That's right, folks, it's yet another damn weapon rebalance mod. There are at least four of these that I know of, and half of them were on the front page when I sat down to type this. Still, I've sunk entirely too many hours into this not to post it.
Generally, what I wanted to accomplish was to, if possible, give each weapon a strong mechanical identity, or, failing that, at least balance the numbers so you could put bang bang guns instead of pew pew guns on your ships and not be too heavily penalised for it.
Details follow; if you don't really care or want to read a big wall of text, just skip to the end under the line.
General Changes
Armour
In vanilla, I was underwhelmed by armour. You didn't get a whole lot of it for any individual armour module, and armour penetration was both extremely common and extremely strong. This reduced the value of both armour as a defensive option and armour penetration as a weapon strength.
In the mod, then, armour values are a lot higher- a lot higher- and penetration is both weaker and rarer. Complete (100%) penetration is only available on rare/salvageable weapons like the mining laser and the matter disintegrator.
When I say armour values are higher, I mean even the humble corvette has 32 points of base armour, and each module is worth twice as much as vanilla. Armour scores in the hundreds are not uncommon on big ships.
Hence, armour penetration- what little is available- is now worth much more. In real terms, for every sixty points of armour on the target, every 1% of armour penetration is worth 1% extra effective damage.
Unfortunately, making penetration that valuable meant pushing armour to a point that shields couldn't compete (except on corvettes), and I have to give them a- slight- boost as well. The way I've set it up, shields start off weak, scale rapidly into the mid-game, then increase in a more linear fashion- i.e. shields are more powerful relative to armour the further you get into the game.
Obviously, all of this has resulted in dramatic EHP inflation, especially on big ships- and so I've also increased damage in an attempt to compensate.
Corvettes Swarms, Accuracy and Evasion:
I started out with an evasion fix that was similar to what Paradox have delivered in Clarke; a simple halving of all evasion bonuses. I decided that I didn't like the fact that evasion started out low and rose fast; it meant that corvettes started off not very agile and ended up very agile, and I wanted the opposite. So, I did exactly that; basic thrusters now give a very large boost to evasion, and it climbs much more slowly.
This balancing was done with the new information about the hit% formula in mind. You might wonder, looking at the figures in game, whether a one-point increase in evasion is really that significant. Believe me- it is.
That might have fixed the corvette swarm problem all on its own, but just to be sure I:
- Nerfed the HP of corvettes
- Reduced combat speeds (making range more powerful)
- Boosted the HP of cruisers and battleships
- Added an upkeep reduction to larger hulls
Combat Computers:
I didn't like the way that, once you unlocked sentient combat computers, you stopped getting to choose what behaviour your ships would adopt in combat.
So I've added more combat AIs, and, since I was in the file, an entire new line of combat computers. There are now three options at all three levels: high-damage, tanky and fast/agile. I wanted to add a ranged/sniper option too, but apparently the weapon range multiplier doesn't work?
I haven't taken a look at the psi computer yet, though, so it's even more lackluster now.
Weapon Changes
Overall, I wanted each of the major weapon trees (energy/projectile/missile) to have one mid-range, all-rounder option, one short-range, high DPS option, and one long-range, high alpha (per-volley damage) option. On top of that, energy weapons tend to be longer ranged than projectiles, and missiles are longer ranged than both- though the differences here aren't as extreme.
On top of that, range now increases with technology- not too aggressively, but a fifth level weapon has about 50% more range than its first level counterpart. This has been tuned so that speed bonuses from thrusters should cancel it out- the idea is not that weapons should improve their relative range advantage, or short range ships should have to take more hits before they can return fire, but that higher tech has more of an advantage over lower tech.
I also reworked weapons so that larger guns have lower rates of fire and higher alpha. Overall, damage is the same- medium guns do 2x the DPS of small guns, and large 2x medium, but the bigger guns are more alpha-orientated. As with the range-by-tech change, this is mostly an aesthetic/make tech more important adjustment.
Lasers
These are the mid-range option on the energy weapon tree. In general they are high-accuracy, low-ROF weapons with a moderate (25%) bonus against armour. They're a nice early-game sniping option, with good late-game performance against armour-focused navies or big ships in general.
