[Combat Revamp] Vast number of Combat & Balance changes intended to test our Options

[Zitchas]

Content (Artwork / Missions / Jobs)

Summary

This PR is not intended for merging in the near future, although if people like the changes it can be considered for such. More likely, this could be the base for the separate "Combat Changes" branch that Amazinite has mentioned wanting to do in the past.

Thoughts

This PR includes a lot of changes. Broadly speaking, it is focused on mobility related aspects of combat. I'm looking at making the feel of the various ship categories more diverse, with fighters, drones, and interceptors actually having a unique level of mobility unmatched by any of the warship tiers. One prime example of this is dodging. It should be quite feasible now for any fast ship, and interceptors in particular, to dodge quite a few projectiles. The AI isn't going to benefit much from that, but I hope the player will. Dodging always felt very rewarding for me in the EV/O/N series, and has always been a sore point for me in ES because a) successfully dodging stuff didn't feel very meaningful, and b) dodging stuff is much, much harder.

I would just like to encourage everyone to NOT read the details listed below. I know everyone has their own things they want to see changed, and there are some strong feelings about what is and is not appropriate to change. I'd like to argue that how it feels in-game should take priority over all our out-of-game meta analysis. There will be a time and place for it, but at the very start of a big overall is a time for first-impressions and feel rather than nitty gritty details. Please, please just switch to this in the launcher, fire up a brand new pilot, and just play the game for a while. See how things feel. After you've got a couple hours of flying around and getting into battles, then come back and look over the details.

Again, please skip reading the detail list, and just go try it out. The entire purpose of this is to give us a way to experience the changes we've been talking about, and I fully expect it to change in the future as tweaks, changes, and other ideas are added to it.

I strongly recommend trying to ignore your preconceptions. Because so many things have changed, when purchasing a new ship or deciding on engines; actually take a look at the performance of the ship options available to you first.

Please Note:
Petervdmeer's Formations have been merged into this as of March 6th. You can change the formation of your own fleet by using shift-G to rotate through the available formations. The list of messages will tell you which formation you just switched to. Please note that formations are selection sensitive. As in, just like you can give different commands to different sets of ships in your fleet; you can use different formations for different sets.

Temporary controls to set formations. For default controls the following:

shift-G to change the formation on selected ships (or the fleet)
shift-F to move selected ships (or the fleet) to a higher ring
shift-H to move selected ships (or the fleet) to a lower ring

On my to-do list:

• Get people to go get into lots of fights, and see how this changes the feel and behavior. In particular, I'd like some feedback on the big FW and Wanderer campaign fights.
• Also, I'd really like people to test different fighter strategies. For instance, using fighters as anti-fighter swarms to target and disable enemy fighters; using them as mobile anti-missile platforms; using them as hold-back missile boats. What about fast attack craft with things like heavy rockets or javelins? Flamefighters? What other fighter/drone strategies are there? How do these changes change their usefulness?

Details

One last time, please go play this instead of reading the change list. I really want to hear people's experiences, and especially first-impressions, not just people stating what they think the changes will result in.

Gameplay > meta-analysis

Slowing projectiles: This is intended to make each shot count for more, and also to re-introduce the idea of dodging and weaving around shots as something that is at least remotely feasible.

• As of the Primary Reset of 2021-Mar-19, the following only applies to missiles, rockets, torpedoes, and artillery style projectiles. Guns, beams, and secondary weapons that are gun-like have been reverted to vanilla.
• All projectiles have half the velocity and double the lifetime.
• All projectiles have double the reload, and double all relevant costs and damages.
• All projectiles have half the capacity.
• Beams are the exception. They have simply had their damages halved to compensate for their instantaneous nature.

Speeding up fighters, drones, and interceptors

• All fighters, drones, and interceptors have had their mass halved and their drag doubled.
• They then had their number of engines doubled. (with appropriate increase in outfit and engine space to fit them)
• They also had an amount of thrust equal to two of their stock engines added to the base hull.
• They also had an amount of steering equal to one of their stock steering added to the base hull.
• The net impact is they all have 4x their vanilla thrust and 3x their vanilla steering. This, combined with the changes to mass and drag, result in roughly double the max speed and four times their acceleration.

Adjusting the acceleration of big ships.

