Change Log for 6.00 discussion

[DFDelta]

One question about POW.
What happens if I pick up survivors from a friendly or allied race?
Lets say my scout happens to come across some ships of my long term allies that are fighting a losing battle against another unknown race. Now I decide to do something nice and rescue their pods. What happens?

[ollobrains]

well steve has so far posted we can pick them up and they will be retained seperate in crew quarters and then on youre planets when u drop them off.  The big question remains is what is he doing next for 5.7 or after to tie it in with diplomacy or even putting them on empty colonies if u have enough of them and they have tolerances for that enviornment

I think theres more updates from steve to come as he tidies things up i dont think the 5.7 log is done by any stretch yet wach this space

[Theokrat]

A straightforward suggestion on the missile engines:

Steve, could you please make the fuel-efficiency of missile engines heavily dependent on their size?

This would go a long way of solving the issue that size-1 ASMs are very effective and render AMM efforts essentially worthless. Essentially to overcome this issue, a size-1 ASM should have seriously reduced combat characteristics.

I would suggest heavily increasing the fuel-requirement of the smaller engines, so that smaller missiles would be much more limited in the attainable range. This would provide a good incentive to use larger missiles, against which AMMs are viable.

In your current example of an AMM, posted in the other thread, only 2% (0.02MSP) of the missile size is fuel. A player could increase this to 0.2 MSP easily at the cost of say agility and get a good size-1 ASM design of 60mkm against which AMM would be entirely futile. If you made changes such that your design would require about 0.3 MSP of fuel to go to its current range, then the size-1 ASM "exploit" would not be viable anymore.

[ollobrains]

A straightforward suggestion on the missile engines:

Steve, could you please make the fuel-efficiency of missile engines heavily dependent on their size?

This would go a long way of solving the issue that size-1 ASMs are very effective and render AMM efforts essentially worthless. Essentially to overcome this issue, a size-1 ASM should have seriously reduced combat characteristics.

I would suggest heavily increasing the fuel-requirement of the smaller engines, so that smaller missiles would be much more limited in the attainable range. This would provide a good incentive to use larger missiles, against which AMMs are viable.

In your current example of an AMM, posted in the other thread, only 2% (0.02MSP) of the missile size is fuel. A player could increase this to 0.2 MSP easily at the cost of say agility and get a good size-1 ASM design of 60mkm against which AMM would be entirely futile. If you made changes such that your design would require about 0.3 MSP of fuel to go to its current range, then the size-1 ASM "exploit" would not be viable anymore.

I agree size affecting engine size as an output to fuel consumption

[wedgebert]

Some other options for helping larger missiles be more viable are:

  Increased damage efficiency as your warhead gets larger. After all, you just need one fuze regardless of warhead size. Thus if a 2.0 MSP warhead was more than twice as strong than a 1.0 MSP warhead, you'd be making an actual trade off of Damage vs Chance of a Hit.

  Either a new armor tech could be added, properties could be added to existing armor or a new module could be added that grants minor damage resistance. This kind of already exists with shields, if you can't do damage faster than it recharges, you're in trouble. Something similar to Sword of the Stars 2's damage resistance could be added to armor that would negate some of the damage pattern of weapons. For example, if a missile did damage in a 5-3-1 pattern (top to bottom), one level of resistance would negate the highest row leaving 3-1. Or maybe just the lowest level leaving 5-3. Either way, unless a size 1 missile happened to hit a section of armor that had been completely destroyed, it would be ineffective. Like throwing a grenade against a tank vs throwing the same grenade inside an open hatch. Ideally this would greatly increase the mass of armor, so that smaller frigates and destroyers might shrug off AMMs, but only much larger heavily armored warships could afford to protect against larger missiles.

  Having distance based accuracy penalties that can be countered by adding small amounts of MSPs in the form of onboard AIs or better communication gear. Since any missile with no onboard sensor is reliant on the firing ship's MFC, this can be explained as the missile relying less on the firing ship to provide instructions that may be experiencing a delay due to the distance from the firing ship. This would limit AMMs to a much shorter range, while larger missiles can devote some space to maintaining their accuracy at a longer ranger. Then again, I can't remember of Aurora is supposed to have FTL communication cananocially or not. If it does, it renders this on pointless.
 
