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[MakoMakoMan]

Awesome, can't wait to try it out!

[Liral]

Hotfix 1.14.1 out!  Fixed a shield damage function typo that rendered shields all but invincible.

[cardgame]

This mod sounds absolutely bananas, can't wait to try it out.

I've been reading through the feedback, if PD is still a problem for non-PD targets, perhaps the kinetic damage could all be changed to fragmentation, which should still deal fine with most fighters and missiles?

Edit: also the weapon ranges really should have a lot more consideration, many weapons are nearly obsolete by their now relatively-much-shorter range, like the phase lance and tac laser. At least one weapon did not receive any adjustment at all, the 500 range IR laser mounted on the Gladius fighter.

edit: so this total conversion needs more conversion. but really does a good job at portraying the combat style of, say, The Expanse. Unfortunately, too much is happening at too great of speeds at too great of zoom levels for me to really understand a lot of it. I don't think it's a great fit for how *I* play Starsector.

[MakoMakoMan]

Is there a way to disable the changes to weapon ammo/refire delays? I'm trying to adjust the values but some weapons just become incredibly strong by trying to normalize changes that made other weapons obsolete (why would the heavy autocannon have a refire delay of 8 seconds?)

[Liral]

A roadmap would be nice, yea. There is a list in the front page of possible future features, which is similar at least.

Shields are currently an issue, I agree.
Did some thinking on Shields, and specifically shield armor. Main issues I see are.
A: Shield armor isn't a vanilla stat, so it has to be derived in some way.
B: Kinetic damage is often in rapidfire kinetic weapons, but still intended to fight larger ships. So Damage comparisons probably make the Needler line, and Machine guns ineffective or useless vs shields.

Having it be based on Shield efficiency, flux/maxflux, Ship size (Fighter/Frigate etc) and maybe shield radius might work, and use weapon size more than damage might work.
Log10 of flux capacity, or Armor/ShieldEfficiency might give useful numbers for actual shield armor.

An entirely different shield mechanic, using the whole Deflection shield thing might also be interesting. Based on how well it penetrates, the projectile might be turned aside to an extent, either missing, or at least hitting the armor at an angle, and likely losing some fraction of speed and penetration power in the process.

---
Of course, the first question really needs to be, How do we want shields to behave? What weapons should be effective and what should be ineffective? And given the intention for realism, what mechanics can be used? I do certainly want to see ineffective shots pinging off of the shield as much as armor.

The big thing seems to be that point defense, normally trading range for massive DPS, gain a massive boost in range while retaining their massive DPS.
I would think that they probably should actually lose some amount of that DPS, simply because they have much longer to shoot at missiles. Alternatively, instead of adding a flat range bonus, you could add a percent bonus, or a combination of the two, so that short-range weapons remain rather short range.

Do you want point defense like the Machinegun to deal less damage, ping off of, or otherwise be ineffective vs Frigates? Destroyers? Cruisers? Capital Ships?
Should this be all small weapons, or just PD? Kinetic? I could absolutely see explosive weapons always bursting on the shield for minimal damage, in much the same way Kinetic usually pierces armor for minimal damage.

Many kinetic weapons are very rapidfire for consistant shield damage regardless of dodging or accuracy concerns, because vanilla shields have no armor. If resistance is in any way based on damage, Needlers, sabots, and machineguns will all be hit similarly, which is probably not ideal.

I honestly can't think of an obvious solution here. Not like with adjusting Frag damage.

Thanks for mentioning log₁₀ and the shield efficiency! I did some math and made the shield damage for every projectile, missile, and beam follow the formula: P * log₁₀(P) * f * f / e, where P is the penetration, f is the flux-efficiency of the shield, and e is Euler's constant.

I agree that shield are suffering greatly from the changes, and I have been thinking over it quite some time.

1. I wonder if giving "shield armor" value is gonna help with this problem, for example if larger ships or high tech ships have shield that simply nullifies smaller projectiles while having "partial penetrations" like armor does, then it would be more effective and makes for much more dynamic gameplay where weapon choices are even more interesting. (this doesnt need to be that strong, cruiser shield can make MG fire do partial dmg and capital shield can negate mg fire will be plenty of buff

2. In addition or alternatively, giving "shield piercing" and not additional shield damage to kinetic rounds will also be a solution. In fact, this is similar to some shields depicted in sci-fi works, where a shield is more like a force field, meaning that extremely fast kinetic projectile can get through despite being slowed down (basically kinetic round does a bit of dmg to the shield, and gets through with reduced capability, and therefore can be negated by armor) This also comes with the benefit that AI can use their shield effectively with this change (basically they can just keep shield on against kinetics), as in current version their biggest problem is that they are unable to switch shield on and off effectively according to incoming rounds, currently often catching a huge wave of kinetics and overloading.

