The problem is not the engine it is the exaggerated firepower of everything, that makes things die too fast
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Sorry by engine I ment the style of gameplay (the glass cannon style). I used the wrong word ;p.
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Like I said, I can’t think of a game that has tech as completely different as HW1 and HW2 does. What game are you thinking of?
They are far more different than the tech/production differences of SC.
Like the time you get Carriers(lol), BC, Ultras are largely similar.
Larva is a really different mechanic than extra production buildings, except not really, since you just build an extra lair to basically have more production buildings if you have more resources than your macro can keep up with.
It’s way more similar than one side having a costly and slow to build building you can destroy to completely stop production on one side but not another.
Well yeah on Zerg you can destroy a greater spire to stop broodlord production, but… the building can be hidden, and you can have a backup one. And that’s not something just on the zerg side. You can kill Terrans fusion core to stop BC production, but again that just makes them similar to zerg and that’s not something that takes as long or is as costly to rebuild. Plus it’s not such a big deal to lose a fusion core and not be able to make BCs in SC2 than in HW.
SC is considered a good example of an assymetrical game. It feels very different, but at the core they’re quite similar. At the core of how HW1 and HW2 production and tech works, they’re more different than any game I can think of an balancing them will be difficult.
It’s not just that they’re different either… The way HW1s works to have 2 production queues, not require a building to produce units and just research to build at any carrier, to have it be completely hidden what they’re doing, to be able to hide research ships, etc etc etc is all just clearly better.
When I say better, I mean better from a strength standpoint, not game design, mind you.
The only reason the race is so much worse is that those research times are so slow and their units are so much worse. Tech and production wise they’re better, so if they had the same tech timings and strength of units they’re unarguably be OP.
Interesting idea. Problem is that shouldn’t destroyers require ions? So you need a frigate research module to get ion tech before you can make the capital module for the chasis to get destroyers. It would be rather confusing.
Could divide it up to strike/capital/non-combat research vessels instead of 6 sections, though.
Actually tempted to change my mod to that now, but it would take a bit of time that I don’t have. 
Isn’t it still sort of BS though that you can find the production module on a MS/carrier to destroy, but that capital research ship could be hidden anywhere on the map?
Production modules are just the one thing HW2 added and I don’t really see why they shouldn’t be used to better both the balance and gameplay.
It’s just really not fair that you can bomb a cap production facility to stop stuff from coming out but you can’t do that to HW1 races.
You fell into my trap. I’m sorry.
Ever played a game called Homeworld:Cataclysm?
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I saw that one coming. 
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Ok, Coming up for air for a minute.
Diff reports for your perusal, eyeball them to see what to expect regarding the current state of Kushan strikecraft. Many more ships have been touched but these are the ones that I believe pass muster with their roles and versus their counters and it is a small sample size to keep things manageable.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/29530650/diff_reports_3-28.zip
How to read them: new on the left, old on the right, differences only are shown. Included are the attack styles for the Kushan strikecraft, point out anything dumb I might have missed.
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Woohooo. It starts. @scole thank you
Few questions. For you and/or modders.
Can these be explained?
Flyby_HW1Corvette_vs_Corvette
dogfight_multigun
frontal_hvette
Facetarget_HW1MGCorvette_vs_Frigate
If my assumptions are correct base on the name of these patterns as a description then this means different corvettes are going to act differently based on what they are attacking?
So If I have a mixed group of heavies, lights, and multis, together attacking a frigate, they will all act the same. But the moment I re-attack a group of fighters or corvettes they some will break off and some start doing flybys?
Also, Flyby patterns with lights and multis vs HW2 corvettes would have the same problem they currently do right? They would only be able to shoot on approach while the HW2 corvettes turrets remain trained on the HW1 corvettes as they fly by?
Can’t wait to test all of this. It may add an interesting dynamic in that light vettes are fighter augmentation and should be mixed-in with an open swarm, and heavy vettes revert back to the corvette we remember from HW1. Multis kind of a hybrid of the two.
Adding 11 seconds to the build time of the multi? That is a pretty big change! however, multis may become the new assault frigate with the increased armor and attack pattern. I could see mixing repair vettes with these as a ‘better vs fighter, ok vs frigate’ counterpart to the assault frigate.
Holly health on the heavy! These things just got a major buff all around. Fontal attack patterns on everything, 1100 health, we just got mini flack frigates.
Yeah, they use a base attackstyle and then modify it for that particular ship.
Edit…ooor could just crack open the attack styles in the text editor! Wee thanks @scole!!!
New attack styles to take advantage of the ships different gun layouts. Yay!
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For those wondering what the 2 number changes in Can_Attack() do, it’s one thing that helps get ships to bunch up more in a consistent ball pass after pass like the scouts in my mod do.
Somewhat, at least. It doesn’t work perfectly.
Really thought that game was less highly regarded than HW1… More people were still playing HW1 after it came out.
Don’t really think Cata was that balanced, not that HW1 really was either.
No you’re thinking of HW2
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@scole why have Multiguns be so slow?
