[MOD] All Hands to Battle Stations: Combat Reimagined

[Ventessel]

This mod is essentially in alpha, and once I have things well balanced I will start to add further content. Currently, it reworks all the weapons, including strike craft, to fit a new model for combat. My idea was to move away from the "rock-paper-scissors" design of the base game and differentiate weapons more.

Each weapon family will now have certain strengths and drawbacks. Mount sizes now matter a great deal, as larger mounts are generally more efficient and powerful than smaller ones.

Components also scale with size. Larger shield generators, reactors, or armor components give proportionally more benefits when a higher level slot is used. The cost per point of shield/power/armor goes down as tech improves as well.

When designing a warship, I want for the slots to really matter and for the larger ones to be valuable.

I have thoroughly overhauled the movement, acceleration, and engagement ranges for warships and civilian craft. All combat vessels now have the same top speed, but smaller ships will accelerate more quickly and turn faster. Ship behavior was also reworked so that ship computers no longer give a statistical benefit, but they will fight at longer distances and move around more to keep their targets near the desired range. Use a defensive computer for a ship you really want to hang back, and an offensive one for ships with close range weapons you want to charge in.

The mod is currently on Steam, here

Other changes include increased military station hit points, and drastically reduced minimum required distances between stations.

It is also easier to withdraw from a fleet engagement. Emergency FTL damage has been dropped to 5%, and can be initiated 3 days after a battle begins. However, it will take 10 days from when the retreat button is pressed for the fleet to disengage.

 

[Ventessel]

Weapons Overview
Lasers: Reliable damage dealers that don’t penetrate armor or shields, but are highly accurate and at higher tech levels boast impressive fire rates. Lasers will provide the most firepower for a given number of weapon slots, and are a strong general weapon despite not having any armor/shield piercing capabilities.

Larger sized lasers have better range but consume disproportionately more power than their smaller counterparts. Laser weapon accuracy is the same for all sizes (80% currently)

Mass drivers: Long ranged death dealers that penetrate armor, but lack the accuracy of beam weapons. Mass drivers are similar in many respects to lasers, although with their lower fire rate and longer range, they won't have quite as much raw firepower. At higher tech levels they boast the best armor penetration of any weapon category.

Larger sized mass drivers are more accurate and have better armor penetration (because the projectiles achieve higher velocities). Compared to lasers, they increase in Power to Damage efficiency with larger mounts.

Missiles: Extreme range and excellent damage, made even more dangerous by the fact that missiles ignore shields. In the early game, they will be very dangerous but as point defense becomes more powerful it becomes possible to counter them very effectively. At higher tech levels, missiles travel faster and have increased fire rates and damage. They consume very little power relative to other weapons.

Larger sized missile mounts boast a higher rate of fire, because of additional launch tubes.

Torpedoes are slower missiles that penetrate armor.

Disruptors pierce shields, with more advanced ones gaining increased shield penetration. They have flat damage, and decent accuracy.

Plasma weapons are cheaper but consume more power than disruptors. They are short ranged and less accurate than lasers. Their damage output varies widely.

Autocannons are more expensive than mass drivers, but boast high fire rates and damage at close range, albeit without the armor penetration. They do additional damage to shields.

Strike Craft have an engagement range of 100-200 and will now properly launch from carriers. Higher tech level craft come in larger squadrons (12-18).

Crystal Projectiles are a multi-purpose weapon. They have some shield and armor penetration, although not as much as mass drivers or disruptors do, and they consume moderate amounts of energy. Cheaper and longer ranged than disruptors, they are a good weapon through the mid game.

 

[Ventessel]

Future Updates / WIP:
Revise strike craft to include interceptors (defend against bombers), escorts (follow bombers and attack enemy fighters), and strike craft/bombers (target enemy warships with armor piercing weapons).

Revamp military stations so that they give a better cost-to-firepower ratio than warships. Defensive installations will be efficient, but obviously stationary. Playing as a defensive turtle type will be more viable.

Military power equation rebalanced to account for new weapon / defense system.

Increase the effect of admirals. Ideally include a scaling modifier that reduces fleet accuracy & evasion as more ships are added to the fleet. Technologies and admiral skill will reduce this effect so that larger fleets can be more effect. Hopefully this will start to mitigate the dominance of huge fleet stacks.

