Compartments making bosses a bit too tough?

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I noticed just now in a 1.2 playthrough that my +30 enhanced smartcannon (13 damage/hit) seemed to do almost nothing to Heliotrope Destroyers (burning through hundreds of rounds to get that kill), so I run a few tests in 1.3 using the G.O.D. mod.
Seems that it takes around 250 (+-30) rounds (or 3000+ points of kinetic damage) to destroy the Destroyer.

This seems a bit absurd.
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sun1404
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Compartments doesn't have resistances, do they?

I guess the reason is simply because the Destroyer's armor is very resistant to Kinetic.
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 I’m not sure about resistances, but I’m pretty sure you need WMD weapons to do more than one point of damage at a time. I do agree that this is something that might need looked into, though.
 On a similar-ish note, do various repair devices have any effect on compartment damage, or do they only effect armor?
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@sun1404: Destroyers are actually slightly vulnerable to kinetic. You don't need more than 12 shots of 13 kinetic to take down an armor segment (75hp x2 due to level and vulnerability).

@AssumedPseudonym: Then it would have taken 100 (compartment)+20 (slightly inconsistent shooting of a segment)+5 (shield)=125 shots, rather than 200 shots for the compartments alone. Really, for something like the Destroyer 50 non-WMD shots should take out the compartments (bearing in mind it's also got a shield and 12 armor segments), not 200. 100 is what I'd expect from a station or a multiweapon boss at that level. 200 of a late game station/boss where WMD is expected/required.

Decent WMD isn't easy to come by at that stage in the game, the Destroyer's armor and shields combined have a negligible effect on durability (ie, a mark I howitzer goes through shields and armor in two shots but needs another 30 to finish off the Destroyer (plus another two or three for the times you miss a downed armor segment)). 1000 blast WMD3 seems like a lot for a pre-St. K enemy where you might not even have been able to get anything with worthwhile WMD.
Takes from 800 (best case with longswords and impregnable shields) to 3000 credits worth of missiles. Oddly enough even mags aren't much better (700-1500, high level mags aren't any less efficient per credit than low level ones).
Nothing else works (ballista cannons seems to do way less damage than they should, supposedly 16 per shot assuming WMD5 is 50% damage, but in practice perhaps a third of that).
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so, following this table:
http://transcendence.kronosaur.com/wiki ... curves1.01
a blast weapon against a level 4 armor will deal 100% of the damage

solar armor has a -25% of resistance to blast weapons

mark I deals (5*12 + 5)/2=32.5 average damage, against the Heliotrope destroyer, WMD is important. Mark I howitzer is WMD3 which means that only 20% of that damage will be inflicted to the armor segment
* WMD0 = 0%
* WMD1 = 4%
* WMD2 = 10%
* WMD3 = 20%
* WMD4 = 34%
* WMD5 = 52%
* WMD6 = 74%
* WMD7 = 100%

So, calculate everything together, Mark I will deal 8.125 average damage per shot to Solar armor, destroying solar armor (75hp) will require an average of 9.2 shots, let's say, 10 shots.

Not exactly sure how interior hp works, though.
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@digdug: WMD only matters against compartments, noncritical segments and stations. The Destroyer only has the first, hence why a Mark I howitzer does the full damage to the Heliotrope's normal armor segments (40 damage, knocking each out in two shots as per experiment). It then needs another 30 to take out the compartments, implying either WMD effects are smaller than expected, compartment hp works very oddly or that the Heliotrope Destroyer has 240 compartment hp rather than the 100 listed in the XML. Either way there's probably a bug here...
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How do you know that the Destroyer's armor segment is already destroyed?
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sun1404 wrote:How do you know that the Destroyer's armor segment is already destroyed?
Because the Destroyer's listed damage % goes up very quickly until the late 40s, then slows to a crawl when attacked by a non-WMD weapon. Getting to that half way point takes two of those howitzer shots (which makes sense given the numbers). I could in theory take out the compartment code to verify it does indeed take two shots, but I'm pretty confident in this conclusion.
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Well, that does sound like breaking through the armor. Still, I have tried fighting a few other capital ships and the Heliotrope Destroyer, but I haven't met anything that takes an abnormal amount of time to down. Maybe your game is bugged, maybe my game is bugged, maybe some of your extensions are affecting the compartment system, or maybe it really need a fix. :?

