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Author Topic: What could be done with Safety Overrides  (Read 5377 times)

Ysolla

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #30 on: January 16, 2023, 06:37:40 AM »

I don't know what could be done with it, but something probably should be. Since Alex has made the best suggestion here, im going to thumbs up that idea and give you my relatively new player anecdotal SO use story:

Been playing this game on and off for about 2 years, half a dozen vanilla runs, a few modded. Only ever used SO in one of those playthroughs but im fairly methodical, and a person that likes to test things. I quickly realize that a fleet of aggressively piloted frigates with SO could beat nearly all the things in the game with no skill. Turn autopilot on, set battle to full assault, sit back drink coffee.

I say "nearly all" because of course there are things this will have trouble with. Mostly because the fights can contain so many ships it takes too long to kill them all and your CR runs out.

So then I test selections of cruisers with SO. This worked against 100% of the game with no tactics or player input. Then I stop using SO on ships and have never used it since. In my opinion it is too good, "overpowered" if you will, it turns the game from being an interesting 2d space battles game to shooting fish in a barrel.
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Megas

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #31 on: January 16, 2023, 06:47:05 AM »

Safety Override is auto-pick for Hyperion.  They get zero-flux boost at all times to access teleport anytime it is charged, and they have the flux to sustain three medium weapons.  And the PPT lost to Safety Override is not very much because Hyperion had little to lose.

SO Hyperion is useful for AI because they do not need to drop shields or stop firing weapons to get their zero flux boost to teleport.


An easy nerf to SO is faster CR decay like Delicate Machinery for phase ships.  That would hit low PPT ships like Hyperion.
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Grievous69

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #32 on: January 16, 2023, 08:03:38 AM »

Faster CR decay doesn't solve the issue though, it just moves the margin for success a little bit. It would still remain the same one dimensional boring pick. Early game wise nothing would change, but you'd probably have to think twice in later stages. Not very elegant.
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SCC

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #33 on: January 16, 2023, 08:24:38 AM »

I don't like SO. Easy fights are faster, but harder fights are more expensive, because the SO ship only gets a fraction of its PPT and then drains CR, whereas it's cost-effective to make multiple deployments with normal ships. But I don't see any reason to dislike SO, so I simply don't care for it. It only annoys me when people default to it, when some ship is bad, because then I'm left out of the conversation. I didn't see any balance changes made specifically because of SO until Hyperion's phase teleport cooldown was made annoyingly long. You now have to play significantly more cautiously, since you will only be able to quickly disengage if you didn't use the teleport to engage. It's also impossible to quickly move around the map. I haven't used Hyperion since that change.

Should we have left the part of the game where skills were so strong a player could solo the whole game in a single ship, just because someone found that fun? Granted you can kinda do this now as well, it's just harder.
You could in 0.9.1. In 0.95 combat skills generally don't feel as impactful, or at least old tricks and ships (Conquest, Aurora, Tempest) don't. Derelict Contingent was busted and it's gone. Doom was busted and it's mostly gone, and I don't like phase ships in the first place. Now I wonder whether it's that we can get 38% of skills instead of ~50%, or if it's the higher baseline number of officers. It doubled from 4 to 8, for you and the enemies. Enemies now field as many officers as fleets whose gimmick was fielding lots of officers. And it's even worse with Remnants. As for the skills, another thing is that Loadout Design, while common, wasn't something you were expected to use quite always. But S-mods you get as a baseline. But perhaps this isn't the thread to discuss this topic in.

Alex

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #34 on: January 16, 2023, 08:53:15 AM »

(Haven't had time to read through everything, but I will, and I appreciate the discussion here!)


What are you on about?
Then you somehow forgot or chose to ignore so many posts over the last period
How can anyone argue that SO increases variety is beyond me.
My man, look at your posts and then see the response you gave now. Hypocritical innit?
What's with the trend of deflecting single arguments and saying "that could be said about anything".

You have some reasonable points to make, but this near-constant sniping is both unacceptable here and uncalled for. This is an official warning.
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FooF

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #35 on: January 16, 2023, 09:11:29 AM »

I think SO, as it is in its current form, makes perfect sense for reckless low-tech ships (i.e. Pathers) but it just doesn't make any sense for "normal" ships, especially finely-tuned ones like an Aurora or low-tech bricks. Short-range, fast, hard-hitting but very vulnerable ships with low relative PPT already exist. In fact there's an entire class of them: Phase Ships. SO essentially makes every ship a phase ship. I think it could be argued there should be a "Ballistic" Phase Ship out there but I think the current Phase Ship line-up has that assassin style under control.