  Finally, building upon the last one, giving missile fire control's a limit to the number of active missiles they can control at a time. If your currently designed MFC can only control six missiles in flight at once, you'll probably want larger missiles that can attack from further out. Otherwise a beam armed ship might be able to realistically close the range without taking critical damage. New tech can influence the number of missiles controllable per launcher. Ideally your fire control links would be pooled together based on range, so if you had two AMM MFCs that can control 6 missiles at 60M KM each, and two ASM MFCs that can control 3 missiles at 300M KM, you attack with six missiles at a time, or the two ASM MFCs could be handed control of six AMMs to increase the density of your defensive fire. (Or likewise increase your offensive fire once you got within 60M KM).

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Either a new armor tech could be added, properties could be added to existing armor or a new module could be added that grants minor damage resistance. This kind of already exists with shields, if you can't do damage faster than it recharges, you're in trouble

i was thinking about this but the problem is the number of weapons that just deal 1 point of damage like the gauss cannon. and it strains credulity that hundreds of nuclear explosions (AMM spam) would do no damage whatsoever.  So I was thinking of a component that had a 50% chance of negative 1 point of damage, 20% chance to negate 2, improvable with technology, or something like that.  Maybe even something ala the Cloaking Device/Jump Drive that had to be scaled to a size of warship.  Starting at like efficiency 10 to be practical.

[Erik L]

  Finally, building upon the last one, giving missile fire control's a limit to the number of active missiles they can control at a time. If your currently designed MFC can only control six missiles in flight at once, you'll probably want larger missiles that can attack from further out. Otherwise a beam armed ship might be able to realistically close the range without taking critical damage. New tech can influence the number of missiles controllable per launcher. Ideally your fire control links would be pooled together based on range, so if you had two AMM MFCs that can control 6 missiles at 60M KM each, and two ASM MFCs that can control 3 missiles at 300M KM, you attack with six missiles at a time, or the two ASM MFCs could be handed control of six AMMs to increase the density of your defensive fire. (Or likewise increase your offensive fire once you got within 60M KM).

I use something similar in Astra Imperia. Each sensor suite has a number of channels. You can only track a number of targets as you have channels. Ships, fighters, missiles. And as an added bonus, friendly indirect weapons (missiles and other weapons) consume channels also.

[CheaterEater]

Increased damage efficiency as your warhead gets larger.  After all, you just need one fuze regardless of warhead size.  Thus if a 2. 0 MSP warhead was more than twice as strong than a 1. 0 MSP warhead, you'd be making an actual trade off of Damage vs Chance of a Hit.

Although I like this to help split up roles between large and small missiles, it doesn't actually hurt size-1 missiles unless you reduce their power and thus force them to have a larger warhead which hurts their performance.  This hurts AMMs, which helps large missiles more than it helps small missiles (assuming they aren't stopping all the large missiles).  Independently of rebalancing though, it gives magazine space advantage to large missiles; more boom for your magazine space helps alleviate one of the primary missile disadvantages.  Combined with a few other overhead adjustments you could make it impossible to have a long-ranged accurate and fast size-1 missile that still does any damage.

Either a new armor tech could be added, properties could be added to existing armor or a new module could be added that grants minor damage resistance.  This kind of already exists with shields, if you can't do damage faster than it recharges, you're in trouble.  Something similar to Sword of the Stars 2's damage resistance could be added to armor that would negate some of the damage pattern of weapons.  For example, if a missile did damage in a 5-3-1 pattern (top to bottom), one level of resistance would negate the highest row leaving 3-1.  Or maybe just the lowest level leaving 5-3.  Either way, unless a size 1 missile happened to hit a section of armor that had been completely destroyed, it would be ineffective.  Like throwing a grenade against a tank vs throwing the same grenade inside an open hatch.  Ideally this would greatly increase the mass of armor, so that smaller frigates and destroyers might shrug off AMMs, but only much larger heavily armored warships could afford to protect against larger missiles.

