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Combat mechanics
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I need some ideas for the combat mechanics
At the moment, ships just have a attack value. Only single ships (and not stacks) can attack, and one defender is chosen. The attack ratio between attacker and defender determines which ship is destroyed. As soon as I can implement it, the ratio will determine which ship takes damage, and only when sufficient damage is dealt the ship will be destroyed.
A medium size ship hull has 10 slots for ship modules : crew, energy, drives - and optionally weapons,defense, cargo bays, colonizing module etc.
Here are the prerequisites which should be supported by the combat system:
- Ship hulls in seven different sizes, each gives some statistics and a number of free slots to put ship modules into
- ship modules have to be produces or traded by the player, they are assigned onto ship templates and those templates can then be built
- there are five (number can vary yet) special ressources, and only one occurs in a region of 40x40 fields (~20 players). Each ressource allows a better kind of ship modules.
- since ship modules are one of the main trade good and since most of the players will specialize into one ore two ship module types - probably on that, that uses the special ressource which the player has at his starting position.
If I keep the single attack value, i do not need special defense modules.
If I implement [rocket launcher + point defense], [laser + Shield] and [Mass driver + Armor (or Evasion)], the game lacks the rock-paper-scissors principle.
While increasing the complexity, the ship statistics should remain presentable and self declaring.
Ships with a special purpose would also be nice: Colony defender, Colony Attacker, general attack unit, nebula fighter, carrier...
But a defender should not just include lots of denfense modules, else he wouldn't deal damage to the attacker.
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After a few hours of bicycling, I decided to do it this way:
Three weapon types: lasers, rockets, massdriver (each with hitting probability and damage output)
Field types give defense bonus:
- planet orbit 30%
- Asteroids 50%
- Nebula 10%
Field give weapon modifiers - sometimes increasing weapon damage or hitting probability, sometimes decreasing
- against Planet-Orbit : +massDriver
- Asteroids : , --rocket , -Massdriver
- Nebula : , --laser , -Massdriver
The bonus might be absolute, or with a percentage (nebula reduces laser damage by an absolute amount - later, lasers will cut through nebula like a hot knife through butter). Asteroids reduce by percentage (some shots hit asteroides instead of defender).
If a ship attacks, each combat module on the ship will do one shot, then the defender will shoot.
Additionally to the weapon types, the ship might have multiple armor modules (increasing hitpoints) or shields ( absorbing a percentage of damage).
I thought about shields that absorb damage instead of reducing it (while shield strength would be reduced). But then, attackers would move ships with damaged shields back from the front, while defenders (which most likely would not be online, would lose every ship that had damaged shields).
Since I want to increase unit damage (and thus consumption of resources to repair them), I will implement shield that just lessen the damage.
Last but not least, additionally to ship hitpoints, I will implement module hitpoints, so that damaged ships might lose modules during battle...
The five special resources can now each increase the statistics of one of weapons/defense modules.
I would like to have each weapon in three or four quality levels, and for each quality level an additional "Special Resource"-Version that will be better that the normal version (perhaps as good as the next normal weapon level, and additionally with better hitting capabilities).
For a start, this is complex enough, and it will surely take some hours (which I will enjoy) to implement this.