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Posted: Wed Nov 22, 2006 2:18 pm Post subject: Ship Defense and You
Shektho wrote:
I see a lot of promise in this mod
just a note to help with balancing: armor needs to be *much* stronger
Armor is quite strong. It already takes quite a long time to kill a ship...
Of course it does help to have tech beyond the primitive steel armor you start with, but larger ships are quite durable.
160cm plates have a thousand hitpoints, and a large, solidly built ship will have ten or more.
Scouts tend to pop at the first sign of serious return fire, but a dreadnought can soak up gobs of damage.
Things that will help survivability:
- Leaky shields, when they get added to a later version.
- Stay out of enemy weapon range where possible. Less return fire is better.
- Focus armor on the facings you will most commonly expose to the enemy. Front armor if you're going to be chasing or charging, side armor if you will be circling, rear armor if you will be running.
- Shift armor to the corners... it will help protect two facings instead of just one, at the expense of protected internal volume.
- Keep your critical components in the center. A long range gun deserves to be in the core so you can keep firing even if you're immobilized.
- Lasers make good point defense in crowds. Although the power levels are low, the extremely short time to target reduces overtargetting and overkill.
- Big ships, and more tonnage devoted to armor keep you alive longer.
- If you get into a close dogfight, the enemy weapons will tend to rain down from all directions, and this will mean less armor penetration overall.
- Use cannon fodder. Small ships can be built dirt cheap, and have better evade. Use them to distract the enemy and skirmish with their light craft while you bring the heavy guns to bear.
- Use mixed fleets. Let the long range guns wound and slow down an enemy... short range guns can deliver much more damage and shred anyone who charges in or gets overrun by your fleet. Missiles make the longest of ranged weapons, point defense ships can counter them, and fighters make for maintenance free support (decent firepower, great damage resistance, and the potential for very high speeds).
You can see a lot of the suggestions in this screenshot
Barreling down on the enemy is a pile of cannon fodder plasma frigates.
Most of them are hidden behind or flying through the explosions of the leaders. They're cheap and plentiful, and if I lose a couple to that volley of torpedoes, it is no big deal to my economy.
The design is almost all forward armor on the little guys which means they remain almost fully operational until damage exceeds 80%, or until they get out flanked. They can shrug off even a 100mm torpedo, which really slows down the enemy.
Since the enemy is running from my onrushing plasma ships, they are exposing their rear. Although it is still tough, those torpedo ships are designed for max range circling with armor on the sides or evenly distributed. All that spreading missile fire helps to cripple even more ships, and punching through just enough to damage an engine or two slows them down. The slow ships simply feed into my blazing plasma killzone while the artillery picks out more ships to drag down.
Those enemy dreads charging in from the right destroy a bunch more of the little ships, but they're simply outnumbered and outgunned. While the dreads kill many frigates, my battleships wear down and destroy the dreads.
As a bonus, with all those cannon fodder ships absorbing whatever missiles make it through my PDLs, the enemy starts running low on ammo.
They run out of missiles (and low on torpedoes), I run out of cannon fodder. Then my battleships hunt down the remaining forces with drastically reduced return fire. Back to top
Joined: Apr 16, 2007 Location: here occasionally, but mostly somewhere else
Posted: Fri May 11, 2007 8:50 am Post subject: Some reservations I have
I haven't had time to try your mod yet. Mostly sticking to Kwok's BM. But I love directional armor!
Now here's the drawback I see: If the AI can't design properly, DA will just get them killed that much more quickly. I think the first step in resolving this would be to add "thin" (5 space) and "thick" (15 or 20 space) armors to the components available. This would let everyone provide at least minimal 360 protection. Then the AI would need to be instructed to use these things.
It's a big job, but it would make for a much more interesting game.
Your economy sounds interesting, but squaring is a bit steep. I forget how to explain the math, but there's a way to raise a number to the 1.5th power, and I think this would be more appropriate if it can be implemented.
It was a tough call, deciding which mod to play. Next game maybe it'll go your way. The AI issues were the deciding factor for me last time. DA is GG's best selling point, and I hope it's part of the future of the game.
Edit: I notice you mention 160 cm plates. If other thicknesses are simultaneously available, you may have already taken care of this issue. I'll know more when I've actually given GG a test.
superscripts appear not to be working in the quote. The fractions should be showing as exponents.
So rather than sqrt, I think the 2/3 power is better; and rather than squaring, I think the 3/2 power would be better. That's what I was trying to say. You still get an exponential change, but it isn't overwhelmingly drastic.
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