AssumedPseudonym wrote:
Key word there is “generally.” Exceptions exist, and likely always will.
Strikes me as the rule. I don't know of any vanilla counterexamples, at least, and I've been playing for a while. A few can be distracted during the mission and then kited afterwards, but that's the limit of it.
Then that’s a separate balance issue altogether that doesn’t need addressed here in the internals thread.
If something is drastically unbalanced, it can't really be used as a metric by which to balance everything else.
Yes, halving internal HP would make things a lot easier under the current system, but dumping the WMD requirement would serve a similar effect (and yes, I realize that some ships would probably need their internal HP raised as a consequence). This would not make WMD weapons less effective against a capital ship, but neither would a lighter weapon be practically useless against them, either. Besides, once you do get through armor, I would expect shooting a faster firing weapon through a hull breach probably would wreak havoc on the guts of a ship.
Only if it hit something important. That's covered in the other half of my proposed rebalancing.
A 50% penalty is more drastic than you might think, but my real issue here is your claim that a capital ship with the exact same type of armor as a playership is somehow going to inexplicably have a segment of, say, blast plate both cover more area and be harder to damage while retaining the same mass. That’s like saying dough for a small pizza is harder to put a hole through if you spread it out to cover the size of a large pizza. And please, do correct me if I’m misinterpreting what your intended implementation there is, but that’s the way I’m understanding it as it’s been presented. It strikes me as more than a little immersion-breaking. If they have more armor, they should have more armor and not something that amounts to a handwave that says, “Oh, there’s more of it because it’s a bigger ship, you just can’t see it.”
I believe it's best explained like this:
There is undeniably more of the armor. The ratio of segments to surface area on a capship is vastly different from the ratio of segments to surface area on a non - capital ship, meaning each segment must be orders of magnitude bigger in order to cover the entire ship. The same effect could be achieved by doubling/tripling/decupling the number of armor segments and giving WMD weapons the ability to damage nearby segments, but that would be somewhat storage and runtime - inefficient, not to mention that it would make destroying an armor segment of a capital ship a bit too arbitrary for my taste without incorporating AOE weapons.
You make a good point about the illogicality of being able to transfer the armor to a gunship after looting it, but as I understand it that appears to be something that's just assumed to be possible for the sake of gameplay at this point, like the ability to repair armor without using materials, its ability to be fitted to vastly different hull types, and so on. While I certainly understand your concern here, this strikes me as the best way to maneuver around the physical impossibilities without breaking too many things.
If anything — and I know this has been suggested before — capital ships need to have dedicated armor made for them, on the order of dozens of tons and ranging from three-digit to four-digit HP per segment on the high end of things in the late game that you’re not going to get through with a few shots of a TeV9 and that are entirely too heavy to put onto a typical playership. Think along the lines of quad-titanium barricade or massive Tharsis plate, but expanded to include the likes of reactive or ceralloy or what have you.
That's another reasonable way of doing this, which I recall proposing a while back. One important point, however, is that DPS for WMD weapons and non - WMD weapons is roughly even without multipliers, meaning weapons that logically should be weak against massive armor segments work just as well as the superheavy bombardment weapons that should logically be effective against them. Thus, I suggested a multiplier that went into effect for extremely large armor segments, making them better resist low - WMD weapons fire.
Overall, what I'm saying here is that, at present, WMD weaponry is not inherently more powerful than non - WMD weaponry, but ammo requirements, cost, rarity, and lack of omni/firerate do often make them a worse choice for fighting off gunships. For the sake of both balance and realism, they do need to be somewhat more useful for dealing with capital ships.
Another way to achieve balance here while retaining uniqueness and a sense of fun could be to make WMD weapons actually be more powerful, with radius effects, much higher damage, and the works, and then massively cut down on their firerate/accuracy to make them less useful against gunships. This would fit well if you're dead set against WMD multipliers, but if we're going that route it would make sense to just eliminate the 'WMD' field entirely(not that there's anything wrong with doing that).
pixelfck wrote:I've two thoughts on compartments:
1.
One thing that always surprises me is that you can destroy a compartment, without the adjacent compartments taking any damage. I would expect the adjacent compartments to be damaged quite a bit by destroying the compartment directly next to it.
This change could make taking out capital ships easier (or not, depending on other balancing decisions). Maybe introduce a nice explosion chain when enough compartments are badly damaged and destroying one causes the next one to be destroyed as well, which causes the next one to reach 0 hp, etc.
2.
Right now, the system is black or white. As we have seen before, all or nothing solutions usually lead to balance problems. So, why not introduce something like a 'compartment strength rating' (CSR) ranging from 1 to 7 for example (to counteract the WMD rating). As a result, an Earth Slaver doesn't need to be as though as a Phobos-class dreadnought, which is a good thing: more shades of grey creates a more interesting game experience.
Cheers,
Pixelfck
1. It could be possible to rig a compartment to explode when destroyed. This strikes me as similar to the previous method of capital ship destruction, where a lucky shot on a non-critical area could destroy the entire ship after the player took down the armor segment covering that area.
2. I like something like this, giving the internal part of capships more nuance. Using my own suggestion as an example, ships could have an 'internals' variable, which could specify hard coded resistance to various weapon effects(not dependent on armor), internal HP's damage multipliers for different WMD types, and outer armor's multipliers against different WMD types.
