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[Liral]

The basegame ships are in fact even less maneuverable than starsector ships, but using only vanilla game materials, functional combat ships with relativly high thrust and 50 km/s muzzel velocity weapons can be designed. The guns them self are very adept at targeting missiles due to their high velocity and anything that isnt just a gigantic laser cant hit them. This makes maneuvers and tactics like splitting up viable hindering the opposing force on dodging. The thing separating both games is either the high muzzle velocity the low ship speed across the board or low engagement range. (It has to be said that only frigates destroyers and maybe cruisers accelerate faster capital ships are quite compareable to base game capital ships.)

I don't entirely understand your response beyond agreeing that CoADE ships are much less maneuverable than RC ships, CoADE weapons have much higher muzzle velocities than RC weapons, and CoADE engagement ranges are much longer than RC engagement ranges.

To be honest increasing the engagement range will make combat using frigates even more difficult that it is already. There are many path to make this mod more functional (it isnt even unplayable right now) and i am curious on how this will progress.

I would, but the AI can't handle it.

Something simple that might help (and incidentally is available in CoADE) is an indicator of the targeted ships suspected weapon range. With the fog of war not being a thing at all in this mod certain assumptions could be made. The first salvos could have an unknown weapons range with the complete laodout of the enemy or an default weapons range that adjust after the real range is known. Certain weapons types could be cycled (pd anti armor anti shield). This all would probably be a lot of work to program so with the enemys weapon ranges for some reason being know in the base game, an argument could be made for showing the targets weapon ranges on the hud.

Showing weapon ranges would not be too difficult.

[Liral]

I was reading through the mod page again, specifically with the image you made to show some of the mod's features and explain armor and projectiles and I have a question about the line "It stays as strong against the last hit as the first". Does this mean that you don't include armor fatigue in your armor simulations?

I know armor fatigue generally isn't talked about that often when talking about armored land vehicles, especially things like MBTs facing other MBTs as usually, the first shot IS the last shot, but armor fatigue is still a real thing, especially in naval vessels. In case you or others aren't aware of what this property is, to put it simply, its the idea that the more a single area of armor is struck or penetrated, the less resistant it will be to penetration the next shot; this property is especially important in the application of NERA Composite armor that uses ceramic plates as one of its components as the ceramic can fracture or be destroyed upon penetration or when struck with a strong enough force thus reducing the composite screen's effectiveness.

I don't doubt that this property would be a pain to program as you would have to look at a projectile's velocity upon impact, its damage type and whether or not it penetrated and then calculate the loss in efficiency based on those figures for a countless number of weapons (and maybe even ships if you wanted to include ramming), so I totally understand if you chose not to simulate armor fatigue, but I feel that the armor staying as strong at 15 shells as it did before getting hit at all might not be so realistic. Also if you really wanted to go mad, you could even include an armor's temperature for its resilience as there are literal laser beams hitting a target that would certainly generate tons of heat. Not to mention weapons like flame/plasma throwers added by mods, or omega weapons which use ice for damage (although in theory that would make the face of the armor more strong but maybe the whole thing more brittle past a certain coldness?).

I did not include armor fatigue in my armor simulations because the ArmorGridAPI cells are far too large to consider hits to the same cell to be nearby; for scale, consider that an Abrams turret cheek would be two pixels long and one pixel tall in the Realistic Combat 25cm-per-pixel length scale.  Therefore, especially considering that ships also have height, I chose to imagine that every hit from a big, slow-firing weapon lands on another half-turret-cheek armor segment.

Of course, the simulation could be changed to represent the destruction of these segments.  If the maximum value of an ArmorGridAPI cell is the thickness of its armor, then its current value could be be decreased by penetrations or near-penetrations depending on the mmRHAe of the penetrator and the in-game area of the cell, the level of which every penetrator could roll against to determine whether it ignores or reduces the armor check by hitting an already-damaged armor segment in the armor cell.

[Necrodamis]

I was reading through the mod page again, specifically with the image you made to show some of the mod's features and explain armor and projectiles and I have a question about the line "It stays as strong against the last hit as the first". Does this mean that you don't include armor fatigue in your armor simulations?