I think an option to increase offensive at the cost of something else does make a lot of sense, though. The one that keeps surfacing for me is a rate-of-fire increase but without a commensurate flux cost reduction (an inferior AAF, if you will) and then there's a cooldown where your guns can't fire for a few seconds and dissipation is reduced. You frontload all your damage and hope to secure a kill/overload or else you're a sitting duck. Likewise, it gets its power from shields so you take more shield damage. Something like:

For 5 seconds:
+50% RoF
+50% damage to (your) Shields
3 second "weapon overload" charge-down: weapons can't fire, dissipation cut in half. Shields continue to take extra damage. Speed unaffected.
20 second cooldown
*Mutually exclusive with AAF
*Doesn't affect Missiles
*Shieldless ships have a 4 second weapon overload.

So, 5 seconds of 50% more damage but 8 seconds of increased shield damage and 3 seconds where weapons don't fire at all. I think this hurts Low Tech and High Tech similarly. Faster ships that can disengage take extra shield damage while trying to pour it on while low-tech ships that drop shields to deal with the extra flux burden would get their PD turned off for 3 seconds and be vulnerable to missiles. However, this feels very derivative of AAF. One could argue that ships with AAF already have this built-in without penalty.

You could make it just a damage increase but I like the double-edged nature of burning through flux faster in order to get the DPS increase. It becomes a calculated risk of "Can I outpace my opponent before I overload or get my weapons turned off?"
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Hiruma Kai

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #36 on: January 16, 2023, 10:25:04 AM »

What should the design goals for safety overrides be?

Right now, from a design perspective it does a few things:

1) Trade supplies and repair time (due to lower PPT) for power in a single combat 

If you are regularly running your SO ships down to 40% CR, you're paying several times more in supplies per deployment for a significant jump in power.  That can be painful for a new player at the start of the game, but either by end game, or for an experienced player willing to dabble in some trading, can be a trivial cost to handle.

Also, it has an inverse incentive to the usual deploy as few ships as you can get away with.  Since most of your time is spent in CR decay, by deploying more ships, you can actually save credits - especially when they are low tech ships, since each % of CR tick down cost more on them then on high tech ships.  SO fleets are encouraged to deploy everything, since it can be significantly cheaper.  A tick down from 100% to 90% or 88% is the same cost as deploying twice as many ships and finishing before PPT runs out for low tech ships like a Lasher or Enforcer.

Ships like the Hyperion are clearly built with SO in mind, since you need to drop to 60% before it costs you as much as a deployment - SO is effectively 3-4x cheaper on them (per DP) than Lashers or even most low tech ships.

2)Maximum range is traded for more flux (both instantaneously and over the course of the fight) and speed.

I'll note that for a typical SO Hyperion with Combat Endurance/Crew Training/Hardened Subsystems, going from 100% to 40%, takes 79.2 + 360=439.2 seconds.  Same ship without SO takes 600 seconds.  439.2 * 2 = 878.4 > 600, so it's actually dissipating more flux in 439.2 than the normal ship over 600 (ignoring venting).  Safety Overrides is both faster flux and more flux possible per fight.

I'm not listing PPT as part of the trade off here, that goes under the supplies for in combat power heading.  In combat, the end obejctive is about putting damage on the enemy faster than they do to you, and flux dissipation is directly linked to how much damage you can put out.  If over the course of an engagement, you've put more damage on the target regardless of how long that engagement took, then the PPT wasn't a trade off for the in combat portion.  You're not trading for less damage overall, you've traded for more damage overall.

I'll also note, safety overrides is unusual, since unlike most hullmods, it multiplies both the ship's base flux value and additional flux dissipation additions.  So it arguably gets more valuable the more vents you grab as well, which can in some situations, make SO provide more flux per OP than a non-SO ship simply buying vents.  Also, with more OP, the high OP cost of safety overrides becomes less burdensome - so s-mods help improve the power of safety override ships significantly.  But this also means you are not actually trading away OP, you're gaining net OP on some ships.

