Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs Large & Expensive ships? |
In most games, I have found that numbers of frigates and light cruisers often are all that are needed to take down larger capital ships. Death by a thousand pinpricks. This sometimes make capital ships in most of my games, a rarity. Never have I built a dreadnought against the AI or very many human players for that matter.
The solution comes down to a resource matchup with time invested being the multiplier.
Someone building 10 ships at 100k resources each should not be able to defeat a single ship built at 1M resources since the more expensive ship has a greater risk in its investment.
Likewise, someone building 10 ships built at 1 ship per turn should not be able to defeat a single ship built in 10 turns since the time invested to build the longer single ship should count for something.
Is there a way to mod in this balance using components and component mounts for engines, shields, and armors to beef up the value of capital ship investment? I like Kwok's Nova Mod idea. I certainly would like to add these as possible inclusions. 
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
The other thing that you'd have to fix would be the inherent disadvantage of Large Ships right now: they're much higher up in the tech tree. By the time you reach your Dreadnought, it might not mean much as a small-ship specialising empire may have ridiculous tech weapons and such to wipe out your big investment. Large ships aren't big enough to make the difference anyway.
So why not have large ships be available right from the start? Collapse all the different hull construction techs into one and (I think Kwok's Nova mod idea already has this in mind) give out various ship sizes as you go instead of "all the smaller ships first". Perhaps even cut down the number of different ship sizes - something wrong with just having Frigates, Cruisers, Battleships and Dreadnoughts (alongside the Baseship)?
Make Big ships BIG (and slow and expensive) - e.g. a 5000kT Dreadnought which then has the option of using "Sniper" mounts or "Massive" mounts to determine whether it's built to fight small ships or big ships (that have "Emissive Coating"). Ultra Tractor Beam would make sure it always has something to shoot at. Maybe allow mounts to work for point-defence weapons too.
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Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
Some ways I balanced ships in my mod:
Consistant to-hit penalty and bonuses across all hulls. Be careful with defense and to-hit bonuses. These can get wildly out of control, and you can start a testing and tweaking death spiral which can last days, only to have all your work blown away when you change something somewhere else (particularly adding or tweaking components). The simplest changes are often the best ones here. For instance: After apply consistant defense bonuses/penalties to ship hull sizes, and letting those values "bake in" through testing, I revisted this area. I doubled the level bonus (though not the base) for combat sensors. This allows large ships to much more consistantly hit small ones. Having done this, however, required me to go back through all the fighter, drone, and each missile weapon's projectile, and tweak those defense stats. That required me to tweak those ships offense bonuses to compensate (if they had any to begin with, that is). After doing that, I found that troop defense and offense bonuses were now whacked, and had to tweak those to bring it all in to alignment.
In default, all ship mounts (as an example) increase damage by 5% of original damage per level past the first. In my mod, ship mounts increase damage by 5% of the original damage modification per level past the first. Example:
Stock:
Heavy ship mount:
Base damage bonus: 200%
Increase per level past the first: 5%
Max increase at level 11: 50%
Total bonus damage: 250%
Increase is 2.5% of base damage bonus.
GidMod:
Heavy ship mount:
Base damage bonus: 200%
Increase per level past the first: 10%
Max increase at level 11: 100%
Total bonus damage: 300%
Increase is 5% of base damage bonus.
With mounts, you can do other things. For instance, you can modify a weapon's max range. You can also modify a weapon's base to-hit bonus. If you increase max range, I suggest you also increase the to-hit bonus. This seems counter-intuative at first, but if you don't do it this way, then ships will fire away at targets at long range, and never hit them.
Another change is how much hulls go up in space per level. In stock, all hulls go up by an inconsistant rate per level. This rate favors certain hulls over others, generally the small ones. In GidMod, all ship hulls go up by 10% of their base size per level. This tends to favor large ships for hull space.
Defensive component stats and the AIs utilization of these tends to be poorly balanced as well. After charting out all the armor and shields, I experimented with shield regenerators as a way to help large ships. These components work well for this, because the value they add is partly determined by the quantity of shields on a ship to begin with. Because of this, several of these components (after stat adjustments) being present on a large ship (when a small one would have to cripple other areas like speed or offense to carry the same) can make a large ship highly resistant to enemy fire. I actually had to make missile type weapons partially penetrate shields in order to have small ships do any sort of armor damage at all to large ones.
