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Author Topic: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses  (Read 60736 times)

errorgance

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #75 on: August 20, 2018, 04:23:13 AM »

Shrugger, it’s not magical hyperspace fuel, it’s antimatter, which you use to travel through a magical place  ;D

And now that I think of it that way, Antimatter make a lot more sense for weapons, especially if you call it “antimatter bombardment” ;)

Second thought on using fuel for bombs, if you can make an antimatter bomb out of fuel, why not something else, like mines? it’d bring more continuity for fuel use as weapon since a singular use is an oddity, while two uses is the start of a pattern.

Besides, aren’t minefields are already planned?
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Chaos Blade

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #76 on: August 20, 2018, 08:54:41 AM »


I actually like the bombardment limitation and costs. even the fuel, it can be made make sense, you are going to be firing weapons in "orbital bombardment mode" say an overpowered mode for energy weapons and sligs or using specialist weapons that might be energy hogs, while performing movements either to avoid ground guns/disrupt them or to move in and go "point blank" in low orbit or even skimming the upper atmo (or both)

In-fiction, the way I see it is pretty much jury-rigged fuel cells being dropped from orbit, whether for a high-orbit dispersal or for a concentrated high-damage strike.

This is... not super important, right, but the important point is that it completelty decouples it from military ships. Otherwise, it's tempting to start, say, calculating bombardment strengths of various ships and so on, and it just ends up being a lot of stats and number crunching without a particular benefit.


Not sure if this one flies wth me, Military ships should be better at bombardment, or there should be at least some ortillery capable weapons that should, at the very least, help with raids. But the Jury rig part is the one that I dislike. if it is a jury-rig, there should be better ways of doing it. Hell, there are transuranics in game so, why not just build some fision-fusion* devices and call it a day? specially if the targets are in planets with atmo?, or grab a few hulks from the last battle and send them down the planet.

So, I am not sure if I understand what is the pro of completely uncoupling bombardment from ships. I can see a few pirates making Jury-rig devices and droping off an airlock, but a ship with bombardment tubes and proper ordnance should be able to do things better (admittedly, both things should be things held zealously by factions, and would need acquiring them though difficult ops and missions for the player) or how the jury rigged method could serve for other than terror strikes or saturation attacks

*which from what I understand is the best way of getting the most bag for your buck if you want to erase a few places in a planet

Mayhaps the saturation bombardment cost should be lower (fuel wise) but much, much higher in reputation (I mean, it is a crime against humanity and outside a very, very narrow set of circumstances, should make you an instant pariah).

It's already got higher reputation penalties, yeah. I'm not sure there's really any reason for lowering the fuel cost.
[/quote]

Yeah, the fuel cost, if we go by the jury rig justification makes sense, but the way I saw it a limited bombardment needs some degree of finesse, so it is actually a skill if you want to hit something in particular as opposed to carped bomb the place, thus I felt that it having a higher material cost made sense, but this was me interpreting the fuel cost was based off maneuvers or some bombardment mode to weapons.
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Shrugger

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #77 on: August 20, 2018, 09:45:52 AM »

Re: Military ships should be good at planetary bombardment.

I don't think so. Weapons designed for use against spaceships in a near-perfect vacuum differ greatly from orbit-tosurface weapons used against industrial zones or even population centers situated on planets with an atmosphere. It makes no sense for anti-ship ships to reduce their combat efficiency by bringing extra weapons that are useful only in special situations they'll hardly ever be in, as opposed to just keeping a few specialized planetary bombardment tools stored in a shed somewhere, to break out when needed.

Whether those tools are special weapons, hullmods or entirely specialized ships doesn't really matter; the main point is that you wouldn't outfit every military ship with them regardless of its intended role.
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Trylobot

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #78 on: August 20, 2018, 10:42:20 AM »

Mmmm, planetary raids. 0.9 is gonna be great.
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Deshara

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #79 on: August 20, 2018, 11:12:13 AM »

fuel makes sense, one would assume planetary defenses would be the kind of stuff you do NOT want to get hit with. Screening fire makes it unsafe to go down to X altitude, but e-burns that expend fuel would artificially lower the safe altitude. terrestrial defense's fire control would paint a target, figure out its maximum vectors, fire salvos at the maximum intercept points of those vectors and then fill in the blanks. The higher up a ship is, or the more maneuverable it is, the wider the space between its maximum vectors and the more blank space between there is for the guns to fill in, so if a planet's defenses are big, you gotta put more into your engines to artificially lower the kill zone until you're able to get to the prime point to de-orbit ordinance without getting your she'll shucked.

