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Author Topic: Ship Recovery  (Read 97682 times)

Cosmitz

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #120 on: January 23, 2017, 07:07:05 PM »

I really love this, it makes good sense and solves issues we've been having for a long time.

But i'm still unconvinced about the ship recovery itself. Using dmods is great, and there's something to be said between disabling/destroying/nuking even the dead hulk to manage a percentage chance, but it'd like to be more play there, with the world map as well.

What would be nice would be some risk/reward to it all. I assume as is we have a chance to recover on each and all of the enemy ships, if they don't make it, you can't pick it for salvaging. I'd consider the ability to salvage any enemy or friendly, ship. Nuked hull gets something low like 5%. Destroyed say 15%. Disabled 30%, modifiable with skills, and functioning on a 'band' for dmods. Either way, have each 'roll' consume crew/supplies scaling up per class. On a first-roll-success, you pay out the crew/supplies, then roll for the dmod. Say on the above 30%, rolling just under 60 gets you a dmod, rolling up from 60 gets you the ship in good condition (well, 'good', you still need to repair it to full from nothing).

Failing the initial recover roll, you lose the supplies/crew, the price increases for the new roll, and the ship gets a dmod (cap it out at all of them :P). Call it a failure to salvage. You can eventually, with enough supplies/crew get the ship you want, even if it'll require huge tuneups in station to get it to pristine condition. Either way, this puts forward a very straight path to getting the ship you want, if at a cost of time, dedicated procedure and huge cost. (The repair at a station should be per d-mod though in this case, and using LIFO methodology, not just a flat sum)

The mention of the world map, as to not abuse the ability to scavange all the ships, would be that for each ship you stay 'still' and do salvage ops for a period of time. Ideally per ship, in the order that you want them salvaged, cancellable permanently at any time, and with no repairs getting done to any of your existing fleet of ships during it.

You can salvage an entire enemy fleet, but the question remains if you can afford to sit still, not repairing any of your ships, and wasting supply/day upkeeping them, while you dilly-dally salvaging, after paying out your nose in crew/supply for them. I can imagine it'd make for some fun times 'waiting' for a ship to salvage while an enemy fleet homes in on you, then full burning away at the last moment. Or not, and get stuck in a battle you really didn't want to have at that moment.


« Last Edit: January 23, 2017, 07:11:10 PM by Cosmitz »
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SafariJohn

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #121 on: January 23, 2017, 07:11:32 PM »

i think most mercantile and faction-military fleets wouldn't really bother with that, even assuming they'd have the necessary cargo space available to take a good amount of loot, as it would be a distraction more so than anything else from whatever they were doing.

I think military fleets would at least try to salvage their own ships.
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Sy

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #122 on: January 23, 2017, 08:53:10 PM »

I think military fleets would at least try to salvage their own ships.
even if it means taking a bunch of mothballed or only barely combat ready ships with them, being either dead weight or consuming a large junk of their available supplies and crew for little immediate benefit, and still requiring expensive repairs at the nearest station just to get them back up to average performance -- and all of this without specialized industrial personal and equipment?

...maybe. i'm not saying it could never make sense for them to do so. but i do think that if the ability to recover (some, not all) ships from debris of lost battles is desirable from a gameplay perspective, it wouldn't require a huge stretch to explain from an in-universe perspective why you're able to do so.

keep in mind, even for the player, recovering a bunch of enemy ships is generally not supposed to be worth the cost of supplies, if you don't have the necessary industry skills. recovering your own disabled ships only adds a single d-mod, but recovering enemy ships adds 2-4. so even if enemy fleets would usually recover as many of their own ships as possible, recovering your lost ships would usually not be worthwhile for them.

and i imagine stripping all remaining wrecks of any useful hardware and materials, to the point where it can all be neatly stored in cargo holds (even assuming they have the necessary cargo capacity in the first place), could take quite a while. probably worthwhile for pirates who seek out other fleets specifically to blow them to pieces for some loot and salvage, or for specialized scavenger fleets that have the necessary know-how, equipment, cargo space, and crew capacity to do it more quickly and efficiently.
but for military fleets that are sent out with a specific, potentially time-sensitive mission or goal, or for trade convoys that rely on short-lived business opportunities to make a good profit, this might just not be worth it.
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Voyager I

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #123 on: January 23, 2017, 10:18:28 PM »

I don't want to shoehorn marines into this just because they used to be involved. There's no mechanical reason for this that I can see, and there are likely future things where they'll fit in much more naturally.