Ps. I didn't use much WMD weapons though. Mostly I favor fast weapons, The only exceptions being the Fusionfire and, of course the Ares Plasma Archcannon. :)
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If you think it plausible that there could be version differences could you run a test (the G.O.D. mod (which should be renamed "Debug/Testing mod" :) ) is good for this) to see if you also find you need 30 Mark I Howitzer shots/200 nonWMD shots?
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Charon Pirate Frigates. 50 Mark I shots (20 Mark III shots) or so in a dogfight (in a real fight only 1 in 2 are going to hit).
Kronosaurus: 50 MK III and 100 MK I.

If a fight is lasting three minutes, it's probably going to be a rather frustrating affair, you're either invulnerable or you're going back and forth to heal a lot (the exception being if you're having to dodge one-shot attacks like the ares plasma cannon).
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I touched on this in my post about the last beta here: http://forums.kronosaur.com/viewtopic.p ... ead#p57949

I've thought about it a bit more. I wouldn't say the effect of WMD on compartments should be eliminated, but the damage reduction for non-WMD weapons is definitely way too high. In the early game it's not really relevant, but in the mid to late game it makes a large fraction of weapons distinctly second-class. Non- or low- WMD weapons tend to have faster fire rates and overall higher DPS or omni, but they're effectively useless against stations and tougher enemies. The enemies they're effective against are common, but generally unthreatening, so have these weapons is a convenience, while having a good WMD weapon is a necessity. The ICS, for instance, is practically indestructible with most weapons (including many high level ones), but dies in seconds to an Ares Plasma Archcannon with speed loader. On top of that, the ability to outrange enemies already makes howitzers better than most weapons. So my recommendation would be to scale it so WMD weapons range from something like 2 to 5 times as effective against compartments and stations as other weapons. Even with that change, some non-WMD, non-omni weapons (like ion blasters) could probably use a bit of a buff, while howitzers could be nerfed (perhaps lower fire rate to enforce the need for a skirmish weapon).

Although realism isn't exactly Transcendence's guiding principle, I will point to "An Introduction to Modern Starship Armor Design" from David Weber's Honorverse collection In Fire Forged, where the author points out that high powered energy weapons don't neatly cut, melt, or vaporize armor and bulkheads. Rather, they cause them to explode.
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I second your thought on WMD, I too feel that right now, the difference between non-WMD and WMD weapons scales too steeply.
wiki wrote: When hitting a large station, only WMD counts. WMD is some percentage of normal weapon damage, using this table:

Code: Select all

* WMD0 = 0%
* WMD1 = 4%
* WMD2 = 10%
* WMD3 = 20%
* WMD4 = 34%
* WMD5 = 52%
* WMD6 = 74%
* WMD7 = 100%
Maybe if weapons with WMD0 started at 8% or 10% instead of 0, things would balance out better?

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Maybe add a new WMD field, like WMD%:x, where x is from 1 to 100.

As for interior, I did not realize at first that interior had WMD protection like multi-hull stations. It takes forever to kill such ships with most energy weapons. (Before interiors, some ships were not too hard to kill because you could always hit critical sections, but not anymore.) Ships with interior are much harder to kill than stations.
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From this thread:
NMS wrote:I think I've come up with a good solution to the WMD issue: change WMD damage against compartments from a divisor to a bonus.

Non-WMD weapons would do their raw damage to compartments. This eliminates the need for rounding up to 1 and the difference between fast firing, low damage weapons and slow firing, high damage weapons.