I know armor fatigue generally isn't talked about that often when talking about armored land vehicles, especially things like MBTs facing other MBTs as usually, the first shot IS the last shot, but armor fatigue is still a real thing, especially in naval vessels. In case you or others aren't aware of what this property is, to put it simply, its the idea that the more a single area of armor is struck or penetrated, the less resistant it will be to penetration the next shot; this property is especially important in the application of NERA Composite armor that uses ceramic plates as one of its components as the ceramic can fracture or be destroyed upon penetration or when struck with a strong enough force thus reducing the composite screen's effectiveness.

I don't doubt that this property would be a pain to program as you would have to look at a projectile's velocity upon impact, its damage type and whether or not it penetrated and then calculate the loss in efficiency based on those figures for a countless number of weapons (and maybe even ships if you wanted to include ramming), so I totally understand if you chose not to simulate armor fatigue, but I feel that the armor staying as strong at 15 shells as it did before getting hit at all might not be so realistic. Also if you really wanted to go mad, you could even include an armor's temperature for its resilience as there are literal laser beams hitting a target that would certainly generate tons of heat. Not to mention weapons like flame/plasma throwers added by mods, or omega weapons which use ice for damage (although in theory that would make the face of the armor more strong but maybe the whole thing more brittle past a certain coldness?).

I did not include armor fatigue in my armor simulations because the ArmorGridAPI cells are far too large to consider hits to the same cell to be nearby; for scale, consider that an Abrams turret cheek would be two pixels long and one pixel tall in the Realistic Combat 25cm-per-pixel length scale.  Therefore, especially considering that ships also have height, I chose to imagine that every hit from a big, slow-firing weapon lands on another half-turret-cheek armor segment.

Of course, the simulation could be changed to represent the destruction of these segments.  If the maximum value of an ArmorGridAPI cell is the thickness of its armor, then its current value could be be decreased by penetrations or near-penetrations depending on the mmRHAe of the penetrator and the in-game area of the cell, the level of which every penetrator could roll against to determine whether it ignores or reduces the armor check by hitting an already-damaged armor segment in the armor cell.

That's understandable, I figured that simulating this property would cause some problems and even if you treated each cell (or box as they appear to the player) as its own entity, that could complicate things immensely with how many variables would go into it and the shear number of cells you would need to treat

[IceFire]

I don't entirely understand your response beyond agreeing that CoADE ships are much less maneuverable than RC ships, CoADE weapons have much higher muzzle velocities than RC weapons, and CoADE engagement ranges are much longer than RC engagement ranges.

I was trying to explain what made the high velocity weapons work in CoADE. The fact that it is possible to extend the weapon range to a distance that even capital ships can dodge while still having weapons that can deal damage.

To make this short without knowing at a glance how far one has to retreat to get out of weapons range and/or without a re balance in weapon ranges or ship accelerations and max velocity or both, all ships are just sitting ducks spraying each other with weapons fire especially when the player is flying as the ai knows the weapon ranges of the enemy and can maneuver out of them accordingly. If this game where only about capital ships and fighters i would actually be sold an your mod but as it stands anything other than a capital ship or a fighter does not have enough staying power to perform in combat. Any capital ship except the conquest would work. Cruisers that have access to large weapons could work.

The whole point of my comments was to express ideas on how to turn this amazing but in my opinion very game play limiting mod into something more usable and non repetitive for everyday campaigns. This is not my mod but i really start to think an target weapon range indicator could be something that is according to you not to hard to implement and something i would like to test but i am no programmer. If you plan implemented please dont make it a hull mod as the ai already has every advantage above the player with this mod.

Maybe i will warm up to this mod tomorrow.

I would, but the AI can't handle it.

And even if they could it would make the early campaign quite boring or very difficult depending on if you autoplay or if you steer yourself. (depending on your prefs. of course) 

You already addressed the cr bug which isnt really a bug but a feature.

[Liral]

That's understandable, I figured that simulating this property would cause some problems and even if you treated each cell (or box as they appear to the player) as its own entity, that could complicate things immensely with how many variables would go into it and the shear number of cells you would need to treat

It's easier than it looks if simplified.  The ArmorGridAPI provide a method that returns the cell edge length in pixel edge lengths, squaring which returns an area in pixels, which can be divided by the area of an armor plate to return the number of plates, which can be associated with an armor level in the cell, which penetrations of the total armor would reduce accordingly.

For example, consider an armor cell with a value of 12 and size of 8: its area would be 64 pixels.  Suppose an armor plate were 1 square meter, or 16 pixels.  That armor cell would therefore have 4 plates, each of which would represent 0.25 of the armor level.  A shot with enough damage to penetrate the total armor of the ship struck this cell would randomly generate a number between 0 and 1, compare that number to the cell level, which we will assume to be 1, conclude that it has struck an undamaged plate of the cell and therefore destroy the plate by reduce the value of the cell by 0.25 x value or 3 points.

