Though realistic, he believes that to get to an enemy and not be able to do any damage either forces players to always implement oblique strategies (such as carrying boarding parties, EMP weapons or hull devouring nanites) or run away and get better weapons.
And this is a problem because? ;)
I have to keep in mind the saying about not being able to please the most people, but as I'm putting alot into this game, nearly working on it full time, and trying to turn it into a business, I can't ignore the market segmentation between gamers who want a simple combat system and those who want a complex one full of intricate dependencies. Heck, with everything I have in mind, I'm already treading on so much thin ice that I know I can kiss the I-War / Freespace players goodbye (oh well).
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As a player who's inevitably annoyed by games that force me to get in and pound things, delaying the resolution that is already obvious, I think it would be a breath of fresh air.
I'm with you on this, I'm sick of straightforward solutions. But the best of both worlds would be a game that doesn't require you to use a wide variety of solutions, but rather rewards you for doing so. For instance, salvage is a part of the game, as is boarding and stealing cargo. I hope that pugilists will have fun blasting on ships and using nukes and whatnot, but the more savvy player will get rich quicker (and thus level more quickly) by taking the more considered approach.
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To soften it a little, though, I'd go with variable damage -- I think that's more realistic, anyhow.
Right now, I'm leaning more toward this simply because on the face of it the math is easier for you to do. I do like some of the other options presented so far, but my motto has got to be "stat heavy, interface light." So you've got to be able to quickly determine the impact of your choices, and as I noted above, the damage reduction and hit point approach does this quickly.
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You might also consider specialized weapons that reduce durability -- or is that what the nanites do?
Exactly. [grin] That, and other, more exotic weapons like antimatter and phased particles, all of which have intrinsic tradeoffs.
--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...
Just one thougth... To avoid no-win situations like this, just make sure every unit is capable of hurting itself.
Well, a ship can always ram another ship if it wins a manuevering contest, and that does damage despite armor. But your response here would be to get out of dodge, and since the game is open ended, you could always fly to an easier area.
--------------------Just waiting for the mothership...
Rather than setting a fixed amount of damage or formula to each weapon versus armor type, perhaps you can include a 'damage range'. It's just like a console RPG where you never really deal a fixed amount of damage with an ordinary attack, but still within a certain range. Let's say, a laser damage point is 1000, with a range of +/-10%. That means the actual damage caused on a target can be randomly between 900 to 1100, and it can kind of can help you make the game more, well, anticipating if the damange range is greater with some certain armor. As for the scale stuff... Go for big number, but I'm thinking of Gungrave style, where you have to break a regenerating damage barrier before your HP is actually touched. It'll work if you have an energy shield that constantly regenerates and forces you or your enemy to attack quickly before the damage barrier is full again.
Original post by Wavinator Every point of damage above 100 would transfer to structure, while points equal or below would be ignored.
This is what ADoM does, and it works perfectly. Come to think of it, I was always able to deal more damage than my protection value. Then again, in ADoM there is a (small) chance of scoring critical hits, so one can deal damage even in the 100 damage / 100 armor situation.
Original post by Wavinator I have a friend who thinks this might be a bad idea because equal opponents will most likely not be able to damage each other or very quickly kill each other. Two opponents with Dur 100 / Struct 100 ships and 100 HP lasers will do no damage, while two with 150 lasers will kill each other in two shots.
I think that's an exaggerated example. Any design with an exaggerated example will always come up as a flaw design. Starcraft uses HP = HP - (Damage - Armor) with a little bit percentage thrown in, and it works just fine. It is the simplest form most players can associate. Some hardcore players analyze things like this when playing, so if you have a complicated formula for a simple thing such as damage reduction, it makes the game harder to excel.
Normally, you don't have weapons that have damage slightly above armor/durability value. Durability: 100, HP: 100, Lasers: 150 is just plain silly. Two shots, he's dead. Durability: 10, HP: 400, Lasers: 50 makes much more sense. Play around with the values, I believe you can still end up with a balanced system.
Got a few suggestions here. You might be able to mix them together, but so far it's just different ideas inspired by different games:
Something like Fallout's system: Why? It's simple and very flexible.
