I must be doing something wrong,
Hey, thanks for playing my mod. I'm happy to help explain what happened. I hope you'll feel less frustrated--and more excited! First, Realistic Combat totally converts combat: read the Field Manual to understand what's changed and what it means.
because all this mod has done to my game is make all weapons except missiles utterly worthless
Missiles in Realistic Combat are fast and maneuverable, but point defense can stop them.
and combat impossible to win.
With the right knowledge, you can win in Realistic Combat.
Probably related to all the other mods I'm running
I can't guarantee Realistic Combat's balance with all other mods, but I'm working on it.
but smaller ships just stay out of range and this mod makes it impossible to fire at them because of the way it reduces weapon range relative to target maneuverability. So I just get chipped away to death and there's nothing I can do about it.
Just as intended, those small ships are too maneuverable for your weapons to hit at range. Bring strikecraft or small ships of your own to chase them down.
Beam weapons don't work against them either, because as far as I can tell they don't do any damage to shields, armor, or hull at all.
With beam weapons, you need to get close enough for the beam to be focused enough to pierce the surface armor of the target.
In the rare instance where I fight a ship where I can get in range, nearly every weapon I've equipped fails to actually destroy the ship I'm shooting at.
To destroy a ship, you need either a lot of small weapons fire to, per the Realistic Combat damage model, destroy all non-essential compartments beneath the surface armor, or a few huge hits penetrating the citadel.
I'll completely destroy all the armor on the side of the ship facing me and should be hitting hull or ship interior and...nothing happens. The target ship's hull stops deteriorating at a certain point and no matter how much I hit the ship, no new damage is done.
Just as intended, armor never ablates in Realistic Combat but instead remains a barrier that fire either penetrates or does not, and the armor cell diagram represents non-essential compartments for the player to destroy.
None of this makes any sense at all.
Hope it makes sense now. Here for any further questions you might have.
I don't have issues quite that extreme, but it still seems to me that ballistic weapons are rather weak against targets with lots of armor, and beam weapons, while strong against shields, are very weak against hull. A tachyon lance does less than 100 in damage.
As intended, thick armor deflects low damage fire entirely. Use higher damage weapons. Use beam weapons to deal damage over time.
Is it possible to add a toggle to allow armor to be stripped away?
You can re-enable the vanilla damage model by setting "replaceDamageModel" to
false in
Toggles.json.
Yeah, for fact-finding purposes, I created a new game, used console commands to give myself a Paragon and four Tachyon Lances. Loaded up one of those crappy pirate freight combat conversion ships, and was barely doing anything to it despite being in range and hitting with all four lances.
This mod makes no sense to me at all.
Beam weapons can penetrate only surface armor and are for damage over time against enemy non-essential compartments and exposed systems.