• While there are a few exceptions, this was quite simple: increase in mass.
• All medium warships as well as transports that appear to be in the "medium" range for their purpose got +5% mass.
• All heavy freighters and warships, as well as transports that appear to be in the "heavy" range for their purpose got +10% mass.
• World Ship got +20% mass increase because it is far too light for the number of bunks it has, much less for being a world.
• Pelican and Peregrine did get gain any mass because their whole thing is being fast and light for their category.

System arrival distance

• Every system has been given arrival 1500 so that ship actually arrive outside the system proper and travel in to the system. This is intentionally set a bit far out to give more time to look at engagements as they develop.
• Realistically, this should be dropped down to 1000 or maybe even 500; although having some option to tell certain fleets to intentionally arrive farther out would be really beneficial, especially for missile/torpedo heavy warfleets.

Miscellaneous other changes

• Albatross has been suggested as being more like a medium warship than a heavy, so I'm giving it a try. There is no change to stats, just a reclassification.
• Bactrian has been moved to the transport category and has had one gun removed (with its associated torpedo launcher)
• The changes proposed in the Heavy Shuttle Buff PR have been included. Tweak: Buffing the Heavy Shuttle #5700
• The changes proposed in the Star Queen Uses Reverse Thrusters PR have been included. Tweak: Adding Reverse Thrusters to the stock Star Queen #5722

Freshly Added Features One

• Added VitalChip's Fighter/Drone AI, and assigned it to all fighters and drones. If they have a big enough agility advantage over their target, they will try to circle and stick with attacking the rear of their target. Acceleration is their key attribute, versus their target's turning speed.
• Added VitalChip's strafing mechanic. Keys for strafeleft and straferight can be set in controls. Strafing is currently half of a ship's normal thrust.
• Added Petervdmeer's Formation Flying.
• Added Terin's Parallax effects

Freshly Added Features Two

• Added Ionic Reverse Thruster
• Added the Plasma Reverse Thruster
• PointedStick's tracking and homing overhaul feat: Overhaul jamming and tracking to make them more fun and realistic #4204
• PointedStick's human missile overhaul Adjust human guided missiles to adjust to jamming and tracking changes #4212 (with some changes to account for slower speeds in currently in the Combat Revamp)
• Added the miner 1 attribute to the asteroid scanner. With VitalChip's AI code, any carried ship with that attribute will engage in mining activity automatically.

Freshly Added Features Three

• Reverted changes to Primary weapons and primary-like weapons such as the Dragonflame and Gattling gun. (Rockets, missiles, torpedoes, and artillery style weaponry retain the original changes)
• A few secondaries that escaped having their capacities halved have been fixed.
• Weapon pods for small ships. (Pods so far include meteor, sidewinder, javelin, and heavy rocket pods. Pods are small launchers (roughly 1/4 the size of their main launchers) and carry 1/5 to 1/10 as many projectilies. Intended to make make stock drones, fighters, and interceptors more reasonable. It makes a lot of sense to have fighters carry 2 heavy rockets. It does not make sense that they'd be able to carry as many heavy rockets as a light warship. Pods use the burst fire mechanic to launch rockets at a slightly increased rate of fire, but then suffer a very large reload which makes them less-than-ideal for ships that want/can use larger launchers)

[Pointedstick]

I appreciate such a comprehensive attempt at changes. I have not playtested it, but I will momentarily.

Before that, I want to give my personal take on the situation: Combat in ES is just so darn fast, which makes it pretty unforgiving and reduces the freedom of movement to make balance changes. However if you slow down combat, you can go too far--combat can become boring, which is what I felt like happened in EVN for a good lot of the not-overpowered ships. Many of the gun type weapons felt like they just didn't do anything (Light cannons, Light Blasters), or would knock you back a good bit but without much damage (Fusion Pulse weapons of all sorts). These felt so frustrating to both shoot, and fight against. So you can go too far, I think.

Guns

I think the super high speed and accuracy of ES guns is a big problem.

In the older EV games, there was no auto-aim (only a manually invoked "turn to face" function) and no auto-fire, and a lot of projectiles were just plain slow. Using guns on a large slow ship against anything but another large slow ship was a challenge. EV Neutron Guns and EVN 200mm railguns come to mind. As a result, a lot of the gun-fired projectiles just plain missed. And many guns had wildly high inaccuracy. I remember the Blaze Turrets from EVO that basically created a flak field of projectiles. The AI was also written to miss a lot too, exactly like you the human would. So the guns' inaccuracy was actually a usability aid to help ships hit anything given that they wouldn't always be pointed in exactly in the perfect direction to land a hit. You could be off by 10 degrees, but some of your projectiles would hit anyway just because your gun was really inaccurate.

