Author Topic: Mesons  (Read 16822 times)

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Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #105 on: December 31, 2018, 07:04:20 PM »
The fact of the matter is that Meson in the current VB6 state are extremely efficient if you have just a slight upper hand in technology and you have exploited that while the opponent neglected the anti-fighter protection defenses in their strategy. Almost no other weapon are ever that effective in the same situation. This is mainly because there are no passive defenses that work. Also, given how easy it will be to render ship engines inoperative now (with much lower strength the larger the engine is) it would be an even worse combination.

I think the new system will work really well, sounds interesting at least.

We also have to understand that role-play campaigns are VERY different from a tournament style play where you ONLY regard game mechanics in an artificial isolated arena and no external factors. Just the fact that no sane human society would use attrition style combat like that with Meson fighters unless really desperate. Wasting good and expensively trained pilots and officers like that would rarely work outside very special situations. Its not like the Japanese started their use of Kamikaze pilots until they were desperate. When you role-play there will usually be many considerations you will need to do outside what is "efficient" from a game mechanics perspective. Many if not most human decisions are politically or emotionally motivated and are made for reasons beyond what is the most efficient thing to do, mostly because human happiness and fulfillment has nothing to do about efficiency and is a highly subjective thing, not to mention most decisions are made by individuals who also have flawed intelligence/knowledge, biases, personal preferences or just egotistical influences. There is a reason why the game add psychological traits to leaders which have no direct impact on the game, this is so they can influence the decisions you imagine they would take and to tell a unique individual story.

In role-play you often try to include these elements into the game which will make what is efficient vary quite differently from what is efficiently from a game mechanics perspective. In role-play you also try as hard as you can not to use fore knowledge of as many things as possible from past experiences playing the game. The people that inhabit this particular game will experience events for the first time and do not have the luxury of past games to draw upon (or game mechanics for that matter).

This is why game mechanics should foremost support play in that respect and "feel" coherent and plausible when you use them in your campaigns.

If you want to play Aurora like a classic game where all you care about are the mechanics themselves you can do that, but as Steve said, the game are not created with that mindset and are not perfectly balanced for it. There have always been a few rather glaring loopholes in the game mechanics which you could abuse to make things way easier to beat enemy NPR players, I don't think C# will remove them all.
 
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Offline Happerry

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #106 on: December 31, 2018, 10:08:03 PM »
Quote from: Jorgen_CAB link=topic=10229. msg111796#msg111796 date=1546304660
We also have to understand that role-play campaigns are VERY different from a tournament style play where you ONLY regard game mechanics in an artificial isolated arena and no external factors.  Just the fact that no sane human society would use attrition style combat like that with Meson fighters unless really desperate.  Wasting good and expensively trained pilots and officers like that would rarely work outside very special situations. 
I object to this statement which de-facto claims people only play as humans, and I also object to your statement that a human society would only use meson fighters if they were being played by someone ignoring RP.  Yes, when fighters die people die, but when any warship dies people die.  And a lot of warships are a lot bigger then fighters.  A lot of fighters can die, and it'll still be less loss of life then when a fleet dies.  It's not like atmospheric fighters didn't die in large numbers at time in our own history, and throwing a swarm of torpedo bombers at a battleship is no less, and no more 'attrition style combat' then throwing a swarm of space bombers at a space battleship.  Or roll-crafting a swarm of X-Wings verses a Star Destroyer, to pick a random example.

Also, didn't we just have a post pointing out a lot of tournaments are designed to emulate the restrictions of a campaign, not just white space combat optimization and people should stop assuming that tournaments are just white space combat optimization?
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #107 on: January 01, 2019, 05:25:59 AM »
Quote from: Jorgen_CAB link=topic=10229. msg111796#msg111796 date=1546304660
We also have to understand that role-play campaigns are VERY different from a tournament style play where you ONLY regard game mechanics in an artificial isolated arena and no external factors.  Just the fact that no sane human society would use attrition style combat like that with Meson fighters unless really desperate.  Wasting good and expensively trained pilots and officers like that would rarely work outside very special situations. 
I object to this statement which de-facto claims people only play as humans, and I also object to your statement that a human society would only use meson fighters if they were being played by someone ignoring RP.  Yes, when fighters die people die, but when any warship dies people die.  And a lot of warships are a lot bigger then fighters.  A lot of fighters can die, and it'll still be less loss of life then when a fleet dies.  It's not like atmospheric fighters didn't die in large numbers at time in our own history, and throwing a swarm of torpedo bombers at a battleship is no less, and no more 'attrition style combat' then throwing a swarm of space bombers at a space battleship.  Or roll-crafting a swarm of X-Wings verses a Star Destroyer, to pick a random example.

