Author Topic: C# Aurora Changes Discussion  (Read 441913 times)

0 Members and 6 Guests are viewing this topic.

Offline Hazard

  • Commodore
  • **********
  • H
  • Posts: 643
  • Thanked: 73 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #615 on: March 26, 2017, 09:34:39 AM »
When it comes to missile ECM I'd offer 3 different forms of ECM; spoofs, shadows and lures.

Spoofs are the standard, current ECM systems, and work by decreasing the effective range of fire control systems to target the missile.

Shadows increase miss chances of point defense systems by creating illusions of more missiles of that type that soak up incoming point defense fire.

Lures make it more likely that a missile equipped with the lure is hit. While this sounds counter productive, this allows you to create sacrificial missile with a lot of armour and a high lure rating to seed into your salvos and to draw fire from the missiles with big warheads.

ECM systems are deliberately meant to be big, but can work together. This just means you've got some very big penetration aid missiles within your salvo. Advances in technology can decrease the size component and increase the effectiveness, eventually letting you create smaller missiles that have some ECM themselves, but really effective ECM will always require big missiles.

There are of course ECCM systems that can defend against these forms of ECM.
 

Offline bean

  • Rear Admiral
  • **********
  • b
  • Posts: 916
  • Thanked: 56 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #616 on: March 26, 2017, 12:22:48 PM »
I dont think it took very long to unmothball the Ohio battleships into active service.
The what?  The last battleship Ohio was decommissioned in 1922.  I think you're referring to the Iowas, and it took a year or so each, and a lot of effort.  Ships go out of date in mothballs pretty fast.

Re longer-range beams, it's pretty obvious that current beam weapons propagate FTL, or they wouldn't be able to hit at range, because ships would be dodging.  I headcanon it as part of the fire-control system, and I don't think that doubling current beam ranges would break the game badly. 
I'll have to dig up some old suggestions I have on EW, but would be excited to see more of that.

Re faster-firing larger missiles, this is long overdue.  Currently, you suffer a penalty in terms of firepower equal to the square of missile size per HS of launcher, which forces down missile sizes.

One thing that might help make small missiles less effective would be to make bigger missiles inherently more resistant to damage.  Alternately, I'd suggest allowing AMMs to make proximity kills of incoming missiles, which makes big salvos relatively less powerful.
This is Excel-in-Space, not Wing Commander - Rastaman
 

Offline Bremen

  • Commodore
  • **********
  • B
  • Posts: 743
  • Thanked: 150 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #617 on: March 26, 2017, 01:21:26 PM »
Generally agree with everything with one exception.

1) Increased beam range. I am reluctant to increase beam range significantly. The main reason is that currently faster ship plus longer-range beam vs beam opponent = instant win. if we make any major change to beam range, that will mean longer range beam (even when slower) vs beam ship = instant win, because the faster ship with shorter-range weapons will be destroyed before it can close the (increased) range.

The big reason that this is a problem is that a faster ship with a longer range beam can hold the range regardless, so longer range beams don't really make it worse. It is true that it would give an advantage to a slower ship with a longer range beam (since the enemy needs longer to close the range), but generally beam range beyond the earliest tech is limited by fire control and damage at max fire control range is tiny due to single digit hit chances (and you mentioned making missiles interceptable inside 5 second increments). So if the enemy can close you'll probably score a few hits as they do but it wont be the unbeatable advantage that faster and longer range is, even with longer range beams.

I do think this needs some sort of fix if beam combat is going to become a major part of the game, though, not to mention kiting being a 100% auto win button is just kind of boring. That's why I suggested some sort of way to "snare" enemy ships.
 

Offline TheDeadlyShoe

  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • Posts: 1264
  • Thanked: 58 times
  • Dance Commander
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #618 on: March 26, 2017, 03:10:27 PM »
i find that beam ships are generally awful at long range, since they have both damage degradation and accuracy degradation, so it will be difficult to get gunned down on the way in.  For example, its rare to score any significant number of kills (or any kills at all) on a group of swarm FACs before they find their range, unless your ships are almost as fast as theirs to begin with.  Bear in mind that i mostly play at TLs 3-5.
« Last Edit: March 26, 2017, 03:29:02 PM by TheDeadlyShoe »
 

Offline Bremen

  • Commodore
  • **********
  • B
  • Posts: 743
  • Thanked: 150 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #619 on: March 26, 2017, 03:17:35 PM »
Yep. If you can just hold the range forever, it doesn't matter if it takes 2 hours to kill the enemy. But if it takes them 5 minutes to close from extreme range to medium range, you'll get some free hits in but it wont be a completely one sided battle simply because damage falloff is so high.
 

Iranon

  • Guest
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #620 on: March 26, 2017, 04:15:58 PM »
The big reason that this is a problem is that a faster ship with a longer range beam can hold the range regardless, so longer range beams don't really make it worse.