In fact, this change would makes kinetic weapons even more interesting, since now Large Kinetic weapons have the ability to directly damage small ships, going right through their shield (though their damage is slow lower), while such large kinetic weapons are no longer useful against capital with shield up as their penetration are drastically reduced by the shield. (they can still penetrate armor effectively against capital ships with shield down) Given how the recent cannon nerf, and the fact that there is no vanilla weapon that can do full damage to capital (1500-2250 armor, this calls for at least 1200 damage kinetics to do full damage), one may even consider raising large kinetic weapon damage, making a situation where large kinetic weapons could potentially fully penetrate capitals when their shield are down, but can only do partial/no penetration when the capitals have shields (with their decreased damage on shield, they will be much less useful in this stage)

3. As for energy and HE projectiles, if we implement the changes of [2], then they could be kept as is, this also comes with the change that now energy projectile is a somewhat weaker but effective shield-breaker. Alternatively, one could also suggest that rather than "type of projectile," we should determine whether a projectile can go through shield by their velocity, therefore giving fast HE and energy projectile potential shield piercing ability. However, I am not sure about how easy this is to implement.

Again, thank you Liral for taking care of the project! Please let me know if you think this is feasible or makes logical sense, I would love to see this mod go further!

The shield changes I have published in the lastest patch make shields 'armored' in that weaker shots hit them for less while stronger shots hit them for more.

My thoughts on the mod: it's an interesting take on Starsector combat and I like playing Rimworld with Combat Extended, so I was looking forward to trying this one. However, it seems that making this more realistic combat work for space battles is more tricky, it's more difficult to handle the inherent dynamic nature of it together with AI being silly. That said, I believe the mod has a lot of promise but it still requires a ton of work to make it worthwhile.

There are also various technical issues pointed out by other people, the one that's pretty much game-breaking to me is the fact that shields seem to be useless now - tested an Apogee vs a Bonnethead in a sim and in a few seconds the former got overloaded by a barrage from some light autocannons - small ballistic weapons vs a good (0.7 flux/dmg) shield. Also Tachyon lance didn't seem to be doing anything in that fight (to elaborate on this further - the big problem is that after the Apogee could not use its shields any longer, it also got quickly damaged by autocannons because they are kinetic weapons, so have good armor penetration. It could be argued that kinetics should no longer be specialized in shield-busting if they are also good at penetrating armor - they end up being just great for everything, maybe there shouldn't be anti-shield weapons at all? Or maybe it's energy weapons that should have anti-shield potential).
It seems that so much care went into developing armor-related mechanics that shields ended up very neglected by comparison.

So now I'm in an awkward position of not really feeling like playing with RC but going back to vanilla is going to be weird too because how very cramped everything will feel. Anyway, keep up the good work 

Thanks!  You should expectautocannons to be less of a problem for shields now.

IF we're going to do full on realistic combat, may I suggest maybe revamping the damage types? "High-explosive" makes a lot of assumptions on what the damage really is, and I would like to have a way to differentiate between HEAT-style, concussion-style, straight up nuke torpedoes, and maybe a way to get multiple-stage warheads like modern weapons do.

There's also kinetic rod AP and then straight up kinetic slug that spalls the armour.

If there's already a difference between energy beams and bolts, then what about EMP missiles? Those aren't really bolts and get brokenly powerful.

To keep it simple for balancing and users and because the AI doesn't understand and API doesn't support fancy stuff.

And lastly, any damage taken on top of the sprite is counted as a citadel hit, which makes stuff like flak OP. Space ships are not 2D structures (not to mention that weapons and fighter bays are accessible from the top) and should have the armour on top be considered as armour and then figure some other arrangement out to have and render the hull (citadel) inside.

That is disturbing: please tell me more.

When in a pursuit situation, the bigger maps can place the flanks too far away, and the distance forwards that they are placed at do not scale with map size or is configurable. All pursuit engagements end up being a literal chase which is funny but not fun. Either allow us to scale the map width separately or add an offset distance to pursuit map flanks.