Also, I'm glad Alex is finally introducing these mechanics bc they're super important to the plot of a post-contemporary pike-and-shot minus-the-shot game that I've been making and basing on the de-civilizing of Maxios as an excuse not to just have a dude with an AK kill your whole army and not to contrive a reason why
(don't worry Alex I never publish, everything I make gets to live in my recycling bin lol)
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Alex

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #80 on: August 20, 2018, 11:36:56 AM »

Overall, looks great!

Thank you!

1.  Not sure about the cooldown as opposed to having to sit there waiting for the Raid to finish.  One of the nail-biters in Mount and Blade was finishing a raid before a Lord showed up.  So... IDK, maybe do a bit of dice-rolling and <if enemy fleet or station is near enough> allow it to engage during the Raid, so that there's some risk to doing a stealth-raid with nothing but a Prometheus and a few Valkyries?

The M&B part was tense, yeah. It still feels like just another way of adding RNG to the process, though. And nearby fleets will already prevent a raid, so that part is already there, just front-loaded and not random.

2.  So... right now, we can Decivilize everything, then plant colonies?  Hmm.  Why not just throw in a simplistic invasion feature where you need a pretty overwhelming number of Marines, for now?

I'd just as soon not add in a placeholder I'll need to replace for this. Devicilizing to recolonize doesn't seem very appealing anyway since the main attraction of most established colonies is their population level, which would go away.

3.  One mini-game option that sounds distinctly Fun, at least to me, is to have Raids take place as a battle, with the Planetary Defenses as actual objects covering the targets, the Marines advancing slowly and the player fleet having to run interference. 

Hah, no :) A more detailed response earlier in the thread; basically it's just insanity in terms of time and effort and not desirable anyway.

The mechanics, as proposed, basically mean players will stack Marines and Fuel in giant piles somewhere until it's time to go on the offensive, and then deploy their giant resource pools through clicking on a UI, hitting planet after planet of the Faction they want to decimate; this sounds pretty anticlimactic. 

Fighting the faction's fleets and stations - which you'd have to do to achieve this - is the interesting part. So, yeah, stripped of the context that gives the mechanic meaning, it's not very ... meaningful. Like, half the point of its existence is to give you reasons to fight or otherwise overcome the defenses!


4.  Obviously, some Factions should be happy you've Raided their enemies.  Shouldn't there be some upside diplomatically?  I can see that nobody would be particularly thrilled with you if you decimate populations, but if you've crippled their economies or defenses with targeted strikes, some parties will be cheering you on.  For example, the Pirates might appreciate it if you bomb Planetary Defenses and make the planet easier to Raid in the future.

Hmm. Probably not, since fleet-to-fleet combat doesn't, either. And it just gets messy, difficult to convey ahead of time, and so on - imagine fighting a patrol or doing a raid and then that changing reputation with 5+ factions, some good, some bad. And that's before mods are involved.


5.  Does this mean Pirate Raids can now be expected to be loot-pinatas of Fuel?

Bombarding is not generally cost-efficient. That said, raiders do tend to have some more tankers along, due to the nature of their job, but that's not tied to these mechanics.


6.  I think there might be a fleet role for not just the combat side of raiding, but the pick-up-stuff part.  Maybe that's a role for the Venture or Hound?

Interesting, hmm. Yeah, "increased value of raided stuff" could be a niche.


7.  How about raiding for people?  Pirates surely buy slaves; your colonies could use experts (and slaves, if you're evil); this seems like a neo-cyberpunkish thing to include.

No.

8.  How about assassinating the Governor or other important leaders?

Hmm - might work better as one-off missions or some such, but it's an interesting idea!

9.  Shouldn't some Factions offer Missions where the Mission is, "go Raid X for us"?

10.  Shouldn't being a notorious Raider without a major Faction to back you up get some really huge fleets chasing you down?  I mean, this is the sort of thing that you'd think would put a huge Bounty on your head.

