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[Megas]

Given the way I fight, CR is effectively battle damage for me.  I frequently time out peak performance and take hull damage.  Hardened Subsystems is must-have for some ships (high-tech frigates always need it, others may not depending on fleet composition).  After two or three fights, my ships have low CR and need repairs.  CR recovery is more important to me than armor or hull repairs.

[Clockwork Owl]

I support this.
At least this idea deserves a try.

[Thaago]

But I would invert the idea: have a long term penalty to CR that builds up by taking hull damage.

with CR being the "campaign stamina" mechanic, it very much makes sense to have it pull this duty instead of hull.

You know, I did consider suggesting just that - using CR as a long term factor, since that would fit better with it's intended role in the campaign. Problem is, I don't see a good way of implementing that, there seem to be some issues with everything that comes to mind.

True, there's always something to work out . What did you have in mind though? To me CR works pretty much out of the box for this purpose. I would propose:

• Penalty for being disabled to maximum CR, varies by ship (5-15%?).
• Possible penalty to maximum CR for hull (not armor) damage, but a very small amount. Only appreciable over a dozen battles with decent damage. I'm not sure if this is even needed or if it would just be atmospheric.

Perhaps each time a ship is disabled and then recovered it gets a 15% CR hit, repairable only at a dockyard? Or the percentage could be hull dependent: a tough old Dominator doesn't really care about another welded on hull plate, while a Hyperion *** itself if it has 10kg of unbalanced load.

The issues I see here is that the effect would be instant (after battle) and cumulative, turning the idea of long term damage into something that has a direct impact on the next fight, where you'd have less CR. That would really compel you to stay close to a repair facility, constantly warding off that penalty. I don't like mechanics that discourage adventure that much.
I'd also not like for it to only apply when your ship gets disabled, heavy damage should suffice.

Any other ideas how to use CR long term?

Hmm, the impact on future fight was intentional - it gives a penalty for losing ships. How about this: instead of giving a CR penalty on top of whatever the ship got from deployment and damage, it just lowers the maximum? Then, if the penalty is reasonable, it has no effect on chain fighting. With regards to staying near facilities: any system where you can only recover X with them encourages staying near them, but as long as players aren't losing a ship multiple times it should still operate in decent condition. And this way gives lots of feedback to the player about when they should start babying a ship - there won't be any surprises.

Mh, I guess you could just circumvent the problem and introduce a new stat, like "structural integrity".  ...which, thinking about it, would actually not be all that new.  After all, disabled ships' hulls "gain" twice their normal HP at the moment, which in my mind represents just what I'm talking about, the structural integrity of the ships metal(?) frame. The game could keep track of that stat between engagements. Buuut, more complexity

Pillars of Eternity has a similar mechanic were you faint in a battle if you lose your stamina (which regenerates after battle), but you have enough health to last for several fights (but it can only be restored by resting).

Could be, but as you said, extra stats are bad. I do like the idea of ships limping off quite a bit.

For example: consider if you get into a long fight and are pushing a ship into low CR, but not quite malfunction, territory to win the fight. All of a sudden you take some hull damage, dropping the ship into malfunction territory. The fight is now basically over in the most frustrating way possible - not only are you almost out of "health", but you are also completely crippled by malfunctions.

This way you have at least a chance (and a strong initiative) to flee and save the ship. Isn't it much more frustrating when your ship is suddenly lost in an explosion because of some random hit(s) in that fight?

To me, very much no. Right up until the minute that last hit gets in, the fight is exciting and competitive. It is much more frustrating to have the game disable a key weapon or an engine do to RNG malfunctions - that is rage inducing. Components getting shot out is different - I had a way of preventing it, either with maneuvering or shield use.
I have a very clear idea of when that last hit is going to be - we can see the health bar, so nothing about it is random. In the current system there is already a strong reason to retreat: don't lose the ship! But in the current system its much more doable than in the proposed one with CR loss: malfunctions cripple a fleeing ship's chance of getting away.

However, taking the same number of hits earlier in the battle, before the CR timer starts ticking down, would not result in the same amount of "damage". Which is weird.

Mhh. It's admittedly unusual for a game mechanic, but I think it makes kinda sense. Take for example a boxing match. A boxer might be able to recover from good hit to the chin in the first round, which would knock him out in the fifth because he's much more exhausted. Even if there were no more direct hits in between. Similar a ship that has been fighting so long that it runs on backup systems and hope would be much more susceptible to a hit than a fresh and neatly run ship with unoccupied damage control teams.
(And since the fight will soon be over once your CR begins to degrade, this should not come up too often anyway.)