On it!

If the (surface) armour reaches 0 on any part of the ship (maybe when blasted off by high-explosives), I suggest that fragmentation ignore surface armour so that they still have some use even if they can't wreck the stuff further inside.

Anything powerful enough to blast the armor off a ship is powerful enough to blast the ship itself apart.

Fighters end up shrugging off point defense systems, and no hullmod or skills apply to increase damage dealt to fighters or missiles. Is there a conflict somewhere?

Please elaborate: are they absorbing point defense weapon damage?

Can we at some point have an entirely custom bitmap for armour values so that ships aren't well-armoured all around? Especially engine sections and fighter bays.

Unless Realistic Combat had become so popular modders would create custom content for it, I would not implement this feature.

Some comments in the settings would go a long way to documenting what they do.

Anything in particular you want documented first?

Fighters can have a really hard time targeting each other, and so do some frigates. Maybe give them a range buff vs fast targets based on manoeuvrability?

I've now increased their maneuverability without increasing their strafing ability: maybe this change will help them turn to target each other!

Also, a fighter deployment range multiplier would be real nice.

Coming in the next patch.

Also, while reading the comments (holy ***, 80% of the discussions go right over my head) someone mentioned the issue of phase skimmers being rendered useless because of the range, and how recoding it would be too difficult. I don't know how hard coding ship systems is, but maybe a simple solution would be to overwrite the effect of phase skimmers with an ultra powerful, short duration temporal shell that reduces damage? Like 500-1000% time dilation for half or a quarter of a second. Would essentially be the same as skimmer, but could actually look even cooler.

I can just increase the range of the phase skimmer!

I also want to add I find it amazing how everyone is super invested in this mod with their opinions and suggestions and how open minded you(Liral) are in face of all that. A+ mod, A++ modder.

People love to complain and argue on the internet, and I have little to no idea what I am doing, so I just let the users playtest, reply, and discuss ideas.

Is there a way to disable the changes to weapon ammo/refire delays? I'm trying to adjust the values but some weapons just become incredibly strong by trying to normalize changes that made other weapons obsolete (why would the heavy autocannon have a refire delay of 8 seconds?)

No, though I may implement a sub-category of autocannons with high damage to accomodate this issue.

[MakoMakoMan]

I also want to add I find it amazing how everyone is super invested in this mod with their opinions and suggestions and how open minded you(Liral) are in face of all that. A+ mod, A++ modder.

People love to complain and argue on the internet, and I have little to no idea what I am doing, so I just let the users playtest, reply, and discuss ideas.

Well if you're open to it, like you can see, people are glad to discuss it!

Is there a way to disable the changes to weapon ammo/refire delays? I'm trying to adjust the values but some weapons just become incredibly strong by trying to normalize changes that made other weapons obsolete (why would the heavy autocannon have a refire delay of 8 seconds?)

No, though I may implement a sub-category of autocannons with high damage to accomodate this issue.

Speaking of discussing ideas, and implementing categories (that I assume can be tweaked), I think two things that would benefit a lot from categories are, if possible, weapons flagged as PD and fighters, so their range can be limited. I think it'd be the simplest way to be able to control (limit) their range because as it is, a lot of PD weapons outclass regular weapons in range and/or DPS, although less so after the latest version.

[Liral]

Speaking of discussing ideas, and implementing categories (that I assume can be tweaked), I think two things that would benefit a lot from categories are, if possible, weapons flagged as PD and fighters, so their range can be limited. I think it'd be the simplest way to be able to control (limit) their range because as it is, a lot of PD weapons outclass regular weapons in range and/or DPS, although less so after the latest version.

Limiting the range of weapons flagged for fighters would defeat the purpose of Realistic Combat: projectile weapons on fighters should out-range ones of equal muzzle velocity on ships because fighters can jink ship weapon projectiles at ranges within which ships cannot jink fighter weapon projectiles, and fighters therefore would carry weapons with muzzle velocities equal to those of the weapons in the small mounts of the ships they attack.

Please tell me more about the point defense weapons out-ranging their non-point-defense counterparts, though.

[Anduin1357]

I think that PD weapons having really good range is because their projectiles have to be fast to hit small targets like missiles and they aren't blocked by other friendly ships.

The balance is that they usually arent too powerful, and future changes to shields may nerf down the damage.

