Critical Hit System

Explosions, in space?

Published on April 3, 2008 By Lost_WLd In Sins Modding

---->Obligatory Wall of Text Warning<----

Hi, over the past couple weeks I've been slowly trying to flesh out a combat mod for SoaSE. To me the RTS standard "shoot unit X until HP == 0 and dies" is a little dated. I'm a big fan of Company of Heroes; and I know Frogboy is too thanks to the GFW podcast. I was looking for a way to add the variety of a CoH style critical hit system to SoaSE. For those of you unfamiliar with CoH it works this way. The units in CoH have a health pool. As that pool goes down the unit has an increasing chance of incurring a critical hit when it receives damage. The occurrence of a critical hit can do a number of things. For instance it can kill member of the squad, destroy the gun on a vehicle or finally destroy the squad/vehicle. Units in the game can only be killed on a critical hit but, once the unit's health is low it is very likely to happen. If your unit survives the fight it can then be repaired or healed/reinforced back to full health.

I feel a system like this applied to SoaSE would make combat vastly more interesting to experience. After fishing around the game files for a few days though, I realized there's no way I'd be able to add everything I'm envisioning. So in a desperate attempt for some community and hopefully developer attention I thought I'd share what I've been thinking about. Please keep in mind I just want a better game like the rest of you.

Down to the guts. The jist of the combat system I'd like to see implemented is very similar to CoH. Each shot would have a small chance to apply a critical hit to the unit receiving damage. In turn each critical hit has the ability, inversely related to the unit's HP/SP, to apply an effect. In other words the chance of a critical hit applying an effect at full HP/SP would be very near 0%. As the unit recieves damage the chance of an effect would scale upward; more so at the lower HP/SP levels. The chance for a shot to apply a critical hit would also have to be balanced on a per-ship basis due to differences in rate of fire. This would be to prevent ships with a high rate of fire from getting more criticals than slower firing ships. Certain critical hits would have a small front loaded chance of occurring; like shield criticals. Others would have a greater chance of occurring when a unit's HP/SP are low. For instance, the criticals that result in the death of a unit would only happen somewhat sparingly starting at X percent of total health. Their occurrance would then scale up as the unit approaches zero health. Units would only be killable on a critical hit. Also to help reinforced the idea of balanced fleets, I'd propose certain weapon types having slightly higher critical rates versus certain armor types. For example: Anti-Light weapons would have a higher critical hit rate vs Light Armor.

I'll now list and describe critical hits I've thought of for this game. Feel free to skip them. They're just ideas I've been brainstorming for my probably vaporware mod, but I think a few are neat.

The partial loss abilities would occur to a unit above X% of HP/SP, while the complete loss ones would occur to a unit below X% of HP/SP. They would both be on short timers.

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I have divided critical hit effects into six categories:

*Anti-Matter
+Anti-matter Implosion Deathblow ->Capital ship only
-Very, very rare (Like, single pretty/funny girl who likes videogames/cooking/cleaning rare)
-Creates a temporary small black hole that sucks in all sub-capital class ships in a certain radius below X% health.
-Units above X% health and within the radius will have a DOT effect applied to them while the blackhole is active.

+Anti-Matter Leak
-Anti-matter around the ship reacts, bathing it in plasma
-Causes hull and/or shield damage

+Complete loss in anti-matter regeneration
-Timed

+Partial loss in anti-matter regeneration
-Would be on a timer.

+Temporary Loss of use of abilities
-Also timed.

*Engines
+Engine Core Damage
-Reduction in effectiveness of all other systems
-Ability cool downs increased
-Timed

+Engine Overload Deathblow
-Ship accelerates randomly at a velocity greater than normal
-After a short time the engines overload and the ship explodes violently, dealing damage to the immediate area.

+Loss of linear speed
-Timed

+Reduction of linear speed
-Timed

+Temporary inability to phase jump
-Think of this as spellcast knockback but on the phase jump.
-Would have a maximum delay time to eliminate chaining.

*Hull
+Emergency Management System Failure
-Greatly increases the chance of *Catastrophic Systems Failure(down further)
-I see this ability not happening atleast until the unit is below around 25% health.