11.  Speaking of which... can't players start accruing a Bounty for their various deeds (i.e., killing pretty much anybody, even Pirates)?  Wouldn't that be cool, if it eventually got large enough that huge fleets came after the player, or they had to pay off the Factions they annoyed so much? 

Well, all of this is potential content that could be added in at some point, but it doesn't seem particularly tied to this set of features.

(I will add that there's now potential for a limited form of #11 happening in some specific circumstances - but I've already said too much :-X)




this seems really.. simple?

Thank you! I know you didn't mean that as a positive, but that was rather the point of the design, so I'll take it :)

To elaborate a bit, I think you get more depth when you have multiple simple mechanics interacting with each other, than you do with specific mechanics having more individual complexity.

For example:
3. enemy capable of sortieing fleets to stop you (risk) station defenses get a shot at you / the ordnance (fair is fair)

This sounds like you're suggesting fleet and station interactions that are specific to raiding and built into the raiding mechanic directly.

On the other hand, we've got these mechanics that are not tied to raiding directly:

-> Stations in orbit
-> Colonies spawning patrol fleets
-> Nearby stations and/or fleets have to be defeated before taking certain hostile actions

And so the end result is more or less the same - you have to face down some active defenses to be able to raid or bombard - but it's not tied into raiding directly, and so is much more flexible. This both means that they can factor into other mechanics as well, where something raid-specific couldn't, and that it can be affected in other ways that add to the depth of raiding.

For a quick example of that, you could draw off the defending fleets - say, by doing an Active Sensor Burst, and then jumping away to quickly approach the colony from another angle. You couldn't do this sort of thing if the anti-raid fleets were a direct part of a raid mechanic.

So, right - the raid mechanics themselves are simple, but they tie into lots of other campaign mechanics, and the interactions that are added by having them have more depth.


seems like planetary bombardment is something that would be rare and a large operation (both militarily and logistically) making it "click a dialogue option" and then resolved instantaneously just seems really weird. ideally it should be it's own campaign where there are a few steps with plenty of opportunity for the defenders to interfere with your attack (or for you to interfere with theirs)

Well, that's how just about everything in the game works. Stripping a research station for salvage? A few clicks in a dialog. Establishing a colony? Same. And so on. But, as mentioned, the "do the raid" action is really only part of the raid. Preparing for it and overcoming the defenses are where the real meat of it is, gameplay-wise.


1. bigger fleets with heavier guns bombard better (really, any sort of actual heavy bombardment shouldn't even be possible unless you have very heavy weapons or weapons exclusively designed for the task)

Did talk about this earlier; not tying it to a fleet's combat capability has some benefits. Mainly avoiding adding otherwise-useless one-off stats for how good a combat ship is at it, or deriving that stat from something. And it'd have to cost a resource - probably fuel - anyway - so it just seems extremely unnecessary. I think the in-fiction justification for it is solid, too, though of course you're welcome to disagree :)


Posted my thoughts in the suggestion area, spoilers, it’s not too far off from what the others suggested, with just a bit more to it, It’s like you said though, in the current game it’d be mostly adding nuance and alternatives, so I agree with you that other features are of higher priority, (just what exactly would you rather work on next?  ;D)

I do hope you find time to implement something like this in the future though, I think this could be one of those features that doesn’t so much as add to the game, as multiply everything else.

Thank you, I'll check it out when I have a chance!


Second thought on using fuel for bombs, if you can make an antimatter bomb out of fuel, why not something else, like mines? it’d bring more continuity for fuel use as weapon since a singular use is an oddity, while two uses is the start of a pattern.

Besides, aren’t minefields are already planned?

Minefields are in 0.9a, yeah, as part of the layered defenses of a star fortress. Mechanically, it wouldn't make much sense to tie them to fuel, since they're not something directly tied to player decisions and the logistics of managing a station are fairly abstracted behind an upkeep cost anyway.



Not sure if this one flies wth me, Military ships should be better at bombardment, or there should be at least some ortillery capable weapons that should, at the very least, help with raids. But the Jury rig part is the one that I dislike. if it is a jury-rig, there should be better ways of doing it. Hell, there are transuranics in game so, why not just build some fision-fusion* devices and call it a day? specially if the targets are in planets with atmo?, or grab a few hulks from the last battle and send them down the planet.