Another defensive component that the AI utilizes poorly is Point Defenses. To correct this problem in the AI requires you to go in and change the AI, and you might not feel up to that pain.
Beam type weapons also have a bonus to hit in my mod. The reason is that they have very low fire rates. At first glance, they don't seem to have low fire rates. However, through testing I found that beam weapons don't start to reload until the beam duration has expired. So, the Anti - Proton Beam has a reload rate of 2000ms (the reload rate) + 1000ms (the beam duration) for an actual reload rate of 3000ms. Because that is so much lower than projectile weapons (133% the reload rate of Depleted Uranium Cannons) I felt they needed an inherant bonus to hit. This illustrates how you must be careful when testing your changes. Testing small vs large ships using beam weapons will show large ships to be much weaker, because of reduced fire rates (lower rate of fire means less chances to hit, which acts as a sort of multiplyer for a targets defense bonus).
Engines are a particular gripe of mine. Frigates have a max of 12 engines, for a base of 120 tons of engine strength, which is 48% of its hull space at base. Baseships have a max of 4 engines, for a base of 40 tons of engine strength, which is ~2.6% of its hull space at base. What the fish-stick is that?!? So, a base ship has less engines than a frigate, and its engine systems are much more fagile? Huh? There are a few ways to fix this. As an example (but not the only way), in my mod, I went through some serious math-gyrations after finding that you can use Engines Per Move to influence how much each engine applies to the vehicle's top speed. Then, I picked an arbitrary percentage of hull space, and used that as the number of engines that can be on a ship. Yes, this means that a Baseship will have much more space taken up with engines than before, and that a Frigate will use up much less space. This also means that a Frigate is much more susceptable to engine damage than a Baseship. While this seems counter to making large ships stronger than small ones, doing this first (and the defense bonus/penalty second) allowed me to have a great base from which to correct the underlying problems. If I had done this after balancing hulls, I would have to go BACK through, and rebalance hulls again.
I recommend that you be careful of the idea that "1 ship that takes 10 turns should beat 10 ships that take 1 turn". I suggest you try for "1 ship that takes 10 turns should be equal to 10 ships that take 1 turn". The reason is to allow for more options in gameplay. Otherwise, you get a game where the large ships are the only real viable option for a fleet. Instead, you want to allow for a variety of strategies and tactics, instead of constraining to just One True Way.
As a final word, be careful about simply increasing the size of a vehicle. It brings up two problems:
First, that a human will have to propigate this hull with components. Making a ship have so much space that it takes quite a while of clicking to fill it can quickly turn annoying. This is as much a flaw in the ship design system as anything else.
Second, that hulls have limited slot spaces. I've found a few times that the AI (in particular) will merrily fill hulls with components, and will run out of spaces well before it runs out of tonnage. This shows another flaw with the ship design system, in that it tries to be abstract and specific at the same time, and winds up with some of the worst of both worlds.
Don't go adding new components without trying to find balance with the stock components. Find balance first, THEN augment gameplay with new components. New components should not be seen as a way to fix inherant flaws. They should be used to add new gameplay options and allow for new strategies and tactics. If you try to fix inherant flaws with new components, then you don't fix the flaws at all. You cover them up, but they can still crop up, and undermine game balance at all sorts of inconvenient places. Then, in trying to fix that, you will throw OTHER things out of balance. This can lead to a modding death-spiral. Remember, that for every new component you add, you will need to make sure the AI knows how to use it. Its never as simple as just plopping in new things, when balance is concerned.
As a final thought, I've found it useful when balancing ships that first its useful to put in wild and unbalanced numbers, to get a feel for what it is like when things are too far the other way. Then, try to find a middle ground and take small incrimental steps from there. As always, with balance related changes, test the heck out of it. Test, test, test. Test until it becomes boring, and then test some more. The AI uses percentages of hull space to assign components, so you can make changs to the data files and then let the AI design ships to give you a basic overview of how things will work out. For detailed testing, you will want to design ships manually.
