getting a bit off topic....
Off topic or not, I really like the general idea.
eleazar wrote: Orbitals can show up in a nice obvious way in the space battles
* They also can blow up in a nice obvious way.
* Stronger defenses are very easy to display with orbitals, just add more.
Nice to see that you have also found the orbitals to be quite useful. However does your suggestion support things like defensive strongholds or would it be possible to develop every colony to have a defense of an equal strength? Maybe defensive strongholds could be created by adjusting the building speed of these orbitals, so that at a certain cost you could build defences fast to certain locations?

This might once again be too detailed for this discussion, but I would like to avoid things like, every planet developing to be a defensive stronghold, since like I have already said, it would then always take a tremendous effort from the attacker to conquer a planet/system. Instead of that I would hope that our solution would allow most planets to defend themselves effectively against small enemy fleets, whereas some important planets/systems would have defences that would be hard to destroy.

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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#33 Post by eleazar »

MikkoM wrote:
Geoff the Medio wrote:Number of remaining orbitals (etc) could be tracked by current defense meter value (assuming such a meter), with the max number possible dependent on the max meter value... but:
* That would mean that number of orbitals is the only thing that can be tracked by current defense meter value, as otherwise you'll have missile bases blow up / disappear when orbitals are shot at, or unrelated damage destroying orbitals (the latter being more plausible)
* If planetary shield strength is also dependent on meter value, then how would it be tracked separately from number of orbitals?
I don`t know if this is a really stupid suggestion, but could the defence meter value be only related to the building/repairing process of the defensive buildings and the buildings/orbitals themselves would be shown separately to the player with each of them having their own damage level and other facts?
I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind here, but it seems you don't have the general idea of how "buildings" in FO are different than in MoO2 (and MoO3?). The way that MoO2 constantly requires you to build new buildings on most/all planets was disliked. We lumped all the mundane buildings into the infrastructure meter, and FO "buildings" are much more like Civ Wonders or SMAC Projects— important choices that make a significant difference in the planet, and are therefore much less common.

Making defenses primarily of FO buildings seems incongruent with this concept, as most planets will want defenses, and presumably more powerful options would appear further up the tech tree, and thus there could be quite a few defensive buildings on many planets.


The other basic approach that no one has developed very much (i'm just mentioning it, i still prefer the meter idea on the previous page) is to build orbital defenses just like ships, but they can't fly around, once deployed on a planet, they stay. But i see other problems with this approach.

MikkoM wrote:
...does your suggestion support things like defensive strongholds or would it be possible to develop every colony to have a defense of an equal strength? Maybe defensive strongholds could be created by adjusting the building speed of these orbitals, so that at a certain cost you could build defences fast to certain locations?
The defense meter inputs should be rigged so that while most planets could theoretically reach near the top, in practice most won't. As mentioned, Planet age, Tech, Governmental Choices, and hopefully something like a Defense Focus with contribute to the power and rate of growth of the defenses. Planets shouldn't be able to max out defenses until the end-game. Up to this point FO has purposely excluding the concept of paying more money to build things faster. I don't think defenses should be an exception, but with something like a defensive focus, and the other factors mentioned previously, there should be a wide range of strengths to the defenses of each empire.

[off topic]
I keep saying "something like a defensive focus" because it's quite possible as the game develops, other focus options could be added like "internal security" or "happiness". These might be added to the five already present, or put in a group by themselves.
[/off topic]
MikkoM wrote:... I would like to avoid things like, every planet developing to be a defensive stronghold, since like I have already said, it would then always take a tremendous effort from the attacker to conquer a planet/system. Instead of that I would hope that our solution would allow most planets to defend themselves effectively against small enemy fleets, whereas some important planets/systems would have defences that would be hard to destroy.
I agree.

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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#34 Post by marhawkman »

I think planetary "defenses" would be best abstracted and not rendered outside combat. It'd be good to have a way to decide what type of defenses your planets use. But actually building defenses sems like a "less fun, more work" sort of thing. Obviously we'd have the power and nature of your defenses determined by the technology you have at your disposal. but forcing the player to actually manually build things like defensive orbitals and space stations is a bit too much.
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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#35 Post by Tortanick »

I have to agree, manually building planatary defences is just unceccarary and time consuming since you have to do it for every planet. Abstract it outside of combat.