This style of thinking is why I and the rest of the Something Awful crew love you as a developer, just to say.  So many games get cluttered up with inane mechanics that don't add anything but more buttons to click and numbers to track because more = better and of course a game in Genre X needs to include Y!  It's truly refreshing to have a dev that can not only tell himself No, but is even willing to do the needful and cull mechanics that aren't pulling their weight anymore no matter how long they've been around (RIP and good riddance, ballistic weapon ammunition).
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Johnny Cocas

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #124 on: January 24, 2017, 02:55:47 AM »

I don't want to shoehorn marines into this just because they used to be involved. There's no mechanical reason for this that I can see, and there are likely future things where they'll fit in much more naturally.

*cough* planet invasions *cough* "Starship Troopers" *cough*

Sorry this winter is really messing my throat ;)
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jamplier

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #125 on: January 24, 2017, 05:04:43 AM »

I'm not sure I've read about it anywhere, so how does this "industry" playstyle compare to the "tech-combat" playstyle from a financial standpoint? From what I understand, industry basically means you'll be burning through ships and replacing them with whatever you can salvage after successful battles, having a "safety-in-numbers" approach to combat, as opposed to the "few-but-strong-ships" playstyle we are all used to right now.

Is the cost of repairing burner ships/replacing crew losses offset by the industry skill set/other changes? The idea of having a fleet of disposable ships which you can "burn through" sounds really appealing to me, but I must confess, I really can't see myself choosing this style of play if it means less $$$ thanks to really expensive fleet maintenance.

Also, choosing industry from the really early game (1 to 3 ships) sounds like it might make an already difficult start even worse. I'm not sure if it actually does, but I think this is worth keeping in mind going forward through development.

<3 u Alex  :-*
« Last Edit: January 24, 2017, 05:11:58 AM by jamplier »
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nomadic_leader

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #126 on: January 24, 2017, 05:26:28 AM »

I think military fleets would at least try to salvage their own ships.
even if it means taking a bunch of mothballed or only barely combat ready ships with them, being either dead weight or consuming a large junk of their available supplies and crew for little immediate benefit, and still requiring expensive repairs at the nearest station just to get them back up to average performance -- and all of this without specialized industrial personal and equipment?

Yes, in real life militaries and navies were/are extraordinarily likely to scuttle their own ships and materiel. If they are obviously outgunned, they'll just destroy the stuff and run off before the fight even starts. This happened in the American wars against the British a lot, for example.

When facing a superior enemy:
      If you don't scuttle:
            You fight
            Lose a lot of men
            Do minimal damage to the enemy.
            The enemy gets your stuff to use against you later
      If you do scuttle:
            You might escape
            The enemy doesn't get any of your stuff

It's a little different in space where there's nowhere to escape to, but there's still many good reasons for their to be space debris all over, even if most of it isn't that useful or valuable. Military Units are focused on a mission, not recovering or holding on to ships and materiel that will be liabilities to them.

Plus, space madness.
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Megas

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #127 on: January 24, 2017, 06:01:31 AM »

So far, I see Industry as the grind-less tree.  If capturing Hyperion and other stupidly rare ships (via field repairs) is the easiest way to acquire them, the skills that make that possible will probably be highly desirable.
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SafariJohn

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #128 on: January 24, 2017, 07:11:14 AM »

I think military fleets would at least try to salvage their own ships.
even if it means taking a bunch of mothballed or only barely combat ready ships with them, being either dead weight or consuming a large junk of their available supplies and crew for little immediate benefit, and still requiring expensive repairs at the nearest station just to get them back up to average performance -- and all of this without specialized industrial personal and equipment?

Militaries operate on a completely different scale and philosophy than private firms. They would repair disabled ships simply because it is faster than building new ships, costs be damned.

Sure, there are plenty of situations where they wouldn't salvage, but I believe those are exceptions, not the rule.

Yes, in real life militaries and navies were/are extraordinarily likely to scuttle their own ships and materiel. If they are obviously outgunned, they'll just destroy the stuff and run off before the fight even starts.

We were talking about when a military fleet wins a battle and whether they would salvage or not.
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Embolism

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #129 on: January 24, 2017, 07:22:42 AM »

I think a military fleet will probably scuttle all derelicts after a victory to stop them falling into enemy hands, unless there's a base nearby they can notify to send out a salvage fleet.

Actually that might be a nice idea: while pirates and mercenaries might stay behind to salvage after a victory, organised militaries would send out salvage fleets instead; or scuttle everything if they're too far away.

