Some thoughts and suggestions on game balance

Equalizer

Isn't there a "rock-paper-scissors" situation between gunships, missile kiter and missile barges?

A missile barge should beat a missile kiter since it doesn't need huge thrusters. It can match range and simply should have more fire power.
A missile kiter should beat any gunship it can out run.
A gunship should beat a missile barge since the barge can't run.

dieaready

Equalizer Pretty much. Cosmoteer needs more of this kind of mechanics and counters instead of the standard cannon wall or missile/ion kite.

Equalizer

By the way is there a reason that lasers have such short range?

Given that they have best accuracy and highest projectile speed I would of thought they would have the longest range.

The range of the cannons and their shot speeds also seem to be backwards. The large cannon has longer range but much lower shot speed. I would expect a weapon's range to be almost directly related to its shot speed (half the shot speed the range should be roughly half) otherwise shots will miss way too much.

dieaready

Equalizer Walt is probably copying the lasers from real life, where lasers in space would actually be limited (due to dispersion/diffraction) in range, while projectile weapons would have a technically near infinite range.

Cannon wise I think it is more about game balance. Don't think he want fast (more accurate) and much more powerful shells for heavy cannons over the standard cannon rounds.

Atarlost

The last changes were very bad for bounty hunter mode, which seems to be intended to be the core or at least initial player experience.

Bounty hunter requires it to be possible to keep a ship alive with low repair costs, which the new electrobolts make nearly impossible for short range combatants because shields no longer protect weapons from energy loss. This makes lasers a complete dead end instead of a viable weapon for tanky brawlers in the midgame.

The large cannon and ion beam range nerfs broaden the missile range advantage. This is makes missile kites more forgiving, which is kind of bad. Missile kites were already the dominant cheese for late game bounty hunter because they never put themselves in range to be shot at and thus didn't rack up repair bills. If anything large cannons needed a range buff to compete with missiles. It's not like they were used in the old tourney meta.

The improved missiles utterly and completely wreck the previously most threatening enemies. Even the Ragnarok, which could previously stalemate a modest 2 launcher kite now loses because its shields no longer protect its point defense mounts, allowing leakers to destroy them. The Cerberus is a joke now. All the enemies that used to be intimidating because they had effective shield layouts are now also jokes.

I might be able to get behind the standard cannon nerf, but the others are all problematic.

dieaready

Atarlost Bounty hunter mode is still a WIP and so it would have to be balanced at any rate when new weapons/components are added as the development continues.

To solve the electrobolt issue, you really need to space out your lasers. EB are now at a very nice place IMO as stacked shields should never provide near invulnerability to a ship. Same with the missiles.

PD AI seems to be broken in some ways atm and probably needs fixing, it now has a slight delay in acquiring the next missile that was only present in the prev patch for the very first missile. Also I've watch a missile slowly chase my interceptor and hit a PD face on after 2-3 sec without the PD shooting at it despite the missile being right in its face. PD acquisition time probably could be halved otherwise they can't provide a good enough counter to missiles atm. Also the shortened range of the PD will need to get used to, but now PD also fires at missiles that are out of range, so in certain specific scenarios a single missile staying just out of range can drain a whole battery of PD dry. Energy consumption is also very steep now and IMO could use a very slight reduction (10-20%). You will need to position them with a good supply of crew and energy nearby or missiles will eat through your PD fairly rapidly.

Also missiles are borked and fly about in a ridiculous manner when chasing interceptors. I've had a missile keep pace with my interceptor FROM THE FRONT (and alongside as well) instead of flying straight into my ship and drained my PDs dry.

Weapon ranges do need to be looked into, IMO all weapon ranges should be doubled except for missiles as the spread over the distance of the other weapons would result them in having a much shorter effective range but would still have a chance of peppering kites at long range (old large cannons vs kites).

dieaready

More thoughts about consumption/production and large ships:

Currently storages (energy/ammo/missile) are hardly ever used with a few exceptions and there still isn't much purpose for having large ships past a certain size. Factories/reactors produce and store so much that it rarely makes much sense to have storages and just simply locate the factory near the weapon to save a lot of logistics.

Proposal

Reduce production from reactors/factories by 2x / 3-5x.
Increase mass of reactors/factories by 2x/3x respectively
Increase capacity of storages by 2-3x.
Decrease the mass of storages by 50%
Decrease damage done by ammo storage explosions by 50 - 75%
Increase movement speed of crew in storages to 0.75
Decrease the cost of storages by 50%

Reasoning

By making reactors/factories produce less and weigh more, there will be a need for ships to rely more on storages, and would also make smaller ships run dry at a faster rate than larger ships (more reactors/factories). Alternatively, with the increased stores, a larger ship would be able to hold larger stocks of ammo and energy to last longer. Also decreasing the explosiveness of ammo storages and increasing the movement speed of crew in storages would go a long way to making people want to use them, and making them cheaper and lighter would encourage them to be spammed.