The neat numbers I picked aside, how would such an approach suit simulating armor fatigue?

[Liral]

I don't entirely understand your response beyond agreeing that CoADE ships are much less maneuverable than RC ships, CoADE weapons have much higher muzzle velocities than RC weapons, and CoADE engagement ranges are much longer than RC engagement ranges.

I was trying to explain what made the high velocity weapons work in CoADE. The fact that it is possible to extend the weapon range to a distance that even capital ships can dodge while still having weapons that can deal damage.

To make this short without knowing at a glance how far one has to retreat to get out of weapons range and/or without a re balance in weapon ranges or ship accelerations and max velocity or both, all ships are just sitting ducks spraying each other with weapons fire especially when the player is flying as the ai knows the weapon ranges of the enemy and can maneuver out of them accordingly. If this game where only about capital ships and fighters i would actually be sold an your mod but as it stands anything other than a capital ship or a fighter does not have enough staying power to perform in combat. Any capital ship except the conquest would work. Cruisers that have access to large weapons could work.

The whole point of my comments was to express ideas on how to turn this amazing but in my opinion very game play limiting mod into something more usable and non repetitive for everyday campaigns. This is not my mod but i really start to think an target weapon range indicator could be something that is according to you not to hard to implement and something i would like to test but i am no programmer. If you plan implemented please dont make it a hull mod as the ai already has every advantage above the player with this mod.

Maybe i will warm up to this mod tomorrow.

Yes, I will add this feature.  Don't worry!

[Necrodamis]

Ok first bit of actual criticism from me: I understand the idea of of hull damage decreasing a ship's CR, but I feel like it's either unnecessary or at least far too excessive. Players should be punished for poor flux management, sure, but this means overfluxing is basically an instant kill or will at least render that ship inoperable. I know this could be realistic as it could be considered internal modules breaking as a result of penetrations, but I feel like it makes fights severely snowball esq meaning things can go from perfect to terrible in an instant.

At the least I would suggest nerfing the rate at which CR is reduced per amount of damage, at most remove the mechanic (but I feel that might be a bit much and might take away from your vision) an ultimatum could be allowing the player to tweak this via difficulty settings within the mod or adding a tip on the mod page telling you how to tweak it in the respective config.
Other than that, I'm still really enjoying the mod and it's made me actively want to play starsector more as the battles are more interesting and it forces me to play completely different

[Liral]

Ok first bit of actual criticism from me: I understand the idea of of hull damage decreasing a ship's CR, but I feel like it's either unnecessary or at least far too excessive. Players should be punished for poor flux management, sure, but this means overfluxing is basically an instant kill or will at least render that ship inoperable. I know this could be realistic as it could be considered internal modules breaking as a result of penetrations, but I feel like it makes fights severely snowball esq meaning things can go from perfect to terrible in an instant.

At the least I would suggest nerfing the rate at which CR is reduced per amount of damage, at most remove the mechanic (but I feel that might be a bit much and might take away from your vision) an ultimatum could be allowing the player to tweak this via difficulty settings within the mod or adding a tip on the mod page telling you how to tweak it in the respective config.
Other than that, I'm still really enjoying the mod and it's made me actively want to play starsector more as the battles are more interesting and it forces me to play completely different

I wanted to create a way to mission-kill a ship without blowing it to pieces or riddling it with holes.  Combat Readiness is limited to hull level less an offset, which is configurable in the settings under "combatReadinessOffset", with the default value being 10, which makes combat readiness decline once the hull level reaches 80.

I could use a sine function instead:

Code

private static float combatReadinessLimit(ShipAPI ship) {
    return RealisticCombatSettings.getCombatReadinessOffset() 
               / 2 * ((float) Math.sin(Math.PI * (ship.getHullLevel() - 1/2)) - 1) + 1;
}

This function is exactly 1 for hullLevel = 1, equals the combat readiness offset for hullLevel = 0, and is ~70% at ~80% hullLevel.  It declines even faster than a straight line from (0.7, 1) to (0, 0.1) though.  I could also try a sigmoid function!