Anyways, feel free to ignore everything I've said here. I just thought that sharing some of my own experiences and hard-learned lessons might help you in your efforts.
Good hunting!
"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
The 1 ten turn ship equaling 10 one turn ships in my mind didn't make sense. After all, there is an investment risk in spending valuable shipyard building time on an item that won't be used for a while, whereas the other player has a new ship every turn that can be put to immediate use. The advantage at that point still stays in the small ship builder's court.
Instead, I was thinking of a way to balance small vs large ships by accounting somehow for the time taken to invest in their construction. In other words, to have the time it takes to build an item to justify the risk of spending that much time on it.
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
I agree with making things widely out of proportion. I'm messing around with triggers in Torque for terrain types and to make sure I made "mud" properly slow the player's movement rate I set it to divide the playerObject's maxSpeed by 50. I KNEW I only wanted it around divide by 5, but I wanted to be damn sure it was working code.
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
Spending 10 turns on 1 ships, or 1 turn each on 10 ships, still winds up with 10 turns spend. Investment in time is the same. I agree that it should be slanted slightly towards the large ships value, but a good place to start is to get things more or less equivilant. Then, with small moves, you can turn large ship effectivness up a notch or two, until it "feels right".
"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
Mind you, this can be solved by providing mounts or specific components that let you fill up 500kT at a time or such. A 50,000kT ship isn't there to be filled with tiny components - it's so you can stick on 2000kT components!
Certainly I do agree with "don't add components to cover up flaws".
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Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
Hmm...true, I hadn't considered using a large quantaty of shipyards as a factor. Perhaps shipyards need to be more expensive (or have a steeper rate of cost increase) in order to have a large quantaty of shipyards be an overall drag on the upkeep you would otherwise be paying for ships.
Since with 10 shipyards, you could have 10 large ships or 100 small ships after 10 turns.
"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
Also mind that with some mods (stock too?) smaller ships have a reduced upkeep cost because of "small size." So with 10 yards and 10 turns one side has 100 small ships with 0.9n upkeep and the other side has 10 large ships with 1.0n upkeep.
Balance might come by tweaking the large ship to have a 7% higher chance of winning a 1 on 10 fight.
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
In stock all upkeep is the same percentage of ship cost.
I suppose both sides of the argument are faulty. Only a fool (and the stock AI) would field a fleet of nothing but the largest (or smallest) size ships it can. A smart person (and improved AI) will field fleets of ships that are mixed sizes and roles.
"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
Hmm...true, I hadn't considered using a large quantaty of shipyards as a factor. Perhaps shipyards need to be more expensive (or have a steeper rate of cost increase) in order to have a large quantaty of shipyards be an overall drag on the upkeep you would otherwise be paying for ships.
Since with 10 shipyards, you could have 10 large ships or 100 small ships after 10 turns.
"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod
Mmm, the brief dabbling I had with your mod (my RL and other hobbies really don't let me spend much time with SE V at present...) indicated everything is setup such that it's only worth building space yards on the larger, breathable planets which aren't many. This isn't always the case in some mods, where it's much easier to spam space yards everywhere to build everything faster and then churn out ships from everywhere.
But yes, if I had access to all the ship sizes, I'd want to mix small and large ships. I'd be more willing to do that if the tech tree wasn't so skewed to only have big ships come in late-game.
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Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
This has been interesting, and keeps giving me food for thought.
Perhaps ship size research should be less expensive? Or perhaps it should grow at a steeper rate (spread the scale out more, so the really huge ships are still expensive, but the smaller ones cost less than current). Typically, I use cruisers as a focal point to revolve balance changes around (kind of a holdover from modding in SE4).
I know the original discussion was for inigma's mod, but I'm finding it refreshing to discuss this, and helpful for my own mod.
"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
Oh, yes, anykind of deep discussion like this is good for any mod.
Cruisers seem to be arouond my prefered size as well. The small ships I can never seem to get everything I'd like into them and the large ones are too expensive to build (in the BM game I have saved, but I've abandoned because I crashed losing about 6 hours of my completely raping the AI with a baseship, I spent the time to build one and fly it around, took FOREVER before I could use it and then it had the stupidity to fly into two of my other ships blowing up one and completely disabling the other causing the baseship 100% damage to sheilds and 100% damage to armor, whereby the planet I was asaulting almost killed it--had to build and fly in a repair ship, which took ANOTHER 5 turns or so).
