#103

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!

1 Like
#104

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.

#105

No you’re thinking of HW2

2 Likes
#106

@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. :stuck_out_tongue:

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?

1 Like
#107

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.

#108

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. :confused:
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. :confused:

#109

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:

  1. 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)
  2. 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)
  3. 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.

3 Likes
#110

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.

#111

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.

1 Like
#112

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.

#113

How about another method… nerf upgrades, like 50% cut on those bonuses. We need to make those balances less “one sided”.

2 Likes
#114

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.

1 Like
#115

Yeah I’m going to make a post on this in a little bit
The upgrade system in HW2 actually seems to have had very little thought put into it and needs some reworking.
There should just be 1 upgrade that increases like 40-50% on corvs, less still on capitals, not 2 that do 30 and 60%.
The 30% upgrade generally does nothing, while the 60% does more than it really should to generally make things survive an extra hit.

Fixing it would go a long way to help make the game more balanced as a whole.

edit: here we go in more detail and with some examples.

I think that’s very restrictive, contrast to how HW generally lets you skip tech.

What if you increase Capital ship chasis research by 2k to account for the HP upgrade it gives, and you don’t even want corvs? Now skipping to frigs is prohibitively expensive.

It could work, but I’m not crazy about it.

#116

I didn’t suggest adjusting HW1 cost, adjust HW2 cost. Not every change has to be a HW1 change right?

1 Like
#117

Reduce it how much?

Torp frigate hp 2 is 2200 RU and 135 seconds total.

SuperHeavyChassis which you say should give frigates HP is 3000 and 330 seconds.

But what… Keep in mind that this research replaces shipyard, which costs 3500/4000 RU.

So erm so how cheap do you make torp frigate hp upgrade? You get 300 RU for researching it? :stuck_out_tongue: And that’s just one ship, while you’re saying the super cap chasis upgrade should upgrade all frigates like Vaygrs does.

Well Vaygr is a better comparison(even though I think their upgrade tree is far inferior and largely responsible for why they were the worst of the HW2 races, minus the new double damage bugs making them better)
Theirs is 3400 RU and 180 seconds.

That said, I do agree(like I’ve said in my other post) that HW2 upgrades should be cheaper but less effective. Though I think the time should stay the same as around what the two upgrades combined are. 90-160 seconds are just good times that leave exploitable openings which is good for strategy.
It’s not going to be balanced just from changing HW1, yeah.
Even worse, it would be bad to copy some of the things from HW2 that were clearly oversights/mistakes, and applying them to HW1 for the sake of balance.

#118

If it is a thing then whatever it is must be over time or exaggerated from number of ships. Just like I did earlier in the week with Laser Corvettes, I temporarily set the Light Corvette gun to do 1.0 damage vs Heavy, commented out the weapon lines on a Hiigaran Destroyer and set the destroyer health to 136 (obviously 1 shot + 1 health), side and read armor damage to 1.0 and spawned and killed 10 destroyers, none of them one-shotted as they all survived the first hit with one health.

Restored the side and rear armor to 1.2 and set the health to 163 (so 135x1.2 + 1 health) and same thing.

#119

So you aren’t actually seeing Lasers do double damage?

I don’t know myself, but it was a feeling that many HW2 players got that they’re doing much more damage than they did before.
Perhaps what it was is something in HW2 actually making them do less damage than they were really supposed to.

People have done tests of pulsars vs vettes which in HW2 would roughly go even and it was down to luck as to which has a corvette or two left, while in HWRM the missile vettes completely wreck pulsars while losing less than half.

Further, when I set accuracy versus capitals to say 0.6, damage=1, it APPEARS that every shot is still hitting, yet it definitely seems to do far far less DPS.

But yes I did mean “over time”. So I guess it could be that they were attacking faster, but I’m not sure… I’m really not the one to test that thing. It would be nice if some people that’ve reported it could post some videos comparing HWRM and HW2 where they see these inconsistencies in unit tests.

#120

So I don’t know about laser vettes, but I read on the relicnews boards that the reason for the sphere burst weapons doin extra damage is that every shot is counting as a critical hit so doing an auto extra 20% for every landed shot. I can dig up and link Carl’s explanation if you like. Pretty sure someone has already liked it here (in the mod forums) though.

#121

There’s no such thing as a critical hit, the “issue” was that sphere burst usually have a wide enough radius that it’ll encompass the sides and/or the rear of the target, therefore applying the flanking bonuses as defined in the target’s .ship - which are 20% on most ships of frigate size and above.

As far as I’m concerned, this sounds like intended behaviour. If you do AoE that includes flanks, it makes sense to do flanking damage.

2 Likes
#122

Theoretically, the area should be spread around the whole ship, so if this is say a shrapnel weapon, shouldn’t only the shards that hit the weaker areas count for 20 extra %? Seems like that would be hard to calculate. And also sounds like neither counting or not counting as a critical hit (which I’m using a a term for the place to hit which causes bonus damage) is ‘fair’ for a AOE weapon.