Atarlost

dieaready To solve the electrobolt issue, you really need to space out your lasers. EB are now at a very nice place IMO as stacked shields should never provide near invulnerability to a ship. Same with the missiles.

It's not about stacked shields. It's about non-stacked shields doing anything at all. If shields can't protect energy weapons from electrobolts then energy weapons are useless.

Teg

SpaceCat I made this recently and tried it out vs Cerberus:
image https://i.imgur.com/2U0TALM.png
image https://i.imgur.com/azMRdZj.png
Poor Cerby!

SpaceCat

LOL - picutres say all about missiles rly 😃

dieaready

Atarlost Spread them out then, and the AI will only be able to shut down 1-2 at a time. Shields have their place for stopping everything else, so it is back again to the scissors-paper-stone game of x counters y which counters z which counters x, etc. This way nothing can be said to be better than the rest and greatly encourages a wider variety of designs and weapon use.

Atarlost

dieaready It doesn't work like that. Lasers were only good because they could be fit into a shield/armor build or because they could be densely packed in the early game. Now both of those builds are bad because electrobolts cannot be protected against at all except by using an all ammo design.

And then you run into the unwarranted missile buffs and PD nerfs. Missile kites beat everything easily. They used to have trouble with some of the smaller, faster ships that also had some PD, but now single hits completely cripple those. This pushes players into the most degenerate design space immediately, destroying any fun to be had.

Shields were only ever a real problem in your head. Everybody used them, but everyone also used engines. Tourneys never ended up in shield wall stalemates and stacked shields were the fun and interesting solution to economical bounty hunting because they enabled every design that wasn't a missile kite.

dieaready

Atarlost Not true, you can spread them out. The whole point of the changes were to break up the existing meta and to encourage more creative ship designs. The new changes may not be balanced yet, but Walt would slowly tweak them as he goes along depending on how he thinks it is.

Just because you don't like the changes Walt decided on doesn't mean that the changes are bad. I put up points where I think there are issues and Walt agreed with me and changed it according to how he wanted to. If you have issues, feel free to point them up and hopefully Walt would see it and agree with you and make changes as he sees fit.

Atarlost Tourneys never ended up in shield wall stalemates and stacked shields were the fun and interesting solution to economical bounty hunting because they enabled every design that wasn't a missile kite.

Uh huh, and so far most of the tournaments that I've seen so far ended up with the one who stacked the most cannons or the best cannon/shield wall winning (or cheesing with AI targeting). Watching two cannon/shield walls slugging it out against each other might be considered fun by some, but IMO that only discourages creative design. The recent 80k War for the Cosmos by Nirl was an excellent tournament because the cheap price forced people to steer away from the usual cannon/shield walls and we saw some really cool ship/fleet designs. With all the eventual changes hopefully we'll be seeing more of such different and unique designs but on a much larger scale. Bounty mode would have to be balanced of course, and as I said, this is still at an alpha stage so all the ships there would have to be eventually redesigned and rebalanced anyway.

dieaready

Atarlost Lasers were only good because they could be fit into a shield/armor build or because they could be densely packed in the early game. Now both of those builds are bad because electrobolts cannot be protected against at all except by using an all ammo design.

Atarlost Now they drain them very fast because weapons don't have large energy reserves in the first place. This prevents effective return fire by non-ammo builds. They may be draining less energy per shot, but they're draining it from places that prevent you from stopping them from continuing to shoot you.

A simple design like the following ship shows how you'd spread out your lasers on an energy based ship to prevent electrobolts from shutting you down hard. If anything, this design actually has a much easier time vs bounty ships at its size armed with electrobolts as the electrobolts do so little damage to armour and they can only shut 1-2 of its weapons down at a time at best. The only time electrobolts will shut down an energy based ship is when the builder is lazy and built a laser wall.

image https://i.imgur.com/xv9cnm4.png

Walt

Just want to let you all know that I'm following this discussion with great interest. 🙂

When I make balance changes, I'm usually thinking about how it will affect the future game more than I'm thinking about how it effects the current game. And so while I think it's arguable that the recent balance changes have made the game less balanced, I still think that the increased distinction between weapons and nerfing of systems-breaking strategies (layered shields) better prepares the game for the long-term. Ultimately, I think there's only so much that can be done to balance the game until there are more weapons in it.

