Capital Ship Rebalancing

If I understand the previous discussions correctly the main concern about battleships and other capital ships can be broken down to 2 main issues.

1. Cap ships are too vulnerable to fighters.

2. There is a general lack of need to use these kinds of ships.

At this point I of course could be wrong and there are more issues to discuss about this topic but that's why we have this discussion..

1) I thought about the topic some time now and the technical options are limited.

Especially if I consider that boosting the combat strength of cap ships and/or their general stats could easy lead to the situation that they end up overpowered and rich players start using cap ships to bully others. That is a situation we should try to avoid.

I already shared an initial idea to balance weapons and shield efficiency instead.

general explanation:

In FL every weapon can be set to cause a specific hull damage and some energy damage to shields. This would be a value we can play with.

However, more important in my eyes is the fact that every weapon causes a specific damage type e.g. laser, photon, tachyon etc. At the same time every shield in the game belongs to an type of shields e.g. molecular, graviton, positron.

Probably most of you did not care about this little detail but you all have been affected by it.

A tachyon weapon causes lets say 500 damage (based on its stats). Against a molecular type shield a tachyon weapon causes 20% bonus damage (with other words a total of 600 damage). Against a positron shield it causes 20% less damage (a total of 400). Tachyon vs graviton is +/-0 (500 damage).

We are talking here about a 40% efficiency fluctuation depending on which weapon is used against which shields. This is the current state and if you did not know yet, now you know.

This applies to all weapons and shields in the game, NPCs and also your PVP performance.

What I have in mind is to use this mechanic to separate small ship combat from cap ship combat a bit.

Fighter weapons will be less effective against cap ship shields while cap ships weapons wont instantly blow every small fighter out of the skies.

At the same time fighter vs fighter and cap ship vs cap ship remains as effective as it used to be.

At this point I need to mention that this only works on shields, damage to hull remains the same (there is no technical way to use this mechanic on hulls).

I don't know how much we have to apply a damage reduction. It might be enough to have 50%, maybe we need 80%... maybe a different value. That has to be tested and carefully balanced.

It is not supposed to be to make combat between fighter and cap ships impossible but to make it harder.

In the end fighters should be efficiently be used against other fighters and cap ships against other cap ships.

2) This leads me to the point where we need to think how cap ships remain or maybe even become an important gameplay option. The stuff I explained above could have a negative impact since the mod is very much focused on fighter gameplay and if using cap ships against fighters is a hard task people simply wont use battleships etc.

This needs to be avoided by giving these big ships a new purpose.

I might have a solution to that.

As announced with for the Blackstar update I want to introduce more dynamic content into CF. One part of this dynamic content is an invading fleet.

My idea here is to make it hard to stop this fleet if you only use fighters.

I want the battleships of that invasion to be extremely hard to kill if you are using only fighters. Player owned Battleships or other cap ships on the other hand are supposed to be able to kill enemy battleships much more efficiently.

Just like in point 1) we can achieve this by balancing weapons and shields. But this time we do it a little bit different.

Enemy fighters will do bonus damage against player cap ships.

Enemy cap ships will do bonus damage on player fighters.

This in theory would force players to team up when attacking the enemy fleet. A mix of fighters and cap ships would be required.

The player fighters will have to take down the NPC fighters while the player cap ships need to take care of the enemy cap ships.

Enemy ships will drop loot that makes it worth to attack the invading fleet.

These are my ideas so far.

What I don't now yet is how the final balancing needs to look like. It is something we need to test.

For that purpose I probably will create a test system on the server (locked away from public access) where the different ship types can be tested under real conditions.

Opinions?

I generally don't see much problems with increasing weapon range.

Upgrade kit might be something we could consider loot from the enemy ships.

make suggestions what you consider reasonable ranges for the ship classes

Quote from GodEatGod

How about add hull dmg reduction

that is not possible

Quote from GodEatGod

Would you like a more direct suggestion approach OP, or having a post like this helps you figure out how to balance/buff things?

I already started gathering numbers by ship category have applied a few changes based on the suggestions.

Nothing is final yet since I did not take the DPS numbers into account so far.

What I have implemented are the new weapon ranges and damage reductions by shields.

I currently run with a 50% damage reduction. This is not a final number but significant enough for conclusive tests.

The way I have set it up makes it possible to balance based on weapon type and also based on the ship class.

There are 4 new shield categories (battleship, cruiser, gunboat, utility) and so far 5 weapon categories (battleship turrets, Cruiser forward guns, cruiser turrets, gunboat forward guns and gunboat turrets). Cap ships deal normal damage against other cap ships but 50% reduced damage against fighters. Fighters deal normal damage against other fighters (depending on the shield class) and 50% reduced damage against Cap ships.

I can do a rough calculation which numbers would work best but in the end some tests will have to be done online.

This weapon shield balancing has to be extended when the Blackstar update will be released because of the new fleet.

Battleship turret ranges have not been altered yet. Its a range between 800m and 2700m depending on fire rate and damage output.

Cruiser/Destroyer forward guns have a new range of 4000m

Gunboat forward guns 2500m (due to higher maneuverability)

Cruiser turrets are set to 2000m

Gunboat turrets to 1500m

Maybe these numbers will have to change due to the DPS calculations.

in the end something that needs to be balanced, but that requires the proper numbers first and tests to be done

this topic is going to get a bit more complicated

finished the calculations based on the current numbers

bsrebalance.html

as reference for balancing we need to take values from fighters

for shields this would be: Adv. Champion H. F. Shield

capacity = 11038

regen = 245

offline_threshold = 0.150000

shield_type = S_Graviton01

-> 11038*(1-0.150000) = 9382,3 = total shield capacity

and a mk10 weapon lets say.... a PPC (i guess it fits into the average top tier range)

hull_damage = 977.100006

energy_damage = 100

refire_delay = 0.330000

->DPS-Hull = 977.100006/0.330000 = 2960,91

->DPS-Shield = ((977.100006/2)+100)/0.330000 = 1783,48

based on these numbers we will have to find a meaningful balance

I tested the different shield classes and the damage reduction and it seems to work as intended.

