Author Topic: Mesons  (Read 16817 times)

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Offline Lucifer, the Morning Star

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #90 on: December 28, 2018, 02:11:24 PM »
I agree with the decision to start at medium calibre and leave Meson design alone. Honestly Steve, I'm not trying to tell you how to play your game, but I regularly run campaigns past mag con, as do several other people. It seems that your approach is to fix things to fit your niche rather than our strategy of exploring what's available and working from there, so we often find unintended consequences you woild never stumble upon, such as this Meson issue. Honestly it seems to me that this is less of a matter of Meson power and more a matter of bad ship design. Not to say that you or anyone else is bad at building ships, but that you haven't explored the many, many options as much as some people have to find the better ways to make a ship more efficient. If you build slow ships, for instance, a beam will cripple you. However, at the end of the day, it is your game that you code for yourself, so the final call is up to you. But as someone who uses mesons more than anyone else I know (I even founded a religion based on worshipping the Meson ;)), I feel I have explored the field and it's power more than many people. You've created this amazing game that I and many others (mostly in the discord) have spent many hours figuring out the quirks of, from deriving your wacky armour equation to creating calculators to help design ship size. It would be a crying shame in my opinion to see such a unique and interesting weapon as a Meson completely reworked due to fundamental design flaws.
 
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Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #91 on: December 28, 2018, 03:57:41 PM »
I agree with the decision to start at medium calibre and leave Meson design alone. Honestly Steve, I'm not trying to tell you how to play your game, but I regularly run campaigns past mag con, as do several other people. It seems that your approach is to fix things to fit your niche rather than our strategy of exploring what's available and working from there, so we often find unintended consequences you woild never stumble upon, such as this Meson issue. Honestly it seems to me that this is less of a matter of Meson power and more a matter of bad ship design. Not to say that you or anyone else is bad at building ships, but that you haven't explored the many, many options as much as some people have to find the better ways to make a ship more efficient. If you build slow ships, for instance, a beam will cripple you. However, at the end of the day, it is your game that you code for yourself, so the final call is up to you. But as someone who uses mesons more than anyone else I know (I even founded a religion based on worshipping the Meson ;)), I feel I have explored the field and it's power more than many people. You've created this amazing game that I and many others (mostly in the discord) have spent many hours figuring out the quirks of, from deriving your wacky armour equation to creating calculators to help design ship size. It would be a crying shame in my opinion to see such a unique and interesting weapon as a Meson completely reworked due to fundamental design flaws.

If your objective is to derive the most efficient ship design for any given situation and maximising that efficiency is where you choose to devote your efforts, then I completely understand that my approach to playing/creating Aurora is going to seem very strange from your perspective.

For me, Aurora is designed for role-playing immersion over months of play that leads to interesting/challenging situations and generates great fiction. If I am going to devote time to something, it will be creating the most interesting setting, or perhaps trying to make the ship designs or ground replicate some historical period or nation or a specific sci-fi milieu. I might spend time creating a multi-start with different philosophies (both political and military) and see what happens. Spoilers and ruins and survey discoveries get thrown into the mix to change the path of the story. Spending time to build the most efficient ship I can, regardless of setting or role-play style or the perspective of the building race, isn't much fun from my perspective, so I don't devote a lot of effort to it.

I know that is probably frustrating from your perspective, but this is my philosophy for game play and game design. There are many games available for whatever type of game play people enjoy, but I am obviously going to design my own game to suit my own style of play. My goal isn't to maximise the number of Aurora players, but to create a relatively niche game for players who enjoy this particular style of game.

I guess that is a lot of perspective for one post :)
« Last Edit: December 28, 2018, 03:59:32 PM by Steve Walmsley »
 
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Offline Father Tim

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #92 on: December 28, 2018, 04:55:06 PM »
Quote from: MajGenRelativity link=topic=10229. msg111684#msg111684 date=1546026477
Quote from: Father Tim link=topic=10229. msg111680#msg111680 date=1546024793
My empire considers it a design flaw to have any component with an explosion chance over 1%.


