(Re-opened) Krooms ship submissions

Verrencia

Atarlost

Verrencia Shield linkers share shield HP with phase shields and other shield linkers within range. They also prevent the shields from dropping entirely while the linker has shield HP. Shots that exceed the shield's HP can penetrate, but not if they explode on contact like missiles. Large twin cannons and nukes have enough AoE to deal serious damage from the shield's edge. Sufficiently large mass drivers and railguns can penetrate. Anything else has to wear through the whole HP pool or deal damage in one linker's domain faster than other linkers can share HP with it.

There are two probable reasons your testing misleads you.

Under AI control your ship will pick a single part to target and hit one or two shields, which can't go into negative HP. Before they can be checked for going down they get the linker's HP shared with them. The missiles explode instead of penetrating because when the shield HP are too low because they're AoE weapons and that's how AoE weapons interact with shields. Tested without the AI, your missiles will go everywhere and do closer to their rated damage, but as a BH NPC they will always be under AI control and target a single part. There is a comment in the code that Kroom thought this overflow would be taken from elsewhere but was not certain. I think your ship empirically answers that in the negative.

In a realistic scenario, ships start more than 270 meters apart. Your missiles will not fire all at once, but spread over the time it takes your ship to move its own length, which since the AI is braking as hard as it can to avoid overshooting its desired target distance is considerable. The stream appears continuous so it must take at least 2 seconds for all the launchers to pass the 270 meter mark. This is long enough for every shield linker or three shields to regenerate the rated damage of one missile, of which most is lost to overflow.

More powerful shields from other mods don't have these interactions unless they are also using multiammostorage.

YAreyaREdAzE

Atarlost More powerful shields from other mods don't have these interactions unless they are also using multiammostorage.

this is the very reason why kroom's shields are among the more powerful shield systems; as long as it can't be penetrated, exploded through, or ignored entirely, it's nigh impenetrable. This may also be the reason why shield linkers are classed as an overpowered part and in my opinion, should be density limited like cannons (but still linkable to each other)

Atarlost

YAreyaREdAzE
Not really. You can overwhelm them with raw damage as long as you don't use explosives with a small radius fired faster than the linkers can move HP around. And damage is cheaper than shield regen. Each linker provides 1000 shield regen and everything that hits a linked shield damages the same pool so you don't have issues with getting all your shots to hit the same shield. If you look at the damage per credit the linkers are not great. Let's say you have three linkers and, small reactor, a crewman in a 1x1 bunk, and four doors. That's 56,025 credits or 0.054 regeneration per second per credit. Compare that to two small and one large laser blasters, a small reactor, six crew in a 2x2 quarters, and four doors. That's 2666 DPS for 29,900 credits or 0.089 DPS per credit. An ion beam, four crew in two 2x2 bunks, a small reactor, three doors, and an ion prism cost 42,800 credits and do 1750-2500 DPS depending on range or 0.041-0.082 DPS per second so you kites not using a mass driver will tend to run into issues competing with linked shields, but I don't think that's a bad thing.

Apart from making unsupported missiles weak, what the linker really does is put shields on the same terms as guns when you're used to weapons having absolute supremacy. A ship with 100 guns firing at a ship with 100 unlinked shields will break through between 25 and 100 times faster than a ship with 1 gun firing at a ship with 1 shield depending on how the shields are laid out. The linkers allow defenses to scale.

YAreyaREdAzE

Atarlost hmm, you have a point with damage scaling with size. In kroom's forge, the density of weapons is either limited to surface area, or increases by volume at a slower rate than defense can (other than mass drivers which increase linearly, but they're mostly unusable after a certain point because of the logistics nerf, and the ion beam, which somewhat scales exponentially with size ut to a point) so the defense can outpace weapons eventually if we're going for size. I haven't done the calculations, but wouldn't that mean that that you could have enough shield linkers for your size to effectively render weapons useless? (also one can consider weapon range after a point)

Atarlost

YAreyaREdAzE
In Cosmoteer, ships are balanced by price not size. For any given price point low enough that you're not maxing out the build box, you can have more gun than shield. If you run out of frontal surface area you can have turret rooms spread out on cheap structure lattice. But you're probably going to want to use a lot of the space between turrets for other things like engines and mass driver clusters and quarters for all the operators since only haulers actually need to be quartered near their duty stations. And if you're using the dead space between turrets for other things it isn't really dead space.