Evaluate the strength of armor/shields through the mid to late game (feedback would be most valuable in this regard, although I will probably run tests with the console when I have some time.)

 

[Ventessel]

Overhauled warship classes:
Corvettes - 90 day build time, 300 hp
0.75 combat speed
0.04 combat rotation
0.35 acceleration
Minus 10% evasion, +2 armor

Destroyers - 150 day build time, 675 hp
0.67 combat speed
0.02 combat rotation
0.25 acceleration
Minus 20% evasion, +4 armor

Cruisers- 195 day build time, 1400 hp
0.62 combat speed
0.01 combat rotation
0.18 acceleration
Minus 35% evasion, +8 armor

Battleships- 232 day build time, 2750 hp
0.55 combat speed
0.0075 combat rotation
0.12 acceleration
Minus 55% evasion, +10 armor

Thrusters also scale more. They add half the evasion that they do in vanilla, but higher tech ones add more speed. I may add in combat thrusters for maneuvering (if I can have them increase rotation speed) and hull specific engines to that the cost scales more with ship size.

 

[PaxHadrian]

I'm going to suggest that you consider reversing the base evasion statistics for your ship classes. The smallest ships, independent of equipment, typically have the best evasion and speed compared to increasing larger ships.

Doing this also gives you some additional tactical capabilities by adding additional weapon slot and utility slot packages with more components (perhaps becoming available as a result of research that reduces the size of system components or increases space utilization, for example):

* The ability to add a second set of thrusters for a more agile (evasive) unit
(also identifies new component possibilities - tactical speed and tactical evasion capabilities mix - different thrusters offer different mixes so you can decide who is a fast strike missile unit versus an evasive point defense escort for larger ships in the fleet.)

* The ability to choose what kind of missile system you use - slower with heavier punch or faster, more evasive with lighter punch, for ex.

I don't know how far Paradox will let modding take us but the tactical implications for this kind of variety are fascinating.

 

[Ventessel]

In case it wasn't clear, evasion does decrease as ships get larger. I just narrowed the range slightly, to a difference of 45 points rather than vanilla's 75.

If there was one feature I would beg the devs for, it would be the ability to have weapon effects scale with range. This way projectiles could lose accuracy over range, and beam weapons could lose damage. It would make differentiating weapons much more effective.

 

[Silverfish42]

Your combat mods are exactly the kinds of things I've been thinking about myself! Going to grab this and have a look to see how it lines up with what I've been thinking.

I've been trying to figure the numbers out so that Accuracy/Evasion and Armor/Penetration both scale from 5-95% effectiveness, so smaller guns are more accurate and better at hitting small, evasive targets, while having less armor penetration, whereas huge guns have trouble hitting said small, evasive targets, but can have much higher armor penetration. I personally feel that armor penetration should never be 100%, the way it is on all the best weapons right now.

My ideal scenario is one in which the heavily armored and armed battleship has trouble hitting the tiny fast corvettes (bigger guns are less accurate), but the corvettes have trouble actually hurting the battleship even though they hit it easily (smaller guns have less AP).

I've been playing with the csv from Weapon and Armour Rebalance 1.1b by dnp@2016/05/18 (grabbed it because I couldn't even find the bloody files), and he was thinking in the general direction I was. Here's what I've fiddled with so far. The shield pen for kinetics was dnp's idea, I'm not sure if I like it or not, but I'm not quite comfortable enough with the code to totally overhaul all the weapon types, since I'm not sure how that would affect AI decision making.

 

[apoc527]

Everyone seems to be having the same idea, which gives me hope that Paradox may make it official. I really want to do the same thing, but i'm extremely nervous of wrecking the AI or creating unintended consequences (i.e. making Fallen Empires and crises too easy or too hard).

I'll take a look at these too.

 

[Silverfish42]

I would like to get a discussion going somewhere about overall combat balance and design, since we have a while until Heinlein 1.3 drops. I'm not how or where to best get such a discussion going in a productive manner, anyone have some ideas?

 

[pentaclegram]

Is this mod still making progress? What is the current state of the mod?

I love the idea of a weapon rebalance, because as it stands, some weapons are just purely better than others, making anything that isn't a tachyon lance battleship irrelevant.