On electro-bolts: Electro-bolt base energy drain was reduced by 1/3, and is reduced by another 1/3 for every shield it goes through. If it passes through one shield, that's less than half the energy drain than the previous version and only 2/3 the drain once the shield is down, which doesn't seem too bad to me? But y'all actually play the game more than I do, so I don't have a super-strong sense of how well they're balanced.

On missile buff: Missiles were buffed primarily because they just didn't "feel" powerful enough, and as a secondary reason as a counter to internal shields. If missile kites are too powerful, then I think the short-term solution is to buff PD rather than debuff missiles, and the long-term solution is to add more weapons to counter missiles (railguns?).

Teg

Walt If missile kites are too powerful, then I think the short-term solution is to buff PD rather than debuff missiles, and the long-term solution is to add more weapons to counter missiles (railguns?).

I'd very much like to see a buff to PD. Perhaps not as strong, but still effective. The increased AOE of missiles helps destroy hulks of de-armed ships and helps prevent internal shield builds, so that seems good. Rail guns sounds like a cool counter, until then how about dramatically increasing weight of missile stuff? Would that decrease speed/thrust enough to slow kiters down? (They are kinda game breaking atm)

Any chance of seeing a standard cannon nerf?

I'll play around with electros a bit more and give my 2cents.

Atarlost

We know one thing about the final meta. It has to favor defense so that bounty hunter or campaign mode or whatever can work. You can't have a survival type mode in a game of glass cannons. This means that stacked shields are necessary, not a problem to solve. The PC needs to survive to play the game. The Dark Souls philosophy simply cannot work in this game because spaceships cost money. If DS had no health restoration that didn't cost souls you can bet it would have failed miserably as a franchise. In Cosmoteer the only health that doesn't cost money to restore is shields. They MUST be dominant for non-arena modes to work.

Walt On electro-bolts: Electro-bolt base energy drain was reduced by 1/3, and is reduced by another 1/3 for every shield it goes through. If it passes through one shield, that's less than half the energy drain than the previous version and only 2/3 the drain once the shield is down, which doesn't seem too bad to me? But y'all actually play the game more than I do, so I don't have a super-strong sense of how well they're balanced.

Electrobolts used to do zero direct drain to weapons that had shields in front of them. Now they drain them very fast because weapons don't have large energy reserves in the first place. This prevents effective return fire by non-ammo builds. They may be draining less energy per shot, but they're draining it from places that prevent you from stopping them from continuing to shoot you.

Walt On missile buff: Missiles were buffed primarily because they just didn't "feel" powerful enough, and as a secondary reason as a counter to internal shields. If missile kites are too powerful, then I think the short-term solution is to buff PD rather than debuff missiles, and the long-term solution is to add more weapons to counter missiles (railguns?).

Missiles shouldn't feel powerful. They require no frontage space. Feeling powerful should be reserved for weapons you have to build around not something you can tack onto the back of your ship any time you have the credits to spare.

Walt

Teg I'd very much like to see a buff to PD. Perhaps not as strong, but still effective.

I welcome suggestions on how to buff PD. Longer-range? Quicker rotate speed? (Unfortunately I can't decrease their targeting time without a lot of programming work.)

Teg how about dramatically increasing weight of missile stuff? Would that decrease speed/thrust enough to slow kiters down?

I suspect the weight increase would have to be really dramatic to create a significant difference, and wouldn't really be intuitive for players. (It makes sense that armor weighs more and structure weighs less, but a missile launcher weighing more than a same-sized cannon isn't intuitive.)

Tractor beams could also be a cool in-the-future counter to long-range kiters.

Teg Any chance of seeing a standard cannon nerf?

Yeah, the 1333 DPS seems way too high compared to the Big Cannon's not-much-higher 1600 DPS and double ammo/second usage. Not sure what I was thinking there. Maybe lowering the damage of the standard cannon to 1000 DPS and increasing the ROF of the big cannon to 2000 DPS? That'd make the big cannon clearly superior as measured by perimeter space usage but give the standard cannon the edge as measured by ammo usage.

akinata

Walt longer range for PD but not only, i feel like all weapons except misiles should have a better range.
i understand some weapons now have a great spread so you lowered their ideal range, but they should be able to fire even if not close to their ideal range so that more guns on capital ships can fire on one another without having to be a wall design or ramming themselves.

Missiles are strong, maybe a bit too much since their aoe can harm whats behind a shield. it will just force players to put PD everywhere because shields aren't a good counter to missiles anymore.
i believe it should harm shields in an aoe instead of damaging parts behind it (if you want to get rid of the stacking shields.)

if you wanted to get rid of the shields generators too deep in the hull then reduce the range of them.
but that means you ll have to change some of the ingames ships as they will become obsolete.