Like Pulsars/Lasers/Missile/Corv are 215. It seems like Multiguns (and Light corvs that were changed) should be faster than any others
On that note, Hiig gunships should probably be faster as well. Also worth noting that Hiig gunship absolutely should be doing 50 and not 42 damage, or that it should do a bonus to unarmored to do 50+ to fighters.
I’m guessing it’s probably due to their dogfight behavior making them stick on slower corvs tails? Which is a pain for lasers… but they still don’t have the DPS(around 40, just headmathing) to kill lasers that fast and lasers aren’t anti-corv anyway. I think that’s why I ended up just making them 5 faster and not the fastest like HW1. Would have been ideal if there was a dogfight light behavior where they’d overshoot and break off and loop back behind within ~500 range instead of stick on the tail.
Multiguns were fast in HW1, anyway, so it’s nice to have just as flavor. Actually, they were the fastest corv in HW1, faster than lights.
Just seems like highly specialized niche ships like those should be able to pick their battles.
A flak frigate with lvl1 speed upgrade is faster than a multigun with those numbers. Heh. 
And on light corvs gun, having a range that small seems silly because it becomes non-consequential on health upgraded unit.
I mean, the reason you ever do a range is to sometimes have something kill something in 3 hits and sometimes 4, for example.
130-135 only works on 400 hp targets. It doesn’t work on the 600(light corvs) hp ones, or 650 hp ones(max upgraded corvs)
For 400 it’s 3-4 hits.
For 600 it’s 5.
For 640 it’s 5.
For 900 it’s 7.
So shouldn’t it just simply be a flat 135, or rather 115-140 so it’s 3-4, 5-6, 5-6, 7-8 respectively? Unless that small edge case of it sometimes taking an extra hit vs unupgraded HW2 corvs is significant… which somewhat could make sense I guess? It makes Light Corvs a twice as worse when Pulsars/Missiles get their health upgrades. If that’s the idea, then well it’s fine, though it sort of came off as an oversight.
Largely looks like a very good start.
It sounds like major buffs but like I’ve said many times, that’s simply how bad they were.
In my mod I gave them 1050 and frontal attack patterns, and an hp upgrade for 50% more, but they(equal RU cost of, so 2) still lose to pulsars and missile corvs(as they should, but they shouldn’t get SLAUGHTERED). That just goes to show how bad the original numbers were.
So while those numbers sound like a lot, it’s just that the numbers were atrocious before, since they still lose to their counters when you make them more than twice as strong.
HW1 strikecraft were almost all 3-6x weaker.
I mean it’s easy to figure why. A missile corv squad is 1600 hp, and get 60% more from hp upgrades. They only took like 50% longer to build than a heavy corv.
And when a missile corv squad loses 3 of them, they can just retreat and resupply. It is easy to see why a single 600 vette that doesn’t resupply is so bad in comparison.
It’s pretty easy to argue why HW1 corvs should have more HP per RU than HW2 ones. Resupply.
The same logic tells why they should have a bit less DPS per RU. With HW2, they essentially lose DPS as they lose HP while HW1s don’t.
Though now I wonder… it might be cool if heavies were the same 900 HP as multiguns, but had 0.8 front and side armor(1080ehp). @ratamaq do you think that’d be enough to make heavy+repair corv do something significant?
The more armor something has, the more efficient repair is.
Or would they just die so fast that it does nothing?(2 torps shooting a heavy gibs them still, after all) Or wind up being op?
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Won’t know until it’s field tested. I haven’t used vettes a lot in R. The few times I tried repair vet plus light/heavy/multi vs CPU, it didn’t go well at all. But trust it will be the first thing I test.
Yeah. Shame Krux used that other mod, a single player mod, for the tournament. We could have maybe seen more HW1 vettes that are similar to what’s coming and then seen more that could have used tweaking. 
And the extra tech mod he’s using doesn’t stop that research vessel sniping.
It’s a little sad how poorly people understand some of the balance issues. Like Krux is just not aware of that problem I showed you. Lots of people aren’t even after they tell them. I don’t have time to play a game against them all and show them. They won’t try it themselves with someone else and see.
Their turret rotations and angles will allow them to track their targets while moving. It’s not a perfect solution but they should be considerably better.
That sounds exactly right and why I posted some info for you guys to look over, I need to re-evaluate that.
I went down that path as well. Gunships being so bad at their job in vanilla was immensely disappointing (it was one of my favorite ships and the one I was most looking forward to texturing). I already changed its maxbankingamount to 35 to try and help improve the time on target efficacy of both top and bottom turrets. Its weapon currently looks like:
StartWeaponConfig(NewWeaponType,"AnimatedTurret","Bullet","Kinetic_Small","Normal",1700,1250*1.1,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,3,0,0,1,0,65,65,0.1,"Normal",1,0,0);
AddWeaponResult(NewWeaponType,"Hit","DamageHealth","Target",44,50,"");
setPenetration(NewWeaponType,5,1,
{PlanetKillerArmour=0},
{ResArmour=0.8});
setAccuracy(NewWeaponType,1,
{Fighter=0.12},
{Corvette=0.136},
{munition=0.2},
{Frigate=0.8,damage=1},
{SmallCapitalShip=0.6,damage=1},
{BigCapitalShip=0.6,damage=1},
{ResourceLarge=0.6,damage=1});
setAngles(NewWeaponType,0,-180,180,-10,60);
setMiscValues(NewWeaponType,1.5,0.5);
addAnimTurretSound(NewWeaponType,"Data:Sound/SFX/ETG/SPECIAL/SPECIAL_ABILITIES_TURRET_ON");
Thanks, I will re-run the simulations and see. Light Corvettes were being fairly murderous against Destroyers and Frigates so there was some variation to give them a chance.