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
Another reason to use big ships is if you use it for resource gathering. Big ships are WAY better than small ships for that. Maybe make it a more integral part of the game, to make big ships more for resources than for fighting... or maybe that's not what you're looking for lol.
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
No, but that IS something for me to keep in mind when I get around to the AI mining asteroids.
"Only by being constantly at war with evil in all things, including yourself, can you truely know peace."
Download my mod here: GidMod
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
I like the ideas suggested so far.
I envision the best setup would be that of a bell curve power structure. This means in a typical FF, DD, CL, CC, BB, DN, BS lineup, the bulk of player fleets would be made up of CCs, and BBs with the other ship types being specialists.
The power structure could be:
2 FFs to a CL
3 DDs to a CC
4 CLs to a BB
5 CCs to a DN
6 BBs to a BS
This would mean a power matchup of 48 DDs to match a BS.
This would mean giving the baseship 48 times the power and capacity of a destroyer.
Further modifications could be to the cost structure which would follow:
2 FFs to a CL
2 DDs to a CC
3 CLs to a BB
3 CCs to a DN
4 BBs to a BS
This would mean giving the baseship 24 times the cost of a destroyer. This cost could be further reduced by trading off for a research cost, for example:
Instead of a baseship costing 24 times the cost of a destroyer, it could cost 12 times the research cost of a researching a destroyer, and therefore only 12 times the cost of a destroyer when built.
Ohhh, I just had a brain supernova. What if all the ship sizes were available in the game right from the start, but only by researching additional levels of a ship size would one be able to get the actual resource production cost down for such a ship?
Perhaps the baseship could wind up costing initially 24 times the cost of a destoyer to produce (and therefore still 48 times the power) but to scale up the advantage, someone has to research all the levels for it - up to 12 times the research cost of a destroyer, in order for a baseship to only cost 12 times the cost of a destroyer.
In such a power and cost matchup, I think the game would favor CC and BBs, since they are right in the middle in terms of power and cost, and as the game develops, smaller and larger ships would be more appropriately used for specialized purposes.
Thoughts?
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
There'd be 4 relevant tech areas to this discussion: "Theory: Construction", "Small Ship Construction", "Large Ship Construction", "Massive Ship Construction" - you start with the first three.
Frigates and Cruisers are available right from the start. Appropriately balance them with size/movement/dodge bonus/cost/available mounts/extra-large components/etc. Let's say each ship size can go up to Lv 5.
Frigates are "Small Ship Construction" Lv 1~5 and "Theory: Construction" Lv 1
Destroyers are "Small Ship Construction" Lv 3~7 and "Theory: Construction" Lv 2
Light Cruisers are "Small Ship Construction" Lv 5~9 and "Theory: construction" Lv 3
Light Cruisers have absolutely no disadvantage to Frigates (in my hypothetical mod) aside from being much more expensive - all the advantages of Frigates (same +Dodge, same Max Move, etc) but with more space. Justified because "Theory: Construction" is meant to be so expensive and you'd get all the Frigate levels as you get to Light Cruisers anyway.
Cruisers, Battleships and Dreadnoughts follow the same pattern except with "Large Ship Construction" - i.e. to get to Dreadnoughts you automatically get all the Cruiser levels and half the Battleship levels on top of having to research that expensive Theory.
"Massive Ship Construction" becomes available at "Theory: Construction" Lv 1 - you get Baseships straight away by early-mid game. Baseships (in my hypothetical mod) would be 10,000kT+ monsters (thereby impractical to even consider building that early on unless you're willing to not build anything else - yes multiple shipyards would be allowed to make this a feasible construction) that only move 2 hexes max per turn (with +combat speed components to make it useful in combat, alongside the Ultra Tractor Beam I mentioned at the start of the thread).
I may rename these ship types but the essence of the point is there - the player is free to choose whether to go for Large ships or Small ships right from the start. They must then choose whether to develop only one end of the spectrum, or both. The current tech tree automatically assumes the mod is balanced for "Bigger = Better".
