A new way to balance ships

[Duke]

Hi all

this post is something I hope the dev team reads...

first of all THANK YOU for this amazing game and although it is still in alpha I have already had more fun in this game than then the overpriced boring no man lie.

as i played this game for hundreds of hours I noticed a small issue in balancing.. at first their was no gun limit and now their is which lead me to think of something .., lets say... new.

I believe the answer lies in something totaly different and often ignored

THE POWER SYSTEM :)

what I prepose is a new way of balancing ships and vehicles in the game, instead of the random number limit for guns or systems .. why not make a power system limit for the actual CORE

example:

A CV core can have lets say 100MW power max... so the player has to pick ... do i have 4 plasma turrets ? or 14 projectile turrets or 1 artilary and 4 rocket launchers...etc etc

of course the value in the example is random I dont know how much power anything takes but my suggestion would not only "balance" the game ships and bases it will also allow for multiple "classes" in ship designs, so u can see war ships that are good at close combat and are fast and ships that are slow but pack a punch and so on and so forth

anyways its just an idea and thanks for this game cant w8 till its beta ;)

[Buddy Dee's Ghost]

True the game is awesome, but when I read the title of this thread I thought it was going to refer to "balancing" the hovercraft...which I can't seem to do....

[Duke]

lol XD well I remembered an old game, fleet commander (startrek) where u could buy a starship and modify it BUTTTTTTTTT you had a warp engine that had limited power so if u add too many weapons u would sacrifice shield power or engine power ..etc etc

[UnshackledJester]

Originally posted by Emperor of Mankind:

lol XD well I remembered an old game, fleet commander (startrek) where u could buy a starship and modify it BUTTTTTTTTT you had a warp engine that had limited power so if u add too many weapons u would sacrifice shield power or engine power ..etc etc

The only issue I see with this is that it doesn't take into account running other things that have power, and we don't really have shielding. If we did, it would make sense. More daca for less protections and such, but in this game it doesn't really work that way. You would either end up with the same situation we're in right now with the limitations, or people would find a way to put a massive genny on a CV with like 5 Arty turrets and then just SLAUGHTER ♥♥♥♥ from a distance.

[Xango2000]

This is alot like a similar thread from a long time ago that was advocating in favor of a D&D type of point system where you get X number of points to spend on a ship based on type of ship.

You would get something like 100 points to spend, each stationary weapon and turret would be worth a different number of points.

[GlassDeviant]

Originally posted by Buddy Dee's Ghost:

True the game is awesome, but when I read the title of this thread I thought it was going to refer to "balancing" the hovercraft...which I can't seem to do....

There are a few tricks to it, take a look at my Forestry Service HV to see one way to get a well balanced HV. The trick is in the roughly triangular shape pointing forwards, though I've added extra hover engines to make a sort of blocky wedge, and lots of booster pads for "jumping" capability which can be ignored. This thing handles like a dream, and can climb ANY mountain, but still takes a bit of skill to keep it under control (nothing like the difficulty of doing so when HV 2.0 first came out). I miss the original HV engines but this gets me around decently enough that the inability to put defense turrets on a SV is not a problem.

P.S.: You don't need the "floating magnets" effect to make HV engines work, I just thought they looked cool that way.

[Merricat]

Originally posted by Zombielord Ativan:

Originally posted by Buddy Dee's Ghost:

True the game is awesome, but when I read the title of this thread I thought it was going to refer to "balancing" the hovercraft...which I can't seem to do....

There are a few tricks to it, take a look at my Forestry Service HV to see one way to get a well balanced HV. The trick is in the roughly triangular shape pointing forwards, though I've added extra hover engines to make a sort of blocky wedge, and lots of booster pads for "jumping" capability which can be ignored. This thing handles like a dream, and can climb ANY mountain, but still takes a bit of skill to keep it under control (nothing like the difficulty of doing so when HV 2.0 first came out). I miss the original HV engines but this gets me around decently enough that the inability to put defense turrets on a SV is not a problem.

P.S.: You don't need the "floating magnets" effect to make HV engines work, I just thought they looked cool that way.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=887914238

For those too lazy to check his profile.

[ZomBeGone]

Avorion has a system for mass, thrust, energy, and shields. Everything has a mass. Engines and shields require energy. More engines or bigger engines require more energy.