Energy Lances
The long-range option on the energy weapon tree, these are basically lasers++. They have higher accuracy, longer range, even lower ROF and a major (50%) bonus against armour- very much anti-capital weapons, they should carve up a battleship like a Christmas turkey. In exchange for this, however, they have a very low base rate of damage, so if you're not fighting capital ships they're probably the wrong tool for the job.
Plasma Cannon
The short range option on the energy weapon tree, these weapons have the highest base DPS in the game. Unfortunately, they've also lost most of their armour penetration and now actually have a penalty against shields. The idea is they can unload the almighty wrath of God into the enemy's face at knife-fighting distance, but if they're up against anything that's heavily shielded you're going to have to crack that open for them first.
Arc Emitters
I'll be honest, I wasn't entirely certain what to do with these guns, or even what their niche is supposed to be in vanilla. Then I saw that they're supposed to have a chain lightning effect, presumably to hose deathstacks and corvette swarms. Obviously, it doesn't actually have that effect in the game (hopefully pdox will add it later), but I tried to implement a "screw you, 'vette's" effect by giving it a lot of shield bypass (shields, being additive, are much more valuable on corvettes than armour's multiplicative boost).
Disruptors
In every respect like lasers, except they have a bonus against shields rather than armour. Like lasers? Fighting a shield-heavy enemy? Substitute in disruptors.
Energy Torpedoes
I felt these needed to be differentiated from normal torps in a significant fashion. So, rather than shield bypass, they now do massive, massive bonus damage to shields and have the lowest ROF of any weapon in the game. So low, in fact, that they might get off all of three volleys in the very longest of battles. Think of these as shield-crackers. Does the enemy have a shield? No, no they do not. The downside is, of course, that once they've gotten rid of the shield you still need to find some way to deal with the rest of the the ship. More of a utility secondary than a primary weapon system in its own right.
Mass Drivers
The mid-range option for projectiles. These presented me with the same problem that I suspect they presented the original devs with: they just don't suggest any sort of interesting niche to place them in. Eventually I decided to give them a little bonus damage against shields, a little shield penetration and the barest whisper of armour penetration- very much a jack of all trades weapon in the mid range. The shield bonuses are more significant than the armour, so they'll be better against smaller, shield-heavy fleets.
Kinetic Artillery
To mass drivers as energy lances are to lasers. These have much more penetration against shield and armour both, and I think this gives them a nice little niche as anti-shield-battleships weapons. That's probably not going to be the most common BB setup (not with a human opponent, at least- who knows what the AI will do), but if someone tries to be tricksy these will punish them for it.
Autocannon
The short-range, high-dps projectile option. These drop the penetration bonuses of the mass drivers in exchange for more bonus damage to shields. This, combined with the already high base damage, mean they're likely to go through corvettes and a destroyers like a knife through hot butter.
Flak Batteries
A high ROF weapon... at mid range? That's also a point-defence gun? To be honest, these don't need anything else to make them stand out. If anything, they're likely to be too strong against missile and strike craft setups- but I gave them a bonus against shields anyway. :V
Missiles
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the mid-range option for missiles. Though, "mid-range" here is a little closer to long-range for projectiles than mid range.
I had some trouble balancing these- originally I wanted to compensate for their vulnerability to PD and delayed-damage problems by cranking up the alpha really high. A sort of "you're going to get slaughtered if you don't have PD" deal.
Unfortunately, this led the AI to decide that they were the best weapons ever, and it crammed them into every nook and cranny it could get its grimy little fingers on. So instead, I downtuned the ROF of PD guns and (slightly) increased the ROF of missiles. Actually, I set it up so that the ROF of weapons on the missile tree improves with tech. The idea is that you just unload so many missiles at the enemy that they can't completely shut you down without a truly unreasonable amount of PD on each ship.
Problem is, I don't have a good mental model as to how these stats interact and what the relative ROFs should be. And, since PD also has to be balanced around strike craft, I've been very cautious with it. In the current version missiles are probably going to have a hard time against PD; this is an area that's going to need a lot of attention in future revisions.
