Author Topic: Crusade - Comments Thread  (Read 44255 times)

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Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #105 on: November 07, 2019, 05:21:03 AM »
I know your Imperium ship designs are probably not the most optimized designs for your tech level, but I thought they'd put up a better fight than that, Swarm is brutal now.

How predictable will they be? Are their ship designs and loadouts going to be the same throughout every game or will they change it up now and again?

Swarm is like a semi-NPR, albeit without populations. Each swarm is a separate race with separate designs and tech, although the overall design concepts will be the same. As with NPRs, the tech will be dependent on how many years have passed in the campaign so later swarms will generally be higher tech than earlier ones. Also, they can gain tech from wrecks so later vessels from the same swarm may be higher tech. They are no longer a single-dimensional threat because they have larger ships with different weapons than the FACs, plus they have some other ship types that haven't appeared in the campaign yet.

I think this swarm was at the higher end of the likely tech level at this stage of the campaign, plus the Imperium was in a terrible tactical situation when the fighting started. Mass missile attacks should be effective against smaller formations. The trick is going to be creating a situation where I don't get run down and obliterated if that doesn't work :) Plus I need to be able to build enough missiles despite a looming Gallicite shortage :)
 
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Offline Bremen

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #106 on: November 09, 2019, 10:15:37 PM »
I know your Imperium ship designs are probably not the most optimized designs for your tech level, but I thought they'd put up a better fight than that, Swarm is brutal now.

How predictable will they be? Are their ship designs and loadouts going to be the same throughout every game or will they change it up now and again?

Swarm is like a semi-NPR, albeit without populations. Each swarm is a separate race with separate designs and tech, although the overall design concepts will be the same. As with NPRs, the tech will be dependent on how many years have passed in the campaign so later swarms will generally be higher tech than earlier ones. Also, they can gain tech from wrecks so later vessels from the same swarm may be higher tech. They are no longer a single-dimensional threat because they have larger ships with different weapons than the FACs, plus they have some other ship types that haven't appeared in the campaign yet.

I think this swarm was at the higher end of the likely tech level at this stage of the campaign, plus the Imperium was in a terrible tactical situation when the fighting started. Mass missile attacks should be effective against smaller formations. The trick is going to be creating a situation where I don't get run down and obliterated if that doesn't work :) Plus I need to be able to build enough missiles despite a looming Gallicite shortage :)

I went to re-read the ground combat bits, and, well, I hope the Imperium research labs are working hard. They seem like they really need some breakthroughs to even the fight; until then the best they can probably hope for is slowing the enemy down.

I'm guessing the Tyranids use genetic enhanced troops but still, wow, that was brutal.
 

Offline chrislocke2000

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #107 on: November 10, 2019, 09:20:12 AM »
Some comments from the last update:

The level of collateral damage from 2 rounds of combat seems huge. I wonder if that was because of the massive overkill and is working as intended or if the chance of wider damage needs to be reduced somewhat.

Conversely the pace of recovering alien ruins seems to be pretty good, has there been an improvement in the chances of recovery?



 

Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #108 on: November 10, 2019, 10:11:52 AM »
Some comments from the last update:

The level of collateral damage from 2 rounds of combat seems huge. I wonder if that was because of the massive overkill and is working as intended or if the chance of wider damage needs to be reduced somewhat.

Conversely the pace of recovering alien ruins seems to be pretty good, has there been an improvement in the chances of recovery?

It was massive overkill and a relatively small amount of infrastructure. I think the main problem with collateral damage at the moment is that it is based purely on damage amount. As tech levels get higher, damage from the same types of forces is higher too. I probably need to add some form of 'minimise collateral damage' orders that makes forces less effective but less damaging and perhaps add 'precision targeting' as a capability so that a unit type has a naturally lower collateral damage output.
 