Guns require a ship mass "level", so a battleship size ship might support a total of 30 guns. Guns take energy, and the big ones take huge amounts. If you don't have enough generators, then they can't all fire, or you can't move full speed. You can add batteries to carry the energy requirements of the guns, but guess what, they have a huge mass.

With a larger mass, your movement and turning are sluggish and slower, so add more thrusters, but they take energy, so more generators.... Everything needs to be ballanced.

You could build a behemish CV, but the energy consumption and fuel usage could make it self limiting.

The game is a bit differant, but some of the concepts are plain simplified physics and univeral. I felt it was an interesting approach, and well done.

[FrostDust]

Limiting a core to only handle a maximum amount of power would hinder non-combat ships and bases as well. Empyrion is part of the way to the game HoneyBadger points out, Avorion. There are already ship classes in Empyrion, so maybe tying gun capacity to this would work. In other words, if you want to put more than x amount of weapons on a ship, it has to be above a certain size. This would make it slower, larger and easier to hit, unless you compensate with more engines and thrusters, which then makes it more expensive and longer to build.

Another approach would be based off of real life, fire control systems[en.wikipedia.org]. These are computers which assist in targeting and firing weapons, typically for artillery or naval guns, although aircraft and even small-arms rifles use them. Allow a core to support x amount of guns on its own, and for anymore than that, the player would have to build and place a new device, an FCS computer, to expand the weapon capacity. To distinguish between less and more powerful weapons, you could give each a CPU cost, and the FCS system govern via CPU capacity. For example, a single Plasma Turret could have the same CPU cost as multiple Gatling Guns.

[piddlefoot]

Its a good way to balance based on energy, we will probably see this start to happen when they do the end game, we may be capable of getting those type weapons later in the game and shields are power based, which they have said there doing so at some point balancing like this will need to come into the game.

I dont mind the 100 point idea, you choose what you use it on weapons, weapon types, shields, thrust power , cloakability , ninja mode lol , emergency warp jump, fire control, so theres alot they could do with it once we start getting true energy based weapons.

[Winterfalke]

Originally posted by FrostDust:

Limiting a core to only handle a maximum amount of power would hinder non-combat ships and bases as well. Empyrion is part of the way to the game HoneyBadger points out, Avorion. There are already ship classes in Empyrion, so maybe tying gun capacity to this would work. In other words, if you want to put more than x amount of weapons on a ship, it has to be above a certain size. This would make it slower, larger and easier to hit, unless you compensate with more engines and thrusters, which then makes it more expensive and longer to build.

Another approach would be based off of real life, fire control systems[en.wikipedia.org]. These are computers which assist in targeting and firing weapons, typically for artillery or naval guns, although aircraft and even small-arms rifles use them. Allow a core to support x amount of guns on its own, and for anymore than that, the player would have to build and place a new device, an FCS computer, to expand the weapon capacity. To distinguish between less and more powerful weapons, you could give each a CPU cost, and the FCS system govern via CPU capacity. For example, a single Plasma Turret could have the same CPU cost as multiple Gatling Guns.

I don't really think this is 'realistic' for the tech level, each turet could easily have its own fire control system and targeting array. And I don't think limiting weapons based on size work very well either, because size/class is hard to define and can vary wildly based on the ship.

What I do think would work is giving each weapon a 'firing cost' in energy consumption. I would eliminate the ammo for the energy based ewapons and give them capacitor banks. Let them require 10MW of power between shots to simulate recharging in addition to their maintenence energy requirements. Obviously projectile weapons wouldn't need that much power, but they should need more power when actually firing. By having actual power requirements to use large batteries of weapons, the generator and fuel tank requirements would effectively limit the number of guns you can use at a time. Any ship with enough generators and fuel tanks to support a large number of turrets would have to be considerably larger and heavier to be able to fire them all and still move. Drastically reducing the ammount of CV type ammo that can fit in an ammo crate would help too, necessetating a large amount of ammo storage to be able to run that many guns. It currently costs next to nothing power and support-wise to fit dozens of turrets on a ship, that needs to change.

[Duke]

just make none combat devices cost low energy I mean how much power can a fridge take :P

I was trying to find a way to get rid of the arbitrary number put on gun limits, this way CV speed, size, armor, shields (in the future) and weaponery will all have to be balanced out

you want more armor ? too bad makes the ship heavy and slow, you want more shields ?? great but good luck putting 4 plasma turrets

thats sort of thing

it could rly add a layer of depth to ship designes and make players really think about ships size speed layout and weaponery