Swarm Missiles
More missiles; more range. In fact, they fire so many missiles so fast now that it seems to bug the game out. This... was not the intent. Will need looking at in the future.
Torpedoes
Torpedoes are mostly as they were in vanilla. They still completely ignore shields, and they still have a very low rate of fire- the difference is that they've gone from being a long-range weapon to being the short-range/high damage option of the missile family.
Strike Craft
As with missiles and PD, I didn't feel like I had a good enough grasp of the mechanics to give them a solid reworking. In fact, I haven't played a game with functioning strike craft yet, so, a few sanity-checking tests aside, I have no idea how they perform at all!
So, they're still among the highest damaging weapons around, they still ignore shields, they still have armour penetration, and now they are the longest ranged weapons available. That's a lot, and I'm just going to assume that they're wildly overpowered.
On the other hand, you can't shoot a turret off with PD, laser beams don't have travel time before they can start applying damage, and missiles don't need to spend the better part of a year regenerating after being blown up.
Non-Standard/Critter Weapons
I didn't spend as much time with these as the others. Mostly they're around to give critters a bit of a punch- they can't be too strong or it'll break the early game, and if that means that the salvageable weapons go obsolete quickly... well, that's what it means.
That said, I tried not to make them too weak. Most of them should be on a level with early tier 2 weapons (uv lasers), and maybe have an interesting quirk or bonus option that you wouldn't usually get that only. Crystal guns have a lot of armour penetration, for example, and mining lasers straight up ignore it. Space Amoebas are super strong now that strike craft work, and should be approached with caution and/or lots of point defence.
That's most of the critter weapons- there are two that are tuned to be better than anything you can naturally get.
Matter Disintegrators
These are the primary weapons of the Unbidden and the secondary weapons of Fallen Empire boats. In vanilla, they had significant shield and armour penetration. In the mod, they now ignore both. The Unbidden care nothing for these flimsy defences you throw up, mortal- they attack the
Why? Because I felt that a race of energy creatures should have the best energy weapons, of course. And because screw you, that's why.
Swarm Strikers
These are the strike craft used by the Prethoryn. After I'd decided that the Unbidden should excel in energy weapons I thought I'd better pick something for the Scourge to excel in too. Missiles and projectiles didn't feel right- but strike craft? They're a swarm, right?
Like disintegrators, these are a step above normal weapons, though slightly less unreasonable. They're no better vs shields or armour than normal strike craft and the damage output is comparable. Their advantage lies in that they take a lot less time to launch, a lot less time to get to the target and a lot less time to regenerate when destroyed. There's also a lot more of them- while a standard fighter wing has 6 craft, and a bomber wing has 4, swarm strikers have 12. They're not particularly durable- the total HP in the air isn't any more than an advanced bomber wing- but there's a lot of them for point defence guns to split fire between. They're also set up as fighters, so they themselves double as point defence for the Scourge.
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As the thread title says, this is a work in progress; none of the numbers are final (though I have spreadsheeted and theory-crafted them to death), and the mod is going to require a lot of testing and fine-tuning before I'm happy with it.
I'm releasing it now mostly because I want it to get it out before Paradox does their own balancing pass- which could obsolete a lot or all of this- and because I'm at the stage where I need lots of actual hands-on playtesting, which is going to be hard for me to do on my own.
So I'm looking for feedback- primarily on gamefeel, what the dynamics of combat are like 10-15 hours into a game, whether you feel like you have a lot of good options, whether any given weapon is too hard-countered by any counter strategy, etc. I especially want to know how missiles, strike craft and PD perform, and which way they should be tuned.
Little things to bear in mind:
- The power formula has been reworked to use a lower exponent, as per this thread. I'm not sure how much I trust the new numbers, so keep an eye on them.
- When evaluating weapons and ships in the designer, please bear in mind that accuracy and evasion do not mean what you might assume they mean, and that the game doesn't really understand them properly- figures derived from them, such as damage per tick and the military power score- have a very tenuous relationship with reality!
- Range is extremely powerful. If you attempt to take on a fleet of equivalent power that out-ranges you, you are probably going to lose.