So, I am not sure if I understand what is the pro of completely uncoupling bombardment from ships. I can see a few pirates making Jury-rig devices and droping off an airlock, but a ship with bombardment tubes and proper ordnance should be able to do things better (admittedly, both things should be things held zealously by factions, and would need acquiring them though difficult ops and missions for the player) or how the jury rigged method could serve for other than terror strikes or saturation attacks

The benefit of uncoupling military capacity from bombardments is this:
Quote
... Otherwise, it's tempting to start, say, calculating bombardment strengths of various ships and so on, and it just ends up being a lot of stats and number crunching without a particular benefit.

As soon as that concept exists, you've got to measure it somehow. Say a cruiser is capable of ... 3 points of bombardment. Or something. But what if it has no weapons mounted? What if half its weapons are mounted? What if it's a carrier? What if it's civilian? Say we get past all that and figure out the bombardment capability of a fleet. What does it actually mean? It probably shouldn't influence the effect of a bombardment, because 1) you could just repeat it and 2) bombardments are pretty binary anyway, in terms of their effect.

So it would probably have to influence the cost, or it might mean that a certain amount of capability is *required* to be able to bombard at all, in the presence of a certain level of defenses. In either case, this bombardment capability would have to be scaled to and compared against the ground defenses of a planet.

And after we work all of that out, we still have a new stat for the player to worry about, and probably one that needs to be displayed on the ship tooltip, and the total in the fleet UI somewhere. Both of these places are prime UI real estate and *certainly* don't need more cluttering up, especially for something that's not super common.

"Bombardment just requires a resource" is a way to sidestep all that. You still need a combat fleet to overcome the fleets and orbital defenses, and the cost is still influenced by the ground defenses. So it's functionally about the same, and it avoids all these complications.


*which from what I understand is the best way of getting the most bag for your buck if you want to erase a few places in a planet

Well, if we've got anti-matter as a power source, it's going to be a lot more bang for buck in terms of converting mass to energy than fission or fusion. But this is straying too much into "realism argument" territory, which I'd say needs a mountain of salt when applied to a game with basically battleship guns mounted on spaceships.

Yeah, the fuel cost, if we go by the jury rig justification makes sense, but the way I saw it a limited bombardment needs some degree of finesse, so it is actually a skill if you want to hit something in particular as opposed to carped bomb the place, thus I felt that it having a higher material cost made sense, but this was me interpreting the fuel cost was based off maneuvers or some bombardment mode to weapons.

Yep, gotcha.


Mmmm, planetary raids. 0.9 is gonna be great.

:D


fuel makes sense, one would assume planetary defenses would be the kind of stuff you do NOT want to get hit with.

Yep! In theory, undefended colonies on no-atmosphere planets probably could get bombarded by ships directly, but yeah, I'd imagine ground batteries can easily outmatch any ship-borne weapons or defenses just due to not being so space-constrained.
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Deshara

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #81 on: August 20, 2018, 11:57:17 AM »

also, since we're decoupling fleet strength from bombardment, it'd make sense to use fuel bc the only way for a civilian kite to bombard would be to drop antimatter out its cargo bay lol which would be shockingly effective IRL

tell ya what tho: I wouldn't wanna be the guy operating THAT forklift
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Chaos Blade

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #82 on: August 20, 2018, 12:18:32 PM »

Not sure if this one flies wth me, Military ships should be better at bombardment, or there should be at least some ortillery capable weapons that should, at the very least, help with raids. But the Jury rig part is the one that I dislike. if it is a jury-rig, there should be better ways of doing it. Hell, there are transuranics in game so, why not just build some fision-fusion* devices and call it a day? specially if the targets are in planets with atmo?, or grab a few hulks from the last battle and send them down the planet.

So, I am not sure if I understand what is the pro of completely uncoupling bombardment from ships. I can see a few pirates making Jury-rig devices and droping off an airlock, but a ship with bombardment tubes and proper ordnance should be able to do things better (admittedly, both things should be things held zealously by factions, and would need acquiring them though difficult ops and missions for the player) or how the jury rigged method could serve for other than terror strikes or saturation attacks

The benefit of uncoupling military capacity from bombardments is this:
Quote
... Otherwise, it's tempting to start, say, calculating bombardment strengths of various ships and so on, and it just ends up being a lot of stats and number crunching without a particular benefit.