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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#36 Post by eleazar »

I've been playing a little MoO2. That perspective is making a defense meter sound better.
There's really no quick way to see how good a planet's defenses are. You either have to look at the stupid colony view and tally up which buildings are defensive, or look and see which buildings aren't available on your build queue, remembering to ignore the ones you have researched.

A single, comprehensive number makes it so much easier to gauge your (or their) strength.

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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#37 Post by The Silent One »

MoO1 had kind of a defense meter: the number of missile bases. That worked rather well.

However, there should be distinctive treshold levels beyond which the player gains certain defense qualities,
for example:

defensive meter of 10: missile base
defensive meter of 20: + ground batteries
defensive meter of 30: + military star base
etc. ...
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eleazar
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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#38 Post by eleazar »

The Silent One wrote:MoO1 had kind of a defense meter: the number of missile bases. That worked rather well.

However, there should be distinctive treshold levels beyond which the player gains certain defense qualities,
for example:

defensive meter of 10: missile base
defensive meter of 20: + ground batteries
defensive meter of 30: + military star base
etc. ...
I see what you are trying to do, but i don't think it's a good thing to get radically different items from different portions of the defense meter. If there isn't a real difference between a missile base and a star base they why bother? If there is a real difference, then it's almost like the rules prevent you from playing part of the game. Maybe the starbase is ideally suited for stopping your enemy— but you can't build it, without building the other defenses first (which may be worthless against the enemy's tech).

If we are going to have a rather simple defense meter, let's embrace that simplicity, and embody the defense in a single type of entity, rather than try to cover over the simplicity by expressing the defense meter in a lot of different weapon types.


Other Non-Ship Objects

1) Outposts
I'd like to see Outposts on the battle map. Outposts don't officially exist, but as i envision them they would come in several types and function as proxies for colonies in systems that don't have a suitable location for a colony. Their function would include such things as pushing back the fog-of-war, and routing interplanetary commerce.

Conceptually, i see the outposts as space stations which have an orbit around a particular planet or asteroid field. Because if we just let them loose in the system, there's no logical limit on the number of outposts, and the sidebar could get very long. Outposts would probably have some sort of defenses, and could be attacked in space combat, like the defensive orbitals, but anything more specific probably belongs in another thread.

2) Shipyards
Shipyards as planned are probably more important than planets as entities in space-battle. However i still think they should orbit a particular planet or asteroid field, this prevents the need for some sort of interface to place objects in a system— an interface i'd like to avoid. I'm not sure if they should be inside the ring of orbitals or not. They might have defenses of their own, because i think it would be worthwhile to allow them to be a distinct target from the planet they orbit, though i'm not sure i like the idea of allowing them to be captured independent of their mother-planet.

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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#39 Post by Tortanick »

3) Astorid mines: These are important enough to be manually built by the player, so it stands to reason that they're important enough to be targeted for distruction during a raid.

4) Gas Giant taps, same reason as asteroid mines.

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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#40 Post by MikkoM »

eleazar wrote:
MikkoM wrote: I don`t know if this is a really stupid suggestion, but could the defence meter value be only related to the building/repairing process of the defensive buildings and the buildings/orbitals themselves would be shown separately to the player with each of them having their own damage level and other facts?
I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind here, but it seems you don't have the general idea of how "buildings" in FO are different than in MoO2 (and MoO3?). The way that MoO2 constantly requires you to build new buildings on most/all planets was disliked. We lumped all the mundane buildings into the infrastructure meter, and FO "buildings" are much more like Civ Wonders or SMAC Projects— important choices that make a significant difference in the planet, and are therefore much less common.
What I was trying to do here was to allow something like this to happen
The Silent One wrote: defensive meter of 10: missile base
defensive meter of 20: + ground batteries
etc. ...
(multiple buildings build by the same meter) without having buildings/orbitals randomly disappear or suffer damage, which I believe was the problem that was presented in the first quoted section of my last post. So in my proposal the meter builds/repairs and updates (not mentioned in my previous post) the defensive buildings, but once the buildings are complete they are shown to the player independently from the meter to prevent random damage/destruction.