Also, didn't we just have a post pointing out a lot of tournaments are designed to emulate the restrictions of a campaign, not just white space combat optimization and people should stop assuming that tournaments are just white space combat optimization?

I was mostly referring to humans as I guess many play humans and aliens similar in ways to humans. Does not mean you have to and you can role-play differently.

I do not agree that for example WW2 air combat was actually throwing planes at each other in attrition style combat where you didn't expect them to come back or did everything in your power to reduce combat losses of pilots etc... Some were better at this than others, some built their planes or other combat equipment better than other to save their crews which also had great effect on both morale, efficiency and outcome long term on war efforts.

Don't conflate war intensity with the need to protect human life as part of the way to get them to fight in as secure an environment as possible given the circumstances.

What I mean is that no same human society would use attrition warfare if there is another similar way to conduct it resulting in much lower human potential casualties and make it safer at a distance. Where would you find your pilots in such circumstances if it was not due to desperation or some slave like environment?!?
« Last Edit: January 01, 2019, 07:17:43 AM by Jorgen_CAB »
 

Offline Barkhorn

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #108 on: January 01, 2019, 11:50:39 AM »
I agree that people will not accept attrition-for-no-reason, but you need to look at the loss rates for aircraft in WW2.  In some cases they were pretty horrific.  The 8th Air Force regularly accepted 10% aircraft losses, which isn't even including all the partial crew losses.  At the Battle of Midway, both sides lost entire waves of bombers; 100% casualties.

I know it's not aircraft, but look at the Kriegsmarine.  U-boat crews suffered 75% casualties over the course of the war. 

I think our perceptions of casualty rates are shaded by what war is like now.  Nowadays, it makes national news when ~5 soldiers die in one action.  Nearly every single air raid the allies performed lost several times as many.  And the allies did that repeatedly, almost every day for ~3 years.
 

Offline Jovus

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #109 on: January 01, 2019, 12:12:33 PM »
None of that even matters. If I want to play a piece of the Imperium of Man, which regularly glorifies in casualty rates that would make Mao sit up and pay attention, you telling me, "You're having fun wrong!" is just you being an ass.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #110 on: January 01, 2019, 01:06:47 PM »
None of that even matters. If I want to play a piece of the Imperium of Man, which regularly glorifies in casualty rates that would make Mao sit up and pay attention, you telling me, "You're having fun wrong!" is just you being an ass.

It is fine to disagree with someone. However, resorting to personal insults is not acceptable on these forums.
 

Offline QuakeIV

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #111 on: January 01, 2019, 01:55:18 PM »
Rip him I guess.

It might be nice if there were some kind of configurable for your society to calibrate how accepting they are of attrition.  It seems to me acceptance of casualties tends to have a lot more to do with culture and society than it does with an actual species.  I also suspect it has a lot to do with the populations ability to figure out how many people are actually dying.  You'll notice the USSR stood up to immense casualties in world war 2, however you will also notice the official number of deaths tends to fluctuate between 10 and 40 million or so depending on which historian is in vogue.

I don't really know how you would do that based on current game mechanics, seems like something for the future to me?
 

Offline Barkhorn

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #112 on: January 01, 2019, 02:12:29 PM »
Ideally we'd have something like the Ethics system in Stellaris, so cultures can grow and develop over the course of the game.
 

Offline Whitecold

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #113 on: January 01, 2019, 02:52:33 PM »
I don't know what exact strategies were used in tournaments but casualty acceptance should not really part of meson balance. Coming back to the mesons:
1) They should have some form of counterplay by either being limited by shields or armor. In that regard, the new changes make them more interesting, and seem like a step in the right direction.
2) They seem to seriously fall off at higher levels, as lasers will penetrate similar amounts of armor, but will dig deep holes and deal shock damage, while mesons just scratch the armor.
3) They have no range dropoff whatsoever, and large mounts only increase range. That seems a lot less than lasers or railguns which gain both range and damage. Also the strong encourgement to stick to maximum range kinda infringes on the particle beams 'thing'
 
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Offline Father Tim

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #114 on: January 01, 2019, 05:33:04 PM »
It might be nice if there were some kind of configurable for your society to calibrate how accepting they are of attrition.

