Shields -> Damage Reduction

[Dilvish]

Or reduce the bonus to +1 to ship shields for Acirema?

This is the most direct translation of their bonus to the current shield scheme; I think it's the right one. I wouldn't be able to make that change for a few days so I hope someone goes ahead and puts it in.

[Geoff the Medio]

I'm wondering about doing a release soon, and one issue that might be problematic is the current state of the shields mechanic and their stacking behaviour. Does the current set of shield parts work OK with, or is it not worth doing a release now until shield parts can be rewritten to use non-stacking shield levels?

The non-stacking should be doable with just content changes, so if someone would like to do so / post a patch that modifies the relevant content file(s), that would be useful regardless of whether a release happens soon.

[Dilvish]

... or is it not worth doing a release now until shield parts can be rewritten to use non-stacking shield levels? ... The non-stacking should be doable with just content changes.. .

Clarification please -- It's clear you're at least partly asking about someone writing up the scripting to make the shields non-stacking. Are you also asking for the total shield levels to be adjusted along with that? Increasing the shield values by perhaps 50% -75% (or even 100% ?) to account for the fact they couldn't be stacked anymore and putting the total value into a middle range of what could currently be accomplished?

Just to review the discussion and recent experience a little to help reach a consensus or clarify any that might already exist -- I know there was some concern expressed about the possibility of loading up a high slot-count hull with lots of shields, but I hadn't noticed any real consensus there yet. Certainly, in games in general, great care has to be taken with stacking DR.

My experience with the stacking DR here has been limited to up through Endosymbiotic hulls (7 slots) and low end Death Ray. Up though this point I haven't seen any real problem with the current stacking DR. It seems reasonably easy enough so far to advance weapon tech fast enough to keep up with the number of shields anyone can load into a hull (though I haven't encountered an AI yet that had been lucky enough to get MultiSpectral Shields, at their current value of 5 each that might change the balance). In this beginning and mid-game range of ships and weapons, it seems to me like there is no incentive to load up too high on shields -- up to maybe a third of half the slots at most being used for shields, or the tank just can't dish out enough damage to be effective. What's everyone else's experiences been like?

I kind of enjoy fielding a mixture of ships designs, some with more shields, some with less, but I'd be fine with a non-stacking approach also. The non-stacking approach would probably also make it be a little easier for the AI to make better battle assessments, so I guess that's another argument in favor of non-stacking.

[Geoff the Medio]

Are you also asking for the total shield levels to be adjusted along with that?

Appropriate balancing would be required after a change of mechanics like this, yes.

I kind of enjoy fielding a mixture of ships designs, some with more shields, some with less...

That shields don't stack for total damage reduction doesn't mean there can't be any benefit from having multiple shield parts. Exactly what that would be, I'm not sure, though. If there was some means by which shield meters were reduced as well, then the regeneration could be a factor that stacks. Having shield levels drop during battle would be too complicated, though; it needs to be just a fixed damage reduction during a particular battle.

[Dilvish]

If there was some means by which shield meters were reduced as well, then the regeneration could be a factor that stacks.

Oh! That sounds like an interesting, and good, idea.

Having shield levels drop during battle would be too complicated, though; it needs to be just a fixed damage reduction during a particular battle.

I haven't looked closely at the new battle code you wrote to make shields non-stacking, but in my ignorance I can easily say it seems like it shouldn't be too tough to make an adjustment like "shields lose 0.1 points for every point of damage they block" -- that seems like it would be a bit of a blend of the old code and new.

Though, as much as I like, as a player, the flavor of such potential factors, as a programming I dread the thought of figuring out how the AI could do good battle modelling for it.

[Geoff the Medio]

...it seems like it shouldn't be too tough to make an adjustment like "shields lose 0.1 points for every point of damage they block"

It's not difficult to implement. I just don't think it would be a good idea to implement. For AI and human player reasons.

[Vezzra]

I'm wondering about doing a release soon, and one issue that might be problematic is the current state of the shields mechanic and their stacking behaviour. Does the current set of shield parts work OK with, or is it not worth doing a release now until shield parts can be rewritten to use non-stacking shield levels?

No, the current set of shield parts is not usable, they are definitely overpowered now. That's not so much of a problem with hulls that only have a few or moderate number of slots, but the hulls with a high slot count can be made almost invulnerable.

The biggest problem are the high end energy/solar hulls in this regard, but even the asteroid hull tech already poses a big problem. You can get it fairly early in the game, it gives you three hull sizes, the largest of them with 3 internal and 6 external slots. Asteroid belts are sufficiently common, so unless you're very unlucky, you can build a hull with DR 18 (assuming you also went for the deflector shield, which too isn't so far down the tech tree) around late early/early mid game, and still have three slots for weapons. Giving you ships that can negate any damage up to plasma gun 2, plasma gun 3 will do 1 point of damage. You'll need at least death ray (the "ultimate" weapon) to do any serious amount of damage against such ships.

