Matrix Games Forums

There has been quite a bit of discussion around how shields, armour and weapons work, or should work.
I am sure some of the bods here have played Stars!
I thought they had a pretty good system, although, to fit DW's system I've had to add a few thoughts:

Armour:
* Cheap with high protective strength;
* Doesn't require energy use;
* reactiveness - reactivity could defend against 'splash' damage and low damage weapons like Ion cannons;
* heavy;
* Require larger amounts of rare metal types as the rating increases (tech levels)
* Armour adds a new stat to a ship "armour value": the total armour from the inherent design (not sure about this bit as it requires specialist hull types) from all armour slots added. This 'magically' covers the whole ship and only after all of it has been removed does internal componentry start being destroyed.
* Some weapons are able to gain 'critical' strikes that pass armour and hit internal components


Shields:
* relatively expensive (at low levels anyway)
* early designs don't have much of a rating but get much better faster as the levels go up - so more of a late game addition;
* but make it faster to regen than it currently is.
* light weight
* energy consumptive, but faster to recharge depending on the amount of 'spare' energy your ships produce at full usage - meaning X where X= (reactor power {or/and energy panel where on stationary vessel} - (total weapons power + total full power engine and full power thruster usage + static power)). Essentially when you have 2 reactors on a design where it could manage with 1, the extra reactor's power could be funnneled to shields such that they recharge faster;
* Shields are not impervious, certain weapons can part-penetrate shields - doing damage against both shields and armour (higher reactive armour could shrug this off without a slot being destroyed)

Repair Bots -
* much the same as at present but repair armour points at a rated speed;
* Also able to repair damage componentry - useful against critical strike instances where a critical-strike-weapon has penetrated shields and armour to damage a component

'Normal' Beam weapons
* cheap
* common materials or small amounts of rare
* low damage done against shields first, then to armour
* medium damage
* short range
* high energy use
* small weight
* accurate (not affected by guidance)
* quick fire rate

'Lance Beam weapons'
* expensive
* rare materials
* long range
* high energy use
* damages shields first, then armour, but has a rating to penetrate armour and strike internal componentry - percentage increases with tech
* Low damage (but enough to destroy components)
* small weight
* accurate (not affected by guidance)
* medium-speed fire rate

Ion weapons
* medium expense
* common materials and medium amounts of rare
* bypasses shields and armour
* No damage but able to temporarily 'crash' energy consumptive devices - pecentage chance - increases with tech
* high energy use
* long range
* small weight
* accurate (not affected by guidance)
* medium-speed fire rate

Shield-Stripper beam weapons
* medium expense
* rare materials
* double damage to shields - no damage to armour (or potentially could increase damage output with 'extra' power use from spare reactor power - see sheild recharge idea - shields take precedense over shields-stripper beams for this functionality)
* high energy use
* small weight
* initial short range extending with tech
* accurate (not affected by guidance)
* slow fire rate

Beam deflectors
* reduces damage done to both shields and armour by a percentage rating that increases with tech - additional units not cummulative (not what was done in Stars! - in Stars additional units had an effect but it each additional unit had less and less effect)
* cheap
* medium weight
* high energy use

Torpedo weapons
* cheap
* common materials with small amounts of rare
* Long range
* low energy use
* high weight
* medium damage - damages shields then armour - if no shields small chance of 'burst through' damage that hits internal components
* inaccurate (requires guidance)
* medium-fire rate

Mass Drivers
* cheap
* common materials only
* long range
* low energy use
* high weight
* low damage - shields then armour
* medium accuracy (affected by guidance)
* quick fire rate

Missiles
* expensive
* rare materials required
* long range
* low energy use
* high weight
* Damage - varies: on a miss it does 10% damage rating to shields, on hit does damage to shields then armour, any damage done to armour is doubled
* very inaccurate (requires guidance)
* slow fire rate
* unable to be carried by fighters

Targetting computers
* medium expense
* medium static energy use
* increases accuracy of weapons that can take guidance - rating is a percentage increase of the 'miss-rate' of the weapon. For instance: a normal torpedo may have an accuracy of 60%, subsequently a miss-rate of 40%. A guidance computer with a rating of 50% would reduce the 'miss-rate' by 50%. 50% of 40% is 20% - this is added to the accuracy. So our torpedo would have a hit rate of 80% with this guidance computer.
* A guidance computers increase in accuracy is offset by counter-measure devices

Counter measure devices
* expensive
* medium static energy use
* decreases the accuracy of weapons that can take guidance - rating is a percentage decrease of the hit-rate of the weapon. If a weapon has a hit percentage of 60%, and the counter measure has a decrease rating of 50%, it would reduce the hit rate of the weapon by 50% - so in this case 50% of 60% is 30%.
* Counter measure devices and targetting computers cancel each other out 1-1 on rating. The rating left over is the amount that takes affect against guidance of the weapon.