As soon as that concept exists, you've got to measure it somehow. Say a cruiser is capable of ... 3 points of bombardment. Or something. But what if it has no weapons mounted? What if half its weapons are mounted? What if it's a carrier? What if it's civilian? Say we get past all that and figure out the bombardment capability of a fleet. What does it actually mean? It probably shouldn't influence the effect of a bombardment, because 1) you could just repeat it and 2) bombardments are pretty binary anyway, in terms of their effect.

So it would probably have to influence the cost, or it might mean that a certain amount of capability is *required* to be able to bombard at all, in the presence of a certain level of defenses. In either case, this bombardment capability would have to be scaled to and compared against the ground defenses of a planet.

And after we work all of that out, we still have a new stat for the player to worry about, and probably one that needs to be displayed on the ship tooltip, and the total in the fleet UI somewhere. Both of these places are prime UI real estate and *certainly* don't need more cluttering up, especially for something that's not super common.

"Bombardment just requires a resource" is a way to sidestep all that. You still need a combat fleet to overcome the fleets and orbital defenses, and the cost is still influenced by the ground defenses. So it's functionally about the same, and it avoids all these complications.

I understand now, yeah, that would be a distraction the players won't need, specially with something that is meant to be relatively rare. I still feel a bit meh about the jury rig nature, perhaps having a hullmod called launch tubes that might reduce the costs (or make the targeted bombardment more precise?) 
Don't want to sound obsessive about the topic, but it sorta feels a bit off if it is only a resource.

Suppose a player has a very Pyrrhic victory against a planet, he has three frigates left and a lot of ships, friend or foe, turned to slag in upper orbit. upset at the loss, the player decides to bombard the world to slag, with a force of three frigates.

and compare it to another player bombing that same planet with a full intact fleet.

I mean, with the circumstances being different the end results should be different, not that I'd be able to say how, but that is my take on it.

It is not something super important, but it is the sorta thing that might help with immersion.

*which from what I understand is the best way of getting the most bag for your buck if you want to erase a few places in a planet

Well, if we've got anti-matter as a power source, it's going to be a lot more bang for buck in terms of converting mass to energy than fission or fusion. But this is straying too much into "realism argument" territory, which I'd say needs a mountain of salt when applied to a game with basically battleship guns mounted on spaceships.

Well, from what I've read it is not quite like that due to the nature of matter-antimatter annihilation, but that is irl physics aad, yeah, this heads into "Realism Arguments" so I'll be happy to drop this


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Alex

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #83 on: August 20, 2018, 02:04:23 PM »

I understand now, yeah, that would be a distraction the players won't need, specially with something that is meant to be relatively rare. I still feel a bit meh about the jury rig nature, perhaps having a hullmod called launch tubes that might reduce the costs (or make the targeted bombardment more precise?) 
Don't want to sound obsessive about the topic, but it sorta feels a bit off if it is only a resource.

Suppose a player has a very Pyrrhic victory against a planet, he has three frigates left and a lot of ships, friend or foe, turned to slag in upper orbit. upset at the loss, the player decides to bombard the world to slag, with a force of three frigates.

and compare it to another player bombing that same planet with a full intact fleet.

I mean, with the circumstances being different the end results should be different, not that I'd be able to say how, but that is my take on it.

It is not something super important, but it is the sorta thing that might help with immersion.

I hear what you're saying - I guess it depends on how you see the operation, really. In my mind, it's - as I think I may have said - an industrial task. So if anything, it'd be limited by not having enough crew to carry it out properly, say.

But I think either that, or some sort of warship-based limitation - it might make sense, right - but as soon as there's *any* material benefit from having more warships (or crew), it's back to having that be a stat that needs tracking and displaying and so on, since you know players would want to take advantage of it.

Well, from what I've read it is not quite like that due to the nature of matter-antimatter annihilation ...

Oh, interesting! I'd assummed it was near-enough to 100% conversion, but looking into it, it appears that's not the case. Huh, good to know.
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Keth Sparks

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #84 on: August 20, 2018, 03:42:51 PM »

Hi, I am new (to the forum, not the game) so I apologize if these suggestions seem naive.