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Could a single Light Cruiser destroy a single Dreadnought in my mod? Yes - assuming this Dreadnought was poorly designed to handle the Light Cruiser's damage type and its build. E.g. it was built to fight other Big Ships therefore didn't worry about much +Hit and went for damage. Light Cruiser has all the +Dodge possible and Dreadnought has no seekers so it has no chance of hitting. The Dreadnought was built to defend against Physical attacks but the Light Cruiser happened to have focussed more on Energy attacks.
Conversely, could a single Light Cruiser be destroyed by a Dreadnought? Again yes, if the builds were wrong. Say the Light Cruiser was built with a lot of +Hit to catch extremely evasive Small Ships and Units. It meets the Dreadnought which it can hit all the time and it has both Energy and Physical attacks. However, Dreadnought has got an "Emissive Layer" on it so all of the Light Cruiser's direct fire weapons (mounted with Sniper mounts, not damage mounts) can't do any damage to it. The Light Cruiser's few seeker weapons are easily countered by the Dreadnought's PD. Conversely, the Dreadnought was packing an overwhelming number of seekers. The Light Cruiser's few PD weapons can't handle it and it falls very quickly. Dreadnought was expecting to have to land some 30 hits with these seekers to take down other Dreadnoughts but this Light Cruiser never stood a chance.
Point I'm trying to make? Just because a ship is larger shouldn't mean it automatically has an overwhelming advantage. They can be balanced through other means.
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Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
I like the idea, but it reminds me of SE:III when I built a cruiser that could take any 3 other ships and win with sheilds left over (most of the time, there were occations it took armor damage). I trounced around an AI filled map with groups of 3 of my ships (a fleet of 3 before there were fleets).
But I have this vauge feeling that it's possible to build that again under your methodology of ship size design.
Cruiser built for speed and +dodge equiped with two seekers and two anti-proton beams (energy vs. physical has no difference in SE:V, they both do "normal" damage, triggering any special "when hit" components such as emissive armor).
It might get pwned by your seeker-baseship due to a bad PDC:seeker ratio, but I'd expect that.
Also, keep in mind in your example, the frigate will probably not kill the baseship if the baseship has any kind of regen abilities (doubly so if it has both sheild regen and organic armor). The only thing that brought down my juggernaught of death (4000 sheilds, 3000 organic armor, about 250 to 350 in sheild regen) in BM was it flying into TWO of my own ships.
Side note:
Engines. Should more engines (meaning faster) make it harder to hit this ship with direct fire weapons? Even if it's something small, I almost feel as if there should be that extra 1% to make the big-slow-easy small-fast-hard more realistic that dropping in an ECM Lv. 20 (+54% dodge baby!) which ANY ship can have, I put one in every ship I design, even the colony ships, and put combat sensors in anything with weapons. My baseship of doom had roughly +62% to dodge, despite it's large size negative modifier (-10%) because of the high-level ECM and the scattering/stealth armor's +18% (+9% each).
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
Uh Draco18s? Was your example a "if it was just the 'make large ships available in beginning' theory added to existing SE V structure" conjecture or "what I know of Psi's hypothetical mod" conjecture? Especially as if you're applying it to my mod ideas then a Cruiser built for Speed and +Dodge is a clash - it would either die to +Hit built Small Ships and Large Ships, or you'd be spending obscene amounts to build that ship because it won't have access to the "Miniturisation" mount that only Small Ships will get access to (it's a work-around to have components that only small ships can feasibly use - reduces cost AND size but only if you're below a certain size).
Hmm... in fact... I can size it such that (Boss-type) Baseships and (Real-type) Small Ships can equip certain components but (Super-type) Large Ships cannot... That is... "Essence of Shuuchuu" and "Hirameki Coating" (names are definitley not finalised) would not be accessible to the Cruiser. Meaning it doesn't get the +30% Hit/Dodge from Shuuchuu nor the +60% Dodge from Hirameki and Frigates~Light Cruisers would inherently get +40% Dodge from their size too. Sure the Cruiser could HIT that Small Ship (equip "Essence of Hitchuu" - +200% Hit Chance but it's expensive, bulky, etc) but... it'd never be able to out-dodge that Small Ship. What little +Dodge it has from a single ECM can be countered by a roughly-equal level Combat Sensors and Shuuchuu and Sniper Mounts (the latter two are only accessible to Small Ships).
