Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

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Oberlus
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Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

#1 Post by Oberlus »

Basic and only weapon:
- Laser: single shot, short range, average damage, requires external slot.

The lack of multi-shot makes it bad versus chaff, decoy and drones. And it won't be good versus late game shields.
To overcome this, and to give crystal flavour, they have this special weapon parts:

- Concentrator lens: it merges and focuses different laser shots (of other, allied ships) into a single laser beam more powerful. Internal slot.

- Diffraction prisms: splits a laser beam (of other, allied ship) into several ones with less power. Core slot.


Example of game mechanics:

A fleet will have among all its ships, L lasers (damage per shot X), C concentrator lenses and D diffraction prisms.
If C=D=0, the fleet will be shooting L shots of X damage per round. Total damage X*L.
Otherwise, the fleet will shoot each round C shots of strength X*L/(C+D), and 3*L*D/(C+D) shots of damage X/3. Total damage X*L*C/(C+D) + X*L*D/(C+D) = X*L.
Example:
10 ships with 5 lasers each with damage 18 (total 900 damage), 2 of them has the prism, the other 8 the lens, so L=50, C=8 and D=2, and thus it will fire 8 shots of 90 damage and 30 shots of 6 damage (total 900 damage)

Keep in mind that the resulting numbers of shots and the damage of such shots will be shown in the ships meters whenever the prism and lens effects are in place (the same way you see the actual shield value for robotic interface shields in the fleets, you don't have to calculate them yourself).

Anyway, too complicated, right?

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labgnome
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Re: Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

#2 Post by labgnome »

Oberlus wrote: Sat Apr 20, 2019 10:30 pmAnyway, too complicated, right?
I know I got a little lost myself so maybe so.
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Krikkitone
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Re: Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

#3 Post by Krikkitone »

Definitely, to simplify

Each Concentrator: combines up to N unfired lasers in this fleet into one shot (if available)

Diffractors: make all lasers on this ship multishot, laser on this ship aren't available for concentrators

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Re: Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

#4 Post by Oberlus »

Krikkitone wrote: Sun Apr 21, 2019 1:30 amEach Concentrator: combines up to N unfired lasers in this fleet into one shot (if available)

Diffractors: make all lasers on this ship multishot, laser on this ship aren't available for concentrators
Diffractors can be done with current FOCS, but I think Concentrators wouldn't be possible because there is no way to affect some of the ships/parts in the fleet (those N lasers) and not others, and there would be no unfired lasers (unless we first set them to 0 damage or fire rate).
Concentrators could work just fine if they just affect the lasers in the same ship.
Ophiuchus or another developer could tell us better.

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Re: Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

#5 Post by Ophiuchus »

One could gate the activation of the concentration effect of the laser part to only be applied if there is no diffraction part on board. So should work
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Re: Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

#6 Post by Oberlus »

Ophiuchus wrote: Sun Apr 21, 2019 3:24 pm One could gate the activation of the concentration effect of the laser part to only be applied if there is no diffraction part on board. So should work
Hmmm!
Let's see.

Make diffractor and concentrator parts mutually exclusive.
Then... No, I still don't see it (or I haven't understood you).
We'll have ships with either concentrator (C), diffractor (D) or none (N). What should each ship do?


if no one figures out a simple way to do the fleet effects, a simpler way could be affecting only the lasers in the same ship:
- Diffractor ups FR to 3 divides dmg by 3 (or 2, TBD) of all lasers in ship.
- Concentrator (which is itself a weapon with FR 1 and default damage 0 that only targets ships and decoys) disables all lasers in ship and gets their combined damage per shot.

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em3
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Re: Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

#7 Post by em3 »

This will get micro-managely very fast.

You sometimes will need to split some ships from the fleet based on composition of event force.

More fighters? Add some ships with diffractors and move ships with concentrators to a different fleet.

More capital ships? Shuffle your lens ships a bit more.