After all military fleets often have tight constraints on when and where they need to be somewhere, they can't be spending days sifting through wreckage.
« Last Edit: January 24, 2017, 07:38:43 AM by Embolism »
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Voyager I

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #130 on: January 24, 2017, 09:06:32 AM »

Keep in mind that Starsector takes place after an apocalyptic event that destroyed or disabled much of the infrastructure in an unfinished colony effort that hadn't even reached basic self-sufficiency yet.  The organized military forces might be above fielding D ships and pirate refits, but I doubt they're in a position to leave good salvage on the table.
« Last Edit: January 24, 2017, 09:08:25 AM by Voyager I »
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Alex

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #131 on: January 24, 2017, 11:05:16 AM »

@ Psiyon:
[overlay rendering stuff]
Derp somehow missed that.
Alex: Solid reasons, that stuff definitely takes a lot of tweaking to get right. Didn't know how performance intensive it was, though--that's a pretty good reason to not do it.

:) (And now, of course, I'm thinking about ways to do it in a different way, specifically suited for (D) hulls. Sigh.)


the strangely low PPT and disproportionally high credit cost (for those rare times someone might actually buy one) also seem quite out of place to me, although i doubt either of them is gonna make a real difference in whether it's worth using a few salvaged ones as industry player.

Reduced the credit cost a bit, another good point. The PPT is part of its rustbucket "charm", though.

sidenote: i kinda stopped responding to all your individual responses to my points when i don't really have anything more to add than "thanks!" or "okay, fair enough", but i really appreciate you taking the time. :]

Fair enough, I tend to do that too :)


Spoiler
I really love this, it makes good sense and solves issues we've been having for a long time.

But i'm still unconvinced about the ship recovery itself. Using dmods is great, and there's something to be said between disabling/destroying/nuking even the dead hulk to maanage a percentage chance, but it'd like to be more play there, with the world map as well.

What would be nice would be some risk/reward to it all. I assume as is we have a chance to recover on each and all of the enemy ships, if they don't make it, you can't pick it for salvaging. I'd consider the ability to salvage any enemy or friendly, ship. Nuked hull gets something low like 5%. Destroyed say 15%. Disabled 30%, modifiable with skills, and functioning on a 'band' for dmods. Either way, have each 'roll' consume crew/supplies scaling up per class. On a first-roll-success, you pay out the crew/supplies, then roll for the dmod. Say on the above 30%, rolling just under 60 gets you a dmod, rolling up from 60 gets you the ship in good condition (well, 'good', you still need to repair it to full from nothing).

Failing the initial recover roll, you lose the supplies/crew, the price increases for the new roll, and the ship gets a dmod (cap it out at all of them :P). Call it a failure to salvage. You can eventually, with enough supplies/crew get the ship you want, even if it'll require huge tuneups in station to get it to pristine condition. Either way, this puts forward a very straight path to getting the ship you want, if at a cost of time, dedicated procedure and huge cost. (The repair at a station should be per d-mod though in this case, and using LIFO methodology, not just a flat sum)

The mention of the world map, as to not abuse the ability to scavange all the ships, would be that for each ship you stay 'still' and do salvage ops for a period of time. Ideally per ship, in the order that you want them salvaged, cancellable permanently at any time, and with no repairs getting done to any of your existing fleet of ships during it.

You can salvage an entire enemy fleet, but the question remains if you can afford to sit still, not repairing any of your ships, and wasting supply/day upkeeping them, while you dilly-dally salvaging, after paying out your nose in crew/supply for them. I can imagine it'd make for some fun times 'waiting' for a ship to salvage while an enemy fleet homes in on you, then full burning away at the last moment. Or not, and get stuck in a battle you really didn't want to have at that moment.
[close]

Hmm. I guess the question to ask first is, "what are we trying to achieve with these mechanics"? I find it's useful to put that upfront so that the ideas can be considered in light of what they're trying to achieve.

Just looking at this as-is, it seems pretty complicated, potentially aggravating for the player (constant delays while you're standing still waiting through another delay), and in danger of undermining the "get lots of rustbuckets" playstyle by making it more expensive by putting more cost upfront. Finally, adding a lot of detail to invididual ship recovery feels like the wrong way to go here - this is potentially something you want to do a lot, and the decisions are "ok, which ships do I want to grab here"? Putting sub-decisions in for each ship you want to grab belabors that process and makes the cost harder to estimate; in my mind ideally it'd be something quick and clear.