The problem with PD having insane range is that AI targeting priority can be an issue since they like to shoot at the currently targeted ship.

Anyways irl ships have gotten hit and damaged by CWIS so its still realistic. The rest is just a quirk of fighting in space.

+++

If the (surface) armour reaches 0 on any part of the ship (maybe when blasted off by high-explosives), I suggest that fragmentation ignore surface armour so that they still have some use even if they can't wreck the stuff further inside.

Anything powerful enough to blast the armor off a ship is powerful enough to blast the ship itself apart.

I recall from the field manual that the surface armour is 1/13 as thick as the citadel armour,  and that the compartment is basically a buffer space between the surface armour and the citadel armour. A blast in the compartment should break up the surface armour and contribute to its  failure. But that only applies if HE is a blast and not a penetrator.

Fighters end up shrugging off point defense systems, and no hullmod or skills apply to increase damage dealt to fighters or missiles. Is there a conflict somewhere?

Please elaborate: are they absorbing point defense weapon damage?

Some (heavy) fighters and gunships rely on armour,  and with certain settings can become immune to point defences. There is no way to configure them separately from ship stats. Because armour does not degrade,  if PD cannot damage them,  then the target ship is effectively defenseless.

Also,  I'm  running Archean Order TC which has skills and hullmods buffing PD weapons against fighters by 250%, 200%...  but this mod does not apply them.

[Liral]

I think that PD weapons having really good range is because their projectiles have to be fast to hit small targets like missiles and they aren't blocked by other friendly ships.

The balance is that they usually arent too powerful, and future changes to shields may nerf down the damage.

The shield changes are live, by the way.

The problem with PD having insane range is that AI targeting priority can be an issue since they like to shoot at the currently targeted ship.

I think you mean that ships are wasting their limited PD ammo on ships that can absorb it easily.  Care to elaborate?

I recall from the field manual that the surface armour is 1/13 as thick as the citadel armour,  and that the compartment is basically a buffer space between the surface armour and the citadel armour. A blast in the compartment should break up the surface armour and contribute to its  failure. But that only applies if HE is a blast and not a penetrator.

~1/15th as thick, and remember that the citadel armor itself is quite thick at 150mm for even a Mudskipper (Armor Rating 150), so the surface armor would be 10mm or a full cm.   Each combat screen pixel at 1:1 zoom is 25cm, so each armor grid cell is about 2m on a side.  Destroying the surface armor covering one armor grid cell on a Mudskipper would entail blasting a 4m^2 hole through 1cm of composite armor--thereby likely disintegrating the Mudskipper.

Some (heavy) fighters and gunships rely on armour,  and with certain settings can become immune to point defences. There is no way to configure them separately from ship stats. Because armour does not degrade,  if PD cannot damage them, then the target ship is effectively defenseless.

Ok, now I understand better!  Thanks for explaining.  What "certain settings" are you talking about, and how do they make these heavy fighters and gunships immune?

Also,  I'm  running Archean Order TC which has skills and hullmods buffing PD weapons against fighters by 250%, 200%...  but this mod does not apply them.

Sounds like those skills and hullmods are not working!  I suspect I could fix this problem by re-inventing Alex's code but am unsure how exactly.

[MakoMakoMan]

The problem with PD having insane range is that AI targeting priority can be an issue since they like to shoot at the currently targeted ship.

I think you mean that ships are wasting their limited PD ammo on ships that can absorb it easily.  Care to elaborate?

I think he meant that since PD ranges are so high they are basically used as regular weapons, if a ship is attacking another with PD weapons, the PD weapons aren't doing their intended job which I think I noticed too.

Personally, my big problem with long range PD is that if the range is longer than some other weapons (I'll give you examples later, currently at work), and said PD ends up being the longest range weapon, the AI will try to only use PD since they tend to stay just far away enough to use their longest range weapon, in this case PD, instead of using more powerful weapons. In the base game, PD solutions are usually half the range of regular weapons so it's rarely ever an issue.

This issue is less of a big deal now that cannons shoot further than autocannons but it's still an issue between PDs and autocannons since they share the same category/range/bullet velocity.

Once that is fixed, it will cause another problem where fighters have weapon ranges being 2-5 times longer than the PDs, but even that problem is less frustrating than ships limiting themselves to using PD, and there's honestly worse problems to solve before that one.