Beam ranges affects the parts where we get "interesting" fights though, where one size has range and the other side speed.
When beam ranges are considerably longer than they are now, the longer ranged side will be heavily favoured and nail-biting situation where one side is trying to rush the other one down rare.
Note that things like Microwaves already allow a short window of one-sided combat to be quite telling if that's what you want to design for; too-long beam ranges would be more problematic than too-short ones.
 

Offline Bremen

  • Commodore
  • **********
  • B
  • Posts: 743
  • Thanked: 150 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #621 on: March 26, 2017, 04:36:31 PM »
Beam ranges affects the parts where we get "interesting" fights though, where one size has range and the other side speed.
When beam ranges are considerably longer than they are now, the longer ranged side will be heavily favoured and nail-biting situation where one side is trying to rush the other one down rare.
Note that things like Microwaves already allow a short window of one-sided combat to be quite telling if that's what you want to design for; too-long beam ranges would be more problematic than too-short ones.

I... what? I'm not talking about beam ranges of 50 million km or something where it might actually take hours to close the range. Right now if you have any speed advantage whatsoever you're looking at closing from their beam range to your beam range in a few minutes at most, taking maybe a few minor hits as you do so. It would if anything increase how often you get a nail biting situation like that, since right now either you can hold the range open forever or they can close to their range pretty much instantly, since beam range is so tiny compared to average ship speeds.
« Last Edit: March 26, 2017, 04:38:12 PM by Bremen »
 

Offline Borealis4x

  • Commodore
  • **********
  • Posts: 717
  • Thanked: 141 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #622 on: March 26, 2017, 06:25:29 PM »
With regard to the various missiles vs beams ideas:

1) Increased beam range. I am reluctant to increase beam range significantly. The main reason is that currently faster ship plus longer-range beam vs beam opponent = instant win. if we make any major change to beam range, that will mean longer range beam (even when slower) vs beam ship = instant win, because the faster ship with shorter-range weapons will be destroyed before it can close the (increased) range.

2) Reduced overall speeds for missiles and ships (and reducing tracking speeds). This also creates the above problem, but by changing speed rather than range.

3) I like the idea of removing the link between missile size and reload time, or at least significantly reducing the impact, as this will negate some of the advantages of smaller missiles.

4) Also like the idea of some type of missile frame that would favour larger missiles (more frame overhead for smaller missiles), although this might impact the effectiveness of AMMs in the anti-missile mode. I guess one option would be to allow fractional missile launcher sizes so you could use missiles of size 1.2 for example.

5) I am happy to remove the distinction in the power curve between missiles and normal engines. From a consistency POV, there really is no reason why a missile engine could be boosted more than a normal engine. However, I will probably just allow normal engines to be boosted more, rather than reducing missile boost. If missiles are reduced in speed too much, they become too easy for point defence to destroy (some may argue that is already too easy).

6) I will include missiles in whatever final version of electronic warfare I decide upon.

7) I like reducing sensor range and it is something I was already considering (one of the reasons I haven't written the detection code yet). It would make the game more tactical and provide more reason for scouts & pickets. While not impacting missiles directly, the main requirement for missile ships is to detect their opponents (as missiles can be designed with very long-range), so this would effectively reduce missile range. At the moment, active sensor range in km is equal to:

Racial Active Sensor Strength per HS * Sensor Size  * Racial EM Tech * Square Root of Resolution * 10000.

The simplest change is to base the sensor range on the area (or volume) covered rather than the linear range. In essence, divide the result of the above calculation by the area or volume. This will shorten ranges considerably and is much more realistic. This would require some increase in base sensor strength though or the ranges would be reduced dramatically. I will run some numbers and post on this separately.

Sorry to keep bringing this up, but I'd really like to know what you think of this idea.

What do you think about the idea of being able to scale up rail-gun components (capacitors, launch-velocity, and caliber) like you can with sensors with technology only increasing efficiency?

As it is, only missiles have any meaningful customization option.
 

Offline Haji

  • Captain
  • **********
  • Posts: 442
  • Thanked: 53 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #623 on: March 26, 2017, 06:34:26 PM »
When it comes to missile ECM I'd offer 3 different forms of ECM; spoofs, shadows and lures.

Spoofs are the standard, current ECM systems, and work by decreasing the effective range of fire control systems to target the missile.

Shadows increase miss chances of point defense systems by creating illusions of more missiles of that type that soak up incoming point defense fire.

Lures make it more likely that a missile equipped with the lure is hit. While this sounds counter productive, this allows you to create sacrificial missile with a lot of armour and a high lure rating to seed into your salvos and to draw fire from the missiles with big warheads.

ECM systems are deliberately meant to be big, but can work together. This just means you've got some very big penetration aid missiles within your salvo. Advances in technology can decrease the size component and increase the effectiveness, eventually letting you create smaller missiles that have some ECM themselves, but really effective ECM will always require big missiles.