Missiles

In ES, missiles seem to have been envisioned as an alternative to guns that offer higher DPS per ton and per energy, with the disadvantage of costing money to fire and being limited in ammunition. This is wrong; missiles are not an alternative style of gun; they are a fundamentally different thing, but they don't feel like it in ES.

The older EV games largely got this right: there would be fewer missiles in flight, and most of them were far slower compared to ES missiles, but when one of them hit you, you knew it. They did a ton of damage if they connected. There was a big incentive to dodge, or install jamming or point defense weaponry, or fire flares. This mirrors the way missiles and torpedoes are in real life: they're big, heavy, expensive, slow (mostly, and at least when compared to gun-launched projectiles), and can be jammed or destroyed while in flight. But of one of them hits your ship, that might just be it. Compared to guns, they are low volume, high risk, high reward weapons.

The only ES missile weapons in human space that I feel like offer the same feeling and possibilities are Heavy Rockets and Typhoon Torpedoes. All the other ones are annoying pinpricks that don't feel missile-like at all. This needs to fundamentally change if missiles are to ever feel appropriate. Personally I would not rule out changes as radical as 5x the damage, cost, and weight, but 0.3x the fire rate and speed.

Small ships

In older EV games, small ships were significantly faster and more maneuverable than large ships, which made them more able to mitigate the disadvantages of projectile inaccuracy and slowness. They could zip close to a target, unleash a devastating barrage of gunfire or launch missiles at point blank range, and then scoot out of range of the return fire. In ES, many small ships are not materially faster or more maneuverable than larger ones (and larger ships have more margin to add souped-up engines too), so the rewards of being able to deliver firepower with more accuracy is not very pronounced. So small ships just don't feel like the jet fighters of space that the game wants them to be.

In conclusion

The net effect in older EV games was slower combat that rewarded player skill more. Guns being inaccurate but deadly meant that a more skilled pilot could kill things faster simply by being on target more often, and survive by dodging inaccurate enemy fire more often. Missiles being slower and more deadly meant a skilled pilot had more opportunities to evade them and more opportunities to hit enemy ships with them by being more skilled in piloting to maneuver them into a position where they can score a hit.

[Pointedstick]

JFYI laser weapons appear to do no damage with these changes.

[Pointedstick]

Played it for a while.

Things that I think are improved:

• Missile weapons feel infinitely better to me, especially the large ones. The different missiles really feel like they have distinct roles now. It's genuinely hard to hit a fighter-sized craft with a Torpedo, which makes it all the more satisfying when you manage to pull it off! I love it.
• Missile weapons that aren't Sidewinders definitely feel easier to dodge now in a small fast ship. This feels appropriate.
• Longer arrival distances slows things down a bit in a way that feels appropriate, especially for escort type jobs and missions.
• Blaster and Proton Turrets come close to providing that "field of flak" effect that I really enjoyed in earlier EV games.
• Large, slow-turning turrets are useless against fighters now. This is perfect.

Things that I think aren't improved:

• Fighter sized ships actually feel a bit too fast now. Faster is good, but the speed increase here feels a little silly IMO. :)
• Big fleet battles still devolve into a giant slugfest in the center of the system; increased arrival distances don't seem to have much of an effect on this. This may requires AI changes to really fix it
• I'm ambivalent about the increased hit force. For missiles, maybe. For guns, ehhhhh, I dunno yet.
• The turrets that are specifically designed as anti-fighter defenses, such as laser turrets and blaster turrets are now too slow to be effective in this role. I would recommend keeping their turn rates the same, and don't reduce the turn rates of Quad Blaster turrets and Proton Turrets as much.