[Necrodamis]

Ok first bit of actual criticism from me: I understand the idea of of hull damage decreasing a ship's CR, but I feel like it's either unnecessary or at least far too excessive. Players should be punished for poor flux management, sure, but this means overfluxing is basically an instant kill or will at least render that ship inoperable. I know this could be realistic as it could be considered internal modules breaking as a result of penetrations, but I feel like it makes fights severely snowball esq meaning things can go from perfect to terrible in an instant.

At the least I would suggest nerfing the rate at which CR is reduced per amount of damage, at most remove the mechanic (but I feel that might be a bit much and might take away from your vision) an ultimatum could be allowing the player to tweak this via difficulty settings within the mod or adding a tip on the mod page telling you how to tweak it in the respective config.
Other than that, I'm still really enjoying the mod and it's made me actively want to play starsector more as the battles are more interesting and it forces me to play completely different

I wanted to create a way to mission-kill a ship without blowing it to pieces or riddling it with holes.  Combat Readiness is limited to hull level less an offset, which is configurable in the settings under "combatReadinessOffset", with the default value being 10, which makes combat readiness decline once the hull level reaches 80.

I could use a sine function instead:

Code

private static float combatReadinessLimit(ShipAPI ship) {
    return RealisticCombatSettings.getCombatReadinessOffset() 
               / 2 * ((float) Math.sin(Math.PI * (ship.getHullLevel() - 1/2)) - 1) + 1;
}

This function is exactly 1 for hullLevel = 1, equals the combat readiness offset for hullLevel = 0, and is ~70% at ~80% hullLevel.  It declines even faster than a straight line from (0.7, 1) to (0, 0.1) though.  I could also try a sigmoid function!

I like the idea of a mission kill, but I don't really know if it makes sense in starsectors combat as the combat typically isn't over until one fleet or the other is destroyed or has retreated. Perhaps if you added in a mechanic that allowed mission killed ships to be easier to salvage or you could get them with less overall damage (keeping more of the weapons, crew, hull armor, etc that they had equipped) or even setting it so that once a vessel has reached zero CR, it auto retreats instantly so that it's not accidentally destroyed and is added to the salvage screen post battle.

These are just a couple ideas since I'm truly clueless on coding and had no idea about what those functions meant lol but regardless of how you go about this, I'm excited to see what you do next with the mod and appreciate your enthusiasm

[Liral]

I like the idea of a mission kill, but I don't really know if it makes sense in starsectors combat as the combat typically isn't over until one fleet or the other is destroyed or has retreated. Perhaps if you added in a mechanic that allowed mission killed ships to be easier to salvage or you could get them with less overall damage (keeping more of the weapons, crew, hull armor, etc that they had equipped) or even setting it so that once a vessel has reached zero CR, it auto retreats instantly so that it's not accidentally destroyed and is added to the salvage screen post battle.

I could order a mission-killed ship to retreat no problem.

These are just a couple ideas since I'm truly clueless on coding and had no idea about what those functions meant lol but regardless of how you go about this, I'm excited to see what you do next with the mod and appreciate your enthusiasm

I encourage you to learn programming because its reputation for involving unusual, or indeed any, intelligence or creativity is entirely undeserved despite its considerable utility.  If you can assemble furniture from an instruction manual, you can learn to program; if you can look up how to fix common furniture problems on the internet, you can program almost anything.  Programming consists of wondering exactly what you want the program to do and then tediously debugging one error after another by following the instructions the errors give you or just copy-pasting them into a search engine to have someone on the internet tell you.  It is boring.  The results are impressive, though!

[Necrodamis]

I appreciate your encouragement, but coding just isn't for me lol I don't do too well at repetition over several hours, troubleshooting my PC and mods is enough of a headache for me.

I worry that simply ordering the AI to retreat at zero CR wouldn't work out too well as the vessel would barely be able to move if at all. So what I was thinking is that if a vessel reaches zero CR, have the game treat it as though they have reached the retreat line and remove them from the battle; or cheat and when they reach zero CR, just teleport them to the retreat line and do it that way lol

[Liral]

I appreciate your encouragement, but coding just isn't for me lol I don't do too well at repetition over several hours, troubleshooting my PC and mods is enough of a headache for me.

It's not repetitive but rather just like troubleshooting, except you make your own trouble by deciding that the program needs to do something new or else even if it were working before.