Take a Fury, 120 OP and 600 flux base, up to 900 with vents.  10 dissipation per OP spent on vents.
SO Fury hits 1800 dissipation at a cost of 75 OP. 16 dissipation per OP spent on vents and safety overrides.
If vents were uncapped, it would cost 90 OP for a non-SO Fury to get that much dissipation.
Given the fighting time from 100% to 40% assuming the usual hardened subsystems/combat endurance, (587.7 vs 1,050), total flux dissipation over the fight is still higher (1,175 vs 1050 seconds equivalent), although admittedly at that point, the total potential flux dissipation over the fight per OP spent on flux is less efficient.  Of course, if the fight ends in 360 seconds, it pretty much doesn't matter.

So, in my mind, where in many cases damage output is directly proportional to flux dissipation (and also in some cases whether you can flicker your shields and remove enough hard flux to take the next volley of projectiles, such as in the case of HVD or Heavy Maulers), Safety Overrides isn't actually making a trade off.  It's just plain better than spending OP on vents.  The only cost comes in the form of max range reduction, since you are getting your OP worth in flux.

Which is also unique.  Safety overrides is the only hullmod in vanilla which sets a maximum range rather than a percentage range reduction (like unstable injector).   Which means different weapons are impacted more or less.  By picking short range, high DPS weapons you essentially pay the disadvantage only once (short range from hullmod and from weapon balance) and get the benefits twice (flux/speed buff and higher DPS).

Now a cruiser is arguably making the biggest trade in range versus speed, but not all ships have the same range bands or hit key speed thresholds.  Medium energy weapon ships (and missile ships) are making the least trade off, while long range ballistic ships lose the most in terms of range (with skills, perhaps 1650 down to 450) and sometimes not getting enough speed in return for said exchange to control engagements.  Dominator at 25+20+50=95 is still slower than most frigates and many destroyers.  On the other hand, Furies can make great use of the extra flux (dumped into Heavy Blasters) and lose less on the range (930 to 450), and hit key speed thresholds (90+20+50=160) making it faster than the majority of frigates.

So I could buy the argument SO is overtuned, since it has so many exceptions and unique factors which just make it so much more efficient on an OP basis, and which the AI is very capable of capitalizing on, and in its only cost is really at the campaign layer.  And it's very easy to min-max because of the existance of short range and high DPS weaponry, as well as ships designed to be short range and high flux dissipation.  If Heavy Blasters and Assault Chainguns, or Hyperions and Furies didn't exist, SO wouldn't be nearly as dominant.

The thought I had about it - and it's not fully fleshed out, and I'm not fully committed to doing this, so, big disclaimer/grain of salt - is to change SO to function as an active ability instead of a constant passive buff.

The idea being that yeah, if you nerf it, it gets less interesting. But as is it's also not all that interesting because - alright, it does add a playstyle, but that playstyle is very similar for everything and there's not too much to it. If you make it an ability where activating it, say, costs the ship some peak time (and then CR when it's out of PPT) then you can have it be really powerful, and "when do you trigger it" becomes an interesting tactical decision. (What effects exactly it would have is up in the air; in a similar vein to what it currently does, though.)

And then you'd have a new control for "active ability"; something like Neural Transfer would use that control, too, ships would be restricted to just one hullmod that adds an ability (and the door would be open to more abilities like this that can be slotted into ships), etc.

Again, though, this is all fairly half baked; these are just my thoughts at the moment. It's entirely possible none of that would go anywhere. (And if it did, I'd probably leave the original SO in the game and accessible via console...)

I guess the fundamental question I'd ask is, is it reasonable to be trading a campaign level resource/issue (i.e. grinding for credits via trade, carrying enough supplies, repair time to get CR back up) for a significant in combat power buff out of proportion for the OP spent?  And does how players view such tradeoffs matter?  Many players simply will not take Augmented Drive Field since it's trading OP which could be used in combat for a campaign layer benefit.  Everyone is expected, at least by endgame, to spend story points to make their ships better, a campaign layer resource being used for in-combat power.  Same goes for credits.  Credits buy you bigger and better ships.  Which is partly why we have DP limits. Credits don't limit maximum fleet power, they limit at the rate at which fleet power can be accrued.  DP limits and s-mod limits are what reign in maximum fleet power.  Safety Overrides don't interact with the s-mod or DP systems, it interacts only with the credits/supplies system.

