Damage modelling is good.

RTS's are not really the place for this, though. Many (or most) players don't want random die-rolls determining if they win or lose. If the game had complex compartmentalised damage systems (like a sim) it'd be fine: but I doubt anybody wants retarded Armada 2 style 'oh yeah by luck the guns on your biggest ship stopped working lol guess you're doomed' stuff. Without targetable subsystems or a more robust 'missing' sytems (like Sword of the Stars, which at least got ONE thing right) it'd be too random and uncontrolable.

In other news, the idea of 'life support failure' is ridiculous. Don't take stupid ideas from stupid scifi unless it's necessary.

I disagree with this. Company of Heroes does this "random" dice roll very predictably. For instance, if your tank is floating around 30% health and is about to receive another cannon round, you know something bad is going to happen. I'm going to try to emulate this effect. I too would be pissed off if my newly minted big bad capital ship arrived to a fight and stopped working the first time it took damage. I don't want that at all.



I wouldn't worry about things like this. The effects that just don't work will be removed

I'm continuing to try to figure out how to mod this combat system into SoaSE so everyone can at least get a glimpse of what I'm trying to communicate, but I'm a complete newb at this.

It'll be awhile.

Battleburger mortal strikes your Kortul Devastator for 4399.

wtfpwned

i love the idea...

i think why people hate it is because they think the chances are high. like a 50% chance....

but when i read it i knew exactly what your talking about. like for example there no chance of critical at 100%-76% Shields. but once it hits 75% shields, there would be a slight change of critical like a 1% chance of a critical but not a deadly one.
and the lower the shields get the more chance of a shield critical to happen. till eventually it at like 20% chance of critical.
then for the Hp when its at 100-80% hp there would be No crits. but once it hits 79% Hp there would be crits but not death crits. then when it gets around 30% hp left there would be an ever increasing chance of crits, including deadly ones, to maby about 40% chance of regualar crits 10% deadly crit.

it would make you want to be more cautious with your caps

Woooooooo, someone understood the concept.

All those English college credits I took weren't a complete waste.

I'd like different modifiers for capital ships though. I don't want people to be afraid to use them.

True, but in CoH, the player only had to keep track of this on roughly 1-3 units at a time. I usually know right away that one of my tanks just lost its main gun and can take the time to get it out of the fight. It would have been a major nuisance trying to keep track of which tanks were utterly useless at any given time if there were 200+ of them on the field.

Though I'd argue against it, death chances might not be so bad but the other non-death status effects strike me as something that would just be a hassle to manage. Especially in a game that's supposed to be low on micro.

I agree with this after realizing the obvious fact it's a lot easier to micro repairs in CoH than in SoaSE. The status effect criticals would have to be on a short timer to avoid the micro needed to get the unit repaired in an efficient manner.

Thanks for all the counter-points so far. The conflicting views are only making the concept better.

their could even be a new tech tree. one to increase the chance to crit enemy, and another to lower the chance of being crit. but to much that it makes it unfair. maby like 5% chance max or something.

I don't suppose any of you good modders know how to trigger a buff using a combination of "OnChance" action type and minhulldamagepercent based off ship weapons fire?

I can't seem to get 2 and 2 put together.

Anyone have any more suggestions or problems with this concept?


So far as the modding goes: I've altered code and it doesn't do what I was hoping.
No crashes though.

Wait, targetable systems was considered and dismissed?
/sadface
Is this supportable in engine through some sor tof legacy code? I really, really, really doubt it would be but that would be so amazing... If you devs uh, wanted to let us modders tweak around with that...

I think less is more with this concept. Engine overload would be pretty sweet, some AoE effects when ships explode might be nice... But the more types of things you have happening the more chaotic and crappy everything gets. If you introduce this much random chance the game becomes less predictable, and without semi-consistent predictability you can't have strategy.

This would be so very difficult to pull off with current modding capacity. 'chance to occur' things are rough to pull off. But I think that this could be a really amazing idea to tinker with.

Kryo, if you felt like talking with some of the fellas about opening up more event-style triggers in the buff system, the modding community could do amazing things... I think the current buff system is very powerful, but it suffers from a limited selection of end conditions, and a limited number of triggering factors. just a little bit more power and we could have the sort of sandbox that thousands of people would pay real good money for... *wink*

Personally I dislike this idea. I don't like combat, at a certain point, having such randomness added to it. As it is weapons fire is already somewhat chance-related with how weapons have a miss percentage. I don't think we need another aspect of probability included, especially with such catastrophic potential. It degrades the fundamental strategic nature of the game.

It is an interesting idea but i think you need to sell it better and make it a little bit more realistic and practical.

First of all, there shouldn't be any critical hits at all until shields are at least 50% or maybe even a little bit less than that. It just doesn't make sense that there would be any critical damage when in the game itself all damage goes to shields first and then to hull (excluding missile going through shields, and for balance reasons that is why crits should probably happen at 50% mark). Then you can start having a low percentile of crits (where the shield doesn't block all the damage and you start to take hits).

Practically, I don't think anyone likes 'big' random chance. In alot of games, they use dice, and there is random chance but it is per battle and generally the odds are reasonable and the rules are very strict so the player 'KNOWS' what he is getting himself into and what he can reasonable expect. No one wants a single practically impossible random occurance in a 2-hour game to decide everything.

If you lose because of economy, or fleet placement, etc. then fine. It is your fault and the reasons for it are clear. But if you lose because of a random unbalanced fluke then that sucks.

So all of the percentile chance that you are doing should be extremely low until the ship is basically in the red (less than 30% hull remaining). Then it is more reasonable for people to accept and knowingly accept that their ship is now in the red and could experience critical failures, etc. The same thing for the opponent. It is reasonable and predictable.

In addition, you could make each individual ship chance have a different percentile chance of critical failures. Small scout ships have high chance, while heavy cruisers are built better/sturdier and have a much much lower chance. Capital ships have the lowest percentile chance possible but then maybe the critical failures that could occur are considerably more catastrophic.

Corv

People seem to keep gathering from my original post that their ships will be there full health one second and then gone the next. That's not what I'm going for at all. The dominant and/or well micro'd force should always win.

Let me clarify again, this system will be random but predictable. If you let a ship with low health get pounded on, something bad will happen. The standard death animation will still be the standard . What I'm trying to do, at the core, is add some variety and effect to the death of a ship every once in awhile.

The RTS staple of a certain type of unit dieing in the exact same way, each and every time, is just bland to me. Very, very bland. Almost every game gives it a new animation, but in the end it does the exact same thing. I want to see some variety . I want to see a weapons cache hit; turning the ship into a fireworks factory. I want to see an engine explode; creating a deadly blast field. I want the death of my hulking capital ship to not just be another myriad explosion in space every single time. It must have effect once in awhile.

As far as the modding goes it looks like the tools have an onchance and minhulldamage condition. That should do fine for this type of mod. I just have to figure out how to get them to work. heh

Thanks for the posts. They help me think.

Wow. I've read your first post and I love the idea - though I haven't really played Company of Heroes.

Although I think some effects sound pretty drastic and extreme, having such variations for unit deaths would be simply awesome.
Also, from a different point of view, it's kinda realistic: Just like some battleships were destroyed after just one lucky hit that cleanly penetrated the armor and hit the ammo storage, there were some cases in history when a ship was almost completely raped by enemy ship artillery before finally sinking.

Simply put: You, sir, are awesome and I really hope you can make it happen in Sins (or find someone who can help you with that).