Ship to ship combat

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defaultuser
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Ship to ship combat

#1 Post by defaultuser »

I have been trying to get familiar with some of the game mechanics, so I was wondering what the combat algorithm looks like for one fleet of ships battling another. Ignoring stealth (sorry Mat) and just looking at Fleet A with a collection of ships totaling a certain damage level and structure, versus Fleet B with its own set.

Is combat fairly deterministic, or is there some randomness?

How is targeting determined?

Do some ships get destroyed before firing?

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MatGB
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Re: Ship to ship combat

#2 Post by MatGB »

defaultuser wrote:I have been trying to get familiar with some of the game mechanics, so I was wondering what the combat algorithm looks like for one fleet of ships battling another. Ignoring stealth (sorry Mat) and just looking at Fleet A with a collection of ships totaling a certain damage level and structure, versus Fleet B with its own set.
No need to apologise, stealth still confuses me ;-)
Is combat fairly deterministic, or is there some randomness?
Mostly deterministic, you hit what you shoot at and damage is decided entirely by published stats
How is targeting determined?
Randomly, each weapon selects a valid target completely independently of all other weapons.
Do some ships get destroyed before firing?
No, they used to, we changed it.

There are three rounds of combat per turn. In each round, all weapons fire at a random, visible, opposing target. (stealth touched on below). Each shot will hit and do damage according to capacity vs shields. the shot's power has the shield strength of the target removed then the residual is removed from the ships structure.

At the end of each round, the structure of each ship is compared and any that are at or below zero are destroyed. In addition, any ship that has fired now becomes visible to all enemies and a new round of targeting and firing is resolved. If you look at the graphs of a combat log, you'll probably see that some ships 'dead' in the combat have displayed stats of -25/40 or similar, that means that they soaked up 25 more damage than was needed to kill them.

We're hoping to have either 'targeting computer' parts or 'leaders' or something, and to improve targeting options with an easy UI at some point but that's way above my paygrade.

The system allows for a smaller fleet to do damage but gives an advantage to a larger fleet. A fully stealthed fleet gets a free round of shooting before it can be targeted, drawback is one or more unstealthed ships will draw all enemy fire so you do need to be careful.
Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

defaultuser
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Re: Ship to ship combat

#3 Post by defaultuser »

Thanks, that clarifies some issues. Especially the shields and multiple rounds. It was pretty clear that fleets with lots of smaller damage ships didn't do well, even if the aggregate damage of the fleet was reasonable. Subtracting the shield from each shot would do that. Three ships with 10 damage won't be the same as one with 30.

That's why it's so tempting to jump on a smaller fleet as you can often wipe it out with relatively low damage to yours, even though the numbers on the fleets might seem like you'd take a bigger hit. Fleets full of lightly weaponed troop ships might add up to a lot of firepower, but don't actually hurt you much.

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MatGB
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Re: Ship to ship combat

#4 Post by MatGB »

defaultuser wrote:Thanks, that clarifies some issues. Especially the shields and multiple rounds. It was pretty clear that fleets with lots of smaller damage ships didn't do well, even if the aggregate damage of the fleet was reasonable. Subtracting the shield from each shot would do that. Three ships with 10 damage won't be the same as one with 30.
Well, depends on the weapons, 3 ships with Laser4 each will do 11 per shot reduced by shields, one ship with 3 laser4s will also do 11 per shot.

Recently (within the last month) the display of a ship has been changed so it tells you what each individual gun does after species modifiers if you hover over it in the fleet panel (the ship, not the fleet), and that's a massive help for this.

For example, a Large Snowflake can be incredibly dangerous because it's equipped with a single Death Ray 3 (25 damage), whereas the Kraken does less damage and it doesn't matter how many Mass Driver 1s you've got, if your opponent has Defence Grids they won't scratch—that's deliberate BTW, each shield is set to have the same protective strength as the tier 1 of each weapon type so a refinement can always get through, at least partially.
Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

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Oberlus
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Re: Ship to ship combat

#5 Post by Oberlus »

After reading the guide for FO 0.4 and browsing some related posts here in the forum I've been having a hard time to figure out something specific to ship shields:

Does ship shield's strength substract from every shot that the ship takes regardless of the previous shots taken on current or previous rounds of the same turn?
(i.e. is shield's strength depleted is some way after receiving dmg or is it constant?)

Examples (all for defender with shield strength 15)
#guns | dmg/gun | Dmg taken
12 | 5 | 0 or 45?
4 | 15 | 0 or 45?
2 | 30 | 30 or 45?

I should be able to see it by myself in the logs but my current game is cluttered with molecular storms so my shields are useless right now.

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Vezzra
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Re: Ship to ship combat

#6 Post by Vezzra »

Oberlus wrote:(i.e. is shield's strength depleted is some way after receiving dmg or is it constant?)
The latter (constant).
Examples (all for defender with shield strength 15)
#guns | dmg/gun | Dmg taken
12 | 5 | 0 or 45?
4 | 15 | 0 or 45?
2 | 30 | 30 or 45?
0/0/30.

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stpa
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Re: Ship to ship combat

#7 Post by stpa »

i just found the issue to this thread and there i wrote this:

> we would have to replace every specific number with placeholders for the actual current value, add some clickable references, make sure it is still up to date (sorry i missed out on a couple years of discussions and development there) .. but yeah, i agree, that should go to the pedia, good stuff.

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