I would argue that adding more depth to raids is a good idea for those looking to play as "Space Vikings" using their colonies as mother ports for launching raids. To that end, I would suggest that raids could be made to be simple for the common player (e.g. just raid based on the already presented statistics) and be allowed to become more complex for players that take new raid related skills. Perhaps ones that allow for more choices that present different cost-benefit scenarios.

Working off of that concept you could also rename "Heavy armaments" to "Combat equipment" and make it a useful resource required for raids (and to a much greater extent invasion later on) much as heavy equipment is required for salvaging. This is me assuming that these are not just bigger squad level guns but also various pieces of ordinance, armored vehicles, transports, etc. and being lumped together much in the way that Hearts of Iron lumps together infantry equipment.

Another thing I might change about raids is requiring hangers be present in the fleet in order to perform them and perhaps even involving strike craft in said raids (unless it happens to be that they are incapable of in atmo flight which would make some sense). This would largely prevent small fleet with one or two frigates (as a previous user mentioned) left over from the preceding space battle to assault the planet effectively. Alternatively, you could just require a specific hull mod (perhaps added to the Valkyrie?) such as landing craft or somesuch which would further limit you. Of course, this would also necessitate a smaller lighter transport ship to allow for the "Space Viking" archetype.

Finally on a side note: I feel sort of uneasy about fuel being the only resource used in bombardment but as they aren't meant to be a common option I'm content to let it be. That said I would say there is room to make the distinction between using fuel as a weapon (which feels like it would be largely haphazard and brutal no matter how it's done) that cannot be targeted and just causes random damage to the planet and using a more specialized bombardment resource (Heavy ordinance or orbital bombs or something) allowing for more targeted options such as picking specific planetary targets to destroy. This would be a resource that the player could produce, buy, steal, and sell and one that requires a specific Domain era tech present on a planet to make (one that could be stolen via raids perhaps?) This would be something I would wait until faction wars are actually a concern for before messing with though.

All said, I have been following this game since there was only one system to play in and fighters were a separate fleet element and I am very pleased with the progress you have made. Keep up the great work!
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Cik

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #85 on: August 20, 2018, 06:26:38 PM »

it's just weird.

one wolf, same bombardment power as several onslaughts

i just don't see it. the system is very, very weird. we assume that fuel is being used to "dodge" surface-to-orbit fire, but how could a single wolf do any damage to anything of significance anyway, and why would a battleship care about that sort of fire when it probably outranges it anyway?

simplicity is a virtue, but not at the cost of any sort of verisimilitude or tactical depth. it feels like bare minimum it should take into account firepower brought to bear and some sort of abstraction of planetary "armoring" (bunkers, redundancies) along with some basic handling of surface-orbit fires. seems weird to have every planet be defended, let alone equally. many of these places could barely be called civilized, and the sector is hardly a fortress. i expect maybe a small handful of planets to have any defenses whatever, and of them who knows how many are in good shape?

it's weird, it has strange consequences for gameplay, and it's not that interesting i guess. personally i'd rather it be put off rather than be given this implementation. we're already getting enough, and it seems like this implementation is hardly consequential anyway (IE, rare for player to do and rarer for NPCs to do against players) why even implement it in this state?

no offense intended, i don't want to criticize the design harshly but it feels like this sort of activity should be a cornerstone of the finished game, not an afterthought resolved in a single buttonpress in dialogue. (though i mean obviously dialogue has to be involved somewhere)
« Last Edit: August 20, 2018, 06:30:19 PM by Cik »
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Deshara

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #86 on: August 20, 2018, 06:52:10 PM »

it's just weird.

one wolf, same bombardment power as several onslaughts

They run on anti-matter fuel. No guns they use are gonna be more powerful than just kicking a pod of fuel out the cargo bay door, so size isn't gonna be a limiting factor.
Also, it takes fuel to dodge incoming fire from the planet. So, a Wolf has vastly less firepower than an onslaught and has to get into firing position to de-orbit ordinance a bunch of times, but, it takes a lot less fuel for the Wolf to get into firing position to shell a facility, whereas the Onslaught takes a lot more fuel to get into position (bc its vastly easier to hit), but doesn't have to get into position more than once. The power-curve ratio is just assumed to be 1:1 here.