There are of course ECCM systems that can defend against these forms of ECM.

By and large I quite like the idea. The problem is with ECCM equivalent.

Right now the reason I don't use ECM on missiles is that I usually have ECCM on my ships and there is nothing stopping me from hooking them up to point defence which means ECM is at best of very limited utility (assuming superior technology) and at worst a totally wasted space (assuming equivalent technology).

Here's the thing. The anti-missiles have agility which helps interception. What that means is that as the time progresses anti-missile interception chances get steadily higher and there is no counter to that. By the time of the medium fusion era only size 2 and size 3 missiles are economical to use at all and by anti-matter era arguably only size 1 missiles are worth building. As such what we need is some way for missiles to get past defences that may be mitigated but not countered as the penaids (be they ECM, armour or something else) will essentially be nothing more than counter for ever higher agility. Hence the ECCM equivalent you propose should be really limited in use or maybe even altogheter absent (although in the latter case the ECM cannot make missile completely untargatable, as it can do now on the max level).
 

Offline Bremen

  • Commodore
  • **********
  • B
  • Posts: 743
  • Thanked: 150 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #624 on: March 26, 2017, 07:28:32 PM »
Sorry to keep bringing this up, but I'd really like to know what you think of this idea.

What do you think about the idea of being able to scale up rail-gun components (capacitors, launch-velocity, and caliber) like you can with sensors with technology only increasing efficiency?

As it is, only missiles have any meaningful customization option.

You can already change caliber, launch velocity, and capacitor charge rate based on tech. IIRC Steve plans on eventually adding spinal railguns as well. In the suggestion thread (since it didn't seem to belong here) I did suggest maybe being able to dedicate tonnage to extra capacitors, though. So that if, say, a laser took 8 power to fire, instead of storing 8 power you could have it be larger but store 16 power and be able to fire twice in successive increments before having to stop to recharge.

Let's say the laser takes 8 and charges 3 power per 5 seconds. Normally it would work like:

5 seconds: Fires, 0/8
10 seconds: Charges 3, 3/8
15 seconds: Charges 3, 6/8
20 seconds: Charges 2, Fires, 0/8
25 seconds: Charging, 3/8

With extra capacitor, it could look like
5 seconds: Fires, 8/16
10 seconds: Charges 3, Fires, 3/16
15 seconds: Charges 3, 6/16
20 seconds: Charges 3, Fires, 1/16
25 seconds: Charges 3, 4/16
 

Offline Borealis4x

  • Commodore
  • **********
  • Posts: 717
  • Thanked: 141 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #625 on: March 26, 2017, 09:13:20 PM »
You can already change caliber, launch velocity, and capacitor charge rate based on tech. IIRC Steve plans on eventually adding spinal railguns as well. In the suggestion thread (since it didn't seem to belong here) I did suggest maybe being able to dedicate tonnage to extra capacitors, though. So that if, say, a laser took 8 power to fire, instead of storing 8 power you could have it be larger but store 16 power and be able to fire twice in successive increments before having to stop to recharge.

Let's say the laser takes 8 and charges 3 power per 5 seconds. Normally it would work like:

5 seconds: Fires, 0/8
10 seconds: Charges 3, 3/8
15 seconds: Charges 3, 6/8
20 seconds: Charges 2, Fires, 0/8
25 seconds: Charging, 3/8

With extra capacitor, it could look like
5 seconds: Fires, 8/16
10 seconds: Charges 3, Fires, 3/16
15 seconds: Charges 3, 6/16
20 seconds: Charges 3, Fires, 1/16
25 seconds: Charges 3, 4/16

What I mean is that instead of just having 8 (is it 8?) tiers of calibers, capacitors, and launch velocity you have 100 like you do with radar resolution and engine size. Choosing a bigger component means making a heavier gun and researching techs like calibers (should be renamed), capacitors and launch velocity (also needs to be renamed) would make smaller guns more powerful like when you research more advanced sensor technology.
 

Offline swarm_sadist

  • Lt. Commander
  • ********
  • s
  • Posts: 263
  • Thanked: 21 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #626 on: March 26, 2017, 11:39:41 PM »
What I mean is that instead of just having 8 (is it 8?) tiers of calibers, capacitors, and launch velocity you have 100 like you do with radar resolution and engine size. Choosing a bigger component means making a heavier gun and researching techs like calibers (should be renamed), capacitors and launch velocity (also needs to be renamed) would make smaller guns more powerful like when you research more advanced sensor technology.
That wouldn't work out because unlike sensor range, the change in damage is very limited. Going from 1 damage to 2 damage to 3 damage will mean you end up having set calibre brackets that are optomized and most efficient, with all other calibres being safely ignored. Only way your idea would work is if damage became a float, or the damage had a percentage to do more (or less) damage each hit. I do, however, support being able to produce 'most' calibre sizes at very early game, with technology increasing efficiency.