And that's assuming both ships are fast enough to dodge the large twin cannon. That gets harder the larger they are and that gun basically no sells phase shields no matter how they're linked because it does enough AoE damage with a large enough radius to kill the emitters when it detonates on the shield boundary.

YAreyaREdAzE

Atarlost so would the meta be "just have a mass driver clump that can dodge other mass driver clump shots because of how targeting works" because that's what i'm seeing here

BrutaTralb

Atarlost

YAreyaREdAzE
This whole conversation is why meta along with balance are dumb

Atarlost

YAreyaREdAzE I don't know where you're getting that. I mentioned mass drivers only as something that could use the space between normal turrets.

I think if people were actually playing competitive MP with Kroom's Forge the meta would settle on ships fast enough that there's no point using large twin turrets, and the budget would be pretty low. I believe I've seen 50k quoted for vanilla tournaments so probably somewhere in that realm. If I had to guess I'd say flak turrets with ion arrays or particle turrets on the surface. Maybe vanilla HE missiles as well if ion arrays wind up the dominant surface weapon. Enough speed to prevent someone from winning by showing up with a large twin cannon ship is probably also enough speed to sumo a shield linker brick so extreme as to be invulnerable. Either that or basically the vanilla MP meta whatever it is with slightly better shields and engines and maybe 20% or 56% longer weapon ranges.

YAreyaREdAzE

BrutaTralb currently, it's necessary to balance to keep the game alive
mods are less affected, but still affected by this, sometimes dealing with a design that has a certain part is much annoying and you could lose a user if the part doesn't get balanced.

YAreyaREdAzE

Atarlost an extension of the rail kiter archetype from the actual vanilla meta, which is basically one of the fastest ship types that one can make, and experimentation with booster boxes

BrutaTralb

YAreyaREdAzE I'm not saying, that dev must abandon this idea, I'm saying, that players are

YAreyaREdAzE

BrutaTralb players are smart and they figure things out, of course, they're gonna find something game-breaking eventually.
anyway we lot should probably move to a different thread lol

Atarlost

YAreyaREdAzE I don't follow the meta closely, but I don't remember any mention of kiters of any sort in the meta since the Ring of Death was implemented. I expect orbiters would be favored.

BrutaTralb

YAreyaREdAzE or make it using modding feature, and that's kind of mindset, that makes metafappers, and meetafapping is bad, cuz it introduces template for game breaker 9bazillion. What thread should we move in?

YAreyaREdAzE

Atarlost https://forum.cosmoteer.net/d/10708-the-meta/5

Atarlost

YAreyaREdAzE I see "this type is rarely seen," in the description. It doesn't matter to my definition of domination if it's theoretically the strongest or even if for a small minority of top players it actually is the strongest. What ship type is out there winning the most games and generally being oppressive? For a theoretical Kroom's Forge competitive meta my guess is still that it would be that orbiters would dominate.

Of the types newageofpower actually bothers to explain, I expect missile orbiters or similarly built roof turret orbiters to gain the most. They use huge thrusters so they benefit from modular thrusters and longer ranged weapons proportionately get more benefit from targeting terminals. Missiles and large twin cannon turrets are the longest range weapons that can benefit from targeting terminals. I'd expect them to start firing at 675 or 702 meters instead of 450 meters. Since he reports these can sumo railfankites and modular thrusters would make them even better at this I'd expect them to come out on top. Possibly a mixed roof turret and missile version as I'd expect roof turrets to help against flak equipped orbital walls that want to get close.

In any case, I am absolutely confident it is not shield linker sumos. If they ever made it onto the charts people would start mounting large twin cannons as there's nothing easier to hit than someone trying to sumo you.

Gray

This is ship submissions, not argument creations.