Also maybe there could be just one building of each of the building "types" on a planet, like one beam base, one fighter base etc. to simplify the presentation for the player. In my original proposal this would be the case with the "not so special buildings that will be on every planet" and the orbitals would be of course free from this restriction.

Now there are some problems with this kind of a system, like:
eleazar wrote: If there is a real difference (between defensive buildings), then it's almost like the rules prevent you from playing part of the game. Maybe the starbase is ideally suited for stopping your enemy— but you can't build it, without building the other defenses first (which may be worthless against the enemy's tech).
This most certainly is a big problem. The only possible solution that I see is that the meter builds the defensive buildings in a logical order. So if a planetary shield is for example strong enough to prevent a couple of ships from bombing the planet and also offers protection for the future planetary weapons it is build first, then a beam base is build because beam weapons have a better change to hit an enemy ship than missiles or fighters etc. Also in my original proposal the defensive orbitals wouldn`t be a part of this system as they are “the special buildings that the player builds on some key locations”.
eleazar wrote: The defense meter inputs should be rigged so that while most planets could theoretically reach near the top, in practice most won't. As mentioned, Planet age, Tech, Governmental Choices, and hopefully something like a Defense Focus with contribute to the power and rate of growth of the defenses. Planets shouldn't be able to max out defenses until the end-game. Up to this point FO has purposely excluding the concept of paying more money to build things faster. I don't think defenses should be an exception, but with something like a defensive focus, and the other factors mentioned previously, there should be a wide range of strengths to the defenses of each empire.
Well the “cost” could of course be something else than money, but the important thing is that it isn`t possible to develop every planet to be a defensive stronghold or even if you could do it, the overall costs (what ever they will be) would be so great that it wouldn`t be a smart thing to do.

I must also say that your all-orbital planetary defense isn`t such a bad idea, since it seems to be a relatively simple solution and could probably still offer some strategic decisions. However if possible I would still like to have a solution, which would take advantage of different weapon types and defensive buildings on a planet as well as orbitals in space.

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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#41 Post by eleazar »

MikkoM wrote:I must also say that your all-orbital planetary defense isn`t such a bad idea, since it seems to be a relatively simple solution and could probably still offer some strategic decisions.
If you'll notice, it offers precisely the same number of strategic decisions as a defense meter that produces different types of buildings... the player can put effort into building the defense meter or not.
MikkoM wrote:However if possible I would still like to have a solution, which would take advantage of different weapon types and defensive buildings on a planet as well as orbitals in space.
You need to explain why that is an advantage.


Also assuming this sequence:
  • defensive meter of 10: missile base
    defensive meter of 20: + ground batteries
    defensive meter of 30: + military star base
What happens if a planet with a defense meter of 30, is attacked and has it's ground batteries blown up? Does it read "30" or "20" or "30-10" afterwards?
And what significance do intermediate values like 12 or 27 have?

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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#42 Post by MikkoM »

To hopefully answer some of the questions concerning my idea, I will try to do as utilae and eleazar have already done and present it here in this one post. This might of course be too detailed for this discussion.

To begin with there are two kinds of planetary defensive components:

-The "not so special buildings that are on every planet" (the basic level of defence=strong enough to withstand attacks from a very small/small enemy fleet) are build by a meter that the player controls on planetary or system level.

--The meter builds, repairs and updates the "not so special buildings"

-- The meter does not represent the strength of the defensive buildings on a planet. To represent this there might be a separate number value for example.

-- A some sort of a focus can be set to this meter to speed up the building/repairing or updating process. This focus setting then reduces production levels or slows the development of the colony or in some other way has a cost attached to it.

--The not so special buildings are (at least for now): planetary shield, beam base, fighter base and possibly even missile base.

--There is only one building of each of the building types on a planet.

-- Info about the individual building is presented to the player so he/she can see info about how damaged the building is or is it up to date.

--The “not so special buildings” are built in following order:

1. Planetary shield. The planetary shield can stop a few enemy ships from bombing a planet as it takes quite much firepower to destroy the shield. It also protects the future planetary weapons, which would be easy to destroy without a planetary shield. It is possible to send ground troops through a planetary shield, this might make the ground troops and troop transports a little bit more important, but hopefully not too important.