Offline Agoelia

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #109 on: November 10, 2019, 10:57:11 AM »
Maybe the tech levels that increase damage also decrease what percentage of collateral damage is applied? It should be tuned so that collateral damage still goes up as tech improves, but not as dramatically. Sure, we're developing more destructive weapons, but also targeting, enemy identification, ethics, coordination and/or precision would get significantly better.
 

Offline Zincat

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #110 on: November 10, 2019, 03:06:28 PM »
Maybe the tech levels that increase damage also decrease what percentage of collateral damage is applied? It should be tuned so that collateral damage still goes up as tech improves, but not as dramatically. Sure, we're developing more destructive weapons, but also targeting, enemy identification, ethics, coordination and/or precision would get significantly better.

That supposes you want to.
I'm guessing a lot of races would not care at all.
If you don't care and just want to destroy opposition, you won't really mind collateral damage at all and just shoot to kill
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #111 on: November 10, 2019, 03:08:05 PM »
It was massive overkill and a relatively small amount of infrastructure. I think the main problem with collateral damage at the moment is that it is based purely on damage amount. As tech levels get higher, damage from the same types of forces is higher too. I probably need to add some form of 'minimise collateral damage' orders that makes forces less effective but less damaging and perhaps add 'precision targeting' as a capability so that a unit type has a naturally lower collateral damage output.


But would *total* collateral damage have been lower (or higher) with less overkill and longer, more drawn out fighting?  Or is my only option to police which kinds of forces I use --- avoiding artillery & air power with their higher likelyhood of destroying installations.

If total collateral damage is based on total damage done over the full length of the fight, and it takes the same amount of damage to defeat the foe regardless of time, then my ground commanders (currently) lack much ability to control collateral damage.
 

Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #112 on: November 10, 2019, 03:37:30 PM »
It was massive overkill and a relatively small amount of infrastructure. I think the main problem with collateral damage at the moment is that it is based purely on damage amount. As tech levels get higher, damage from the same types of forces is higher too. I probably need to add some form of 'minimise collateral damage' orders that makes forces less effective but less damaging and perhaps add 'precision targeting' as a capability so that a unit type has a naturally lower collateral damage output.


But would *total* collateral damage have been lower (or higher) with less overkill and longer, more drawn out fighting?  Or is my only option to police which kinds of forces I use --- avoiding artillery & air power with their higher likelyhood of destroying installations.

If total collateral damage is based on total damage done over the full length of the fight, and it takes the same amount of damage to defeat the foe regardless of time, then my ground commanders (currently) lack much ability to control collateral damage.

Collateral damage is based on the cube of the damage of each weapon. Light weapons will do far less collateral damage than heavy weapons, even when inflicting greater overall damage.

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=8495.msg110508;topicseen#msg110508
 

Offline Father Tim

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #113 on: November 10, 2019, 04:24:17 PM »
But will one thousand infantry fighting for fifty combat cycles inflict more, less, or the same collateral damage as fifty thousand infantry fighting for one combat cycle?

Is sending overwhleming strength of numbers -- all else being equal -- likely to reduce collateral damage or increase it? 
 

Offline db48x

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #114 on: November 10, 2019, 05:42:39 PM »
But will one thousand infantry fighting for fifty combat cycles inflict more, less, or the same collateral damage as fifty thousand infantry fighting for one combat cycle?

Is sending overwhleming strength of numbers -- all else being equal -- likely to reduce collateral damage or increase it?

The same, since collateral damage is created from each weapon hit (or was it for each shot taken?) and you're presumably asking about two scenarios with the same number of hits (or shots taken). Just don't forget that your enemy will be firing back. Assuming that you win in both of your scenarios, the scenario where you win quickly presumably means that they got to take fewer shots; there might be less collateral damage just because of that.

As for weapon choice, heavy weapons have always caused the most collateral damage, so that makes sense. Avoiding artillery and air strikes (and missile attacks) would greatly reduce the collateral damage, but put your infantry at greater risk; I hope your population can absorb the additional grief and misery. Those infantry have families you know, and someone has to patch up the wounded.

