Geoff the Medio wrote: ↑Thu Aug 30, 2018 8:02 am
I don't like the proposal that individual parts types should have a built-in prioritization or restricted target set outside of a few broad but specific cases (eg. fighters don't target planets).
Basically, the entire approach (giving ships/ship parts properties to help determine target selection) tries to determine the combat role/tactical decisions of a ship automatically. Which is the major issue with such an approach: it tries to make tactical decisions for the player.
Our current system "solves" that problem by completely randomizing these "tactical decisions". I can understand why people see that as an even worse approach, and consider the suggested approach an improvement.
I also think the proposed implementation of conditions with various tiers or weights or levels of precision / adherence to priorities or rounds of targeting is overly complicated.
True, but that affects primarily the content scripting. The player would just use the parts and only needs to know that e.g. a Flak has a higher chance to target fighters than e.g. a Spinal Antimatter Cannon (which, admittedly, makes some sense).
The results and distinctions would be too subtle for most players.
That depends on how you set up/balance things in the end. You surely can go overboard easily enough, but I think if you try to keep the rules and numbers reasonably clear, simple and distinct, you could get usable results.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not exactly a huge fan of the proposed system (for the various reasons I already cited in this and earlier posts), but as long as the "probability scewing" effect isn't too strong, it's still an improvement over the current system, which is the intended goal.
My preferred implementation of weapon targeting control would be that weapons will by default target everything, and that players will find this problematic and want a way to fix it.
I probably wouldn't start out quite that extreme. Even at the very start of the game combat shouldn't be an exercise in frustration. Some basic sane behaviour of your combat units should be default, but obviously improvable.
The game would provide this in the form of targeting parts or possibly by having a leader be able to control the targeting. Getting the ability to control the targeting would be a strategic decision [...] Actually adding the controlled targeting to a ship would require planning ahead by adding the part to a design.
That approach, while having the compelling advantage of being able to assign specific combat roles/tactical behaviour to ships while completely avoiding the micromanagement issues if you could/had to do that for each ship in every combat, has huge issues. It works well with single purpose ships (like troop transports), but with general or multi purpose ships things get nasty.
Stellaris works with a system very similar to that, by making the player choose the type of battle computer when making a ship design. The system works to a certain degree, but I wouldn't say it works well. The reason why it works at all is because in Stellaris refitting your ships is something you (have to) do quite frequently (and which is also somewhat managable in that game), and because the selection of combat roles is
very limited (basically at what range a ship engages the enemy: point blank, picket, line or artillery). So, if you need to adjust the combat roles of your ships, a quick refit of your fleet will do it. The end result is meh at best. Frequently tedious and annoying. Fun? Not so much.
Now consider how things work in FO. Ships can't be refitted at all, meaning their combat role is fixed. You need to adjust the combat role of your ships, you're in for extensive scrapping and rebuilding. Oh boy.
... This will make ship design decisions more involved / interesting, and pushes ships towards being more specialized / situational.
With all the suggetions you made here, it will also force you to work with a
lot more different ship designs, and to micromanage your fleet composition far more carefully. Fixed specialization means it becomes more difficult to adapt to different/changing strategic/tactical situations. And while a certain degree of (fixed) specialization is very important (a single ship type which I could dynamically adjust to fulfill all possible roles would be excessively boring!) to provide proper variety, too much (fixed) specialization can quickly create a lot of micromanagement, and make the task of adjusting your fleets to changing situations very tedious and unfun.
That's not to say such an approach can't work at all. But, as all possible approaches to space combat, it has very distinct advantages and issues, and needs to be designed and balanced carefully, otherwise you just end up with something as unsatisfying as the current system, just a different way of unsatisfying. We'd definitely need to do better than e.g. Stellaris...