TalVerd

Join Date 01/2012

Mod Idea: smaller ships are more evasive (Crusade only)

Why aren't smaller ships harder to hit than bigger ships? It's a pretty basic idea, and I think it would add some interesting balance and need for combined-arms in mid to late game if balanced right.

Larger ships already are at an advantage value-wise since you get more HP per manufacturing point, and putting all systems on a single ship means you get 100% of their effect as long as the ship is alive as opposed to if you spread them out over multiple ships, you lose effectiveness as ships are destroyed. Yes this is balanced somewhat with logistics and the fact you have to research them first, but the discrepancy remains. plus it just makes sense that smaller ships would be harder to hit.

I was thinking along the lines of: smaller ships get intrinsic jamming + accuracy based on their size so they can still take out eachother while the bigger ships would miss them more often.

I've looked through the code, and I think I could implement it pretty easily, but I'm asking for input for balance.

My initial thought was

Tiny: +60 jamming

Small +40 jamming

Medium +20 Jamming

Large +10 Jamming

Huge no change

and half as much accuracy as they get jamming, just so that small ships aren't ridiculously accurate and fleet jamming modules still have use. And I think I would also give stations either +15 or +20 accuracy so they can't be overrun by small ships too easily, but are still plenty easy to hit (they are large and stationary after all)

This would enforce a need for combined-arms since if you have all larger ships, they would get overrun by a group of smaller ships, but you would still want to have larger ships for the fact that you get more value out of them plus for taking on starbases, since you don't need extra accuracy vs starbases and the starbase extra accuracy won't help much against large ships with no jamming

This would also be packaged with a change to BattleBehaviorDefs.xml where things would try to target things their own size first

So: good idea in general? bad idea? more or less jamming/accuracy? your thoughts?

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Honestly this would not be an issue with computer targeting.

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I agree it seems small and tiny assault ships should have more relevance late game. I think the jamming should decline more quickly and more steeply, though. Something like 60,40,5,0,0. Then I think you would have to run tests to see what the result would look like in battle scenarios.

BTW - Where are the files that have these values are listed?

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Quoting northernwater,

reply 2

I agree. In my own game I modded drives so that smaller ships can have more and bigger less drives than vanilla because another aspect of the fact that small ships get out of fashion middle to late game is that they can't compete with bigger ships speed-wise.

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Quoting admiralWillyWilber,

reply 1

Honestly this would not be an issue with computer targeting.

Well ya, I guess, that's true to some extent, but that's also less fun also, you could flavor it as smaller ships being more physically evasive, since having less mass means they could dodge incoming attacks more easily

Quoting northernwater,

reply 2

oh right, duh I forgot to say what files I'd edit when I asked if people thought it was possible lol

The mod would have the file Game/ShipHullStatDefs.xml and basically I'd add the following lines to each ship type

<Stats>

<EffectType>Jamming</EffectType>

</Target>

</Stats>

and

<Stats>

<EffectType>Accuracy</EffectType>

</Target>

</Stats>

I got those lines from ShipComponentDefs.xml. Everything in there seems to follow the same notation as the stuff in ShipHullStatDefs.xml which is why I'm pretty sure it would work.

As for running tests, I'm absolutely terrible at that sort of thing, and especially since I would basically have to play through matches to do it, if there was some sort of instant battle simulator thing it'd be a different story, so that's why I'm asking for balance input

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I already did this in my New Battle Behaviors mod, that I haven't updated since 2.3.

Also made hull-based changes to movement and dynamic ship leveling.

Someday, I will update this. You're free to use it if you wish. Just Control+F in Notepad++ while in the modded files, and toggle through the instances of "Go4", and you'll see what lines of code I altered. I tag them all this way with "Go4" commented out, because it makes it much easier to update the file without missing anything.

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Is that mod on steam?

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No, Nexus.

Or scroll down the modding forum to last May 22nd, you'll find it there.

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