If your engines have an explosion chance of 1%, your power modifier must be tremendously low.  Would you mind sharing some of your ship designs with me? I don't want to clutter them up here, so you can either PM me here or on Discord at MajGenRelativity#4971.  In my opinion, it's impractical to have a military ship with that low a modifier, as it would be very slow.

Given the impracticality of running military ships with a 0. 1 power modifier to get a 1% base explosion chance, I'm assuming Father Tim is referring to the overall chance of an explosion when being hit by a meson (i. e.  base chance / HTK )

If he's referring to the base chance, yes, I thoroughly agree with MGR.

Actually, I'm mis-remembering instead of going to look things up and dropping a '0'.  I should have said my empires never use increased-power engines or power plants (with their increased chance of explosion) on proper warships.  That would make the base explosion chance 10%, right?  My empires will frequently use reduced-power engines, with the consequent reduced explosion chance, for fuel efficiency reasons.  So somewhere around 5-7% explosion chance by the time we're building battleships.

I should have said our philosophy is "any component with an explosion chance over 10% is a design flaw."
 
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Offline Lucifer, the Morning Star

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #93 on: December 28, 2018, 05:19:27 PM »
I agree with the decision to start at medium calibre and leave Meson design alone. Honestly Steve, I'm not trying to tell you how to play your game, but I regularly run campaigns past mag con, as do several other people. It seems that your approach is to fix things to fit your niche rather than our strategy of exploring what's available and working from there, so we often find unintended consequences you woild never stumble upon, such as this Meson issue. Honestly it seems to me that this is less of a matter of Meson power and more a matter of bad ship design. Not to say that you or anyone else is bad at building ships, but that you haven't explored the many, many options as much as some people have to find the better ways to make a ship more efficient. If you build slow ships, for instance, a beam will cripple you. However, at the end of the day, it is your game that you code for yourself, so the final call is up to you. But as someone who uses mesons more than anyone else I know (I even founded a religion based on worshipping the Meson ;)), I feel I have explored the field and it's power more than many people. You've created this amazing game that I and many others (mostly in the discord) have spent many hours figuring out the quirks of, from deriving your wacky armour equation to creating calculators to help design ship size. It would be a crying shame in my opinion to see such a unique and interesting weapon as a Meson completely reworked due to fundamental design flaws.

If your objective is to derive the most efficient ship design for any given situation and maximising that efficiency is where you choose to devote your efforts, then I completely understand that my approach to playing/creating Aurora is going to seem very strange from your perspective.

For me, Aurora is designed for role-playing immersion over months of play that leads to interesting/challenging situations and generates great fiction. If I am going to devote time to something, it will be creating the most interesting setting, or perhaps trying to make the ship designs or ground replicate some historical period or nation or a specific sci-fi milieu. I might spend time creating a multi-start with different philosophies (both political and military) and see what happens. Spoilers and ruins and survey discoveries get thrown into the mix to change the path of the story. Spending time to build the most efficient ship I can, regardless of setting or role-play style or the perspective of the building race, isn't much fun from my perspective, so I don't devote a lot of effort to it.

I know that is probably frustrating from your perspective, but this is my philosophy for game play and game design. There are many games available for whatever type of game play people enjoy, but I am obviously going to design my own game to suit my own style of play. My goal isn't to maximise the number of Aurora players, but to create a relatively niche game for players who enjoy this particular style of game.

I guess that is a lot of perspective for one post :)

Steve, my father, I am firmly in your camp on this issue. I love writing stories for Aurora, I have several of them. Min-maxing and efficiency has never been my cup of tea, it's all about the lore for me. For me, it's just more about the general balance of the game. Even if I never touch it, I wouldn't want it to be messed with if it affected the game for other people. I don't touch missiles with a ten foot pole, but if you suggested making missiles 100x more expensive, I'd object because I could see how it could effect other people even if it helped me. I like using mesons, but honestly I wouldn't really care if they were removed. I just feel that they don't need this level of nerfing, so I'll advocate for the devil and defend them. If I wanted a mechanically balanced game I don't know why I'm playing this one (kek). (Shameless plug, join the Discord for AARs and stuff, we've got a whole section dedicated to them <3)
 
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Offline MajGenRelativity

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #94 on: December 28, 2018, 05:22:46 PM »
Quote from: MajGenRelativity link=topic=10229. msg111684#msg111684 date=1546026477
Quote from: Father Tim link=topic=10229. msg111680#msg111680 date=1546024793
My empire considers it a design flaw to have any component with an explosion chance over 1%.


