New Weapon System ->Area effect/mass effect

I agree that adding AoE weapondry would add a very nice aspect to the game. I can think of a lot of weapons that could benefit...

The unique weapons come to mind, as you had mentioned. Making these weapons a possible deciding factor in battles could really make things more interesting.

Psychic weapons could definitely benefit from AoE, maybe even a shockwave effect from the ship. The targeted weapons could still exist, but imagine a 60 ls radius burst that stuns ship for a second or two...

Heavy missiles could become a much more effective means of attacking (assuming the AI in stock learns to use PD, and PD becomes balanced). If just one missile gets past a tight formation of enemy vessels, it could spell doom for them all

Self-destructing a ship could deal damage to the enemy vessels nearby, too. Possibly surviving supplies and ordinance could assist in the explosive power. Could be useful for that lone colony ship that is just about to get overrun by an enemy scouting group.

Mines could become an in-battle weapon used similarly to Star Fury. With AoE, a few mines might just save that fleet that is fleeing for its life.

Anyway, those are my 6 cents. Inflation, you know.

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Give me atmopshperic manipulation cannons, or give me death!

I agree that it is a good idea.And there is no doubt that it can make the game more interesting.
But I am afraid that this new weapon system seems to be rather difficult to implement.

Personnaly i HATE that kind of weapons in games like SEV. Thoses tend to make small ships/fighters obselete once they start to appear as they can destroy a bunch of them each time. For me to accept the existance of such annoying super weapon would be to have it as a large, one use device that is destroyed after use. One that can't be fitted in every sticking ship and be abused of...

I think it could work. Just have the radius of say the flak cannon do very little damage. A direct hit is still your goal and does the most damage, but there are a handful of weapons where close should count for something. I wouldn't say more then 2 or 3 weapons use it, and since it relies on a larger warhead, make it very ordinance hungry for balance. The other option is to reserve this damage for ship ramming/self destruct only. This way drones become a bigger threat and exploding ships have to be given some room to explode. Espically when a starship rams another ship, threr should be a radius of damage.

SPOILER ALERT! If you haven't seen the first few episodes of this season's Battlestar Galactica, STOP READING HERE!...you've been warned.

In the first or second episode, the Pegasus rams a basestar and the resulting explosing actually throws one of the docking pods off the side of Pegasus and into a second Basestar, severly damaging/destroying it. I can see that as very possible in game combat.

This is a WIBN (wouldn't it be nice). It'd be lovely in some mods, but I don't think Aaron will ever actually add it.

Aditionally, Jersey, do you really think drones NEED the extra punch ATM? Try a few out, they're overpowered (something is seriously wrong with them on code level, I ran an experiment where a 1000 dmg warhead did 3000 during a ram, and the drone only had 10 structure and tonnage to ram with so I do NOT know where the extra damage came from)

There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

I think AoE weapons are fun and useful, but I would think that it would greatly unbalance the game. It would be to easy for a human player to load a bunch of ships with AoE weapons and then have no trouble beating the AI.

I agree that AoE weapons would be nice. Though, I would more liek to see exploding ships do AoE damage, as well as let ships have the option to either ram as normal, damaging one ship very very heavily, or explode, and do medium damage to a all ships in a certain radius.

Also, ya, AoE weapons would be expensive weapons with either very very very low damage over an area, or extremely long reload times.

AoE weapons would be expensive, expend very large quantities of supplies/ordinance, or have very long reload times.

AoE PD could easily be balanced by making it fire slower than normal PD. That would make flak cannons sensible. The damage radius would be short for PD, maybe 5-10 ls max, and so would be most effective against groups of missiles.

On a similar note, I think being able to fire seeker weapons in a staggered volley, rather than all at once, both looks more impressive and might help PD a bit.

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Give me atmopshperic manipulation cannons, or give me death!

The fact of AoE can easily enough be balanced by the mod author (and I'd 100% support any effort to make it mod only). Slow firing rate, high expense, high supply/ordinance, lower damage, a thousand and one ways to underpower it

That said, a few thoughts: This is very much a "WIBN" feature, not likely to occur while there are still bugs floating out there that REALLY need to be squashed, or even simple, non-engine modifications (like making it so that vehicleunittypes.txt includes a listing for ship/bases so we can customise those, cloning "ships" into "large ships" and "small ships" for example). This would require a modification to the base engine for space combat, and probably some graphics/AI work too (which means Aaron would have to pay for others to help him).

Oh, and the ramming battle-star, from the looks of it, was a once off "Wow!" kind of thing; the basestars where at minimal range from eachother and the galactica rendering unsual effects possible. I doubt you'd see that kind of thing happen very often, especially as fighter-heavy as BS:G is

There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

AoE does have a good deal of potential usefulness in the ground combat system.