Atarlost

Okay, groups. There are going to be a lot of these. The big Martian battle carrier doesn't have one because it can't not go over the price cap even discounting for noncombat carrier expenses, and the Colossus needs to run alone in additionally to as groups to provide adequate variety in its unladen price tier.

Most carriers have at least two possible loadouts. Some of these probably need to be cut to not overwhelm the ship pool if they can't have their probability adjusted. Since all of them except the Martian Defense Fleet have carriers or completely decorative space stations in them all of them have adjusted prices.

The English stuff is generally problematic because Cosmoteer recalculates flight direction of ship fragments and anything with only Kroom vector and maneuvering thrusters will fly sideways until it gets into gun range.

Woolworth Escort Group: 365,448 BC

Colossus class with CSP (combat space patrol): 964,548 BC

Colossus class with CSP 2: 1,010,032

Colossus class with strike: 979,440 BC

Colossus class with strike 2: 1,046,808

Starfire Transport: 1,682,809 BC

Unicorn class with strike 1: 1,975,687 BC

Unicorn class with strike 2: 1,933,939 BC

Unicorn class with strike 3: 1,737,955 BC

Unicorn class mixed strike: 1,769,879 BC

Unicorn class with interceptors: 1,980,598 BC

Unicorn class with CSP: 1,849,635 BC

Unicorn class with CSP 2: 1,569,911 BC

Starfall Transport Convoy: 2,147,296 BC

Illustrious class with CSP: 2,126,387 BC

Illustrious class with strike: 2,187,185 BC

Furious class with strike: 2,763,835 BC

QE Battlecarrier with CSP: 2,846,790 BC

QE Battlecarrier with strike: 2,891,466 BC

French light escort group: 477,665 BC

French Fighter Base : 164,144 BC

French heavy escort group 1: 778,795 BC

French heavy escort group 2: 796,245 BC

French Heavy Escort Group 3: 703,119 BC

Jeanne d'Arc group 1: 1,262,835 BC

Jeanne d'Arc group 2: 997,869 BC

Clemenceau with escorts: 2,230,042 BC

French Carrier Group 1: 2,070,008 BC

French Carrier Group 2: 2,396,884 BC

Martian Fighter Base: 231,480 BC

Martian Defense Fleet: 1,332,234 BC

2193 Martian Privateer Group: 1,203,482 BC

2199 Martian atmospheric raid: 1,196,448 BC

2200 Martian Assault Group: 1,363,084 BC

2203 Martian Escort Group: 713,754 BC

2204 Martian Privateer Group: 1,297,481 BC

2206 Martian atmospheric raid: 838,083 BC

2225 Martian Assault Group: 1,723,245 BC

2232 Martian Patrol Group: 1,966,888 BC

Also reuploaded Royal Sovereign (British), Daring (Jovian), and Astronomer (Jovian) to fix or at least improve lingering crew issues and Jeanne d'Arc to reduce missile collisions.

Coming soon?: diagonal Bavarian ships.

Atarlost

Right, Bavaria. The paint isn't as nice. It would require a third layer to have the edge shadows my other ships have. The more common Bavarian flag is not distinct on a white background (same issue as Poland's, just with blue instead of red) but the lozenge flag looks pretty good. Rhombuses only work pointed along the grid, which is why wanting to do a Bavarian space navy lead to diagonal ships. Fortunately it isn't strictly defined so I could stretch it a bit so the "white" blocking triangles didn't have to intersect the two tone grey triangles defining the shape of the fuselages. The fighter doesn't have room for a proper flag so it just has a lozenge pattern on the wings. Other than the fighter they are named for internal political divisions. Bavaria has its own federal system within the greater German federal system with province analogues subdivided into rural county analogues and cities that are independent of any counties.

I hope the diagonal build plan makes these sufficiently distinct from my other work.

So, without further ado, the Bavarian Space Navy:

Also, you get a bonus second class battleship because I noticed that some of my fluff refers to the English using battleships before the Martian War of Independence and while I have an old downrated French battleship in the Colbert class and the Italian Andre Doria appears to fit into the same period, the English don't have a ship of similar apparent vintage. I could have just gone with "they were all scrapped" but instead I took it as an excuse to design this thing.