2. Beam base. A beam base is build next because beam weapons will probably have a better change to hit an enemy ship than fighters/missiles that will probably suffer from PD weapons. A beam base might also work as an effective PD for the planet, possibly even so that the longer the distance between a planet and a missile/fighter ship the better the change of PD weapons to destroy most of the incoming missiles/fighters. This kind of a system hopefully forces the missile/fighter ships to come close to the planet and so the planet can use its beam weapons against the enemy ships.

3. Fighter base. Having a fighter base on a planet forces the attackers to think about PD weapons in their attacking fleet. And the more PD ships in a fleet the lesser ships with other kinds of weapons for your fleets/planets to destroy. And even if every enemy ship can be fitted with PD weapons they take space from other weapons. Edit: If normal fighters are going to be a rather long range weapon, maybe their range should be limited when planets are in question. This way the defender can`t just send the fighters from every planet in a system to destroy the intruder.

(Missile base) I am not certain if it is a good idea to have a missile base, since at least in MOO3 the missile bases where a sort of an ultimate defensive weapon and therefore at least I always wanted to build them first.

--- All of these buildings are updated every time a new beam weapon, fighter or a shield version becomes available. This gives the meter an important function after all of the defensive buildings have been build. Also as the update speed depends on the meter focus setting there might be interesting differences in the defensive capabilities of different “normal planets” which an enemy can take advantage of.

- The “special buildings that the player builds in some key locations”= planetary orbitals

-- The orbitals are under heavy maintenance costs. As ships are probably also under these maintenance costs this means that if you build a lot of orbitals you can only build very few ships or perhaps none.

-- The orbitals are either much larger than any of the ships or a lot smaller, but you can build many of them (perhaps this would only lead to problems).

-- The orbitals have a lot of fire power and they can endure a lot of damage. This means that especially with the basic level of planetary defence the orbitals can form defensive strongholds that are harder to conquer than ordinary planets.

-- Building of the orbitals allows the player to directly influence the defensive readiness of some parts of his/her empire.

Problems and questions:

- Are the orbitals ready buildings like in eleazar`s suggestion or can the player design them?

- How are the orbitals updated? The player manually updates them(sounds like micromanagement)? They are updated somehow automatically? The planetary defensive building meter updates them (are they then an independent component)?

- How to ensure that the micromanaging of the defensive building meter isn`t the best strategy? For example: when all the buildings have been built remove the focus, then when an update comes put the focus back and then remove it again.

- Can the building order of “the not so special buildings” be made absolutely logical and can we also present this logic to the player?

- And maybe most importantly, can this kind of a complicated system offer enough interesting possibilities that it would be worth implementing, since we already have eleazars`s much simpler system?

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#43 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:Orbitals, and only orbitals, no whole-planet shields, missile bases, or giant guns aimed at distant systems.
Why eliminate shields? I rather like the possibilities that would be provided by having shields, defensive-only, combined with orbitals, offensive-only, that are tracked and can be destroyed or improved separately.
Ok, so what happens if you have 15 Mark-2 orbitals around a planet, and then you discover the tech for Mark-3? I believe the simplest solution is to put any additional meter points into upgrading an old orbital to a Mark-3. So in this scenario, each meter increase of 1 will convert an old orbital to a Mark-3. Once all are converted, each additional 3 meter points will produce a new Mark-3.
This would prevent the state information of the orbitals from being stored in a single meter value. Instead, we'd also have to track how many of every type of orbital is present. And, I doubt that it's possible to have a single, always-applicable power value for an orbital... A mk. IV orbital might be more or less than 4 times as effective as a mk. I, depending on the situation, and this is probably unavoidable.
MikkoM wrote:...could the defence meter value be only related to the building/repairing process of the defensive buildings and the buildings/orbitals themselves would be shown separately to the player with each of them having their own damage level and other facts?
For most implimentations, this would require too many buildings / orbitals to be displayed. It also doesn't really fit with the concept of a defense meter as distinct from the construction meter.
If you don`t expect to have a ground combat system of any complexity, isn`t it then quite reasonable that most of the important battles are fought in space, where the player can use our complex space combat system and really control the battles?
Yes...
Now the system that you were previously suggesting would make ground attacks always possible when you don`t have a (defensive) fleet in a star system. This would most probably lead to [more] ground combats... And I must say that I don`t really want to increase the amount or importance of ground combats, trivial or not, if they can`t offer the player the same kinds of experiences and interesting decisions as space combats.
If ground combat happens much more frequently, it becomes essentially a new weapon type to be used by ships in the ship / system battles, not a separate battle type. You could drop off ground troops on a planet, and then while you fight the other ships in the system, the ground troops do their thing on the planet.
MikkoM wrote:-The "not so special buildings that are on every planet" (the basic level of defence=strong enough to withstand attacks from a very small/small enemy fleet)
OK, this is the basic planet defense level that has been successfully argued for earlier in the thread...
- The “special buildings that the player builds in some key locations”
Why are these necessary? If they're just for key locations, can't the player just put ships there?