[gentulf]

After shield damage changes combat is indeed more reasonable. What stands out now are ship behavior quirks, some of those are probably a result of how weapons work (PD being used against normal ships being one). One noticeable thing is that ships are considerably worse now at micromanaging their shields - something they were notably good at in vanilla, getting overloaded easily because they don't drop their shields to take a bit of direct damage.

Also, does anyone else get this weird turning to pointless direction that sometimes ships do? It's not common and those ships didn't have PD, so it wasn't because of that.

There is also an unfortunate problem with Laskaris Blaster from Epta Consortium - because the weapon is scripted to fire three separate bolts, it seems they were unaffected by range multipliers and the weapon is pretty much useless (AI will also use it wrong by firing from the "official" range).

Going back to AI quirks, some of those can be worked around with using Advanced Gunnery Control - e. g I can set PD weapons as "PD" so they only get used against fighters. I can tag expensive-to-fire weapons to not get fired above certain flux levels to alleviate the issue of overloading perhaps (I don't know yet how effective that will be).

Overall shield changes seem like a move in the right direction, further issues are not as severe as that one was, I still have to get more playtime to really get to know the mod.

[gentulf]

About that weird turning - that seems to be from low CR, sorry, I wasn't used to seeing frequent low CR so didn't connect the dots on that one.

[gentulf]

Ok, so what's going on with Autopulse Laser? It has 30 charges but I can't actually shoot them - I have to wait 12 seconds before each shot, that's not how autopulse laser is supposed to work (also it's pointless that it has 30 charges, or any charges at all, recharge time is shorter than re-fire delay). Perhaps recharge - re-fire should be swapped?

[Anduin1357]

I think that PD weapons having really good range is because their projectiles have to be fast to hit small targets like missiles and they aren't blocked by other friendly ships.

The balance is that they usually arent too powerful, and future changes to shields may nerf down the damage.

The shield changes are live, by the way.

The problem with PD having insane range is that AI targeting priority can be an issue since they like to shoot at the currently targeted ship.

I think you mean that ships are wasting their limited PD ammo on ships that can absorb it easily.  Care to elaborate?

Yes you're right, but also at the same time, in my game, PD can reload so it isn't that crippling.

I recall from the field manual that the surface armour is 1/13 as thick as the citadel armour,  and that the compartment is basically a buffer space between the surface armour and the citadel armour. A blast in the compartment should break up the surface armour and contribute to its  failure. But that only applies if HE is a blast and not a penetrator.

~1/15th as thick, and remember that the citadel armor itself is quite thick at 150mm for even a Mudskipper (Armor Rating 150), so the surface armor would be 10mm or a full cm.   Each combat screen pixel at 1:1 zoom is 25cm, so each armor grid cell is about 2m on a side.  Destroying the surface armor covering one armor grid cell on a Mudskipper would entail blasting a 4m^2 hole through 1cm of composite armor--thereby likely disintegrating the Mudskipper.

Fair enough... I guess blowing off armour with concussive blasts rather than explosively formed penetrators was too much.

Some (heavy) fighters and gunships rely on armour,  and with certain settings can become immune to point defences. There is no way to configure them separately from ship stats. Because armour does not degrade,  if PD cannot damage them, then the target ship is effectively defenseless.

Ok, now I understand better!  Thanks for explaining.  What "certain settings" are you talking about, and how do they make these heavy fighters and gunships immune?

It's that kinda mysterious "armorOverMatchFactor", increasing it seems to raise the effectiveness of armour against low damage projectiles.

[Anduin1357]

Once that is fixed, it will cause another problem where fighters have weapon ranges being 2-5 times longer than the PDs, but even that problem is less frustrating than ships limiting themselves to using PD, and there's honestly worse problems to solve before that one.

Liral might want to actually detect and buff all PD weapons to increase their effective range against strike-craft, missiles, and highly manoeuvrable targets, with a smaller buff for all small mounts with good or better turn rate.

Going back to AI quirks, some of those can be worked around with using Advanced Gunnery Control - e. g I can set PD weapons as "PD" so they only get used against fighters. I can tag expensive-to-fire weapons to not get fired above certain flux levels to alleviate the issue of overloading perhaps (I don't know yet how effective that will be).

I have a message on there for 'PD-priority' so that PD can still shoot at ships once they have cleared out the missiles and fighters, PD damage is still damage after all, but I haven't tried out the new shields yet...