v2.2.0 Changes Discussion Thread

[Snoman314]

Yeah I totally get realism ! = gameplay, just that I've always loved elegant abstractions of real world stuff in wargames. As far how deep down the E war rabbit hole Steve wants to go, that's up to him of course, I'm just spit balling. It's an incredibly advanced subject though that can be as simple as "less range" or turn into a psuedo modern-naval combat simulation on the other end of the spectrum.

As for jamming having missiles die 100% of the time, I forgot to mention the other aspect of jamming that's bad: you're blasting everything with EM radiation and making the jammer a huge target. Typically the "counters" to jamming are either burnthrough or anti radiation missiles. If you go that route I don't know if you want to make that yet another missile component or some "default" behavior of missiles, but essentially in that scenario you would have all the missiles chasing the now-massive signature of the jammer.

As I said there's a million routes to this, which is why I always love E war implementations in games, since they always tend to be different.

Maybe a combination of "last known position" for all missiles with a more complex component / missile size addition of an anti radar module that is able to track on  active jammers and active sensors even without a fire control link: they're just chasing the radiation.

Although consistency-wise this opens a rabbit hole of scenarios with passive homing missiles (think sidewinder) if anti-radar are allowed. I'm not sure what the stance on those are (heat seeking, etc.) but it's more complexity and work to do.

Yeah I'm mainly just throwing ideas into the mix as I come up with them, and will wait and see what Steve ends up putting in.

FWIW, I thinking adding HOJ etc is going too far down that rabbit hole for this game, but having missiles continue in the hopes of re-aquiring seems straightforward enough. It directly ties to another requested feature - firing homing missiles on passive contacts, so could be a 2 for 1.

[Snoman314]

If the ECM module otherwise functions as the current one, it cannot be turned off.

Yeah roger. I'm talking through the difficulty introduced if turning it on and off were allowed.

[Mayne]

Is it just me, or does it seem like shields are getting a number of indirect buffs from this patch?

More "leaky" PD because of system changes as well laser warheads is one thing, but another is big alpha strikes from ships bristling with many of the now smaller, high damage particle lances.  I know Aurora's goal isn't to be perfectly balanced like some multiplayer game, but it does make me a little concerned for the NPRs.

On that note, do current NPR designs ever use shields at all? I have played quite a bit but can't recall ever seeing them. 

[Droll]

On that note, do current NPR designs ever use shields at all? I have played quite a bit but can't recall ever seeing them.

NPRs use shields but it's very rare, I've seen it only once.

[kilo]

Is it just me, or does it seem like shields are getting a number of indirect buffs from this patch?

More "leaky" PD because of system changes as well laser warheads is one thing, but another is big alpha strikes from ships bristling with many of the now smaller, high damage particle lances.  I know Aurora's goal isn't to be perfectly balanced like some multiplayer game, but it does make me a little concerned for the NPRs.

On that note, do current NPR designs ever use shields at all? I have played quite a bit but can't recall ever seeing them.

This is hard to predict. Shields are actually pretty bad against big alpha strikes due to their moderate HP/tonnage. Using them against a minor but sontant barrage is something completely different. They do reduce the effect of high penetration beam weapons against shields significantly as well, but these tend to be pretty weak against shields. The damage per increment per ton of stuff like spinal lasers or particle lances is still not stellar and at range with many shots missing, shields will remain important. Against smaller caliber and high dpm weapons or at shorter range shields will still be of minor use.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I also thin it would be more fun if jamming actually was jamming and not some way to masking you like stealth, that is something very different. It also would make throwing all eggs in one basket type of attacks become dangerous as you might get jammed and waste an entire salvo of missiles.

If it can be solved with how they AI operates in the game then I like for jamming to be an of/off thing that also emit EM signals. You also could fit missiles with EM sensors to hit jamming sources too.

If we then had the ability to lock on to either EM and Thermal sources and hit them we would walk around in the circle and be back the first step again. An EM sensor missile should then have a chance to intercept any jamming ships. If these sensors are expensive enough you can't equip them to just every missile.

This would then make missile combat more realistic and in my opinion fun... but I do understand that the AI probably would suffer here.