+Uncanny Construction
-Ship regenerates X amount of health over Y amount of time.

+Weakened Armor
-Ship's armor value decreased
-Timed

*Miscellaneous
+Bridge Crew Killed
-Command controls on the ship randomly blew up upon ship receiving fire.
-Ship temporarily inoperable while stations are being re manned.
-It's going to happen on spaceships, Star Trek proves it beyond any doubt.

+Catastrophic Systems Failure Deathblow
-Ship explodes at whatever health it's at currently
-Almost impossible at higher health but, chance of happening increases with hull damage. IE: Less than 10%
-Occurrence would be modified based on the cost of the ship. More expensive = less likely

+Command and Control Failure
-Ship is temporarily unable to be controled by the player.
-Unit defaults to AI control patterns
-Effect triggers a timer and wears off afterwards

+Defiance Deathblow
-Ship recieves a deathblow, continues to fight for X seconds then explodes

+Deflectors Down
-Differs from Shielding
-Applies a slow temporary DOT on the ship as space debris slowly works away the hull

+Life Support Failure Deathblow
-Ship continues to fight normally
-Ship becomes useless space junk after X amount of time.

*Shields
-Shield effects would be front loaded and happen toward the start of the fight or versus
targets with laden shield pools. Need to be modified to not unfairly punish Advent.

+No shield regeneration
-Timed

+Reduced shield regeneration
-Timed

+Shield Overload
-Ship's shields massively over energize causing them to expand very rapidly, generating an EMP pulse
-Deals EMP damage to surrounding area and leaves the effected ship with reduced shields.

*Weapons
+Computer Damage
-Greatly reduced weapon accuracy
-Timed

+Disabled Weapon
-Main weapon temporarily inoperable
-Can happen to each bank of weapons on the ship
-Timed

+Reduced rate of fire
-Timed

+Weapon System Overload Deathblow
-Ship starts to spin like a gyroscope while firing its guns faster than normal
-Weapons fire damages friend or foe
-After a short period of time the ship explodes violently, dealing damage to the surrounding area

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All of these effects would require an user interface adjustment in order to make the effects clearly distinguishable. I'd propose having some small pop-up text on screen when a critical happens, much like in CoH. One difference though; the text would be preceded by a slightly larger icon. This icon would allow immediate identification of what happened to the ship. My ideas for icons are:

*A rocket for an engine critical
*A bullet for a weapon critical
*A shield for a shield critical
*A plus sign for a hull critical
*An atom for an antimatter critical
*An exclamation point for a miscellaneous critical

These icons could also be used in the Empire Tree to help identify effected ships. I would also like to see the unit portrait be applied in a way that would show which part of the ship is effected. The unit portrait and mouse over text would specifically tell the player which parts of the ship are under duress and how they are effected.

On top of this critical hit system I would like to see a change in the mitigation system. IE: As you max out a ship's shield mitigation, it does less damage and/or moves slower. The reasons for this are that I see an individual ship only having so much power. It can go to weapons, propulsion or shielding. If one of these is being taxed heavily, the other two should suffer. I feel this change might add to the epic aura of fleet vs fleet battles. It would encourage against focus firing as the loss of a ship wouldn't be the only way to reduce the damage output of an opposing fleet. It would allow a player to spread their fleet's firepower around and effectively reduce the other fleet's damage output.

Anywho, this encompasses "my" ideas for combat changes. Once again, I believe the critical hit system and mitigation system would add a lot of variety and randomness to SoaSE combat. I really enjoy the game right now. I think something similar to these changes would make the game even better though. Hopefully all of this could be done without drastically raising system requirements.

Thanks for your time.

Comments (Page 4)

ManSh00ter

on Jun 10, 2008

Ramming.

Who needs criticals when you can go foamy at the mouth and scream "RAMMING SPEED" at your monitor in the heat of the battle!

The idea with critical sounds nice, I hope you can pull it off, though I personally don't see how.