Each armor type have two values (in Fallout they have these two values for each damage type the armor protects against, but not sure if that would get too messy in your game)
Anyway, the armor has an amount of damage it can absorb, and a percentage of damage it deflects.
When it's hit, you first absorb a fixed amount of damage. This means ridiculously small weapons won't be able to harm heavy armor at all. Makes sense, and if you rely on ridiculously small weapons, and want to fight something heavily armored, I think it's fair. :)
If there's any damage left after this subtraction, you subtract the % value from that remaining damage.
A good example of the effects of this system would be the following: In Fallout, two really powerful weapons were the chaingun and plasma rifle.
With most normal armor, the chaingun could rip you apart several times over. (You had around 80-100 hp, it fired something like 30 bullets that each does around 10 damage). The plasma rifle fired one powerful bolt doing around 100-150 damage.
So both can kill you, but the chaingun is able to inflict more damage.
Now grab a suit of power armor. That thing has around 8-10 damage absorbtion against most damage types. So when a chaingun fires at you, each bullet only damages for around 10, which means almost all the damage is absorbed by the armor. A few of the bullets might be able to get through with one or two damage points which are then reduced by the armor's deflection %, maybe reducing the remaining damage from 8 to 4 points. Basically the weapon is rendered useless, even if it's *the* most powerful weapon against less armored targets (and even had a nice cone of armor so it could mow down you and your entire party all in one).
The plasma rifle would fire that one bolt at you, get 10 points subtracted, and then you still have around 90-140 damage to deal with. Thats where the armor %'s really come into play. I think power armor had something like 40% against energy weapons, which means the final damage is reduced down to something like 50-100.
Still able to kill you if you're unlucky, but here the fixed absorbtion didn't really do much, while the %'s almost halved the damage.
Of course, critical hits can be used to spice it up a bit.
Ok, so next system: Warhammer 40k: (Taken from memory, never played it regularly, and haven't played at all for ages) Each unit has a couple of values: - Armor - Toughness - Hitpoints
So the system is simple enough. When you hit the unit, you first compare the attack to the armor value. It's either deflected completely, or it goes through. If it manages to get through the armor, you check against the toughness value in the same way, and if it manages to get through there as well, it is subtracted fro mthe targets hitpoints.
The funny thing is that most units had only one hitpoint. The two other layers could usually deflect a lot of attacks, but people could still be killed instantly with a lucky shot.
Of course in your game, you'd probably want to avoid one-shot kills, but then just add to the hitpoints.
Toughness and hitpoints would represent the ship itself, or the component you hit, and might be difficult for the player to improve on, while armor would represent the external armor plating.
I guess this really implements a "built-in" kind of critical hits.
And finally as much a question as a suggestion, really: What type of damage are you looking to achieve? How should the fight usually go? Two ships pounding away at each others at full power, until one explodes? Two ships firing at each others, and when damaged, one or more of their components are disabled? So they fire until one is blown up, loses control of their weapon systems, life support systems, or anything else?
And are they meant to fight till the death no matter what? Should a badly underpowered ship try to escape?
The reason I'm asking is that I believe the damage system you choose should reflect how you want the battles to happen. If it's the former, all-or-nothing, then giving each ship a million hitpoints makes sense. They just have to wear each others down. It's basically a deterministic system. No amount of luck is going to change facts, when you do 100 damage points against a ship with 5 million hitpoints.
If you want a more risky system, where a lucky shot can blow up the generator, or destroy your big guns, while others might be deflected completely, then you should definitely look into some more sophisticated damage system. But I think it really comes down to what kind of balance you want in the battles.
Finally, I dont think you should worry about the player being unable to inflict any damage. A system with millions of hitpoints can be just as discouraging.Whether you do no damage (in a DR system) or 100 damage (in a HP system) against a ship with 4 million hitpoints doesnt really make a difference. Especially because a ship with 4 million hitpoints will undoubtedly be able to inflict a lot more damage on you. So either you're able to kill it fast, or you're dead.