Instead of a flat nullification of absolute damage, make it reduce small amounts of damage more than large amounts.  As an example, if you make it so that every piece of armor has a 10% chance to shrug off a damage point, -5% for every previous damage point that tried to make it through and +2% for every armor point beneath it, you give extra power to penetrating weapons and better armor for taller stacks but don't completely nullify light weapons.  Under your method above I could fly within range of an enemy AMM ship and completely laugh off hundreds of damage points which I feel would be unfair and unbelievable when working with the energy scales of Aurora.  It could be believable though depending on your ideas for physical properties of trans-newtonian materials, so it's kind of a wash.  I do like adding some form of damage reduction though, as it would help differentiate heavily armored ships from lightly armored ones.

Having distance based accuracy penalties that can be countered by adding small amounts of MSPs in the form of onboard AIs or better communication gear.  Since any missile with no onboard sensor is reliant on the firing ship's MFC, this can be explained as the missile relying less on the firing ship to provide instructions that may be experiencing a delay due to the distance from the firing ship.  This would limit AMMs to a much shorter range, while larger missiles can devote some space to maintaining their accuracy at a longer ranger.  Then again, I can't remember of Aurora is supposed to have FTL communication cananocially or not.  If it does, it renders this on pointless.

Looking at a previous thread (can't post a link due to low post counts) it seems that, by canon, the MFC just paints the targets (assuming it hasn't changed somewhere else along the line).  I would assume the electronics for beam-riding missiles is a very small percentage of the total mass for a multi-ton missile (even a size-1 missile is 1/20th of 50 tons for 2. 5 tons, versus the AIM-7 Sparrow at less than 1/2 a ton).  It also adds extra overhead that isn't needed, since you could put the overhead somewhere else (like the warhead size above) and get roughly the same mechanic without adding another factor.  I've also seen it mentioned on the forums and on the wiki that trans-newtonian materials gives FTL communications, but I couldn't find a quote from Steve in particular.

Finally, building upon the last one, giving missile fire control's a limit to the number of active missiles they can control at a time.  If your currently designed MFC can only control six missiles in flight at once, you'll probably want larger missiles that can attack from further out.  Otherwise a beam armed ship might be able to realistically close the range without taking critical damage.  New tech can influence the number of missiles controllable per launcher.  Ideally your fire control links would be pooled together based on range, so if you had two AMM MFCs that can control 6 missiles at 60M KM each, and two ASM MFCs that can control 3 missiles at 300M KM, you attack with six missiles at a time, or the two ASM MFCs could be handed control of six AMMs to increase the density of your defensive fire.  (Or likewise increase your offensive fire once you got within 60M KM).

This would really hurt reload rate differences for any mid-long range engagement.  Since the missile flight time is normally so much longer than the reload rate for any reasonable missile size you might as well drop the reload rate and save yourself the cost.  It would also hurt the large-salvo long-reload tactics like the Soviets in Steve's campaign.  I do believe that MFCs are too cheap at the moment, but I don't have any decent ideas to change that at the moment.

[wedgebert]

i was thinking about this but the problem is the number of weapons that just deal 1 point of damage like the gauss cannon. and it strains credulity that hundreds of nuclear explosions (AMM spam) would do no damage whatsoever.  So I was thinking of a component that had a 50% chance of negative 1 point of damage, 20% chance to negate 2, improvable with technology, or something like that.  Maybe even something ala the Cloaking Device/Jump Drive that had to be scaled to a size of warship.  Starting at like efficiency 10 to be practical.

Actually, I think the negated damage thing makes a good bit of sense. You can take a 50 cal machine gun and open up on an Iowa class battleship all day long and not do much more than scratch the hull. Even nukes might survivable in space with the right armor. With no atmosphere and thus no shock waves, the primary destructive element of a nuclear weapon (on Earth). Your armor needs to be able to deal with the high levels of x-ray radiation a spaceborne nuclear explosion produces. This radiation can cause both spallation and impulsive shock from vaporizing layers of armor. Granted we don't have anything today that could survive a direct hit from a weapon, but we also don't have duranium.