I'd prefer if this mechanic would only affect the ship itself. Maybe even simplify it more. Concentrator would reduce shots from lasers by one per weapon and has one shot with damage depending on number and damage of lasers. Diffractor adds shots to lasers, but reduces damage.
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labgnome
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Re: Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

#8 Post by labgnome »

em3 wrote: Mon Apr 22, 2019 7:12 amI'd prefer if this mechanic would only affect the ship itself. Maybe even simplify it more. Concentrator would reduce shots from lasers by one per weapon and has one shot with damage depending on number and damage of lasers. Diffractor adds shots to lasers, but reduces damage.
I think that's what I originally proposed back on the weapons thread.
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Re: Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

#9 Post by Oberlus »

Definitively, I'm discarding the crystal fleet effects and sticking to ship effects (Cybertec and Biotec still have some fleet effects like the solar concentrator and the robotic interface shield).

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

#10 Post by Geoff the Medio »

Not sure I follow all the above discussion, but perhaps this could be reworked a bit:

-There are 3 ship parts: Pulse Generators, Pulse Diffractors, and Pulse Concentrators.

-Pulse Generators produce shot power. All of an empire's shot power in a system is summed each game turn, and then allocated to the diffactors and concentrators in that system.
--The total (sum) strength of all shots by diffractors and concentrators is determined by the generated shot power.
--Number and distribution of diffractors and concentrators determines the number of shots and how the shot power is spread out (by some interesting algorithm I haven't though of).
---Probably diffractors add more shots to a ship and concentrators increase the strength of individual shots relative to other ships?
---Having too many diffractors for the available show power would result in a lot of very weak shots, which would be blocked by shields.
---Having too many concentrators would mean too few shots, which would be weak against fighters or large fleets of weak ships.

-There could also be building, tech, or species effects that generate shot power.
--Makes a defensive fleet easier to set up as you don't need generators on ships if the planet do so more cost effectively.

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Re: Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

#11 Post by Oberlus »

Geoff the Medio wrote: Mon Apr 22, 2019 11:13 am Not sure I follow all the above discussion, but perhaps this could be reworked a bit:

-There are 3 ship parts: Pulse Generators, Pulse Diffractors, and Pulse Concentrators.

-Pulse Generators produce shot power. All of an empire's shot power in a system is summed each game turn, and then allocated to the diffactors and concentrators in that system.
--The total (sum) strength of all shots by diffractors and concentrators is determined by the generated shot power.
--Number and distribution of diffractors and concentrators determines the number of shots and how the shot power is spread out (by some interesting algorithm I haven't though of).
---Probably diffractors add more shots to a ship and concentrators increase the strength of individual shots relative to other ships?
---Having too many diffractors for the available show power would result in a lot of very weak shots, which would be blocked by shields.
---Having too many concentrators would mean too few shots, which would be weak against fighters or large fleets of weak ships.

-There could also be building, tech, or species effects that generate shot power.
--Makes a defensive fleet easier to set up as you don't need generators on ships if the planet do so more cost effectively.
I like this so much! I'd like that to be implemented :cry:
Merging the planets and ships pulse powers, awesome for new defensive strategies.
But I think it is similar in complexity or in readability for players to the OP's proposal, that hasn't got a nice welcome.

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Re: Crystal weapons proposal, too complicated?

#12 Post by Ophiuchus »

Oberlus wrote: Mon Apr 22, 2019 12:46 am
Ophiuchus wrote: Sun Apr 21, 2019 3:24 pm One could gate the activation of the concentration effect of the laser part to only be applied if there is no diffraction part on board. So should work
Hmmm!
Let's see.

Make diffractor and concentrator parts mutually exclusive.
Then... No, I still don't see it (or I haven't understood you).
I meant if the combination of both fleet effects is too complicated, one could diffract ship-only_

Else i think it is possible to base an effect on the count of parts in the shipˋs fleet (but never tried).

Edit1:
The main question actually is if we want Up Fleet management for fine control of combat. We need to step UI up if we are going to introduce chaff and fleet management tactics.
I think we should try if we can make it work well for this as a kind of prototype. if it bugs us we can always go back to the ship-only versions.

Also note that we could amend the move ships between issue by leveraging active/passive ship settings (so only apply the part effects if the ship is set to active)

On the other hand maybe it's too micro. Maybe the effect should be also gated by an enable-combat-tactics rule which defaults to false?

Edit2: back to original question on possible implementations:

All lasers of ships which contain diffractors do not care about concentrators and do ship based multi shot.

All lasers of ships which do not contain diffractors are bundled by the concentrators. Note that concentrator would still count for the total number of concentrators even if it sits next to a diffractor. Concentrators could be fleet based (if we allow mico) or combat based.
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