By and large I quite like the idea. The problem is with ECCM equivalent.

Right now the reason I don't use ECM on missiles is that I usually have ECCM on my ships and there is nothing stopping me from hooking them up to point defence which means ECM is at best of very limited utility (assuming superior technology) and at worst a totally wasted space (assuming equivalent technology).

Here's the thing. The anti-missiles have agility which helps interception. What that means is that as the time progresses anti-missile interception chances get steadily higher and there is no counter to that. By the time of the medium fusion era only size 2 and size 3 missiles are economical to use at all and by anti-matter era arguably only size 1 missiles are worth building. As such what we need is some way for missiles to get past defences that may be mitigated but not countered as the penaids (be they ECM, armour or something else) will essentially be nothing more than counter for ever higher agility. Hence the ECCM equivalent you propose should be really limited in use or maybe even altogheter absent (although in the latter case the ECM cannot make missile completely untargatable, as it can do now on the max level).
I think Steve is going to revamp the EW elements in the game. Hopefully, dedicated ECM/ECCM for use against missiles. Although making missiles use agility to dodge attacks could also work.
« Last Edit: March 26, 2017, 11:42:22 PM by swarm_sadist »
 

Offline alex_brunius

  • Vice Admiral
  • **********
  • Posts: 1240
  • Thanked: 153 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #627 on: March 27, 2017, 03:47:55 AM »
5) I am happy to remove the distinction in the power curve between missiles and normal engines. From a consistency POV, there really is no reason why a missile engine could be boosted more than a normal engine. However, I will probably just allow normal engines to be boosted more, rather than reducing missile boost. If missiles are reduced in speed too much, they become too easy for point defence to destroy (some may argue that is already too easy).

I made a suggestion for shared efficiency vs size curve between missiles and normal engines some time back here:

http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=7448.msg76067#msg76067

Shared efficiency vs size curve makes alot of sense and would also improve fighter design considerably as engine size would actually matter for them, as well as add the same exponential scaling from missile engines to ship engines ( and allow bigger but reasonable efficiency bonuses for above +100HS engines too if we want ).


I don't think it's a good idea to allow normal engines to use the same boost levels as missiles can however, since it would allow Point defense fighters/FAC carried in hangars to fly out and match the speed of any incoming missile, thus being able to fire effectively for as long as it takes to shoot down all the missiles even if you only have a small amount of PD ships.


What do you think about the idea of being able to scale up rail-gun components (capacitors, launch-velocity, and caliber) like you can with sensors with technology only increasing efficiency?

I would love to see big but crude tech guns, and I am also curious what Steve thinks of this idea.
« Last Edit: March 27, 2017, 04:07:56 AM by alex_brunius »
 

Offline IanD

  • Registered
  • Commodore
  • **********
  • Posts: 725
  • Thanked: 20 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #628 on: March 27, 2017, 05:07:52 AM »
Just to clarify as I cannot see it spelt out and I tend to have multple NPRs starting on Earth.

Max planet population of Earth = 12 Billion = (player race population x  population density modifier) + (sum of all (NPR population on planet x population density modifier))
IanD
 

Offline DIT_grue

  • Lieutenant
  • *******
  • D
  • Posts: 197
  • Thanked: 33 times
Re: C# Aurora Changes Discussion
« Reply #629 on: March 27, 2017, 08:14:46 AM »
5) I am happy to remove the distinction in the power curve between missiles and normal engines. From a consistency POV, there really is no reason why a missile engine could be boosted more than a normal engine. However, I will probably just allow normal engines to be boosted more, rather than reducing missile boost. If missiles are reduced in speed too much, they become too easy for point defence to destroy (some may argue that is already too easy).

Sure there is - a missile's engine only has to work for as long as its endurance; anything else has to be maintainable forever. It isn't even possible to restart a missile once (you have to build in a whole new engine and there can be no coast phase at all), and I'm given to understand that in RL rocketry achieving that is an important distinction in capability and carries commensurate costs (although improved reliability is a big part of its value, which doesn't really translate).


This could be mitigated by making planet based missile PDCs less efficient, and all in a realistic way. Since escaping gravity is a costly thing, planet-based missiles could require a 2-stage design, in which the first stage is just something to escape gravity, and the second stage is the normal TN missile. This would make sense and would make planet-based missile PDCs less unbalanced.

Except that with Trans-Newtonian tech (even 'Conventional' engines!) it is completely trivial. Gravity is irrelevent: all that matters is the fuel cost to move a particular distance, and it doesn't make the slightest difference how curved the space traversed to cover that distance is or isn't. You can RP otherwise if you want, but trying to justify it against game mechanics as the default assumption would be more of an uphill slog than escaping Earth's gravity well.