Maybe instead of armor, a new type of shielding would work. A dampening field of some sort or a structural integrity field. The latter would still let small weapons inflict structural damage if the armor had already been pierced.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

50 cals are not designed to hurt warships - gauss cannons definitely are!  But that aside, the gameplay implications are less than appealing. You basically eliminate an entire branch of beam weaponry as collateral damage. Or if you try to balance them appropriately (RP costs included), Gauss cannons would either be underpowered against wall fields or totally overpowered against ships without them. Or relegated entirely to point defense duties - glorified CIWS. Arguably they are sorta that way already, but oh well.  There's also a dramatic range nerf to railguns and lasers while presumably leaving mesons untouched.    In short, you'd have to a massive balance pass for existing weapons to address these problems.   Now, that shouldn't always be ruled out, but it would be simpler and faster to try to build a mechanic with existing balance in mind.

This would really hurt reload rate differences for any mid-long range engagement.  Since the missile flight time is normally so much longer than the reload rate for any reasonable missile size you might as well drop the reload rate and save yourself the cost.  It would also hurt the large-salvo long-reload tactics like the Soviets in Steve's campaign.  I do believe that MFCs are too cheap at the moment, but I don't have any decent ideas to change that at the moment.

well, right now MFCs run like size 1-2.5 or so in part because they get a 3x increase in capability compared to active sensors.  I have long believed they shouldn't get that reduction.

I mean... even if you drastically overengineer a MFC to counter ECM their size is negligible compared to to the huge weight of missiles they can control.   Whereas you generally need one BFC per several weapons and they start at size 3-4 for competitive controls (and only get larger).   

[o_O]

1) Missiles could have a % overhead that decreases with larger missile sizes.   A Size 1 MSP is 50% overhead, decreasing linearly until a size 100 MSP is 1% overhead.   The idea would be for larger missiles to have overall greater capabilities, rather then being just like many small missiles all stuck together.   

2) remove the reload bonus that small launchers get, because it makes it even easier for small missiles to overwhelm PD.     

3) make launchers take up more space relative to magazines.   So a 'volley fire' setup can deliver much more total firepower per unit of ship size, but a 'one big wave' setup is much better able to penetrate PD.   

[TheDeadlyShoe]

Oh I forgot.  One of Steve's comments was that ultra long range missiles will be more viable under the new regime, which entails larger / more expensive MFCs.   Point to keep in mind.

[Theokrat]

Some other options for helping larger missiles be more viable are:[...]

Yes, you are correct of course. The reason that I suggested to introduce heavy economies of scale in the engine field in particular is that it is very close to something already announced by Steve: economies of scale in ship-engine design, and a uniform design process for all engines.

So in the spirit of making the smallest possible change solve a situation I think this is an workable, consistent, and most importantly easy solution: It merely requires that large missile engines get enough of a "bonus".

But obviously, other points have a certain appeal to. In particular, there is a gross misrelation between the damage you need to destroy an armour box and a missile. You need one damage point to destroy either, but a missile can be 0.05 hull space, while armour is around 0.20 hull space. Or conversely, 1 HS of missiles can absorb 20 damage, while 1 HS of armour can absorb 5. So missiles are much better at absorbing damage /hullspace than armour, which is kind of awkward since armour is designed for that purposes, while missiles are not particularly sturdy. This could be solved by making armour much more weight-efficient, or by allowing a smaller "0.1 damage" warhead (or whatever size), which would be sufficient to destroy another missile, but would not harm armour at all (like the 0.50 cal against a battleship). Or, alternatively, one could think of adding some mandatory dead-weight module (say the board computer, MFC-link and final approach sensors) that would allow larger missiles to be overall better.

At any rate, I suspect none of these other approaches is as readily available, or straightforward to program, so my request stays to simply make large missile engines much more to fuel efficient than smaller ones, up to the point where smaller missiles can not be made to go to maximal combat ranges.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

But obviously, other points have a certain appeal to. In particular, there is a gross misrelation between the damage you need to destroy an armour box and a missile. You need one damage point to destroy either, but a missile can be 0.05 hull space, while armour is around 0.20 hull space. Or conversely, 1 HS of missiles can absorb 20 damage, while 1 HS of armour can absorb 5.

