Proposal for 1.82: combat balance changes

[Norby]

Maybe the current "sharpshooter" AI can be kept if accuracy is set to 11 to rarely put an Elite enemy into missions.

[cim]

way to implement them in 1.80 can be found

The closest you'll get to that is the Balance Test OXP I put together earlier, I think, though there are a few points in that where the settings could be turned up a bit further.

rather than having to wait for 1.82 to be released

I would guess that by the time the various balance changes have been made and more importantly tested we'd be at the very least moving in to the bug-fixing part of the release cycle anyway. Looking at what needs to be done and what already has been done very little of it is going to be suitable for a 1.80.1 release, unfortunately.

Maybe the current "sharpshooter" AI can be kept if accuracy is set to 11 to rarely put an Elite enemy into missions.

The accuracy 5-10 range can probably be kept mostly as it is in 1.80, since you never get them in the core game.

In terms of how good they actually are, I would say "Dangerous" - Deadly or Elite would require much more situational awareness and strategic cleverness from them, rather than just raw aim.

[cim]

Tonight's nightly will have a few extra balancing features.

1) Missile damage is more predictable - the influence of closing speed has been halved. This means that a single missile hitting a shielded Cobra III is unlikely to destroy it except sometimes in a direct head-on collision. Hopefully this will solve the early game problem where a player who doesn't yet have ECM will often lose fights with most ships because they'll "win" the fight and then get a missile launched at them.

2) The combat odds calculator has been changed a bit - plain weight of numbers counts for more than it used to, and the thresholds for good/bad odds have been adjusted. You should see groups of 2 or 3 ships often being willing to attack the player - especially in the early game before the player arms their ship up a bit.

Nothing here should affect the combat simulator, so no need to re-test that, but please test how the spacelanes feel, especially the "new Jameson" experience.

There are also a few extra variables in the populator script for people who want to make broad OXP changes to the armament and skill of the NPC ships.

[Venator Dha]

1) Missile damage is more predictable - the influence of closing speed has been halved. This means that a single missile hitting a shielded Cobra III is unlikely to destroy it except sometimes in a direct head-on collision. Hopefully this will solve the early game problem where a player who doesn't yet have ECM will often lose fights with most ships because they'll "win" the fight and then get a missile launched at them.

Just had an incident with a new Jameson: Survived a head-on missile strike, lost front shield and 2 energy banks, but survived to destroy the hostile. This would never have happened before.
The other interesting thing from the game play perspective was that it destroyed all my cargo (3tc computers) leaving me in the station without enough money for fuel - sold my 2 remaining missiles to continue An interesting start.

[cim]

One thing I've been playing with for the last couple of weeks is revising the laser balance - specifically, bringing down the damage/time but not damage/heat of the beam and military lasers.

It makes dogfighting considerably more fun, I think, since you can fire your laser more than 3 seconds in every 30 - a ratio that I think rather encourages the supremacy of sniping as a combat method because that makes it much easier to not be hit while you're waiting a long time for your laser to cool. It should also make combat rather more forgiving for new players - even a skilled pilot will find their laser overheats eventually in a protracted fight, but a new player won't be out of the fight for some time just for a couple of seconds of poor aim.
(Sniping still works about as well as it did before, by the way: you just have to hold onto the target for a few more seconds)

I plan to push this in to the main branch so that it can be tested by the various testing volunteers on this thread: my current impression is that it's the last change needed to fix the combat balance.

There are two possible ways to merge it in:
1) As a change to the hard-coded laser settings.
2) As a change which allows laser properties to be defined as part of the item in equipment.plist, including creating entirely new lasers.

Option 2 would have two disadvantages, mainly for OXPers:
a) The "twin plasma cannon" weapon would be removed. This has the potential to break OXPs, but I'm not sure anyone actually used it since it was pretty terrible in practice and not installable on most ships. OXPable projectile/plasma weapons might come back after 1.82.
b) The "weapon_energy" shipdata property would no longer set laser energy, only missile explosion energy (and you really shouldn't be using it for missile explosion energy either since that routine has its own problems). Obviously you can work around this if you're still around to update the OXP by just giving the ship a custom laser.

I still need to do some more testing of my own on this before it gets merged (the branches are on github if you feel like compiling it yourself) - if any OXPers have particularly strong opinions on which way to do it, let me know.

[Switeck]

Are you reducing damage/time by reducing rate-of-fire?
Or reducing damage-per-shot?
Or both?

I consider the high rate-of-fire for the beam and military lasers to be mostly wasteful especially if "walking" fire across a hard-to-hit target (due to range and/or maneuvering) -- you miss most of your shots but spike heat outrageously high.

[cim]

Damage per shot. You can still walk your shots - it won't waste as much heat, and the bits that hit won't do as much damage. As before it's better not to do that.