. . .

I don't really know how you would do that based on current game mechanics, seems like something for the future to me?

That is -- at least in part -- what the 'Racial Determination' species rating (of 1 to 100) was supposed to represent.  PC empires generally ignore all those stats, and NPRs don't do all that much with them either.
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #115 on: January 01, 2019, 08:29:32 PM »
None of that even matters. If I want to play a piece of the Imperium of Man, which regularly glorifies in casualty rates that would make Mao sit up and pay attention, you telling me, "You're having fun wrong!" is just you being an ass.

I'm sorry but that is not what I said... I did say that under the right circumstance you can force people to behave like that. But if you look at history those societies have been quite dysfunctional and not very effective as a result. They usually only premiered the elite and oppressed the rest which usually produce very inefficient societies with rampant state corruption and ferocious political infighting and low overall stability/productivity.

What I meant was that when you role-play you can incorporate those side effects as well, or not... that is up to you.
« Last Edit: January 01, 2019, 08:38:36 PM by Jorgen_CAB »
 

Offline Iceranger

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #116 on: January 01, 2019, 10:02:32 PM »
I don't really see how role play factor come into play in this discussion.

If your setting of your empire values the life of pilots of the fighters, that is totally fine.  In that situation, you avoid using fighters unless cornered, that's fine.  If you choose totally avoid using fighters, that is also fine.  But, this is not the reason of removing the fighters if you don't like it from your role play settings.

Same goes for meson.  Again, it is not 'uncounterable' as many of the players think it to be.  Successful meson designs (aka meson fighters), are highly specialized and require specialized designs to counter them (aka anti-fighter ships).  A general use tool is not as efficient as a specialized tool when dealing with specialized situations, and this definitely apply to Aurora.  I understand that under role play limitations, designing the optimal ships for every role may not be possible.  As a result, if such a fleet fails to defeat a meson fighter swarm, it is not because meson swarm is overpowered.  More often than not, such fleets are not suitable to deal with a swarm of fighters.  A meson swarm will wreck them, a missile fighter swarm will also achieve the same thing, and a swarm of microwave fighters will also mission kill such a fleet.  Thus, the failure of such role play limited fleets cannot be used to argue whether a design is overpwered or not.

It seems to me that there is some degree of misunderstanding about arena/tournament play.  The idea of arena duels comes from the fact that in VB6 NPR/spoilers design ships so inadequately.  Thus, ships we used in the campaign, or the ones derived from them, are tested against each other under a controlled settings.  Typically the two fleets have equal tech and similar BP (including ammunition BP), and are given large enough starting separation to allow tactic maneuvers.  In this way, we can get a better idea about what counters what, and what cannot be countered by what.  From a role play point of view, all these can be viewed as simulation, concept-proofing and prototyping before a design of a ship goes through before production.  I definitely see my imperial naval design bureau are full of optimization freaks to adjust the designs to their best potential.
 

Offline Rich.h

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #117 on: January 02, 2019, 02:15:17 AM »
How about just adding an extra box in the species group, one for attrition or "mass casualties" or somesuch? Keep it as a 0-100 percentile factor, and it is used for every combat engagment of all types that takes place. If you suffer casualties of a percentage equal to or greater than your species attrition rating (from the original starting force amount), then you suffer an amount of unrest points across your empire (could be explained by way of media reports of how the leadership got this latest battle totally wrong).

You could take this a couple of stages further, firstly by having a second attrition rating for other empires (All the tenticle lovers in your empire protesting). Secondly allow a research path for attrition rating that allows you to create a new species with a lower rating than your current one (maybe in set blocks of 10% or such), this allows you to create emotionally dead races for places you really want total control.
 

Offline Jorgen_CAB

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #118 on: January 02, 2019, 04:14:37 AM »
I don't really see how role play factor come into play in this discussion.

If your setting of your empire values the life of pilots of the fighters, that is totally fine.  In that situation, you avoid using fighters unless cornered, that's fine.  If you choose totally avoid using fighters, that is also fine.  But, this is not the reason of removing the fighters if you don't like it from your role play settings.