Which brings up a point I forgot to address - upgrades. This is straight non-upgraded vs non-upgraded at the moment which obviously will not fly. I’m not entirely sure which path to choose:
- Built in inherent family speed upgrade in the drives/health in the chassis (early advantage:HW1, maybe make it around level 1 of a HW2 race)
- Separate research ability (Like the poor HW1 races don’t have enough to manage, but it’s easier to time and gives the player a choice)
- An other option I haven’t explored.
At the moment Hiigaran Interceptors will overcome their Vette counters, at equivalent ship RUs spent, only at InterceptorMAXSPEEDUpgrade2 and just barely.
This reminds me, I was mucking about in the code looking for extra damage bugs and I’ll have to look again to verify but it looked like front armor was not defined, only side and rear. If that is the case I’ll try and have that added so we have the ability to give ships heavier frontal armor when needed.
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I should note that I think a lot of us feel that fighters become too bad later on, so anti-fighter things don’t need TOO much of a buff.
I think it’s mostly that Pulsars are just too good against fighters. Have 4 pulsars go vs 5 bombers and the outcome is pretty similar to 4 gunships vs 5 bombers. It’s not that Gunships are THAT weak(except vs hw2 fighters, and being too slow), it’s more than Pulsars are too good. That change you pasted looks good at least to start, though. Occasionally 1 shotting, but other times 2, and being about to have guns converge, that is.
I had this happen as well like I said somewhere else; it seems like they were being effected by the double damage bug.
Like those numbers are only around 200 DPS for them. Dessies have tens of thousands of HP. They seem to be killing them twice as fast as what the HP/DPS would indicate.
I think myself in later versions, yeah, I ended up dropping their accuracy vs capitals a ton to make up for the apparent double damage they were doing.
I’m going to make a thread about upgrades. I really feel strongly that HW2 2 tier upgrades are useless fluff that don’t actually add anything from the game. In fact, they often deter from it.
The jist of it is that generally the tier 1 upgrade often doesn’t even make a ship survive an extra hit.
In most cases, when you have a unit attack a ship it will die just as fast unupgraded as with a tier1 upgrade. IE when torps shoot frigs, or laser corvs shoot other corvs. Generally it’s actually useless except to better counter units they already decimate which seems silly.
I’ll make a thread to clarify my thoughts, give more examples, etc, hopefully convince others about it, since it will seem like a big change to most people to just have one upgrade even though I think it’s really not.
I’d really like to see HW1 have 2 research queues. One for “major research” (ship unlocks), then another one for “minor research” (HP and speed upgrades, perhaps an additional improved manufacturing research like HW2 has? Maybe Jump shouldn’t be innate but you have to research it here?) Once HW1 is no longer vulnerable before being able to get out interceptors, and research vessels don’t die easy to fighters alone let alone bombers, it’s going to become rather BS that they can freely jump and hide a research vessel at the start.
This would be a good compromise as well with people missing the way HW1 let you research multiple things at one time. I don’t remember how the exact mechanics with timings on that worked and if that would work well exactly the same in here, though.
Couldn’t figure out how to mod this in. Don’t think it’s possible.
Maybe the next level of drive upgrades the lessor up the chain? Say vette drive gives fighters more speed, vette chassis fighters more armor. Then because super cap chassis is not required for destroyers, let it give a boost to destroyer armor or speed, then heavy guns boost destroyer firepower or something like that? Done right sounds like it could be a win win.
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But what if you don’t want frigates? You have to get cap research just to get more vette hp?
Not to mention, that’s an upgrade that’s worth around 1.5k-2k RU that you just get for free bundled in, which would be imbalanced if other things are balanced.
And I think HW1 Destroyers and others capitals do not need a health upgrade. That’s what support frigates are for.
How about another method… nerf upgrades, like 50% cut on those bonuses. We need to make those balances less “one sided”.
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Yea that is kind of the point. To me it makes logical sense. If I put my scientist to work figuring out how to build a larger better perpolition system or chassis, it stands to reason that in the process they would learn how to make improvements to the smaller frames and drives.
Cost shouldn’t be a concern because we are balancing against the HW2 counterpart that cost could be for adjusted. Meaning if this in turn underpowers the HW2 upgrades, just reduce the HW2 research cost.
I agree with this, but then again if support was working properly, I don’t see a need for upgrades on anything except maybe fighters. You may notice that for the most part I’ve stayed out or tried to throttle back ideas for HW1 upgrades because I want working support.
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