Special weapons like the planet destroyer have their own rules.

It would be nice if DW ripped off Stars!' combat system in some ways.  I also liked the way that adding more of any type of widget to your design was always helpful, although with diminishing marginal returns. 

That said, Stars had just three kinds of ship-ship weapons: beams, shield-buster beams, and torpedoes.  Each of them had enhancement techs (computers, beam amps), and each had corresponding defenses (jammers, beam deflectors).  Even with just that, there was plenty of interest and challenge in ship design (and counterdesign).  I am not sure having 7 categories of offense really adds that much.

from your description (I've not played Stars) it seems very similar to GalCiv2
I offcourse would like to see more from MOO2 combat system ripped [:)]

Stars had/has:
beams
shield stripper beams
range zero beams (very powerful - but you had to have a fast light ship and high initiative before they would work)
Multi-target beams (each one could hit many ships)
torpedos
Capital missiles
 
Stars! is more a play-by-mail game. Suffered terribly from micro-management in late game and the AI was appallingly bad. However, if you could get by the micromanagement, a PBEM game could be very intriguing.
 
At the crux of this email is to make more scissors - paper - rock to the model: i.e. capital ship missiles are very very powerful, and especially against an -unshielded target, but they have poor accuracy so need targeting computers (which can also be jammed), are heavy so they're difficult to use in small hulls and also make it difficult for larger hulls that tout them to be nimble.
There is also some nice synergies, like using Capital Ships with Capital ship missiles are partnered with fast frigates loaded only  with shield stripping beam weapons and lots of jamming. They get in, clean off their opponents shields, and the Capital ships send in the Capital ship missiles.
Weapons like beams and torpedos are your standard jack-of-all-trades weapon. They'll do everything but just not that effiicently. In a large battle with a well balanced fleet a jack-of-all-trades weapon system is likely to suffer (unless you heavily outnumber your opponent).
 
So, I just figured the groundwork on such concepts was already in DW but that it hadn't quite taken it to the degree they could.

Heh, Stars! is nothing like GalCiv. Closer to MOO2, but less user-friendly, a bit ugly, and not compatible with 64-bit systems. However, it had an interesting race creation system, which featured some very different traits that really changed how some races work. Interdimensional races could only live on Starbases, and got larger starbase hulls to compensate, another race could fling mass-driver packets with larger contents at higher speeds, and yet another race can specialize in mines. Oh, and you could make Colonizers that are equipped with Ram-Scoop engines, which let them regenerate fuel on the fly...but, if your race wasn't resistant to radiation, your colonists will die while enroute. It took me a bit to figure that out. [:-]

ORIGINAL:
Stars had/has:
beams
shield stripper beams
range zero beams (very powerful - but you had to have a fast light ship and high initiative before they would work)
Multi-target beams (each one could hit many ships)
torpedos
Capital missiles

Yes. (You are taking a closer view than I was; i.e. torpedoes and cap missiles are similar from a high level view but they did have significant differences, as you say) This was a very good combat system. As you say, it has something of the rock-paper-scissors thing going on, although (IMO) the highest tech "superhull" partially spoiled that.

Anyway, back to what you have proposed: it is basically Stars' system with the addition of more beam types, minus "area" weapons (although perhaps that was an oversight, since DW already has area weapons). I'll second your proposal, but I suggest collapsing the categories a bit to simplify things. I'd suggest unifying "lance beam" and "ion" beams, and also torpedoes and mass drivers. (And adding back area-effect weapons.)

Hi Wreck;

yes as you surmised. I didn't add area weapons because they were there, and also agree regarding unification of Ion with lance, but not sure about unifying mass drivers with torpedoes. The idea of the mass driver is its rapid fire but small damage but with relatively good accuracy - higher latent accuracy kinetic weapons are more efficient with the counter measures/computer targeting model, as these two systems cancel each other out - therefore if they do cancel you're left with whatever latent accuracy comes with the device.
The torpedoes have a warhead, do more damage, but are slower to fire, and have less latent accuracy. With the warhead they have the 'burst' ability that can damage internal components if sheilds are removed.

However, potentially you make mass drivers a split on the torpedo research tree - so you get them later?

Sounds like a great mod! Now, if we can just convince the developer(s) to externalize the component data to a .txt or other similar file (similar to the Space Empires series) 90%+ of this could easily be accomplished by the modding community.