Now if Safety Overrides couldn't be used on a ship with s-mods, or if Safety Overrides increased the DP cost of a ship, effectively a cost in terms of combat (you can put fewer of them) and a cost on the campaign layer (the ship costs more supplies per deployment), then that would start to interact with the maximum power of the fleet.  The other option is to make safety overrides be worth it's OP value, rather than significantly more than it's OP value would suggest on min-maxed ships.

The other way to look at it, is abilities which cost CR simply encourage trade grinding to build up credits, to pay for supplies and supply ships, and then simply fight fewer fights, but weighted towards end game.  Story points at least encourage fighting since you gain far more XP fighting than trading per unit player time.  Even easy trivial fights.

So, the proposed CR cost per button press tradeoff is the same one people are making now, spending more supplies for more power, but at least aggressive and reckless AI can make use of it well enough.  Making it an active ability means a lot more logic around it, and I'm guessing, a lot more behavior like Hammerheads and Accelerated Ammo Feeder - but with fight long and after combat consequences.  AFF you can use basically on cooldown, and that decision only affects the next 10 seconds or so.  Using this SO button potentially might be dropping CR to the point where the ship is useless if used too often.  I fear getting the AI to use it at the right times is going to be a significant coding challenge, as making the big picture decisions (do I need to burn down my CR now, or reserve it for later) is tough for the AI.

I feel like you changed Missile Autoforge from a CR hit to a limited charge based system for a reason in 0.7.1a?  Was it related to AI usage and CR costs being a permanent fight long thing?

Then there's stacking question.  Accelerated Ammo Feeder + SO or High Energy Focus + SO is going to be much more potent than other ships which don't have a limited time damage buff which can by synced with this new activatable power.  And negative combination with things like fortress shield or damper field.

Another question to ask is how to scale the CR cost.  Is it flat per use, or scaled to a ship's deployment supplies cost and CR per deployment in some way?  A flat per use cost runs into the current issues with how the CR cost to deployment is decoupled from the supplies cost to recover it.  Such that a flat cost would make it cheaper to use on a Hyperion than on a Lasher.  Just to strawman something, a flat 10% CR per use cost on a Lasher is 4 supplies (400 credits per use), but only 3.75 supplies (375 credits) on a Hyperion.

So, 400 credits per use on a Hyperion past PPT (which is where most of the time is spent).  As opposed to say, the 100->40% CR drop currently with an approximately 22.5 supplies (2250 credit cost) one might associate per fight currently.  Or 24 supplies (2400 credits) cost on a Lasher?

On a only slightly related note, I still like the idea of linking CR tick down rate to the CR loss per deployment.  So a Hyperion would tick down 4 times faster than a Lasher.  It always feels weird to me the campaign costs of a SO Lasher are higher than that of an SO Hyperion, but you get no in combat benefit for it.

Here, if an active use variation is introduced, and assuming a flat CR hit example, it would be making that explicit.  Each press of the button is potentially more expensive on a Lasher than on a Hyperion.  Which doesn't sound balanced to me, especially since you would be making the implicit assumption that spending credits on the campaign layer are balancing things in combat.
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Rusty Edge

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #37 on: January 16, 2023, 01:58:35 PM »

Why not keep SO roughly the same, and just add other wild overhaul hullmods?
 Every overhaul hullmod would provide a substantial change to playstyle, with a substantial drawback of some kind, and any ship could be restricted to only one Overhaul at a time.
 This way SO can keep it's flavour, but it's not the only viable option.

Things like
 External missle racks that boost your missle capacity, but drastically increase the chance for enemy weapons to deal critical damage to your hull.
 Stripped down armor, cargo and fuel capacity, for a massive increase to speed.
 A boost to weapon range and speed that also makes your weapons take more damage.
 An improved converted hangar that makes your flux take a hit.
 Maybe some mods might increase maintenance or deployment costs.