Then again, the video game concept of a heavily injured/damaged fighter/vessel being just as agile and potent as one in pristine condition never sat well with me, so maybe it's just my personal pet peeve coloring my judgement.

I agree with you completely here about it making sense (the same thing has always struck me as odd as well), but it makes for a much better game imo. Downward spirals are very realistic, but are not fun to receive or inflict.

[Hari Seldon]

Downward spirals are not fun, but people should not "rage" that they have to retreat battle after receiving critical damage because if they had taken better care of their armor and shields then the damage would never have reached the structural integrity and caused the malfunctions from the critical damage.

Hitpoints totally could be merged with Armor and "Structural Integrity" could be what Hitpoints used to be.  Seriously, if you increase the armor and/or shields enough that makes up for the lack of hitpoints (so yes ships would have to be re-balanced but it could totally work).

In real life armor can be much more important than the structural integrity underneath it (eg. if an armor-penetrating round gets through a tank's armor ... then shrapnel or plasma kills the crew or blows up the ammunition inside BOOM dead ... less so for things larger than tanks but you get the idea).

This idea would also make those repair gantries actually useful.  Even tugs would get a lot more helpful because they could drag damaged ships out of combat if the damaged ship cannot fly away on its own engine power.  And this idea would make it much easier for the enemy to surrender because you can disable their ships instead of blowing them up every time.  And I love that it would be harder to permanently lose ships to accidents because they do not blow up as easily.

I think a change like this is like the controversial changes that just happened CR: it is more realistic and makes things more difficult but improves gameplay because it adds depth (eg., before the changes to CR, bounty hunting was a grind).  I fervently hope that you guys spend some time trying this idea out because it could be awesome.

[Dark.Revenant]

I feel that numerous goals can be tied together with an updated damage and repairs system.  We want ships to feel like important, permanent investments that you don't acquire or lose lightly.  This can coincide with a decrease of availability and an increase in price to add soul, weight, and importance to ships.  At the same time, ships should be costly and make sudden fleet growth more difficult, prolonging the experience of the game via progression.  And while we're at it, the cost of defeat can be mitigated from total loss to a setback by letting defeated ships limp back home.

How can this be done?

Take the current system: ships lose CR by entering battle, sometimes during battle, and (if hull is damaged or the fleet is harried) after battle, on average about 30% CR.  Hull and armor can also be damaged; some ships come home with no damage, others can have nearly 100% damage.  On average it ends up being roughly equal to CR loss in cost (though, repairing from 0 is generally more expensive than recovering from 0).  Both types of damage (CR and Repairs) end up on the same bill, the total cost of recovery is merely the worse of the two rather than the sum of the two.  As a result, recovering nearly-destroyed ships costs quite a bit, but the general wear and tear of battle is fairly easy to circumvent.  Stations giving instant repairs doesn't help, either.  And if a ship hits 0, which they often do, it is more often than not gone... Until later in the game where you have skills to make that chance higher -- when you no longer really need it.

First things first: making ships stick around longer.  Ultimately, making the ship merely more likely to repair after battle is lame and detached from the reality of the battle: it freaking exploded!  Once a ship blows up like that, it should be a lost cause, or at least future scrap or a D variant.  Instead, ships would have a transitional state between hitting 0 hull and actually blowing up and becoming a "disabled" hulk.  Let's call this "crippled".  To represent hit points in this state, which would be some function of max hull rather than an advertised stat, a gray bar is used instead of red or green.  While crippled, other AIs treat it as living for the purposes of pathfinding and such, and friendly AI will avoid shooting it, and it is still a valid escort target.  Enemy AI would depend on their disposition to you: pirates would avoid shooting it because they want to capture it, but the Luddic church would make sure to blast that cursed technology to slag.  When crippled, a ship would act as if it was overloaded with the added penalty of having engines malfunction all the time.  In addition, being crippled would cause a flame-out.  It can eventually limp away but not that much else.

Crippled ships would be the norm as far as casualties are concerned; the ship would be unable to continue fighting but would have a logical reason for returning alive.  It could also tie into reputation; crippling enemy ships would not make you drop as much as if you outright disabled or destroyed them.  Maybe you could give a standing order to your fleet to annihilate the enemy, leaving nothing alive -- making it more likely for the enemy to retreat and leave you with salvage to pick up.