I'd like to hear what you want to achieve with the damage system, before we can get any closer to suggesting the perfect system ;)
There's a small addition to whatever system you use that should solve the problem with millions of HPs. Each weapon or armor belongs to a class, which can be infantry, armoured vehicle and capitol ship (these are just examples with lousy names, I'm sure you can come up with better ones ;)
A weapon can't damage higher class armor at all, and instantly destroies lower class armor. Because of the desparities between the different classes this makes a lot of sense. Foot soldiers can still carry armoured vehicle class weapons (anti-tank rockets...) or use a robotic armor that is so strong that its class is armoured vehicle. Fighter ships with armoured vehicle class armor and weapons can still have a huge torpedo that does capitol ship class damage. Feel free to mix and match. Planet class weapons and armors would be way too cool :) And for damage between equal classes, you can use regular hit points and damage reduction and stuff.
hmmm, be warned; I just signed up and am jumping into an already involved topic. To avoid shortchanging anyones views that I didn't see, I'll give my basic thoughts on a DR system. I may post something someone else has posted, but that's just agreement...
DR definitely has a place. In a space-war game, it has more of a place than in other genres. It goes without saying that it's a touchy situation in any case...
I'm a tabletop player myself -- D&D, Spycraft, RIFTS, anything I can get my hands on. Naturally, this means that DR is not usually something I deal with.
I would have to guess that for this situation, it would be best to use a hybrid system. Factor in DR( probably not a huge amount, but a revolver shouldn't be able to pierce a starship's armour ) as well as HP, but I think the best way to do things is to take a step back and look at all of the ramifications of being hit with a uber-laser-blast-o-doom(...+2!...) - things will get hurt, unless we're talking ridiculous armour. If a DR was in place, the laser would do less damage, but it would still do a significant amount( let us say ). Now - it's one thing to damage a hull, it's another to penetrate it, and it's something entirely different to destroy it.
Set up "state" or "status" tracking on the armours. Let's say that each item/ship has a "perfect", "scratched", "worn", "battered", "breached" and "destroyed" threshold( disregard names or particular number of stages, of course ) - for every item, it could work something like this: 100% - "perfect" 80% - "scratched" 60% - "worn" 40% - "battered" 20% - "breached" 0% - "destroyed"
with effects based on state such as - air exits any hull with a "breached" status into the vaccum( sp? ) and the section must be sealed off to prevent complete loss of pressure. Similarly, a plasma blast isn't going to do bloody much to a guy in an environmentally sealed suit, except to hurt the suit. However, some poor schmuck standing next to the guy is unfortunate enough to have his lungs seared out, along with any other soft tissue, even if he was wearing the best non-environmental suit around. Now if the env-suit was at a "breached" state...or maybe there's a % chance if it's at a "battered" state...that's just number pushing, I'll leave that to you.
............................ now that's a lot of words for a simple concept, eh? DR should be used, but always, always, always! used with care.
[Edited by - DesignerGuy on August 6, 2004 6:38:54 PM]
How about allowing durability to be damaged? A simple formula that would give some interesting results is cD = cD - (dam/tD) where cD is current durability, dam is the damage of the weapon and tD is total (or max) durability.
In the case of of the 100/100 ships with 100 damage weapons, their first shot would do no damage, but subsequent shots will do increasing damage. To speed up the battle even more, you could substitute tD with cD in the above equation (though keeping tD is a bit more realistic I feel).
With this system, it gives the player the option of including rapid fire low damage weapons for the sole purpose of degrading his opponent's armour. This damage formula is also processor friendly with only one divide operation being the bottle neck. Best of all, if you go with the tD version and dam is also a constant, you can pre-caluate dam/tD to optimise things.
If your going to have Characters with HP and then Ships with HP, perhaps you should think about using three digits on people and 6 or 7 digits on ships. I say this because of past example, Xenogears on the PS1, that had characters and Giant Fighting Robots. If a unit of HP is to be taken as the same between systems, i.e. by the same measurement, then it only stands to reason that the grand machine has way more of these units then the person.
As for the Structural / Durability naming scheme, thats all good stuff. Though, you may want the effect "Durability" to have be in the Multiplication/Division operations rather then Addition/Subtracton. For instance, lets say the Durability of a person is about 10 or 12. We can consider this to be "1%" and the durability of a space ship, measured in around 400 and 500, be 40% and 50%. Number wise, the Laser Beam that does 4000 Damage will reduce a person's Structual number by 3960. Another spaceship, 2000.
Makes sense, a laser beam from a spaceship should instantly fry a persn, right?