I don't think there's inconsistency here. Armor actually harmlessly absorbs/ablates the WHITE HOT FURY OF A HUNDRED SUNS; missiles are simply destroyed by any actual damage.  I mean that's why a size1 and size 20 missile are equally easy to kill. It's just a matter of hitting them, not of survivability. Unless the missile itself mounts armor- which just gives it a chance to survive a small explosion.  On that note, at 20 MSP we're looking at missiles being waaaaaay worse than armor. 

That's without bringing advances in armor tech into it. 

I mean...I'm not necessarily against missile or armor changes. For what it's worth, I've been experimenting with 'avionics' designs.  The two following Ion Era designs are an AMM and short range anti-ship missile that use the rule of 0.2msp+0.1msp/size in avionics, using armor as a placeholder:

R-27 Riot Missile

Code: [Select]

Missile Size: 1 MSP  (0.05 HS)     Warhead: 1    Armour: 0.3     Manoeuvre Rating: 15
Speed: 18000 km/s    Endurance: 10 minutes   Range: 11.3m km
Cost Per Missile: 0.75
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 270%   3k km/s 90%   5k km/s 54%   10k km/s 27%T-20 Torpedo

Code: [Select]

Missile Size: 5 MSP  (0.25 HS)     Warhead: 9    Armour: 0.7     Manoeuvre Rating: 12
Speed: 20000 km/s    Endurance: 8 minutes   Range: 9.9m km
Cost Per Missile: 4.145
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 240%   3k km/s 72%   5k km/s 48%   10k km/s 24%
The AMM is super bad - normal ion AMMs can have twice and more that accuracy. (Tho if I sacrifice some fuel I can get it to 30% at 10km/s).  And you can't even make an ASM version, because it's impractical to fit 0.5 of warhead and 0.3 avionics into a size 1 missile. I mean you could but it'd be purely a PDC/orbital assault weapon in terms of accuracy.

The following design is magnetoplasma, with another level of warhead and agility tech:
GARDIAN-1 Countermissile

Code: [Select]

Missile Size: 1 MSP  (0.05 HS)     Warhead: 1    Armour: 0.3     Manoeuvre Rating: 21
Speed: 24000 km/s    Endurance: 7 minutes   Range: 10.5m km
Cost Per Missile: 1
Chance to Hit: 1k km/s 504%   3k km/s 168%   5k km/s 100.8%   10k km/s 50.4%Twice as good, but still half as good as a contemporary no-armor AMM. 

[Theokrat]

I don't think there's inconsistency here. Armor actually harmlessly absorbs/ablates the WHITE HOT FURY OF A HUNDRED SUNS; missiles are simply destroyed by any actual damage.  I mean that's why a size1 and size 20 missile are equally easy to kill. It's just a matter of hitting them, not of survivability. Unless the missile itself mounts armor- which just gives it a chance to survive a small explosion.  On that note, at 20 MSP we're looking at missiles being waaaaaay worse than armor. 

Of course it's a bit more than hitting the missile. It's hitting the missile and doing some damage. And currently there is a minimum amount of 1 "point" of damage in the game, corresponding to a nuclear explosion. In other words, currently in order to destroy a single missile of 2.5 tons you need at least the "white hot fury of a hundred suns" - maybe even in all capital letters. Nothing smaller will be able to destroy missiles, because there is nothing smaller.

And that's why I think it would be sensible to introduce the ability to deal some smaller amount of damage that would affect missiles. And, yes the minimum amount of damage that would be sufficient to kill a missile should bear some relation to the effects of damage on other structures. Maybe the closest equivalent in composition to missiles is a fuel tank - 1 damage to destroy 1 HS. It should require less damage to destroy an object 1/20th of that size.

Of course this is just a relict of small integer numbers, which are inherent to the abstraction, and normally it would not really be much of an issue. Yet here it means that to destroy one ton of incoming ordonnance, you need about three tons of ordonnance yourself. If this can be avoided, e.g. by making changes that require incoming missiles to be larger in the first place, then the whole issue becomes mood in normal game situations...