Then, choose a factor by which top-tier WMD weapons should be better than non-WMD weapons. It should be large enough to incentivize WMD weapons, but not so large that non-WMD weapons are useless by comparison. Something like 3 seems about right. Increase compartment health by 3 times across the board, and multiply weapon damage against compartments by 3^(WMD rating / 7). So each level of WMD rating would do 17% more damage to compartments than the previous level. The net effect is that WMD-7 weapons and no-WMD weapons that do 3 damage stay the same, but low- or no-WMD weapons gain effectiveness against compartments proportional to their damage.

Multi-hull stations work a bit differently, but they could be handled by giving them reasonable amounts of compartment health under their armor, or multiplying their armor health by 3 and applying the WMD bonus against their armor.
NMS wrote:
Shrike wrote:In terms of making WMD work a bit differently.....that makes sense. Might require some rebalance to make the mass destruction stuff not completely overpowered....but armors could use a few tweaks here and there anyway, so eh.....it could work out.
Under my proposal, WMD7 would be 300% damage against compartments, but compartments would have 300% as much health. So WMD7 weapons would be exactly as overpowered as they currently are. The lower the WMD rating of a weapon, the more it would benefit from my proposal, except for low damage, low WMD weapons that are currently benefitting strongly from the minimum of 1 damage per compartment hit. Here's how most common weapons would change in effectiveness against compartments under my proposal:

Code: Select all

WMD0:                                         change in effectiveness against compartments:
Laser Cannon, Mining Laser                                   83%
Light Recoilless Cannon                                     100%
Recoilless Cannon                                           150%
Turbolaser                                                  250%
Lancer Cannon                                               117%
Particle Beam Weapon                                        183%
Shuriken Neutron Blaster                                    167%
X-Ray Laser                                                 667%
Ion Disruptor                                               583%
Light Ion Blaster                                           467%
Katana Star Cannon                                          433%
Tev-9                                                       600%
Ion Flame Cannon                                            150%

WMD1:
AK15 Partisan, RK15, Smartcannon                            390%
Slam Cannon                                                 409%
Ion Blaster                                                 975% to 1500% (depending on enhancement level and whether the division is adjusted to round rather than truncate)
Heavy Ion Blaster                                           975%
Omni Ion Blaster, IM90                                      546%
KM110 Starburst                                             351% (blast), 214% (kinetic)

WMD2:
Flenser, Akan 30                                            456% (Or maybe a bit more depending on rounding)
PK25, Plasma Torch                                          ??? (I don't know how damage for these is currently calculated against compartments)

WMD3:
Moskva series                                               240%
Mark I Howitzer, White/Green/Black Strelka                  266%

All WMD4:
Dragonfly, Mark III Howitzer, Tritium Cannon, TM7,          187%
Plasma Cannon, Reaper Missile

All WMD5:
AK505, Mark V Howitzer, Thermo Cannon, Fusionfire,          141%
Longbow, 400 and 600 MAG, Red Strelka

All WMD6:
Mines                                                       116%
All WMD7:
Lucifer, Siege and High-flux MAG, Gotha missiles,           100%
M2, M5, Ares Plasma Archcannon
Shrike wrote:It might be useful to have a method of penalising compartment damage on a weapon though, if WMD is changed to a pure bonus system (Also, removing the wmdX rating on damage entirely and going with a simple percentage bonus/penalty system would be *really awesome* for usability. Likewise armorX and shieldX. *cough*).
That does seem like it would make things easier. So WMD1 through 7 would become something like compartmentX:117 through compartmentX:300 if my proposal were also implemented.
Essentially, this proposal would be approximately the same as changing the WMD table to this:

Code: Select all

WMD     compartment damage %
 0               33
 1               39
 2               46
 3               53
 4               62
 5               73
 6               85
 7              100
...except that it would avoid rounding issues at the low end.
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