The solar hull can be made ultimately invulnerable, and still leaving you with enough slots to pack some serious firepower on it.

In my current game I've been able to test these things extensively. First I had to restrict myself from packing too much shield parts on my asteroid ships, otherwise the game would have been boring. I could have build one or two dozen of heavily shielded ships and simply gone over the first AI opponents I encountered like a bulldozer (although I had an extremely unlucky start!). Later I ran into an AI that pretty much steamrolled the rest of the galaxy. At that point I decided to build solar hulls with enough shields to even negate the damage dealt by the highest death ray, and although I shouldn't stand a chance against this AI (considering it's industrial capacity and number of high end ships it throws at me every turn), I'm able to push it around almost at will.

To cut a long story short: If you don't want to actually "cheat", you'll have to restrict yourself to reasonable numbers of shield parts on your ship designs at the moment. I think that's something we want to fix before the next release.

The non-stacking should be doable with just content changes, so if someone would like to do so / post a patch that modifies the relevant content file(s), that would be useful regardless of whether a release happens soon.

Based on this recent test experience I've already considered coming up with some new numbers for the entire weapon/armor/shield stats. Being sick at the moment and having to stay at home, I'll have some time at my hand, so there's a decent chance I might get to that within the next few days. I'll post my numbers for review, and if you guys approve, can try to implement them.

[Vezzra]

What's everyone else's experiences been like?

See my reply to Geoff above. My main objection against stacking DR are the current combat mechanics, as I already mentioned earlier in this thread:

The problem that arises when shield parts stack is our current implementation of combat resolution. Every gun a ship has is fired independently, you don't get several guns firing simultaneously, so their firepower doesn't stack. Shields however do. So each shot ship A fires against ship B is reduced by the combined shield strength of ship B's shield parts.

This will make balancing shields, armor and weapons extremely difficult, if not impossible. If, OTOH, shield parts don't stack, you can balance weapon and shield strength fairly easy, because you can do it "one-on-one", so to speak, and don't have to take into account that multiple shield parts will stack against single weapon shots.

I think the whole system will be far easier to balance, easier to understand for the player and (as you mentioned yourself) easier for the AI with non-stacking shield parts.

I kind of enjoy fielding a mixture of ships designs, some with more shields, some with less

I agree, but if we want that, the best way would be to modify the combat resolution mechanics accordingly. The simplest solution that comes to my mind would be instead of selecting a new target for each weapon a ship has mounted:

• Choose a target
• Calculate how much of it's weapons the ship must fire to take the target down, taking the target's DR in account
• If the ship can't take down the target with all it's weapons, fire all weapons at the target
• Add the damage stats of the calculated number of weapons
• Deduct the target's DR stat from the resulting value
• Apply the final value as damage to the target
• If the ship has some "unfired" weapons left, repeat with the remaining "unfired" weapons

That way we avoid the problem of non-stacking weapon shots countered by stacking shield parts, because weapon shots will stack too. This is, however, of course a bit more complicated to implement (we'll have to adjust the combat resolution implementation). Just making shield parts non-stacking is easier.

EDIT: However, if we choose to go down this road, we'll have to make the bigger hulls far more expensive in comparison to the smaller hulls than they are now. They already have a big advantage over the small hulls by our current hull-cost-increase mechanics, which impose essentially the same "maintenance costs" regardless of hull size, so your cost increase is the same if you build 10 tiny scouts or 10 behemoth battleships. This already is a strong incentive to only use the biggest, most powerful hulls for your (combat) ships.

With stacking shields, the big hulls get another big advantage: They can mount more shield parts, thus gaining a far higher DR than a small hull. Now, one big ship can mount enough weapons to overcome the DR of another big ship and still deal a decent amount of damage. However, as only weapon shots from the same ship stack, several small ships that in theory can dish out the same amount of damage as a big one don't get their weapon shots added together, so the DR of the big one is applied to the firepower of each of the small ships (as compared to only once, if all the firepower comes from one single big ship). So, one big ship that has the same firepower, structural strength and DR as x smaller ships added together is more powerful and more maintenance cost effective than the smaller ships. I'd very much prefer to counter that at least by making small hulls far more build cost effective than larger hulls.

[Vezzra]

If there was some means by which shield meters were reduced as well, then the regeneration could be a factor that stacks.

Oh! That sounds like an interesting, and good, idea.

If what you have in mind is a specialized weapon ("shield disrupter") that temporarily reduces the shield strength without doing any other kind of damage, yes, that sounds like a very interesting concept. More shield parts could mean faster regeneration in that case, or make it harder to reduce the shields. For example: The amount a single hit from a "shield disruptor" reduces the shields of the target is divided by the number of the shield parts.

If you're referring to that:

...it seems like it shouldn't be too tough to make an adjustment like "shields lose 0.1 points for every point of damage they block"

It's not difficult to implement. I just don't think it would be a good idea to implement. For AI and human player reasons.