Teg

Walt

Walt I welcome suggestions on how to buff PD. Longer-range? Quicker rotate speed? (Unfortunately I can't decrease their targeting time without a lot of programming work.)

From what @dieaready was saying, pre patch the PD's were triggering multiple missile explosions right? I agree that is bad as it wrecks missile barrages. For normal use either of those or a mix of both might work, can you (or a modder) release some test mods for us to try out different variables easily?
I'm more worried about PD at high speeds, my test matches vs dieaready at high speed led to some pretty funky missile and PD behavior.

Walt I suspect the weight increase would have to be really dramatic to create a significant difference, and wouldn't really be intuitive for players. (It makes sense that armor weighs more and structure weighs less, but a missile launcher weighing more than a same-sized cannon isn't intuitive.)

Tractor beams could also be a cool in-the-future counter to long-range kiters.

Yeah that makes sense. What about using unguided heavy rockets in place of current missiles to counter internal shields and keep missiles launchers as a lower damage round the back type weapon?

I think we'ed all like to see some form of tractor beam! 😃

Walt Yeah, the 1333 DPS seems way too high compared to the Big Cannon's not-much-higher 1600 DPS and double ammo/second usage. Not sure what I was thinking there. Maybe lowering the damage of the standard cannon to 1000 DPS and increasing the ROF of the big cannon to 2000 DPS? That'd make the big cannon clearly superior as measured by perimeter space usage but give the standard cannon the edge as measured by ammo usage.

I'm not much good at imagining the new changes, I'd love to try the different cannons out. I quite like dieaready's storage changes too, there just isn't much incentive to use them atm.

dieaready

Walt Just a few more ideas for the missiles/PD issue:

Increase missile health to 2-3x
Reduce PD fire rate by 20-30%
Increase PD range by 50%

This should allow PD to destroy incoming missiles that it is targeting while reducing the 'accidental kills' from the misses.

For cannons, I'd actually think of continuing to rebalance the penetration values of the different parts and drop the damage of both standard and large cannons as you'd not be calculating the DPS per shot, but rather, the DPS per penetrating hit. This means that cannons would have their role in being able to penetrate past external components and do a high total sum damage after penetrating, but maybe their damage could be greatly lowered to compare with lasers (maybe keep the shield damage close to normal but drop the hull damage?).

Also for cannons vs railguns, I'd actually want cannon shells to explode after it reaches its max penetration, dealing the most damage when the projectile stops (and maybe doing a little bit splash damage) while railguns would not only have a longer range but also a much faster projectile speed (accuracy in a sense) and a good bit more penetration, but conversely wouldn't have the exploding shell at the end and maybe do slightly less damage initial damage per shot. Would also be good if you could introduce mechanics where weapons would need both energy and ammo to shoot so the modders can play around with it and see what they come up with.

akinata

Walt Yeah, the 1333 DPS seems way too high compared to the Big Cannon's not-much-higher 1600 DPS and double ammo/second usage. Not sure what I was thinking there. Maybe lowering the damage of the standard cannon to 1000 DPS and increasing the ROF of the big cannon to 2000 DPS? That'd make the big cannon clearly superior as measured by perimeter space usage but give the standard cannon the edge as measured by ammo usage.

what i do to test things out, i take 2 identical ships, one with few of the first weapon and the second one with a certain amount of the second weapon to match the price of the first one. i try 1v1 with and without shields. with and without AI. then i create 2 identical big dummy ship with no weapons (or cannons with no ammo) and set the same targets at both of my test ships. then i add some shields and see how it perform.

right now you ll have 6 medium cannon for the price of 2 heavy cannons. despit the good penetration the big cannons has their damage is no where near the med cannon dps.
the med would fire 2 shot when the big fires one. atm med cannons do 1000damage and the big cannon 2400.
so you have to pay 4000 credit more to have only 400 bonus damage per shot and more penetration where you can use those 4000 credit to do 3600 more damage per big cannon shot. no to mention the horrible spread on the big cannon.
all this to say, the big cannon needs a buff in damage or a lower cost.
lowering the med canons damage might result of them being less effective than small lasers.

Walt

akinata i understand some weapons now have a great spread so you lowered their ideal range

That's not why I lowered cannon range (back to what it originally was, actually). I lowered cannon range because with the longer range cannons tended to waste most of their shots, which was pretty frustrating. If I increase range again, then it at least should come with a projectile speed bump.

akinata Missiles are strong, maybe a bit too much since their aoe can harm whats behind a shield. it will just force players to put PD everywhere because shields aren't a good counter to missiles anymore.