"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
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I agree there should be AoE effects.

As for AoE weapons taking out fighters easily... why?
Fighters are small and have little mass compared to a big ship. A blast that might cave in a big ship's side might onyl do minor damage to a fighter and end up 'pushing' it away from the blast, as the fighters small mass offers little resistance and causes it to 'surf' the blast.

I remember in MOO2, there was an AoE weapon that sent out a pulse from a ship that did damage based on size of ships hit, and for fighters and missiles, it did half damage.

AoE would mainly be of use in ground combat.

In Space, you would need some really big warheads or powerful nukes to have any appreciable effect, as there would only be stuff like prompt radiation and EMP from a big nuke, as there would be no atmosphere to carry a shockwave or overpressure effect, which are the most devestating parts of a nuke would have.

Something like CSMs and Torpedoes, plus warheads for fighters might have minimal 'splash' damage.
Stuff like Drone warheads, Plasma Missiles and Ship warheads (cobalt charge?) might have better splash damage.
Mines would probably need the largest area of effective splash damage, perhaps via a fragmentation or energy/plasma wake effect, since mines typically need to go boom in a big way.

Anything that could do major damage to fighters in an area would probably be unable to even target them in the first place, unless it was some sort of weapon that simply did an AoE effect with the ship at the center and have a limited range.

There's lots of fun things that could be done with AoE.
Shockwaves from exploding ships. Scattering fighter groups and drones caught in its radius, possible damage? It would be cool if ships had clipping to so if they cross each other's flight paths they collide... destroyed hulks flying into other ships.
Flak cannons would benifit alot as stated above, sending up debri fields to mess up fighters. Could have chain-reaction weapons like the Little Doctor.
I like the ideas of massive AoE sheild depleters.
Wave motion guns should destroy everything in their path....

Guns that can damage multiple targets?
That's an idea.

Perhaps the Mental Singularity thing could have an 'implosion' factor on impact, that pulls in everything within a few dozen LS for a few seconds (causing ramming damage to stuff that gets pulled in just to hit other stuff), followed by an explosion that does some damage and then repels everything.

On a similar note, the shot could have a minor tractor/damage effect towards anything that is in or very close to its path (excluding the firing ship), and it could possible end up snagging and dragging along any fighters or satellites it flies close to or at least toss them around while dragging smaller ships and drones in its patth off course..

Considering distances in this game, AoE should at most affect "stacked" units/ships (eg. 20 fighters who look like one fighter, becose they are all in same position). This would make extremly tight formations weaker.

Groovy Baby Yeah!

Combine it with an option to change the formation distances in-game, and combat will become much more interesting!

Minor nitpick: shockwaves? In the vacuum of space? At least in the strict definition of a shockwave, that's not possible. Mind, there are alternate ways of achieving AoE and even "shockwave-looking" attacks could be implemented sure. It would add one more tool for customising and balancing, though how easy it is to actually implement, I'm not sure.

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How would a shockwave be impossible if it originated inside the ship? I know their possible I've seen them on star trek

Groovy Baby Yeah!

Flashy SFX for eye candy and coolness, and physics, are two different things.

A shockwave (a.k.a. overpressure?) is carried by an atmosphere or other medium (such as other gas, liquid, maybe even plasma). If a ship explodes, the atmosphere is quickly dispersed, leaving nothing to carry a shockwave/overpressure.
This only leaves any physical matter that was accelerated by the initial blast, and stuff like outgoing plasma (before it cools/disperses), energy and radiation to damage anything nearby.

It might be better to look at some things as an energy/plasma wake/wave type effect as far as when a ship explodes, and not simply as a shockwave, as to me it would probably take an insane amount of force/energy to have a blast wipe out something several miles/km away in space without anything such as ultravelocity shrapnel or masses of plasma being involved.

(although I could be wrong in any number of ways...)

You could create a gravitational shockwave..

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That would be cool, might actually give the Wave - Motion gun some use.

The real challenge would be to come up with an interesting way of applying such effects without completely destroying game balance in the process. I'm thinking of some mount option which would allow some weapon to hit a large area but the effect would also be a diffusion of what the single target would have been subjected to. I don't know how this stuff is calculated in SE IV, but I'd see it like this:
- normal mount: weapon does X damage to 1 target
- area effect mount: weapon does x/5 damage to 5 closest targets of impact

Other area effects:
- EMP bomb which fries all components of types XYZ in case a ship in the impact zone has no shields
- Suicide detonation which could take out the closest ships (how can this be triggered in a ship strategy? ramming would probably not be efficient)
- I loved the lightning field in MOO2 - it had a % chance to take out incoming missiles and fighters, which could be considered an area effect