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Mods / Re: [0.95a] TC: Archean Order: Rebalanced Combat/Lore RPG - New REDACTED 8/13/21
« on: September 14, 2021, 04:39:06 AM »@Albreo
Ok gotcha I looked at it more closely and read the key. I will evaluate it over a couple of days.
Overall, thank you very much for doing this! I find it extremely helpful since it categorizes the craft by multiple strengths and weaknesses rather than just giving blanket assertions. For a dev, that is invaluable information.
My initial hot take is comprised of two main counter-points atm:
1) Replacement rate should be taken into consideration or otherwise rolled into the survivability grade and it doesn't seem like it is. (At a first glance.) For instance, the Wasp might be very fragile, but it replaces quickly enough that an F grade is somewhat misleading to its actual impact on replacement rate, if that makes sense. Same thing for E grades for the Spectre, Fang and Imp. In my tests with the Legion, it was actually fairly hard to reduce the replacement rate against Spectres. They could take 80% losses in one pass and be back to full strength in about 10-15 seconds - so not enough time to really reduce the replacement rate much.
2) Some survivability and anti-ship dps grades seem off from my own tests. But, that could be due to differing baseline expectations - which I will address below.
Questions: (Not just for Albreo, these are to determine expectations and context for future tests and will eventually probably result in a poll of some kind.)
- Should bombers be *mostly* successful with their attack runs if interceptors are not there to protect the ship? Or should they be situationally useful but damaging?
- How survivable should the baseline craft be against ship weapons? For instance, if one wing is under destroyer fire, how many seconds should the wing last?
- Should shields be better than armor defensively? Why or why not?
- Should at least a couple of carriers be required in the players fleet - whether to defend with interceptors or strike with bombers/gunships? Why or why not?
- What are the most useful types of craft you have used atm and why? What aspect of their design makes them better to use over other craft?
Hello, I have been thinking about this a lot. I usually just lurk but I love this mod battle system more than the vanilla because I do agree about the importance of fighter wings in space battle. I do mainly agree with the concept of battlestar galactica style of space battle that put an extra emphasis on fighter wings.
To implement that, i have some ideas in my mind, if you don't mind or too hard to implement:
Fighter Archetype role issue:
I think there should be a differentiation between the archetypes of fighter wings. Bomber archetypes, as they going deep into the enemies PD death zone, should be equipped with higher armor/shield, higher hull HP and a good survivability skills such as fortress shield or plasma burn with longer cooldown and short duration (eg: 1 second) but long redeployment time, slow-ish speed and low maneuverability. This make sense as they SHOULD survive the first bombing run but struggle madly to survive after that. For fighter/heavy fighter, they should have decent speed and maneuverability, medium redeployment and *skillfull* ship system that focus more on dealing more damage or spamming flares, going in and out the PD death zone, with narrow angle hardpoint weapon but should be pitifully weak against interceptors. Now how could fighters, with decent armor n hulls be weak against interceptors archetype? By buffing interceptors wing size, speed and maneuverability! Interceptors doesn't have to have good armor or high hull HP, basically paper thin, but they should deal shitton of damage to fighters and fighters should be struggling to destroy interceptors, mainly with their weapon mount type: leaning towards anti-fighters wide angle mount type or even interdictions type. So it will be like this: bomber will be able to weather the PD and interceptors alpha strike, but will be deadbeat if not supported. Fighters will be able to harrass ships even ships with good PD because fighters long range and skill spamming, but fighters will be beaten black and blue by interceptors because interceptors higher maneuverability, speed and wing size.
Carrier archetype issue:
Lore wise, carrier should be support type ship, slow, lower armor and decent hull, focusing on PD defense rather than striking. The problem i think with carrier archetype is the lack of specialized fighter supporting hullmods. Maybe you can implement three types of fighter support hullmods only for carriers, where players can only choose 1:
1. lowering redeployment time for a specific type of wings but twice the extra time for the other type (make sense lore wise as we can use a specific streamlined nanoforge) so each carrier can have 1 specialty wing type
2. extra speed or launch speed for fighters but lowering the flux pool or regeneration rate (make sense lore wise as we can equip the carrier with catapults for the fighters and some of the ship energy should be drained to maintain those)
3. wider deck so bigger wing size but with a penalty in redeployment time and armor (make sense lore wise because we have mass deployment skill in vanilla tbh, lowering armor because some of the ship armor is taken down to support the extra deck)
I hope this can spark an idea for future development, as I really love this mod of yours. Thank you and cheers.