Recommendations for further improvement:

• Decrease gun accuracy even more. This would further cement Lasers' niche as "the actually accurate gun-type weapon".
• Make greater use of the "confusion" NPC trait to make other ships less accurate.
• Increase missile strength values to compensate for them being slower so that anti-missile systems have more time to hit them, and also consider switching some of the bigger missile launchers to sequential fire instead of grouped fire. This would have the same general effect but make it less frustrating to fire missile weapons that now have a very very long reload time, such as torpedoes and heavy rockets. These launchers don't benefit as much from grouped fire anyway, now that they do so much damage.
• Also integrate changes to give fighter-sized ships more gun ports, as it dovetails very nicely with these changes. Fighters want more guns!
• Also integrate changes to decrease the size of missile launchers or add small-capacity launchers so fighter sized ships can mount them more readily. If people didn't like my proposal to make missile capacity require ammo box outfits, you could just increase the weight of each individual missile, as in the older EV games. But just choose something; the reason why I suggest this is because most fighter type ships are absolutely begging to have like 2-4 heavy rockets or torpedoes on them in addition to any other weapons, because now they're perfect fast, long-range delivery systems for heavy munitions against large projected targets (which is the reason why fighters exist in real life).

[Terin]

* Big fleet battles still devolve into a giant slugfest in the center of the system; increased arrival distances don't seem to have much of an effect on this. This may requires AI changes to really fix it

Which systems did you check this out in? Aldhibain seemed like a great improvement, where you could see militia interceptors responding to new pirate threats in the system, able to move quickly but still needing to cover a meaningful distance, compared to militia argosies and bastions. It just looked great as well, making the fleet coming in and out look much more apparent and impressive, rather than just sort of a mess in the middle.

Wah Ki definitely seems like a problem still, but I think that's just the Shield Beetle being far too fast. If nothing else so far, I'd love to see the jump-in distance integrated into the game.

[Terin]

Although even looking at Wah Ki some more, fights are spread out pretty far for me. I think this is a pretty big improvement for such a notorious system.

[Zitchas]

Thanks for the feedback!

Right now I'm working on getting VitalChip's fighter AI improvements in, which make them actually make use of that very high speed.

In regards to your suggestions:

• For the missile strength, I agree. With half as many missiles in flight at a time, the missile strength should be increased.
• One side effect that I hadn't thought of was that with each missile having double the damage (but half the fire rate) the DPS has stayed the same, but the overal total potential damage dealt by a single ship's loadout has doubled, it just takes twice as long to completly unload. This significantly erodes regular guns ability to compete since long duration staying power is their main strength. So for starters, all the launchers and racks should have roughly half the capacity.
• That being said, as you mentioned, having fighters able to carry a small payload of heavy ordinance would make them quite effective, and is literally one of the reasons fighters exist. Doing something along the lines of dropping the launcher capacity to a rather small number of missiles (probably in the 1-3 range depending on the projectile in question) and then adjusting the missile racks accordingly so that the total damage potential of current loadouts stays constant would be good.
• I'm not sure I'll get any additional gun ports in the near future, but yeah, that'd be a good idea. Without a space increase they'd naturally tend towards the small and light weapons anyway. That being said, if some largish fighter scrapped all their light weapons to mount one big thing along the lines of the A-10 Warthog, well, I wouldn't consider that a bad thing. ;)

[Pointedstick]

Another issue with ES weapons is that their battlefield roles are a bit muddier than I think would be ideal. You can see this in weapons that have fairly similar shield and armor damage values, in gun accuracy values that are close to laser levels of accuracy, missiles that barely do more damage than guns, and so on.

Here's how I envision it:

• Laser weapons in general: short range, perfect accuracy, good against shields, bad against armor. Very high energy usage, very low heat generation. Very lopsided weapons, and therefore fun to use!
• Blaster weapons in general: medium range, poor accuracy, well-rounded against both shields and armor. Low energy usage, but high heat output.
• Missile weapons in general: long range, devastating against armor, less so against shields; but there could be a special type of missile that's specifically designed to be good against shields, like EVO's Dispersal Rocket. Wanderer Thunderheads could do this. Launchers would be smaller with very very low capacity (2-5 projectiles), and capacity outfits would be much larger.
• Torpedoes: massive damage, like 3000 shields and 4000 armor, but even worse speed and turn. Basically they are only useful against capital ships, or when delivered at point blank range by fighters
• Light laser turret, blaster turret, modified blaster turret: keep their extremely high turn rate so they are useful for anti-fighter defense
• Heavy laser turret, quad blaster turret, proton turret: reduce turn rates a lot so they become more useful for anti-capital-ship. But don't reduce too much.
• Plasma turret: so slow it's anti-capital ship only