If your engines have an explosion chance of 1%, your power modifier must be tremendously low.  Would you mind sharing some of your ship designs with me? I don't want to clutter them up here, so you can either PM me here or on Discord at MajGenRelativity#4971.  In my opinion, it's impractical to have a military ship with that low a modifier, as it would be very slow.

Given the impracticality of running military ships with a 0. 1 power modifier to get a 1% base explosion chance, I'm assuming Father Tim is referring to the overall chance of an explosion when being hit by a meson (i. e.  base chance / HTK )

If he's referring to the base chance, yes, I thoroughly agree with MGR.

Actually, I'm mis-remembering instead of going to look things up and dropping a '0'.  I should have said my empires never use increased-power engines or power plants (with their increased chance of explosion) on proper warships.  That would make the base explosion chance 10%, right?  My empires will frequently use reduced-power engines, with the consequent reduced explosion chance, for fuel efficiency reasons.  So somewhere around 5-7% explosion chance by the time we're building battleships.

I should have said our philosophy is "any component with an explosion chance over 10% is a design flaw."

I'd still like to see some of your ship designs, as even power mod 1.0 seems a bit slow for a warship.

Edit: I don't use increased power power plants for anything other than fighters.
« Last Edit: December 28, 2018, 05:28:04 PM by MajGenRelativity »
 

Offline Lucifer, the Morning Star

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #95 on: December 28, 2018, 05:25:47 PM »
Oof, just saw your meson change. Honestly this seems like a bad way of going about it. There is now exactly 0 reason to be using mesons. At early levels they are actually terrible, as with a 4 layer armour ship my chance at damaging internals is 6%, with every other possibility dealing 1 point to a random spot on armour. Or, I could use a laser and just cut through armour with guaranteed death after a little bit. And since it scaled in tech cost with lasers, there is still no point. It's not even a matter of RP anymore, they are just objectively bad weapons now, the worst in the game. Hell, microwaves can kill a ship more effectively. Picking mesons as your weapon now is literally only for challenging yourself, because any ship with it is neutered.
 
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Offline somebody1212

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #96 on: December 28, 2018, 05:31:04 PM »
Alright: Proposal.

If we have to have the meson nerf, can we at least have an option in game setup to allow the nerf to be undone (by giving everyone an otherwise hidden "0% block rate" tech immediately).

Can't find the thread where people were posting suggestions for additional setup options but this seems to be a divisive enough issue to be worth splitting.

EDIT: Similar options could also be used for the oft-discussed "can we spinal mount / reduced size mount non-laser beam weapons" and "can we make X beam weapon be turretable / non-turretable".
« Last Edit: December 28, 2018, 05:32:56 PM by somebody1212 »
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Offline Jovus

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #97 on: December 28, 2018, 06:31:55 PM »
I wouldn't say this makes mesons useless, but I would say this does the exact opposite of addressing the ultimate objection about them by turning them into early game weapons.

Early game, it shouldn't be too hard to research down to ~30% stoppage chance for a meson, much like you would research up to visible light or near UV laser wavelength by the time you hit ion. At 30%, a single meson should expect to penetrate 3 and a bit layers of armour - quite reasonable for sending them against targets around the ion tech level, especially if you use large swarms of fighters to deploy a hundred mesons or so. (Three is somewhat light armour, but definitely within the realm that I use for things like carriers and missile ships that I don't intend to be on the front line - the exact sort of target a fighter swarm would prioritize.)

If you want to bump it up and say the enemy is likely to have 5 layers of armour, well, each meson has about a 17% chance to penetrate that much armour. Against a swarm of 100 (not an unreasonable number for someone who prioritizes that strategy; I've done it myself) that's 17 internal hits. Not great, sure, but probably more internal hits per interval than you're getting through other means (at least until you've stripped off the armour). Definitely enough to take down this 5-layer ship fairly quickly (although certainly less quickly than before).