OR, to put it another way; what's gonna take more fuel? Holding seven onslaughts in a firing position, using fuel to e-burn out of the way of planetary batteries that can one-shot even an onslaught, while they shell the planet with guns that can destroy buildings but aren't even accurate enough to score precision hits even at close ship-to-ship range, or dive-bombing a single tiny Kite that's impossible to hit from the ground thru the atmo to kick an antimatter pod out of the cargo bay that will wipe out an entire city and the targeted facility within it?
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xenoargh

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #87 on: August 20, 2018, 07:20:30 PM »

I'm in agreement with the, "a Prometheus should not be the ideal cheap bomber" argument.

Overall, I like that the systems that are proposed start to make piracy seem less like suicidal lunacy and that there will be some form of open warfare to consider.  I'm just not sure this is the flavor that will sell it, in terms of bombardment.

So, what'd be a better solution?

Inefficient space weapons whose primary purpose is bombardment of ground targets.  

We already have bombers and bomb racks in the game... in fact, we have three types already built that could have differing effects.  So... why not just calculate the fleet's DPS?  Use bombs at full DPS, everything else is at 1/100th, and voila, we have a number, or at least a starting-place for a sensible system.

Now it'd feel right- you'd need a big bad fleet, but one that has traded some space-fighting power for planetary attack capability, just like you'd need to trade space-fighting power for Marines if raiding.

It'd be really hard (and therefore, interesting) to build a fleet that could both fight a major space engagement and also bombard a major planetary target (and carry the Fuel and Supplies to do it all, too).  This would go a long way towards explaining why the Sector isn't lifeless and make it very difficult to become Space Emperor, without being unfair or involving numbers that aren't apropos.

I get that the final effects of a bombardment are binary; you either bombed the things you wanted to bomb, or not.  And I agree that keeping that side simple is good; this isn't a bombing simulator, after all.  I just think that if the Ultimate Bomber Force is me and 24 Drams... maybe the system needs a re-think and a little nod to Realism here would actually result in more interesting gameplay.
« Last Edit: August 20, 2018, 07:22:36 PM by xenoargh »
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Alex

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #88 on: August 20, 2018, 07:48:37 PM »

Hi, I am new (to the forum, not the game) so I apologize if these suggestions seem naive.

Hi, and welcome to the forum!


I would argue that adding more depth to raids is a good idea for those looking to play as "Space Vikings" using their colonies as mother ports for launching raids. To that end, I would suggest that raids could be made to be simple for the common player (e.g. just raid based on the already presented statistics) and be allowed to become more complex for players that take new raid related skills. Perhaps ones that allow for more choices that present different cost-benefit scenarios.

Working off of that concept you could also rename "Heavy armaments" to "Combat equipment" and make it a useful resource required for raids (and to a much greater extent invasion later on) much as heavy equipment is required for salvaging. This is me assuming that these are not just bigger squad level guns but also various pieces of ordinance, armored vehicles, transports, etc. and being lumped together much in the way that Hearts of Iron lumps together infantry equipment.

Another thing I might change about raids is requiring hangers be present in the fleet in order to perform them and perhaps even involving strike craft in said raids (unless it happens to be that they are incapable of in atmo flight which would make some sense). This would largely prevent small fleet with one or two frigates (as a previous user mentioned) left over from the preceding space battle to assault the planet effectively. Alternatively, you could just require a specific hull mod (perhaps added to the Valkyrie?) such as landing craft or somesuch which would further limit you. Of course, this would also necessitate a smaller lighter transport ship to allow for the "Space Viking" archetype.

So what you're suggesting, more or less, is a couple more ways to boost the raid strength of a fleet. I could definitely see expanding on that, yeah - right now it's limited to 1) a skill and 2) the Valkyrie (and now Colossus Mk.III) hullmod, but being able to specialize further could be good, yeah.

One reason I didn't use Heavy Armaments for this already is that if you run the risk of losing some, then how many you want to us (and risk) should be offered as a choice, and that's... not a great choice, as it would often boil down to doing a math problem with one right answer. Another option is to not have any risk of losing Heavy Armaments - then you could stock them in your fleet, and it'd always be strictly better (or at least not worse) to have more; it could say be capped by the number of marines divided by 10 or something. But not being able to lose Heavy Armaments would probably feel weird. Maybe.