I worry that simply ordering the AI to retreat at zero CR wouldn't work out too well as the vessel would barely be able to move if at all. So what I was thinking is that if a vessel reaches zero CR, have the game treat it as though they have reached the retreat line and remove them from the battle; or cheat and when they reach zero CR, just teleport them to the retreat line and do it that way lol

That's easy enough to fix: just make them retreat at more than 0 CR.

Code

private static void getFleetSide(ShipAPI ship) {
    return ship.getOwner() == 0 || ship.isAlly() ? Fleetside.PLAYER : Fleetside.ENEMY;
}

private static void retreatShip(ShipAPI ship) {
    Global.getCombatEngine().getFleetManager().getTaskManager(getFleetSide(ship)).orderRetreat(ship.getDeployedFleetMember(), false, false);
}

private static void retreatLowCRShips() {
    for (ShipAPI ship : Global.getCombatEngine().getShips()) {
        if (!(ship.isFighter() || ship.isStation()) && ship.getCurrentCR() < RealisticCombatSettings.getCROffset()) 
            retreatShip(ship);
    }
}

Also, here's a different function to implement the CR falloff.

Code

private static float getCRLimit(ShipAPI ship) { 
    final float a = 1 / (1 + 1 / RealisticCombatSettings().getCROffset()),
                b = (a + 1)(Ship.getHullLevel() - 1);
    return Ship.getCRAtDeployment() * (1 - b * b);
}

This one reduces CR as soon as the ship takes hull damage, but slowly at first, then faster until it hurtles to 0 at the CR offset.

[OmegaMan]

I was coming to the Mod forum to ask if it was possible to do an armor mod like this one, and here it exists!?  What is this sorcery?  Really excited to try this mod out.      Had a few questions and thoughts.

Most of your starting weapons can't even touch the mule, because it's 650 armor is just too strong. Only the Assault chaingun on your wingman can function, but his thumper murders you.

This is actually a pretty basic balance test that should be addressed. Because no armor is 100% perfect and homogenous, there are always weak spots, joint between plates, viewports, Engine Nacelles, weapons ports, sensors, exhaust ports, manufacturing defects, etc....

Perhaps there should always be a fixed ~5% chance for a critical hit where the projectile bypasses  60% of armor.     This would give weaker ships and weapons at least SOME damage which is a little more realistic.   A direct hit to the bridge window or a torpedo to the rudder/engine exhaust has a good chance of causing issues no matter how much armor the belt has.

 In  battleship shellfire AP caps would be designed to dig into a thick armor and rotate to a degree while still delivering the majority of their kinetic energy to armor even at 35-45 degree strike angles.   Non AP shells tended to ricochet off at those angles especially when striking non face hardened armor often used on deck and turret roof armor plating.   Plus armor is not one smooth surface, there will always be lots of different protrusions so the hit angle is perhaps over-emphasized in calculations.

Do all ships share this exact same Citadel model?  It's perhaps too much of a generalization
because frigates and fighters realistically might only have a thin layer of outer armor that would deflect only low caliber projectiles.   While the most protected ships, like US Navy CV Lexington class would often have up to layers of 3 torpedo compartments, each capable of blunting most of a 2000 lb he. blast,  requiring 3 direct hits to the same area to even have a chance to breach the main armor belt.   Big surface ships that well designed could REALLY take punishment, taking 100+ direct hits with bombs or large caliber weapons to sink.   Having the largest ships rock 3+ layers of anti missile compartments vs 2  or 1 for smaller ones would be an interesting differentiator and accurate to contemporary armor schemes.

Since there is already an Auto repair damage sub-system,  maybe you could allow that to repair damaged compartments armor plating, making the larger ships last longer in battle?

[canned Tomatoes]

I found that the Project Tafetta weapon from Tahlan shipwork completely freezes my game with this mod.
When I hit a ship on its armor with that weapon, it spawns an incredible amount of projectiles, which causes the crash.

It's a rare weapon so I don't think this is going to come up often in the game.
I tested this one in the for the greater Ludd mission with the Hammerhead in a simulation and it does this with this mod enabled every time and never without it.

[Necrodamis]

I found that the Project Tafetta weapon from Tahlan shipwork completely freezes my game with this mod.
When I hit a ship on its armor with that weapon, it spawns an incredible amount of projectiles, which causes the crash.

It's a rare weapon so I don't think this is going to come up often in the game.
I tested this one in the for the greater Ludd mission with the Hammerhead in a simulation and it does this with this mod enabled every time and never without it.

I've had this exact problem with a random scavs enforcer that had the weapon, I just didn't know what the weapon was