Now its only a totally messed up balancing process.

A VHF with 6 PPCs would do 17765,46 damage to hull and 10700,88 damage to shields.

A Dreadnaught has 450000 hull and 63750 shields. Without damage reduction from the new shield types the shields would be down in 6 seconds, the hull in another 25 seconds. A 50% shield modifier would in this case only make the fight 6 seconds longer.

A 90% damage reduction on cap ship shields would increase the time required to take out a battleship shield to 60 seconds or even longer due to the regeneration rate.

A vhf with ~10000 hull and 10000 shield would explode after a little more than 2 seconds after being hit with 4 PPCs (confirmed by tests).

The benefit of a vhf.... it moves fast and wont get hit as much as a capital ship.

Balancing is really going to be tricky.

By raw numbers most cap ships are not even in a bad spot compared to fighters... its about the subjective component of getting hit vs not getting hit.

I think to balance it we would first need to figure out how long do we want cap ships to last under direct fire. How long does a normal fighter pvp take?

Based on such a timeframe it would be possible to balance the cap ship damage input... and then from that point take care of the damage output on fighters.

This turns out to be extremely complicated especially since the numbers currently dont seem to be that much out of place.

I had to simplify the calculation by putting up some inaccurate assumptions.

e.g. I did the calculations for fighter damage based on a VHF with 6 PPCs. In reality the VHF only have 4 mk10 weapons and 2 mk9 weapons. But they also might have an additional turret and missiles. So for simplicity reasons I went with the assumption of 6 mk10 weapons (in this case PPC). I think this compensates the variation with turrets and missiles. The difference should at least not be significant.

All my calculations ignore shield gating and are done under the assumption that there is no energy drain from the weapons. I also did not consider any mounted armor equipment or the fact that after 12 seconds shields would rebuild with 15% capacity)

What I mean with "the numbers currently dont seem to be that much out of place" is that a VHF with 9700 hull and 11038 shield (this is a very likely scenario) is going to be destroyed while being under constant attack with 6 PPC in ~1.5 seconds. I verified this number in a test environment.

This of course is based on the assumption that every shot hits.

Now what is the situation with 6 PPCs vs Cap ships?

I took into account the hitpoints aswell has the shields with non-stop fire.

Assuming 0 damage reduction of the new shield modifiers a gunboat would survive 4,28 seconds, a cruiser 8,57 seconds, a battleship 25,8 seconds and a dreadnaught 31,43 seconds.

The chart below shows how the numbers change if a certain % damage reduction is applied to the shields (hull damage remains the same).

Screenshot 2021-02-24 105648.jpg

Ignoring the damage reduction however, it means that a VHF by calculation will survive 1.5 seconds while a battleship at least makes it 25.8 seconds.

By these numbers the current balancing does not even sound wrong.

There is a fundamental difference between these ship classes that I can not simply measure and put into perspective.

Ship size and agility.

There are no numbers to really meaure that and that makes balancing everything super tricky.

We have to apply subjective goals instead.

Such as "how long do we want a battleship to endure when being attacked by a fighter?".

5 minutes?

10 minutes?

If we assume 5 minutes to be a value to go for that would be 300 seconds.

A 95% damage reduction would mean 243.35 seconds for a battleship under non-stop fire. But lets face it no fighter would non-stop attack without evading and/or reloading weapon energy.

Let's assume a 95% damage reduction and we get into the area of having fights take 5-10mins. (I can only make rough estimates here.)

Figther vs Fighter gameplay would remain untouched.

Fighters vs capital ships would have significantly more difficulties.

But we also need to consider what it looks the other way around. How fast can battleships in theory destroy fighters?

Again, lets start with the numbers.

The calculation is purely based on the turrets (the main weapons are excluded).

The 4 gunship turrets can in theory destroy a VHF in 3.3 seconds.

The 7 turrets of a cruiser require 1.8 - 5.7 for that job. (cruiser turret damage is highly inconsistent and needs to be rebalanced)

8 Battleship turrets need ~1.25 seconds with the exception of the Rheinland turret which is much stronger but has a much shorter range.

Not bad actually. (I have not even take a damage reduction into account)

And now to the subjective part.

With the exception of the gunboats the other cap ships are that big that you will never get the chance to point all the turrets at your target.

Some turrets are on the left side.... some on the right side... some on the bottom... some on the top and in the end there always is a big ship hull between them.

In theory you can double or tribble the numbers for battleships and cruisers above.

The question is if it matters at all since cap ships are not meant to destroy fighters with ease. Maybe these numbers are exactly where they belong to.

By increasing the survivability of cap ships we would also increase the time they have to take care of attacking fighters.

Maybe that already is enough.

Of course the inconsistent cruiser turrets have to be balanced.

Once the balance between the different ship classes is sorted out it would also be required to figure out the number for cap ship vs cap ship combat. I guess specifically the primary cap ships weapons will play a very big role there. But I did not do any calculations here yet because first the balancing between cap ships and fighters need to be done in a meaningful way.

f*** no, did not consider it in the calculation

it is getting more and more complicated

correct me if i am wrong but.... the Adv. Battleship Defense Turret seems to underperform compared to the other battleship turrets, right?