This would expose various interesting possibilities:

• Be a generalist with blaster weaponry, or specialize with lasers and missiles?
• Equip only heavy turrets and use sidewinders for anti-fighter defense, or include some light turrets for anti-fighter defense and use your gun ports for heavier weaponry
• To really be a missile boat, you'll need to fill your entire ship up with capacity outfits, limiting the amount of other equipment available
• Fighters could feasibly carry 1-3 torpedoes or rockets in addition to their gun armament, making them true to their real-world role

[Zitchas]

Great feedback! I'll see about implementing some more things (including some of those) in the next few days. I've almost got the Fighter Circling AI and a surprise mechanic addition courtesy of VitalChip implemented. Just so long as the checks pass and it actually works...

That being said, if you have any of the changes mentioned ready somewhere, please feel free to PR them to my branch. I'll accept quite a wide variety of PRs at this point, especially ones like these that I like the sounds of. The point is to try ideas, after all.

[arkhne]

I'm all for changes that limit the potential of missile boats such as requiring more dedicated storage (it also makes sense, these are exploding things, do you really want to just throw them in your cargo hold?
That said, I've never been a fan of missiles in ES. Long ago, it was because they just weren't worth the cost. More recently, it's because I've thought they were far too effective, and far too dangerous. Making them more deadly is not nice.

The distance change has definitely been noticable for me, and not just because it means more travelling. Other than the random missile deaths which happen far too much for my liking (although it seems I'm most definitely alone in this camp), every single one of my deaths has been on approach to a planet, but I'm perfectly fine with that. That's the risk you take piloting a fat, slow freighter in a world of zippy interceptors.

The small ships are so fast now that I am, for the first time ever, genuinely afraid of pirates. This is a good thing.

I will work through this some more later, and see about helping out some more, see if we can make this into a fun experience for everybody involved and not just "yet another test that went nowhere". Looking forward to experimenting with mass, AI, and finding ways of reducing the dominance of ship capturing.

[Zitchas]

Thanks for the reply. One thing, that kind of ties both what you say and what PointedStick said is that missiles are deadlier now, but also that missile ships have twice the firepower than they do in vanilla. This is not intended, and is probably contributing to the number of deaths.

On a different note:

NEW FEATURES
Added:

• VitalChip's Fighter AI circling/strafing behaviour (fighters and drones that are fast enough to actually circle a target and keep ahead of its guns will do so. Not many can, but the fastest of them should be able to)
• VitalChip's strafing. Yes, you can now strafe. Not sure how well the AI will handle it.
• PeterVDMeer's Formations. (others will have to provide some data changes so that fleets actually use them, by and large, but the mechanics are now there. (will be merged momentarily as soon as the PR checks come back clean)
• Arkhne's rifle expansion: Most ships should now have at least their minimum crew in their faction's basic H2H weapon.

[arkhne]

Slight clarification on the rifle bit, Hai variants of human ships use Pulse Rifles, as a few of them did before this change. Part of this is that it makes the "better" ship harder to cap (better rifles), but also they'd want to protect their investment more (so they would use the better rifles that they know about).

The "crew minimums" were based on hull minimums, and in most cases does not account for Turrets. Notable exceptions are the Navy ships, who also carry Grenades by default, so I only added "most" of their bunks in rifles, they now have more than enough H2H outfits for basic complements to go armed with something, just not all rifles.

[Zitchas]

OK, just a general advisory thing: This PR is getting less and less coherent. With the addition of the additional reverse engines and the weapon pods and a few of the other changes, most of which conflicted with stuff in here, things are getting messier and less useful.

I'd really like to see FighterAI, Formations, and Parallax merged - but revamp is on its last legs. I'm actually not 100% sure that I properly merged the conflicts in the source to make FighterAI and Formations work properly as it is.

[warp-core]

@Zitchas if you don't intend to pursue changes in this PR, should it be closed, even if that means creating a new branch for testing. This is pretty far out of date, it doesn't even have the battery buff which seems like it'd be highly relevant to the ships this is aimed at changing the most.

[Zitchas]

Yes, this is better off closed for now. I hope to bring it up to date and incorporate some new changes into it, but for now ..