Compare end-game penetration chances. A 7% stoppage chance, into which you've sunk a lot of research points (comparable to getting lasers that will do 168 damage) means that you can expect to penetrate 14 layers of armour. Fourteen is a tiny number of armour layers when you're around gas-core AM drives. That laser itself will penetrate about 20 layers of armour (or 24 if you figure in template overflow) and do 17 points of shock damage (calculated according to the new shock changes) besides.

tl;dr: The armour stoppage change to mesons forces them to be only viable in the ion-MPD age and below.
 
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Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #98 on: December 28, 2018, 07:40:11 PM »
Within the last three posts I have one person saying mesons are now useless in early game and another saying they are now only useful in the early game :)  However, at this point the change is coded and I have moved on to boarding combat. I'll see how mesons fare in play test. Thanks for all the views expressed and the feedback.

I won't be adding options for weapons to have completely different mechanics. If I create an option for every alternative mechanic suggested (in this or any other case), I will never finish the game.
« Last Edit: December 28, 2018, 07:41:46 PM by Steve Walmsley »
 
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Offline QuakeIV

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #99 on: December 28, 2018, 09:22:11 PM »
Probably for the best.

If the mesons need finagling then that can presumably wait until later.  I personally think as long as the overall mechanics are basically fine then all is well at least until the game has re-entered a playable configuration.  Its all partly guesswork until people are actually able to experiment with all of the new options anyways.
 

Offline somebody1212

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #100 on: December 30, 2018, 11:13:04 AM »
Proposal: Given that Advanced Mesons currently have little purpose other than just having a longer range than a regular meson, can Advanced Mesons retain the current "always bypass all armour and shields" mechanic that mesons currently have?
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Offline Steve Walmsley (OP)

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #101 on: December 30, 2018, 11:44:06 AM »
Proposal: Given that Advanced Mesons currently have little purpose other than just having a longer range than a regular meson, can Advanced Mesons retain the current "always bypass all armour and shields" mechanic that mesons currently have?

No, that would be a lot more powerful than the other 'advanced' weapons in respect to the 'normal' version.

I know that from the perspective of tournament play, particularly high-level tournament play, some people don't like the meson changes. However, Aurora is designed/intended for campaign play, not tournament play, so I am always going to make design decisions based on the effect in campaigns, even if that has a detrimental impact on tournament play (real or perceived). Secondly, now the decision on mesons is made, I am not reopening that particular debate (in my own head, at least) until I have some play test experience with those new rules within the vastly changed campaign environment of C# Aurora.

We have a lot of debates on the forums about different ideas for Aurora and it helps me a lot in terms of thinking it through. There are often many different opinions expressed, which means that usually one or more people in the debate would prefer a different outcome than the decision I eventually make. However, everyone moves on and joins in the next debate and eventually we might come back to the topic if the weight of opinion changes.
 
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Offline Agm-114

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #102 on: December 30, 2018, 01:40:50 PM »
One of the things that really bugs me is the constant dissmal of tornament play. 

The tornaments we run are designed to emulate the restrictions of a campaign.   Most tornament designs are just designs from campaigns that people are trying to improve. 

We have only actually run one tornament, and that was a "what ridiculous design is the best" sort of thing.
« Last Edit: December 30, 2018, 01:44:38 PM by Agm-114 »
 

Offline Whitecold

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #103 on: December 30, 2018, 01:45:01 PM »
One of the things that really bugs me is the constant dissmal of tornament play.

The tornaments we run are designed to emulate the restrictions of a campaign.  Most tornament designs are just designs from campaigns that people are trying to improve.



It doesn't seem to be a difference in tournaments, but between low tech and high tech, and Steve's campaigns tend to be lower tech. In any case, since so many things changed, and only Steve can currently play test all these changes, we can only wait.
 

Offline Agm-114

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Re: Mesons
« Reply #104 on: December 30, 2018, 01:55:48 PM »
If this is a difference between low & high tech he has issue with why wouldn't he have reffered to it as such.