Same goes for meson.  Again, it is not 'uncounterable' as many of the players think it to be.  Successful meson designs (aka meson fighters), are highly specialized and require specialized designs to counter them (aka anti-fighter ships).  A general use tool is not as efficient as a specialized tool when dealing with specialized situations, and this definitely apply to Aurora.  I understand that under role play limitations, designing the optimal ships for every role may not be possible.  As a result, if such a fleet fails to defeat a meson fighter swarm, it is not because meson swarm is overpowered.  More often than not, such fleets are not suitable to deal with a swarm of fighters.  A meson swarm will wreck them, a missile fighter swarm will also achieve the same thing, and a swarm of microwave fighters will also mission kill such a fleet.  Thus, the failure of such role play limited fleets cannot be used to argue whether a design is overpwered or not.

It seems to me that there is some degree of misunderstanding about arena/tournament play.  The idea of arena duels comes from the fact that in VB6 NPR/spoilers design ships so inadequately.  Thus, ships we used in the campaign, or the ones derived from them, are tested against each other under a controlled settings.  Typically the two fleets have equal tech and similar BP (including ammunition BP), and are given large enough starting separation to allow tactic maneuvers.  In this way, we can get a better idea about what counters what, and what cannot be countered by what.  From a role play point of view, all these can be viewed as simulation, concept-proofing and prototyping before a design of a ship goes through before production.  I definitely see my imperial naval design bureau are full of optimization freaks to adjust the designs to their best potential.

I agree that role-play don't have that much to do about Mesons, this was sort of a separate discussion about the goals and intentions of the design. But role-play and campaign play also give different constraints and thus shift balance in different ways, this is the important thing.

I can give a few very simple examples why tournament style comparison are no more relevant than role-play or regular campaign play, I'm not saying it is not relevant at all. Just that it should have roughly the same weight as anything else.

1. Missiles are hugely different in one of play since you don't have to deal with the logistical side of it in a meaningful way (from mining to deploying them in the correct area) as you need to in a campaign. Missiles also have a few flaws in the mechanic that can be abused if you don't house rule them.

2. JP battles and defenses play no major role in arena play while they do in campaign play in a very different way. This can have huge influences of ship design and priorities.

3. Scouting and reconnaissance are very different in campaigns which mean impacts on ship design and priorities.

4. Defense of worlds and colonies are also completely different which mean different constraints to ship configurations.

5. In campaign play you rarely face something on equal terms which will highly influence how you build a fleet and/or defences in a major way.

6. Intelligence of the opponent can heavily influence your choices of what is deemed an efficient design in role-play or campaign play.

You simply can't assume that the constraints in mock battles will ever be true for a real campaign.

Meason weapons are extremely efficient in JP attack/defence where it is pretty impossible to stand off.
 

Offline sloanjh

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #119 on: January 02, 2019, 07:25:46 AM »
It seems to me that there is some degree of misunderstanding about arena/tournament play.  *snip*
I can give a few very simple examples why tournament style comparison are no more relevant than role-play or regular campaign play, I'm not saying it is not relevant at all. Just that it should have roughly the same weight as anything else.

*snip*
You simply can't assume that the constraints in mock battles will ever be true for a real campaign.

Hi All,

A few observations:

1)  It seems to me like some of the people who play tournaments feel that others have been overly dismissive of their insights, and that has generated a request for a little more respect.

2)  The purpose of this thread was for Steve to find out what people think about mesons.

3)  Steve has made a decision, and signaled that further discussion isn't going to affect that decision.

4)  We've already had one "play nicely" warning in this thread *after* Steve posted that he was done for the time being.

5)  A common (unconscious) failure mode in online discussions is to not respond to what was actually said, but instead to rebut a more extreme stance than was stated.  This seems to be going on here in the quoted exchange - the OP was trying to explain the tournament methodology they use; the response seems to read as refuting the idea that tournament insights are better and then refuting a claim that tournament sees the same constraints as campaign (which was not claimed).

Given the above, I think everyone should be asking themselves "what am I trying to accomplish with my next post" before writing it, especially since Steve has called a close to the meson debate.  In particular, let's be careful not to fall into a religious discussion about whether tournament or campaign people have better insights into the game.  Otherwise Erik might need to get out the trout....

Thanks,
John
 
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