I like the idea of "precision targeting" weapons. It's a trade-off you can make when designing your forces (and when deploying them, if you have a choice of which forces to deploy) that allows for role-play as well as for choosing which of several criteria to optimize for.
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #115 on: November 11, 2019, 06:56:47 AM »
Precision weapons would not necessarily be better at avoiding collateral damage on Aurora's scale; installations would be valuable positions to protect or take, and it doesn't matter how precise your weapon is when you want to prevent collateral damage but what you are aiming for is exactly what you want to keep intact. They're also more expensive per shot, but can be much cheaper overall because greater precision means less munition wasted to deal with the uncertainty of hitting the target with any given shot.

Training or engagement rules to lower or increase collateral would be useful though. Even for species that are otherwise callous of others, it can be beneficial not to have to replace facilities that could've been taken intact enough instead.

Another option however would be to have the game save what installations were destroyed on the planet, and to let the ruin recovery mechanics from the precursor ruins take over from there, with some tweaking.
 

Offline Garfunkel

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #116 on: November 11, 2019, 12:06:04 PM »
If Steve implements precision weapons, or a precision ability for weapons/units, it should NOT deal less damage but be more expensive. Smart/precision guided munitions are vastly more expensive than "dumb" ones, but also vastly more effective. And military history proves that carpet bombing as well as days long shelling are actually very ineffective for anything else but killing civilians.

To give a sense of scale here, some prices:
JDAM package that can be bolted on a dumb bomb to make it "semi-smart" costs ~$25k.
GBU-12 Paveway II costs ~$22k but Paveway IV (which is a lot more advanced than II) costs ~$85k.
AGM-65 Maverick costs vary a lot depending on model, with the oldest A costing ~$17k to latest L costing  ~$110k
M982 Excalibur costs ~$68k.

For comparison:
155m artillery shell is ~$200 at cheapest for a contact fuse and ~$1k at most expensive for variable-time fuse.
Mk 82 iron bomb is ~2k while Mk 84 is ~3k.

 

Offline Scandinavian

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #117 on: November 11, 2019, 02:55:29 PM »
The practical issue with "smart" munitions is that their smartness is limited by the level at which you can identify and resolve the targets you want to blast. With typical actual battlefield target intelligence, as long as you have rifling in your artillery barrels, your fire support is probably about as smart as it's gonna get.

(I would also be a bit careful with using the price tag of NATO weapon systems as representative of their design or production costs, let alone their practical combat value; there is a reason the American slang for procurement corruption is "pork barrel.")
 

Offline Bremen

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #118 on: November 11, 2019, 03:51:20 PM »
Another possibility might be to have the facility owner's armor tech reduce collateral damage. It doesn't necessarily mean that every civilization plates all their buildings in top of the line armor, just that improved materials tech probably means the buildings are sturdier.

That would mean that if you invade a pre-TNE homeworld with your plasma cannons and fusion artillery, yeah, a lot of civilians and facilities get blown up, but if you invade a colony of a race with similar tech to your own things survive better.

Edit: Another way of looking at the above solution would be that it equalized the collateral damage per ground unit destroyed. Which is to say, it would mean if a pre-TNE civilization lost an average of 1 facility per 100 troop losses, then a high tech civ would also lose about 1 facility per 100 troop losses, the troops would just be correspondingly more powerful.
« Last Edit: November 11, 2019, 03:57:18 PM by Bremen »
 

Offline Hazard

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Re: Crusade - Comments Thread
« Reply #119 on: November 11, 2019, 05:02:24 PM »
Keep in mind that the population losses also scale with the total amount of boom thrown around, and they aren't as easily armoured/benefit from improved materials sciences.

I know that PDCs were removed, and for a good reason, but civilian shelters of some sort might be a good idea, especially as weapon power escalates.