Yeah, I need to write all these ideas up sometime so discussions are possible...
Oh and a "any single ship vs Baseship" scenario? Baseship can't die to that - it'd take tens of turns to build and crawls at 2 hexes per turn, so I'd expect it'd need 20+ ships to take it down or expensive "Overkill Warhead" drones. For starters, it might have a "anything below 500 damage is negated" Emissive Layer (with 99% penetration so after it cuts that 500 off it doesn't get damaged much), with 300,000kT of regular Armour for anything that penetrates it (though with frequent crits, it's not that bad).
If it was properly built, that Baseship can just Tractor in a single ship from range 500 and ram it or unleash a highly destructive, ultra-short range weapon on it with suitable +Hit to guarantee that hit.
Disclaimer: I haven't thought the numbers through fully yet.
Also, if you're curious where the heck I'm getting these insane numbers and ideas from, PM me.
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Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
Disclaimer: My thoughts are always a combination of what I've experienced plus the notes on the subject at hand.
You've made a good counter-argument to mine.
I'd have to see it in play to decide in final how well it's working.
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
Yeah... my source of inspiration is a turn-based strategy game's system (bred over 15 years of many games in the series). Not sure how well it'd translate over to real-time combat, but gotta try.
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Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE
Re: Modding Mounts - The best way to balance Small & Cheap vs La
Well, there's nearly no chance my mod ideas will ever be implemented by myself until 2 years later, so I may as well share some now in the hopes of getting them implemented in someone else's mod:
Emissive Coating: Make Emissive Armour a "only one component per ship allowed" component. Give it say, 300 damage reduction, change ArmourLevels such that emissive is damaged first and 99% damage penetration for most weapons. This means (until MM changes the emissive mechanics yet again) a ship that this component will just about never be destroyed and only truly powerful hits can do damage through it.
That is to say, only the mounts on large ships (or seekers/ramming drones) have a chance against this beast. Naturally, make this "Emissive Coating" component have something like 600kT or such to prevent small ships from equipping them.
You can make several different grades of this "Emissive Coating" such that even bigger ships enjoy a bigger damage reduction. Well, better would be to do this with Armour 'Mounts' but I don't think you can make them affect the emissive damage reduction property...
Hmm... I guess "Damages only X" weapons and Toxic Injectors would be the natural counter to this...
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Illusive Coating: Again, some 600kT or such so small ships cannot equip this. Has 1kT of structure so is easily destroyed (be sure to say this is the first armour type to be damaged). Gives +80% Dodge boost such that while you have this, it's very hard to hit you except with seekers. Granted you could abuse this with shields - balance with cost and size of this "Illusive Coating".
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Ultra Tractor Beam: Range 500, fast reloading Tractor Beam to pull in targets towards you. Uses up vast amount of supplies per shot, so only big ships can make use of it without going 'bankrupt' fast. This now allows big ships to constantly kill small ships that are trying to 'snipe' at you with seekers.
Heck, you may as well instruct your ultra-ships to ram if they have this - assuming near impossible amount of armour/shields, then they can smack tiny ships onto their bodies all throughout the battle and not feel much.
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You can see where I'm getting at. Include a "sniper" mount that doesn't increase range or damage, but vastly increases accuracy (and tonnage) so large ships can hit small ships. I haven't stated my shield ideas as that'd require much more modding work (in essence: split all damage into Physical/Energy and have shields block only one of the two).
If you really wanted to be evil and you didn't care about racial techs, you could make the "Unholy Armour" that only Dreadnoughts would be able to equip:
- Regenerates (Organic Armour)
- Gives 500 shield points (Shield Generator)
- Regenerates shields fast (Shield Regenerator)
- Each time it gets damaged, it replenishes 200 shield points (Crystalline armour gone mad)
- Most damage penetrates it though, so you can still damage the ship each time you get its shields down.
---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE