If Malfador ever fixes shields... |
If Malfador ever fixes shields so they work as intended (normal and phased shields should stack without being all converted to normal), here's an idea for how to make shield depleters work properly with multiple shield types where no one type is "better" than the others!
Suppose your mod has Particle Shields which block kinetic weapons, Beam Shields which block energy weapons, and Gravitic Shields which block gravitational weapons. Interesting enough, you say? Well, your first instinct is probably to start listing the shield types in ShieldAndArmorTypes.txt, and assign damage types so that kinetic weapons skip everything but particle shields, etc. But what happens when you want to put in shield depleters? If you're not thinking, you'll end up with whatever shield type you listed first being depleted first! In stock this makes sense, as normal shields are the weakest shields - there is no weapon that pierces phased shields but not normal shields, so the ship designers would sensibly put the weakest shields on the outside. But what sense does it make for a shield depleter to hit particle shields first and beam shields second? It would make more sense for the damage to be allocated equally, wouldn't it?
Enter the penetration field in DamageTypes.txt. Each damage type can have a penetration percentage for each type of shields. (This works for armor, too 
) Suppose your shield types are listed in the following order: Particle, Beam, Gravitic. Then you will want to allow two-thirds of the damage through the particle shields, one-half through the beam shields, and none through the gravitic shields, using the penetration field. This will allocate the damage equally amongst the shields. If you have more than three shield types, start with three-fourths, or four-fifths, or five-sixths, or whatever, and work your way down to one-half and then zero in the same fashion.
The only problem I can foresee is if the target doesn't have enough of one shield type left to absorb that type's share of the damage; then the damage will either be wasted (if it is the last shield type) or passed down to the next types in the list. But oh well, this is a pretty stupid esoteric discussion anyway 
You really thought this idea
You really thought this idea over, didnt you 
With this idea a smaller and a lower advanced tech lvl race can still beat a race with a higher tech lvl.
If their standard weapon type did not matched the advanced defense/shield type.
Good idea hopefully this will be implemented in the game.
******
Just take me to your leader !!!
Heh, yeah - I did spend a
Heh, yeah - I did spend a little time chewing it over. The basic idea was not specifically to balance combat (which may or may not be a side-effect) but rather to provide more tactical opportunities in the game (e.g. if (in a mod) your long-range scout ship discovers that race X's fleet is using primarily thermal-based-shielding and kinetic weapons you could tailor your retrofitting to counter it)
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So..when is your mod going
So..when is your mod going to be ready?
Sound alot like a
Sound alot like a complicated version of Rock-Paper-Scissors...
Well, as I said in the post
Well, as I said in the post it would require Aaron to change the way the game handles internal damage.
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Could be, if a mod written
Could be, if a mod written to use the new functions handled like that - this is just a framework for a more in-depth shield and armour damage functionality.
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The point of shield
The point of shield depleters is that they're supposed to do much higher damage than normal weapons, but only affect shields. Therefor the shields go down much quicker leaving the ship vunerable to normal fire.
Personally, i've always thought that shield depleters were too short ranged. They were always shorter ranged that standard Anti Proton beams and stuff.
Your lord and master (below Foamy) LordHavoc
Damage Model Overhaul
Now this is the sort of thing i'd love to see. Off the top of my head, there's kinetic damage (er, rocks / uranium slugs / whatever) - thermal damage (lasers! PEW PEW!), corrosive damage (or other chemical burns), Electromagnetic damage, Explosive damage - and that's only a handful of things we can current produce on earth. It would be great if we could allow specific shield resistances, so a hyper-cooled armour would be great at soaking up the old thermal damage, but not so good at everything else.
Although - for 'damage distribution' - it would make more sense to organise shields and armour into a greatest->least resistance order.
Example (bear with me, this could be quite long
):
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Now, a *better* way to handle this would be to re-think the way shields and armour currently work, and to assign the following setup to shields / armour and weapons.
Damage Types
A list of Damage Types needs to be created - each should be conceptually different and ideally non-overlapping where possible.
DamageTypes.txt file is partly redundant - penetration, damage and resistance are moved into the relevant components (weapons / shields+armour) so only a few fields (like population killed per damage point, viral weapon flag) will remain - along with the special requirements for targetted weapons, special effects, and so on.
Shields/Armour
Shields are still hit before armour, but are handled in the following way:
ShieldsAndArmourLevels.txt file is now superfluous as resistances will be ordered from highest to lowest.
The shield and armour components will get a rather large overhaul. Alongside the usual component fields we would see:
Weaponry
With the introduction of new damage types and resistance formulae - we need a way to be able to quickly and easily define shield and armour penetration. Previously these were held in DamageTypes.txt, but if we were to do this with the proposed model the file would become incredibly complex and unwieldly. Thus - penetration(s) are moved into the weapon components, and damage for weapons will be split up as follows...
Alongside the usualy component fields, we get something like (I know it's not exactly the correct language used, but you'll get the important bits!) :-
The big example
Ship A shoots the weapon described above (level 4) at Ship B (who has one unit of the shields described above)
At a range of 5 squares - the weapon will do 27.5 Thermal damage (4*10-12.5) with zero penetration and 40 Kinetic Damage(4*10), where 30% will pass through the shields and 5% of the remainder will pass through armour.
So.... it's time for some calculations!
1. Remove all 'penetration data' and move it to one side (we'll come back to this after the shield stage)
Ship B has the shields listed above (75% thermal resist and 40% kinetic resist) - so immediately, the damage applied to shields is completely reduced by this amount.
This damage is then removed from the remaining shieldpool at a 1:1 ratio. If the shield is depleted - you must remember to cancel-out the resistances on the remaining damage, and move on to any remaining shields in order of greatest resistance.
Let us assume that the ship only had 10 shield points remaining.
We then need to reverse the shield-resist calculations on this remaining damage pool (after all, the shield couldn't cope with this much damage so the shield-resists can't affect this portion of damage.
Undoing the 75% thermal resist and 40% kinetic resist leaves us with:
This added to anything which directly penetrated the shields gives us the amount we then start using when working out armour damage
In this case, we add the 12 Kinetic Damage which penetrated before to give a new starting point for the next round of calculations:
15.88 Thermal Damage and 28.16 Kinetic Damage.
All of the calculations are then repeated for armour and resists, and anything remaining / penetrating armour will damage the internal structure.
Multi-mixed-shields and multi-damage types.
Since weapons can deal more than one damage type, and shields can resist more than one you must apply each damage type to the shield with highest resist for that type, in order descending. This could get complex if you're working it out on paper, but the computer just needs to track each current damage-type path.
So, if Ship B had two shield generators, once specialising in Kinetic and another specialising in Thermal, each shield would deal with the particular part of the damage as best it could: e.g. (woop - another example full of maths)
Simpler weapon though. It deals 50 Thermal Damage and 50 Kinetic Damage.
Ship B has 3 shield generators, one has 60% thermal resist (and 5% kinetic resist), the second has 75% kinetic resist only. The third does a flat 20% resistance to everything.
For each damage type that gets gets calculated, order the shields (or armour if you're at that stage) into resistance order.
Damage and resistance versus the shields will then get computed in the order listed above....
So firstly, all kinetic damage will be worked out against generator B, any remaining damage is put on one side until we hit the next kinetic damage step later, then all thermal damage is worked out against generator A... again any remainder is put on one side, then all combined remaining damage is worked out against generator C, finally leaving any remaining kinetic damage versus generator A. Anything not absorbed by shields, resisted by shields, or so on gets through to armour.
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Also - handling them in this way shouldn't break the existing concept of simple shields, phased shields and whatever else in stock because by (when damage is worked out) applying the shields in order of highest resistance you'll get the same overall effect. Just define a few simple damage types (Normal, Phased, Null-Space) and you'll get identical behaviour - but this model increases the scope for modding significantly. Of course - shields don't *have* to have resist values - they'll be depleted by unresisted damage or damage remaining after resists are worked out.
I hope I explained that all in enough detail - the concept is sound in my head at least
If anyone needs / would like, I can work through more (more detailed!) examples.
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