Just keep in mind it works both ways... and you could lose a precious high-level battleship fast to a freak streak of criticals... that's statistics for you. Always coming back to bite you in the arse.

Lost_WLd

on Jun 10, 2008

lol, exactly! Monotony is the antithesis of fun.

Shadow_of_Light

on Jun 10, 2008

uff thats alot of stuff u wanna add...

looking at in from a few angles, some show a nice improvement, some show it to be a to large change, in other words, we'll get 2 seperate games.

i totally agree on the "shoot unit X until HP == 0 and dies" being a lil dated, but it's also the most "fair" and easyiest method

right now i doubt this wil do any help in later stages as alot of people just focuss fire on ships killing it with 1/2 shots.

if you were to add this then another factor must be implemented.. namely, not being able 2 focuss fire.... now doing so would result in a situation where all ships just fire randomly upon the enemy, so if a capital ships flees with 1 hp health u cant order any ships 2 take down the last hp

to compensate for this we could add an ability (or special "cruiser") in the game, 1 based on the same principle for all races..
this ability would allow the ship having the ability to command nearby ships (20???) to fire on a specific target

as i see this this would both help improve the original SoaSE + your thought on the CoH method (wich shows lotsa promise if alot of balancing is "re"done)

S_o_L

Thomas Fife

on Jun 10, 2008

New abilities or cruisers should be made in order to speed the process of ships recovering from their critical hit or recovering at all(in case of the happening of a non-0% HP kill). Ramming is already a tactic: martyrdom

SpardaSon21

on Jun 10, 2008

Well Martyrdom is a tactic. However, I think he means taking a Marza or Kol and shoving it through a frigate. Now that would put TEC's armor plating to good use.

Lost_WLd

on Jun 10, 2008

Using a sledgehammer to kill a fly... I like it.

P5yy

on Jun 10, 2008

How about a critical hit system limited to certain units , or a special unit that fires and its weapon causes critical hits..like maybe The Kols beamweapon can cause critical hits
Just an idea loosely tossed in

Helioforge

on Jun 10, 2008

Oh, there might just be a way to implement this...

I had so many problems with damage sharing causing a ship inexplicitly explode!

When a ship is hit, it will incur a damage-sharing event for one second, which will pile on the damage in a seemingly random way... ...this might be enough...

If not, you can use an antimatter pool as an extra Jackpot Attack, from your Ability Source, allowing more random damage dealing...

You could also make it deplete antimatter reserves, as if the attack struck the Antimatter tanks

Helioforge

on Jun 10, 2008

Here's a list of effects a hit could do (based on this thread, if I missed something, add to it)

Shield Hit........(drain, loss, effects only shields (sharing))
Antimatter Hit....(drain, loss, slower charge)
Weapons Hit.......(disable, diminish)
Hull Hit..........(destroy ship, loss, this could be damage sharing 1 second)
Ability Hit.......(Disable)
Engines Hit.......(Disable, diminish, top speed, accelerations)
Etc...

That's more than four, so you might need more than one Ability Source

dracothedragon

on Jun 14, 2008

Lost_WLD

Excellent idea. I knew the combat was missing something other than the lack of the AI moving the ships while they are in battle. 2 sitting ducks shooting at each other. Not realisitic. A critical hit reminds me of what happened to Britain's 42,000 ton Battlecruiser HMS Hood. Germany's Battleship Bismarck (the crew was not thrilled going up against a legendary ship) after only minutes of engagement scored a lucky hit to the Hood's magazine. Poof the Hood was no more. Similar concept. Go with it. Just keep the odds real low of something happening. Don't want to run wild. Makes sense, because if a shield drops in integrity. There will be weekpoints that could be taken advantage of. Be cool to see a new ability that could be researched and used in battle that may increase (not much though)the likelyhood of a critical hit. We will just say that it looks for the weekpoints in the shield as well as a w chink in the armor.

makbar59

on Jun 14, 2008

I love this ideas yaar they sound cool but alot of them r in practical coz of the large amount of ship fighting at once.. critical fits will happen to much.. the AI will hav to decide the probablity of a critical hit.
a few less chances and a lower death rate wud b good...

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