Rate of fire is tricky because the laser entity visually only lasts 0.1 seconds, so if you fire less often it doesn't look like a beam laser. If you make the visual last longer, then you get odd results because a ship can turn quite far in 0.25 seconds and that detaches the laser from it in a way that isn't too noticeable at 0.1 (solvable, but requires a fair bit of rewriting of both the laser visual and the ship laser firing code).

[Bogatyr]

I don't know, I think blazing away in the midst of a furball where you can actually see the ship you're fighting is much more fun compared to running away and sniping at 2 or 3 pixels from 25km. Sniping has its place but it would be nice to have a choice. As it is, even small groups of decent pirates can be instant death if you come out of jump drive too close to them. And the hardest random hits contracts it seems are all but impossible in 1.80, they can hit you from 25km and shred you in about one second.

[Norby]

The "twin plasma cannon" weapon would be removed.

I found a few old ships only which use Twin Plasma Cannon as aft weapon by default: Firefly, Lampyris, Merlin, Paladin, Pallas and Tepiu, so this is not a problem imho.

Weapon energy is mainly used to set to 0 for special objects and 15 for beam lasers which is the default anyway, but there are many normal usage also.

Used for laser settings: Anarchies, Blackjack's Bullion, Cataclysm, Coyote's Run, Deposed, Griff's fixed shader krait(EW), Ionics, Ixian freighter, Llama, Longway, UPS-courier, RVandGS, Saleza, Spyhunter, Staer9 Ghost gunship, Tianve, Xeptatl's Sword, and this is about the half of the list where I left the search.

Turret weapon energy set in Aquatics, Assassins, Att1, Baakili Far Trader, Commies, Draven, Griff boa prototype, Iron Raven, KillerInsectPack, Liners, Nuvipers, RandomHits, ResistanceCommander, RxandDangerushipset, TCAT, Stellar Serpents, Taranis, The Feudal States, Trident Down, Victim11, Vector and WildShips - again about the half of the OXPs only.

[Venator Dha]

As there soon will be the lasers to test out I thought it a good time to give my view on theses changes:

1) Missile damage is more predictable - the influence of closing speed has been halved. This means that a single missile hitting a shielded Cobra III is unlikely to destroy it except sometimes in a direct head-on collision. Hopefully this will solve the early game problem where a player who doesn't yet have ECM will often lose fights with most ships because they'll "win" the fight and then get a missile launched at them.

This I really like, there was nothing worse then having spent some minutes chipping away at a ship to have it kill you with a sucker punch, and as I said in an earlier post a head on missile hit is not necessarily fatal now. The chance to survive a missile cuts both ways and makes their use more tactical, such as using 1 or even 2 to degrade the hostile before destroying it with a couple of pulse hits. I have found that I'm using missiles more now, but the cost at the very start can be a bit problematic as it does make a big dent in any profits until you can fill the hold with goods. I wonder if ordinary missiles cost say 10Cr then a new Jameson would use them more, as there is still a chance to make a profit on the first few runs. After that the price is less of a problem. I also wonder if it makes hard-heads too expensive now for the damage they deliver.

2) The combat odds calculator has been changed a bit - plain weight of numbers counts for more than it used to, and the thresholds for good/bad odds have been adjusted. You should see groups of 2 or 3 ships often being willing to attack the player - especially in the early game before the player arms their ship up a bit.

I can't be certain but it feels like I'm being attacked more, and that I'm meeting more 2& 3 pirate groups (this might just be chance?). This linked to the changes to the Torus drive mechanics (which I had misgivings about but really think are a good change after playing) gives more survivability to encounters, including the chance to outrun the slower ships leaving 1:1 & 1:2 encounters with are more balanced fights.

[cim]

and 15 for beam lasers which is the default anyway

Which is the 1.80 default, that is - 6 is the proposed default. That actually suggests that disabling weapon_energy for laser damage may be necessary to stop various NPCs getting beam lasers with the heat generation of a 1.81 weapon and the damage of a 1.80 weapon. Looking at the list of other uses the same problem occurs (and most of those OXPs set weapon_energy with the heat generation of a 1.76 or earlier weapon in mind [1], so are already probably rather unbalanced)

[1] 1.76 NPC heat generation meant that essentially the higher you set weapon_energy on an NPC, the quicker its laser would overheat, and the longer it would take to cool down. You actually got statistically more damage out of them by lowering the weapon_energy number.

Turret weapon energy

Turret weapon_energy will continue to work as before.

[cim]

I also wonder if it makes hard-heads too expensive now for the damage they deliver.

I think they've always been too expensive for that. Valuable at getting an opponent off your back for a while, though.

[Cody]

Valuable at getting an opponent off your back for a while, though.

Exactly this!

[Norby]

disabling weapon_energy for laser damage may be necessary to stop various NPCs getting beam lasers with the heat generation of a 1.81 weapon and the damage of a 1.80 weapon.

Ok then go for it, I would like to see some new lasers.

[ffutures]

Which ships have twin plasma cannon - is this part of an OXP? I've never come across them.