I'll have to agree with Geoff, I don't think that this would be a good idea. Too complicated. We're aiming for clear, simple mechanics, and IMO such a concept doesn't add something interesting that would make it worth the added complexity, nor do we need it to make things work.

[Quadhelix]

I kind of enjoy fielding a mixture of ships designs, some with more shields, some with less...

That shields don't stack for total damage reduction doesn't mean there can't be any benefit from having multiple shield parts. Exactly what that would be, I'm not sure, though. If there was some means by which shield meters were reduced as well, then the regeneration could be a factor that stacks. Having shield levels drop during battle would be too complicated, though; it needs to be just a fixed damage reduction during a particular battle.

Just throwing ideas out here, but what about a cap on how much shields could reduce damage - e.g., shields never reduce a weapon's damage below 1 and never reduce weapon damage by more than 50%. That way, shields could still stack for total damage reduction, but the effect would be mitigated/capped: a ship with a DR of 3 would take 5 damage from an 8-power weapon, while even a DR of 500,000 wouldn't reduce the attack power below 4 (50% of the weapon's original 8 damage).

Higher tech shields could have a higher percentage cap, but some damage will always get through (although that raises the issue of what happens when you put multiple shield types on a ship).

[AndrewW]

Higher tech shields could have a higher percentage cap, but some damage will always get through (although that raises the issue of what happens when you put multiple shield types on a ship).

Perhaps an average when you put stack multiple shield types.

[eleazar]

Just throwing ideas out here, but what about a cap on how much shields could reduce damage - e.g., shields never reduce a weapon's damage below 1 and never reduce weapon damage by more than 50%. That way, shields could still stack for total damage reduction, but the effect would be mitigated/capped: a ship with a DR of 3 would take 5 damage from an 8-power weapon, while even a DR of 500,000 wouldn't reduce the attack power below 4 (50% of the weapon's original 8 damage).

Higher tech shields could have a higher percentage cap, but some damage will always get through (although that raises the issue of what happens when you put multiple shield types on a ship).

That would tend to require more stats to be added to the fleet window. I'm not fond of any idea that leads that way.

[Quadhelix]

Just throwing ideas out here, but what about a cap on how much shields could reduce damage - e.g., shields never reduce a weapon's damage below 1 and never reduce weapon damage by more than 50%. That way, shields could still stack for total damage reduction, but the effect would be mitigated/capped: a ship with a DR of 3 would take 5 damage from an 8-power weapon, while even a DR of 500,000 wouldn't reduce the attack power below 4 (50% of the weapon's original 8 damage).

Higher tech shields could have a higher percentage cap, but some damage will always get through (although that raises the issue of what happens when you put multiple shield types on a ship).

That would tend to require more stats to be added to the fleet window. I'm not fond of any idea that leads that way.

How so?

I mean, yes, the "higher cap for higher tech shields" would require that the ship's shield strength be shown as, e.g., "10 (70%)" instead of just "10." However, other than that, I don't think the idea introduces any variables that weren't already part of the system. The strength of each of the ship's weapons is important in the current system anyway: as an example, let us consider two ships with an attack power of 10 against a ship with a shield strength of 2.

If the attacker has one weapon with an attack power of 10, then the shield will simply reduce that by 2 for a final of 8 damage. Conversely, if the attacker has two weapons with a strength of 5 each, the shields will reduce each of those attacks by 2, leading to damage of 3 each - a total of 6 damage.

Higher tech shields could have a higher percentage cap, but some damage will always get through (although that raises the issue of what happens when you put multiple shield types on a ship).

Perhaps an average when you put stack multiple shield types.

That could work.

[Vezzra]

The non-stacking should be doable with just content changes, so if someone would like to do so / post a patch that modifies the relevant content file(s), that would be useful regardless of whether a release happens soon.

Based on this recent test experience I've already considered coming up with some new numbers for the entire weapon/armor/shield stats. Being sick at the moment and having to stay at home, I'll have some time at my hand, so there's a decent chance I might get to that within the next few days. I'll post my numbers for review, and if you guys approve, can try to implement them.

Ok, I've come up with some new numbers. See here.

[wheals]

Now that DR shields have been implemented, I was thinking of something interesting they could be used for. Currently we do not have very much weapon variety. However, there is a ROF stat in the content files (and presumably the parser) that controls the number of shots a weapon can make. It would be interesting if weapons with >1 ROF were implemented in the combat engine. All shots would have to be at the same target, presumably. High-ROF, low-damage weapons would deal more damage against less-shielded targets, but possibly none against very shielded ones. A 1x10 "machinegun" might cost as much as a 5x1 laser cannon, and could be useful if you know your enemy does not use/have shields or you are fighting space monsters.

The only problem would be displaying the weapon stats in the fleet window. Does anyone have any idea how the information could be shown clearly?