[nuclearslurpee]

So does the new carronade change mean that we can have reduced-size carronades? 

[kilo]

So does the new carronade change mean that we can have reduced-size carronades? 

They are half size to begin with, so plasma bombers are a go. We can even put small carronades on fighters, without the need of reduced size tech. I worked in VB6 after all. But I bet the one thing that makes reduced-size so unappealing stays in the game. The painfully slow reload.

[Bremen]

Sounds like I've missed discussion on a lot of fun changes!

If this sounds like a huge boost for missiles, it is. However, I also plan on adding some form of ship-deployed decoy to distract missiles, which will be much larger and more costly, but will affect all missiles heading for the parent ship. I may also add a form of fragmentation warhead to missiles, that would be ineffective against ships but able to eliminate decoys and small missiles.

It took me some time to fully wrap my head around this change, since I mentally wanted to handle it like the old ECM vs ECCM system, where having ECCM 3 countered ECM 3. But it's worded as a reduction if the ship has an ECCM advantage, which means equal levels do *not* counter each other out. What's more, even if the ship does have an ECCM advantage reducing the number of decoys by 1 does not necessarily negate *all* decoys. So yeah, that seems like a pretty powerful change. I think we might be approaching the era of big honking anti-ship missiles with tricked out subsystems (I'm not opposed to this).

I know you mention decoys for ships (it would be interesting to me if the size of ship decoys was proportional to the ship size, cloaking device style, which might give a little more role for anti-missile escort ships), and after thinking about it that's probably important to provide a ship-side version of the new EW mechanics. But I was also thinking if testing shows this change favors missiles too much, the recent addition of partial warhead damage means you could also do something similar for dedicated ship based point defense weapons - a 6 cm anti-missile laser doing .5 damage and such.

[Zap0]

So, do carronades keep their damage profile or not?
I'm assuming their size goes up to match lasers too?

Damage profile post

[StarshipCactus]

I am hoping to create a situation where larger, smarter and higher tech missiles may have a better chance of inflicting damage than a swarm of small missiles. This will be a huge change so I will be doing a lot of playtesting and tweaking once all the changes are completed, possibly via a campaign with multiple player races.

I always look forward to multiple player race campaigns. I don't think you have done one of those since the VB6 days. I think many of us who have played multi player race games have noticed the C# version has inferior tools to help manage several races that require complicated DB editing compared to the VB6 version that could do many of those things with SM mode. I know I would personally enjoy the ability to trade minerals, wealth and buildings without needing to DB edit, either through SM mode or through the diplomacy window.

All that aside, I'm really looking forward to the missile changes, this seems like a very good direction to take missiles to make them more interesting.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

So, do carronades keep their damage profile or not?
I'm assuming their size goes up to match lasers too?

Damage profile post

Good spot. They still have the original damage profile. I've updated the post.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

I know you mention decoys for ships (it would be interesting to me if the size of ship decoys was proportional to the ship size, cloaking device style, which might give a little more role for anti-missile escort ships), and after thinking about it that's probably important to provide a ship-side version of the new EW mechanics. But I was also thinking if testing shows this change favors missiles too much, the recent addition of partial warhead damage means you could also do something similar for dedicated ship based point defense weapons - a 6 cm anti-missile laser doing .5 damage and such.

Yes, that's an interesting idea. An energy weapon that can't penetrate ship armour but could damage missiles.

[Steve Walmsley (OP)]

So does the new carronade change mean that we can have reduced-size carronades? 

No, as they are half size already

However, after considering it overnight I see no reason they can't have a spinal version, so I have added that to the post.

[Jorgen_CAB]

So does the new carronade change mean that we can have reduced-size carronades? 

No, as they are half size already

However, after considering it overnight I see no reason they can't have a spinal version, so I have added that to the post.

Does the half size half cost now also mean that carronades are even cheaper to increase your ground unit weapons strength as it is based on the focal strength?

This always was sort of a weird interaction with ground force unit offensive values.

Personally I think that ground unit weapons and armour strength should have their own tech lines. It is generally fine when they interact with armour as you really need that technology but weapon techs have quite varied costs and sort of incentivise you to focus on one type and certainly push you toward Carronades to get an early good weapon penetration value on your ground forces.