How will chock damage to ship alter tactics?!

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

Just wanted to start a thread on how this new mechanic will alter the style of the tactics in the game from beam combat to missile designs and doctrinal changes.

I find the new system to be quite intriguing and a way to differentiate weapons more and it will hopefully diversify the weapon platforms more.

I suppose that shields in some form will become more common to protect against small number of missiles leaking through the defences, single missiles impacting a ship will be a much bigger concern than before.

I also suppose that spreading your fire among more than one ship will become a slightly more viable option than before once you know you can comfortably penetrate your opponents missile defences. Which in turn will make CIWS slightly more appealing as well.

I also think that this change will make bigger ships and beam combat a little more appealing on average.

It will certainly make bigger missiles with higher yields much more interesting to use in favour of small missiles with a low yield.

The way I see it missiles with a yield of 9 or more will be the entry point where chock damage will start to get interesting. Anything below that will have too low chock damage to have much impact. This means that chock damage from missile combat will start to become interesting at middle game tech levels and above.

Some more thoughts on changes in combat behaviour?

[waresky]

My 2 cents :

am hoping,Steve DONT implements any Stress combat mechanic into a too stressed program.

Better simplify, not more micro management.

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

Well... being a programmer myself I don't see how this mechanic actually would add very much to the CPU strain of the game in general. If that is what you meant.

[Gyrfalcon]

What's there to micromanage?

I'm looking forward to shock damage, actually - it gives a reason to ignore the mathematical 'most damage' model of spamming size-1 missiles at everything in existence and gives a reason to lob some truly large warheads at enemy targets.

Design-wise, ships will want more damage control and maintenance supplies to repair in-combat damage, and it will lead to an actual use for in-combat repairs, especially for heavily-armored ships that can take multiple hits but now need to get their sensors online. Backup systems might also be a good idea - extra reactors for beam combatants, extra firecontrol systems, etc.

[joeclark77]

I would imagine it would reduce the appeal of fleets of large, specialized ships.  You don't want to bet your whole fleet on one well tanked ship carrying the only active sensor.  This will be an additional pressure for the use of small fighters and FACs that are individually disposable but highly redundant en masse.  It'll make the use of passive sensors, as well as active-sensor bouys, drones, and fighters more appealing.

[icecoldblood]

I think it would bring about more compartmentilization. No longer will a large fuel tank be considered safe, neither would one large magazine. Ships would all have to carry backup sensors, Damage control would be essential. It would shake up design considerations as well as fleet composition.

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

Yes, in general I think that the overall size of main ships would creep up a few thousand tones in size to add some redundancy and survivability overall and it might also make more sense to use smaller escorts and larger mission critical ships as well as more smaller specialized ships so the number of them become the redundancy.

It would be nice if we now could armour our ships bridge though, I would certainly want that on larger ships. I would perhaps also like to have an auxiliary bridge module to reduce the chance of my commanding officer dying if the bridge is destroyed/damaged, or something like that.

It will become way more dangerous to put engines and generators with high explosion chances on larger important ships. I might even go so far as to lower the efficiency below normal on very large ships to keep them safe from some random missile taking out the whole ship. You would not want your 80000 tone carrier exploding from a stray missile hitting their engine.

[Brian Neumann]

It would be nice if we now could armour our ships bridge though, I would certainly want that on larger ships. I would perhaps also like to have an auxiliary bridge module to reduce the chance of my commanding officer dying if the bridge is destroyed/damaged, or something like that.

You can put more than 1 bridge on a ship currently.

a mechanism that would allow a design to have a core hull with extra armor would be good.  Most WWII heavy ship designs have a central area that has an extra bit of armor to protect the core areas.  Things like engineering and main magazines would often be protected separately.  Maybe having a slider bar that the designer could attach specific systems to.  Each tick on the slider would be good for 1 extra htk for each attached system.  This way you wouldn't have to design bunches of different systems with the armor.  Just a couple of clicks and the extra tonnage is added to the ship and the indicated systems get extra protection.  Putting an actual points of ship armor around systems would probably be more work than it is worth currently.

Brian

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

But I thought that if you put more than one bridge that just increased the possibility it it being destroyed and thus risk you loosing your captain.

You mean that all bridges need to be destroyed before you risk loosing your captain?

[Brian Neumann]

But I thought that if you put more than one bridge that just increased the possibility it it being destroyed and thus risk you loosing your captain.

You mean that all bridges need to be destroyed before you risk loosing your captain?

I am not sure about the loosing your captain part, but there is another part where if you do not have a bridge the ship takes longer to respond to task force orders.  Kind of like having a poorly trained up ship in its task force training.

Brian

[Jorgen_CAB (OP)]

That seems reason enough to put more than one bridge in larger ships then.