My intent is for non-internal shields to still be a good counter to missiles, but for internal shields (that are hidden deeper within the ship) to not protect as well against missiles. It's possible the missile AOE is just slightly too high now and can still damage parts even when hitting a non-internal shield.

akinata i believe it should harm shields in an aoe instead of damaging parts behind it (if you want to get rid of the stacking shields.)

No, the point of the missile AOE buff was to counter internal shields, not stacked shields.

akinata if you wanted to get rid of the shields generators too deep in the hull then reduce the range of them

Wouldn't this basically have the same effect as increasing missile AOE?

Teg I'm more worried about PD at high speeds, my test matches vs dieaready at high speed led to some pretty funky missile and PD behavior.

I'm slowly going through the code and fixing all the places where game speed effects outcome. Won't be completed for the next update, but it's coming. (It's actually something I need to do in order for multiplayer to work.)

Teg I quite like dieaready's storage changes too, there just isn't much incentive to use them atm.

Yeah, I originally wanted to have a 1-to-1 sprite-to-ammo ratio for the storage rooms, but I think in practice storage rooms need to have more ammo than they can fit sprites in order to make them useful.

For now, I'm putting off rebalancing storage rooms because that entire system will get remade once mining is added. (I'm thinking ever tile of a storage room is like a single Minecraft/Factorio-style inventory slot that can store a stack of items.)

Teg

Walt I'm slowly going through the code and fixing all the places where game speed effects outcome. Won't be completed for the next update, but it's coming. (It's actually something I need to do in order for multiplayer to work.)

This is great news, thanks!

Walt Yeah, I originally wanted to have a 1-to-1 sprite-to-ammo ratio for the storage rooms, but I think in practice storage rooms need to have more ammo than they can fit sprites in order to make them useful.

For now, I'm putting off rebalancing storage rooms because that entire system will get remade once mining is added. (I'm thinking ever tile of a storage room is like a single Minecraft/Factorio-style inventory slot that can store a stack of items.)

Eek, I'd be sad to see the 1:1 sprites go, could you just reduce their size? I was thinking of some kind of stacking indicator for multiple storage levels, but again not very intuitive. And mining sounds awesome!

akinata

Walt Wouldn't this basically have the same effect as increasing missile AOE?

no because missiles would then not harm parts that are behind the shield

akinata

Walt That's not why I lowered cannon range (back to what it originally was, actually). I lowered cannon range because with the longer range cannons tended to waste most of their shots, which was pretty frustrating. If I increase range again, then it at least should come with a projectile speed bump.

atm i am okay with the actual ideal range set. what i wanted was more range for weapons sitting on capital ships too far away from the target to still try to shoot at the enemy.

Walt

Here's a bunch of balance changes I've made so far:

Decreased standard cannon damage such that its DPS is 1000 (was 1333).
Increased standard cannon cost to 3000.
Increased big cannon rate-of-fire such that its DPS is 2000. (Was 1600. The increased ROF correspondingly increases its ammo usage per DPS.)
Increased Ion Beam DPS to 2000 (was 1800).
Decreased missile AOE to 5.5 (was 6.0).
Increased PD range to 80 (was 60) and targeting range to 100 (was 90).
Increased PD power priority to be equal to that of the shield generator.

dieaready cannons would have their role in being able to penetrate past external components and do a high total sum damage after penetrating

I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but it would certainly be a pretty big change from the current setup where most weapons block penetration. (Though I did take a baby step with 0.12.11 and let the big cannon penetrate just a bit past weapons.)

dieaready Also for cannons vs railguns, I'd actually want cannon shells to explode after it reaches its max penetration, dealing the most damage when the projectile stops (and maybe doing a little bit splash damage) while railguns would not only have a longer range but also a much faster projectile speed (accuracy in a sense) and a good bit more penetration, but conversely wouldn't have the exploding shell at the end and maybe do slightly less damage initial damage per shot. Would also be good if you could introduce mechanics where weapons would need both energy and ammo to shoot so the modders can play around with it and see what they come up with.

This is basically exactly what I have in mind. I'm thinking railguns will have a lot of penetration, so much that in some cases they may penetrate all the way through small ships, doing little damage.

Teg I'd be sad to see the 1:1 sprites go, could you just reduce their size?

I'd be sad to not have 1:1 sprites as well, but I don't see a good alternative. Reducing their size would just make it harder to see and could also lead to performance problems with that many sprites.