This style of thinking is why I and the rest of the Something Awful crew love you as a developer, just to say.  So many games get cluttered up with inane mechanics that don't add anything but more buttons to click and numbers to track because more = better and of course a game in Genre X needs to include Y!  It's truly refreshing to have a dev that can not only tell himself No, but is even willing to do the needful and cull mechanics that aren't pulling their weight anymore no matter how long they've been around (RIP and good riddance, ballistic weapon ammunition).

I feel like it's definitely an area I can improve in, but thank you :)

(On a related note: thank you to everone that's made a positive comment that I haven't responded to! When there's a lot of posts, I tend to focus on answering questions, but I really appreciate all the positive comments.)


I'm not sure I've read about it anywhere, so how does this "industry" playstyle compare to the "tech-combat" playstyle from a financial standpoint? From what I understand, industry basically means you'll be burning through ships and replacing them with whatever you can salvage after successful battles, having a "safety-in-numbers" approach to combat, as opposed to the "few-but-strong-ships" playstyle we are all used to right now.

Is the cost of repairing burner ships/replacing crew losses offset by the industry skill set/other changes? The idea of having a fleet of disposable ships which you can "burn through" sounds really appealing to me, but I must confess, I really can't see myself choosing this style of play if it means less $$$ thanks to really expensive fleet maintenance.

Also, choosing industry from the really early game (1 to 3 ships) sounds like it might make an already difficult start even worse. I'm not sure if it actually does, but I think this is worth keeping in mind going forward through development.

All good questions. Ship recovery should be considerably cheaper than buying new hulls, even accounting for d-mods. Assuming the numbers make that work, there's still more expenses, but hopefully that's covered by 1) having the Salvage skill in the same aptitude and 2) being able to take on riskier fights more casually.

But, yeah, really need more playtesting here.
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Thaago

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #132 on: January 24, 2017, 12:16:38 PM »

Exciting!

Regarding the cost of the industry playstyle, it seems that a lot of that is going to revolve around the cost of supplies. Vanilla SS has done a good job at having that be a reasonable number, but I know that a lot of the mods struggle with imbalancing the economy and having supplies suddenly be hundreds of credits (and not always in a reproducible way when it comes to the procedurally generated stuff).

Any thoughts on having supplies have a more regulated price than other commodities? Some hidden damping factors that drive them back towards a value that balances the industry playstyle?
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Wyvern

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #133 on: January 24, 2017, 12:55:04 PM »

A minor suggestion: add a chance for (D) hull mods on ships that turn up in the black market - and perhaps a slight increase to the number and variety of available hulls.  Finding, for example, a pristine XIV-Variant Dominator on the black market is (and should be!) a very rare occurrence.  Finding one that's been pounded to scrap and patched together often enough, and it makes more sense for some Hegemony logistics officer to be able to write it off as scrap (in exchange for a hefty finder's fee, of course...)
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Wyvern is 100% correct about the math.

Morrokain

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Re: Ship Recovery
« Reply #134 on: January 24, 2017, 01:05:11 PM »

I get what you're saying here, yeah. The reason it works the way it does is the breakup chance for hulls is partially set for "feel" reasons rather than purely mechanical ones. So, for example, lighter and flimsier hulls break into pieces more often.

Nice! I appreciate you taking that direction with the break-apart mechanic. Is overkill a factor there as well? For instance, will smaller ships (destroyers and such) unlucky enough to eat a Cyclone salvo rightly get evaporated? >:D

Regarding the cost of the industry playstyle, it seems that a lot of that is going to revolve around the cost of supplies. Vanilla SS has done a good job at having that be a reasonable number, but I know that a lot of the mods struggle with imbalancing the economy and having supplies suddenly be hundreds of credits (and not always in a reproducible way when it comes to the procedurally generated stuff).

Any thoughts on having supplies have a more regulated price than other commodities? Some hidden damping factors that drive them back towards a value that balances the industry playstyle?

Yes! +1 I've been meaning to suggest something like this as well. Its too important of a resource in the campaign and probably has been for a while, industy or no industry.

(Edit) I should probably be a little more specific here. :) What I mean is that even in Vanilla, sometimes I will get overconfident and take a bounty mission to another part of the sector. Even if I have prepared with a stockpile of additional supplies, if the destination, or even just a stop on the way (to browse new markets), has low stability markets everywhere and I take a couple fights or god forbid have to emergency burn my whole fleet, it adds up really quickly that I am forced to exodus because I am essentially bleeding credits with every CR drop... which is everything I do haha. In the meantime I am not making any money in these excursions, just gathering info at a ludicrous price.

Oh how I hate you, Sindrian Diktat. How I hate you.
« Last Edit: January 24, 2017, 01:16:54 PM by Morrokain »
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