So, not 100% here, but definitely worth thinking through some more, and as far as the general point of having more ways to specialize in this, I think we're on the same page.

Finally on a side note: I feel sort of uneasy about fuel being the only resource used in bombardment but as they aren't meant to be a common option I'm content to let it be. That said I would say there is room to make the distinction between using fuel as a weapon (which feels like it would be largely haphazard and brutal no matter how it's done) that cannot be targeted and just causes random damage to the planet and using a more specialized bombardment resource (Heavy ordinance or orbital bombs or something) allowing for more targeted options such as picking specific planetary targets to destroy. This would be a resource that the player could produce, buy, steal, and sell and one that requires a specific Domain era tech present on a planet to make (one that could be stolen via raids perhaps?) This would be something I would wait until faction wars are actually a concern for before messing with though.

I see what you're saying, but it's a bit of a "realism" argument, so you can really make up just about anything to make it fit. For example, a tactical bombardment might make use of whole fuel cells, for concentrated strikes at specific targets (with a few misses, sure), while a saturation bombardment could have the cells rigged to explode at altitude, scattering antimatter-containing fullerenes over a wide area.

So, ultimately it comes down to gameplay, and I don't think the distinction is worth making.

All said, I have been following this game since there was only one system to play in and fighters were a separate fleet element and I am very pleased with the progress you have made. Keep up the great work!

Thank you :)


it's just weird.

one wolf, same bombardment power as several onslaughts

i just don't see it. the system is very, very weird. we assume that fuel is being used to "dodge" surface-to-orbit fire, but how could a single wolf do any damage to anything of significance anyway, and why would a battleship care about that sort of fire when it probably outranges it anyway?

Hmm, I feel like you're maybe not reading what I'm saying. Bombardment just involves dropping destabilized fuel cells on the targets, and a conveyor belt is a more suited tool for the task than a battleship's armaments.

The "use for maneuvering" point is something someone else brought up; one is free to imagine that as being a contributing factor, but at least in my mind, that's not a required part of the explanation (and, indeed, doesn't consider that fuel is only be used in hyperspace, so it doesn't quite fit too well.)



It'd be really hard (and therefore, interesting) to build a fleet that could both fight a major space engagement and also bombard a major planetary target (and carry the Fuel and Supplies to do it all, too).  This would go a long way towards explaining why the Sector isn't lifeless and make it very difficult to become Space Emperor, without being unfair or involving numbers that aren't apropos.

I suspect the more likely outcome would be making the player carry around some bombs and - after defeating the colony's defenses - having to laboriously slot them into a bunch of ships until whatever required threshold is met. Sure that carries a CR/supplies cost, but it'd be less than the cost of fighting with subpar ships.


We already have bombers and bomb racks in the game... in fact, we have three types already built that could have differing effects.  So... why not just calculate the fleet's DPS?  Use bombs at full DPS, everything else is at 1/100th, and voila, we have a number, or at least a starting-place for a sensible system.

Using weapon dps just strikes me as an extremely troublesome idea. The number generated may as well be random (since it's using combat-balance-driven values), and tying a fleet's in-campaign bombardment effectiveness to a number dependent on combat balance seems less than ideal. Imagine if, say, Piranhas are adjusted by tweaking "standard bomb bay" stats and this leads to a huge, unintented change in bombardment difficulty. That sort of stuff is just not the way to go.

I also completely disagree as far as fuel and tankers and so on - I think it makes damn near *perfect* sense. Heck, pouring fuel on enemies below you is a time-honored tradition since the middle ages, and that didn't require particularly much in the way of soldiery experience, either.
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Histidine

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Re: Raids, Bombardments, and Planetary Defenses
« Reply #89 on: August 20, 2018, 08:05:51 PM »

Meta-comment: IMO we've picked apart the bombardment mechanics enough that at this point it's probably best that we just wait for 0.9 to come out and play it, and decide if it needs changing then.
I am currently persuaded enough to make this prediction: the various things-that-don't-make-sense from edge cases we've described in this thread, won't come up often enough to actually matter.

(c.f. removal of ballistic ammunition: there was a lot of discussion, we tried a substitute mechanic that didn't work out, eventually we just axed it outright and in the end it was never missed)
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