Ophiuchus wrote: ↑Tue Mar 10, 2020 10:16 amI will do the damage/structure rescaling at the same time as switching to four bouts (instead of doing rescaling twice).
Let's talk again about the 4 bout combats.
You know I was all-in about the idea. I proposed that set of new weapons for the always-in-the-future themed tech tree that counted on those 4 bouts for better balance and the such. Now I'm not so convinced. What I liked the most about the idea was that thing of the hidden CR-ships hitting the enemies on bout 3 with no retaliation until bout 4.
The same mechanic for stealth is still working with just two weapon ranges (long and short) and 3 bouts: hidden LR-ships shot from bout 1 but can be shoot from bout 2 (-33% enemy LR damage, -0% enemy SR damage), hidden SR-ships shot from bout 2 and do not get retaliation until bout 3 (-66% enemy LR damage, -50% enemy SR damage).
Regarding "CR weapons might not do any damage at all (when shot down before bout 3)", that problem is less serious with only LR/SR and 3 bouts.
So I need the values for four bout combat (LR,SR,CR,CR).
I'll do it. But those might be bigger numbers for the MD-1 because of more shots-per-combat variety (we add 12-shots).
A weapon like the spinal mount could be considered unusable at close range if not hidden
We are adding some complexity to combat. What's the point of minimum range regarding tactics? Not opposed to the idea, but I don't see what does it bring into combat tactics.
Should a weapon like the spinal mount suggestion a LSR weapon? And should we call a normal long range weapons a LSC*R weapon (because then the prototype missile would be a CR weapon? And a general launch in LR fly-one-bout missile would be LCR+1R ).
What a storm of letters...
If we reject the least range thingy, LR, SR and CR would be enough. But I don't need to worry about that because calculations are about number of shots per combat (regardless of fancy stuff for shot distribution among bouts).
I would keep damage increase uniform
Got it.
For the fighters a damage range would be helpful (e.g. considering damage minimum damage if shot down in the first bout vs not being shot down at all), maybe add extra columns for that (e.g. "Bomber MIN", "Bomber MAX", "Fighter MIN", "Fighter MAX" of +/- instead of MIN/MAX).
Less urgent would be the same for the other weapon types (cause it is quite probably that CR weapons do no damage at all).
OK, my original spreadsheet has many more columns.
I came up with some estimations for frequencies of types of defence against weapons and survivability of the ships to get some sort of average weapon efficiency (percentage of maximum damage that will deal on average) and scalated PP cost with that (so that weapons that has greater efficiency have more cost per damage). An example (still for 3 bouts): for fighters, I said that on average 50% of them survive to shoot on bout 3, so 75% efficiency. For cannons I assumed fully refined tech and:
- 25% of the targets will be shielded (75% will not) with a same-tier shield, so -50% damage against those targets for LR weapons, -33% for SR.
- Targets would be detected from start 50% of times, from bout 2 33.3% and undetected on bout 3 16.7%.
- Gunner would die on bout 1 (one one chance to shoot) 20% of the times, 50% on bout 2, 33.3% it makes it to bout 3.
Different range and fire-rate weapons get affected differently. Combining all cases above I get an average efficiency for each weapon (above is a refined version of what I used in the OP's attached table).
Do you like this reasoning for the balancing?
p.s. off-topic side-note: If choosing different bouts (3, or more than 4), damage could be scaled to the number of close range bouts so the total damage per combat does not change, just the granularity (in close range bouts). So e.g. when choosing 3 bouts all weapons should do twice the damage when in close range. Or it could scale damage over all the bouts (so still double the damage for CR weapons, but +33% damage for LR weapons in each of the three bouts). Or KISS for the beginning, do not scale the damage and simply give game rule access to manually change damage multipliers for the different types of ranges (LR damage, SR damage, CR damage).
All this gives me the chills. Keep in mind that different number of bouts require a different minimum damage to avoid integers, and different cases that need rounding up or down and changing the regular formulas. Should we use real numbers, what you propose would be quite easy (define values based on bouts per combat). But if we want to stick to integer values and to not deviate too much from recognisable numbers (40 better than 41, etc.), we better stick to a single, fixed number of bouts, or to a subset like 3,4 and 6 (avoid 5 for the extra denominator that blows numbers up). In any case, balancing things like chaff with more bouts is not necessary: we can adjust hull costs (I'm doing numbers for the shields and I'm more and more convinced that hulls are too cheap).