The crippled state would be repaired before anything else on the ship, and until it is no longer crippled, the ship would act as if it were mothballed and have a steep burn speed penalty.  This would drill in the feeling of limping back home and make the decision to "leave it behind" (scuttling) viable.  Plus it would give an excuse to have better pacing for escape scenarios, as you would not be that worried about your fast and healthy fleet members, but you would definitely need to put in work to save your crippled ships.

This can also tie into officer death, at some point; if the officer's ship is crippled, you can ride in like a knight and save his ass from the fire.  The player would feel like they have agency and importance by being able to make a solid impact on their own fleet's survival, rather than hoping the fickle hand of the AI RNG will spare their ships this time.

Plus, it cuts down on save scumming because crippled ships would be a temporary rather than a permanent setback.

[Cycerin]

Im just going to quickly chime in and say that I don't think a change on the level of what Gothars suggests is warranted, but that I agree that ship permanence and loss has to be delicately managed going forward.

I like what DR posted above, and I also think that flat-out repairing ships after battle is a mechanic that needs some more detailed reworking. Its hard to envision an elegant way to solve it without introducing a more detailed mechanic for ship death as outlined above.

[Megas]

With crippled, there is no need for disabled, just crippled to destroyed.  When I see the screen flash white due to a kill, I expect the ship to explode into pieces like in a classic arcade shmup, but that does not happen in Starsector.  The idea of crippling a ship sounds nice in that if I really want to kill the ship, the ship does not need to leave behind a greyscale husk after an explosion - it can explode into a million pieces instead.

[Dark.Revenant]

A way of avoiding the issue wherein retreating becomes more complicated with crippled ships: at 33% or 50% hull away from death, the engines would completely fail and the ship would be dead in the water.  Then if any super-crippled ships remain, they count as dead for victory purposes.

[Hari Seldon]

A way of avoiding the issue wherein retreating becomes more complicated with crippled ships: at 33% or 50% hull away from death, the engines would completely fail and the ship would be dead in the water.  Then if any super-crippled ships remain, they count as dead for victory purposes.

CR loss, malfunctions, engine failure etc. starting at 50% or less hull sounds easy to implement.  Maybe we should figure out how complicated/hard we want to make this.

[Dark.Revenant]

I meant more as a way for there to be additional granularity to the crippling mechanic.  The idea of having a crippled state is so the player explicitly knows *this ship is messed up*, and needs to GTFO.  AI behaviors are allowed to change based on cripple state, etc.

[Clockwork Owl]

Just had some thoughts about it... What about fighter wings?

I had set an Onslaught's CR to zero in a simulation, without intending it, but the effect was quite nice. Shame we can't get to see this in game that much... Which is another reason I support this.

[Unfolder]

I don't understand, doesn't CR already do this? If you take a large amount of damage (any significant damage really), you suffer a CR penalty even if redeployed immediately. Or is that unique to SS+? If so, then yes vanilla should do this.

[Pushover]

I don't understand, doesn't CR already do this? If you take a large amount of damage (any significant damage really), you suffer a CR penalty even if redeployed immediately. Or is that unique to SS+? If so, then yes vanilla should do this.

The idea would be to have a semi-permanent CR reduction if you take a ton of damage. The ship was so damaged, it could not be repaired without spending a few days getting repaired at a friendly station. Supplies would no longer fix every problem on your ships.

[Megas]

Most ships already take a few days to recover CR if no friendly base is handy.  One reason I use frigate hordes is fast CR recovery.

[Unfolder]

The idea would be to have a semi-permanent CR reduction if you take a ton of damage. The ship was so damaged, it could not be repaired without spending a few days getting repaired at a friendly station. Supplies would no longer fix every problem on your ships.

I do not really like this idea, as it would not be fun, I don't really see what it adds to the game from an enjoyability perspective, it's limiting rather than additive. There is already more than enough griefing from CR dynamics as it is, as well as loss dynamics (losing a ship, particularly a rare ship, is horrible without omnifactory). In effect, crippling damage would partition total loss damage into smaller segment, rather than losing a whole ship, you loss half a ship if you take, say, 75% damage. Since loss penalties are, imho, completely and totally broken in vanilla, to the point of making the game semi-unplayable, the idea of a semi-loss penalty is just more grief.

One compromise I COULD see, is if you had a mobile repair gantry, that could uncripple crippled ships on the fly. Maybe...but overall though it seems like a big ball of hair without too much payoff.