 Elite bounties and some Elite faction fleets could be built around Overhaul mods. So it doesn't feel like the player is the only admiral capable of suping up his ships.
« Last Edit: January 16, 2023, 02:13:45 PM by Rusty Edge »
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Wyvern

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #38 on: January 16, 2023, 05:25:33 PM »

Since it got kindof lost behind Alex coming in with the 'make SO active' notion, I'd like to re-suggest my idea: Make SO something that's fleet-level limited, like automated ships, with a very small cap by default (enough that an SO destroyer with Combat Endurance is hitting maybe 45% max CR), and an increased cap - enough to run a cruiser or two - if you've got the appropriate Industry skill.
And, of course, ships with Ill-Advised Modifications don't count towards the cap.

I don't really want to see SO nerfed in terms of direct combat potential (though removing the always-on zero-flux boost wouldn't be a bad idea), but having it limited so you can't just spam a fleet full of SO Hyperions seems fine.
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Tigasboss

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #39 on: January 16, 2023, 05:38:46 PM »

I don't understand the hate for SO, this is a single player game, if you don't like a hullmod dont use it? Its not like npcs abuse it either, I haven't seen a non player SO hyperion or anything of the sort. I did like Alex's idea though, it makes SO more interactive and more of a choice, like a trumph card of sorts.
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Amazigh

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #40 on: January 16, 2023, 06:13:50 PM »

Since it got kindof lost behind Alex coming in with the 'make SO active' notion, I'd like to re-suggest my idea: Make SO something that's fleet-level limited, like automated ships, with a very small cap by default (enough that an SO destroyer with Combat Endurance is hitting maybe 45% max CR), and an increased cap - enough to run a cruiser or two - if you've got the appropriate Industry skill.
And, of course, ships with Ill-Advised Modifications don't count towards the cap.

I don't really want to see SO nerfed in terms of direct combat potential (though removing the always-on zero-flux boost wouldn't be a bad idea), but having it limited so you can't just spam a fleet full of SO Hyperions seems fine.
I like the sound of this, you'd still be able to use a few SO ships with no change, but a mono-SO fleet would not be viable due to reduced CR.

And it would be a comparatively "easy" change, compared to reworking SO completely.
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BCS

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #41 on: January 17, 2023, 12:06:15 AM »

Faster CR decay doesn't solve the issue though, it just moves the margin for success a little bit.

Running the numbers it's actually a lot more than "a little bit".

Let's take Hyperion as an example since it's the ship with single lowest base PPT in the game - and therefore should theoretically be hit hardest by SO:

Base 120 +60(Wolfpack Tactics) +60(Combat Endurance) +60(Hardened Subsystems) = 300 PPT. This is then cut by 2/3 down to 100 seconds which is not a lot. That's all fine and as expected.

Hovewer the Combat Endurance and Hardened Subsystems stack to reduce the CR decay by half from 0.25/second to 0.125/second. Which means that it will take the hyperion 60/0.125 = 480 seconds to go down to 40% CR. Or in other words, from the moment in enters combat the SO Hyperion can operate without risk of malfunction for 580 seconds - almost ten minutes. And most of it is thanks to slow CR decay.
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Jackundor

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #42 on: January 17, 2023, 01:01:29 AM »

Since it got kindof lost behind Alex coming in with the 'make SO active' notion, I'd like to re-suggest my idea: Make SO something that's fleet-level limited, like automated ships, with a very small cap by default (enough that an SO destroyer with Combat Endurance is hitting maybe 45% max CR), and an increased cap - enough to run a cruiser or two - if you've got the appropriate Industry skill.
And, of course, ships with Ill-Advised Modifications don't count towards the cap.

I don't really want to see SO nerfed in terms of direct combat potential (though removing the always-on zero-flux boost wouldn't be a bad idea), but having it limited so you can't just spam a fleet full of SO Hyperions seems fine.
I like the sound of this, you'd still be able to use a few SO ships with no change, but a mono-SO fleet would not be viable due to reduced CR.

And it would be a comparatively "easy" change, compared to reworking SO completely.
couterpoint: who the hell has an all SO fleet? unless that's a specific goal someone has set themselves for a playthrough, i just can't imagine someone having more than a few SO ships bc not every ship is suited to it.
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Grievous69

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #43 on: January 17, 2023, 01:15:25 AM »

You can have multiples of the same ship in your fleet though...
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SCC

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Re: What could be done with Safety Overrides
« Reply #44 on: January 17, 2023, 01:40:03 AM »

I actually thought people either don't use SO, use or just for the flagship, or go all in on it.
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