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eleazar
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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#44 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:Orbitals, and only orbitals, no whole-planet shields, missile bases, or giant guns aimed at distant systems.
Why eliminate shields? I rather like the possibilities that would be provided by having shields, defensive-only, combined with orbitals, offensive-only, that are tracked and can be destroyed or improved separately.
Primarily to reduce the number of defense meters to one.

But i don't really see the point to having a defensive only set-up. Unless the shields are utterly impenetrable, the invader just sits there and wears away at the shields at no risk to himself.

Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:Ok, so what happens if you have 15 Mark-2 orbitals around a planet, and then you discover the tech for Mark-3? I believe the simplest solution is to put any additional meter points into upgrading an old orbital to a Mark-3. So in this scenario, each meter increase of 1 will convert an old orbital to a Mark-3. Once all are converted, each additional 3 meter points will produce a new Mark-3.
This would prevent the state information of the orbitals from being stored in a single meter value. Instead, we'd also have to track how many of every type of orbital is present. And, I doubt that it's possible to have a single, always-applicable power value for an orbital... A mk. IV orbital might be more or less than 4 times as effective as a mk. I, depending on the situation, and this is probably unavoidable.
The fact that the program needs 2 (gasp ;) ) variables to store this information is irrelevant.
The real question is "can a very strong correlation be maintained between meter number and defensive power," with my system. I believe it's quite easy. The Mk. IV has 400% of the armor and has 4 times as many weapons as the Mk. I. It uses the same ammo. When it reaches 25% damage, 25% of it's weapons become disabled. It's effectiveness should be about identical to the performance of 4 mk. Is. Certainly it should be close enough that the meter number is meaningful to the player.

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Re: Combat: Non-Ship Objects

#45 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:But i don't really see the point to having a defensive only set-up. Unless the shields are utterly impenetrable, the invader just sits there and wears away at the shields at no risk to himself.
You generally wouldn't want to have only a shield if offensive orbitals were obtainable as well, and likely chose to get bonuses to shields to the exclusion of offensive orbitals. But, the shield might be quite strong compared to orbitals or ships, such that a fleet might not be able to wear away the shield, or might take several turns to wear away the shield. This allows blockades to happen, whereas if there were just defensive orbitals, once these are destroyed, there's nothing physically stopping planetary bombardment. It also lets a fleet achieve system space superiority while still needing several turns to take a well-defended planet, giving counterattackers time to arrive. It also gives a purpose to specialized shield-breaking weapons (bombs?) and, as above, ground troops that bypass the shield.

So... to summarize, it's not that you'd want a defensive-only setup, it's that defensive shields and offensive orbitals have somewhat different functions, and are complimentary, and could benefit from being tracked separately.
The Mk. IV has 400% of the armor and has 4 times as many weapons as the Mk. I. It uses the same ammo. When it reaches 25% damage, 25% of it's weapons become disabled. It's effectiveness should be about identical to the performance of 4 mk. Is.
Why does it matter than there are Mk. IV and Mk. I orbitals then? Why not just keep the 4 Mk. I's, and have the meter value just be a rough indication of the number of orbitals, where orbitals are always the same?

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