Thoughts and ideas on Warlords balance

[evillejedi]

If you are not familiar with the Warlords mod for HW2 then please see http://warlords.swrebellion.com/

within the confines of the Homeworld 2 engine I've tried to make a playable game as well as putting in some approximations of practical considerations. I am stuck with what the engine is capable of providing which is not a tremendous amount.

now unfortunately, even though the game allows maps that are 1000's of km across, the scripting does not allow user or even script controlled acceleration manipulation (it does but it is such a hack that it will never be fully usable), the ship gets one acceleration value. If it was possible I would make an interface for the player and AI to divert energy to the engines and quickly accelerate to 10 km/s or faster (and also establish a minimum of 1000 km for hyperspace jumps, but there is no minimum setting)

since there is no impulse values the game effectively treats ships as having a maximum speed and an acceleration to reach that velocity (strangely decelleration cannot be faster) there is also no player controllable way of setting the vessels velocity, it is determined strictly by the path and base statistics. so we are stuck with either very fast or very slow ships that don't play in newtons world.

this presents the first problem. How fast can ships get before it is impractical within engine limits? Ships over 1000 m/s are difficult to control (and in fact sometimes become uncontrollable) 400-500m/s is a value that works for the interface well. small craft are set to this level for reasons discussed later, capital ships are set to even lower values because of the following.

one thought I had was to give all ships the same max speed but modify the accelerations, however this comes into the second issue... the collision modelling sucks, big objects cause lots of problems when they are fast(if you've ever walked around with a big box in front of you that is pretty much the problem.) I ended up with a maximum speed of around 250 m/s for most vessels with some being higher to provide a variety (as a pseudo acceleration for ships with high thrust ratios) should a CR-90 outrun an ISD? probably not, but the corvette should probably get a lead because of it's much lower thrust/mass ratio. I gave ISD's 12 seconds to get to 250 m/s which is roughly 21m/s^2 taking into account that the game actually reduces the acceleration as it reaches target velocity intead of cutting off impulse (as it would if it was actually accelerating)

small craft achieve their 400-500 m/s in about 1 second (anything less and they behave oddly)

at 250 m/s a 1000km map would take nearly an hour to cross, so map sizes under 200 km are really the only practical values. If base separation is slightly less than this the third big issue comes into play. Gunnery ranges are limited by the playability of the map

I set fighter weapons to 2000m, lasers to 15 km and turbolasers to between 22 and 30 km. These values could easily be made longer, however it would require a rethink of weapon damage and ship health (for reasons which will become important later) I have thought of bumping the ranges up to 75 km and have a few experiments that would require modifications in different areas of the game. This would also necessitate a slight increase to the ship maximum velocities, but nothing over 400 m/s

laser ranges seem to be only dictated by how far out small ships and weaponry should be targeted. 7 km is the range that torpedoes became active in the Xwing games and 1.5 km was the maximum blaster range so I used those as familiar points. It makes sense that defensive lasers should start suppressing incoming craft and missiles at ranges that exceed the attackers practical launch distance while also providing supplementary damage in large engagements. Currently lasers are allowed to target subsystems automatically.

Small munition ranges should be heavily influenced by jamming and ECM, so 7 km is practical to avoid all but point defense weaponry (however due to performance issues, small projectiles are treated as non-targetable objects for defensive weaponry)

Large munitions should have an appreciably larger range, however the ability of well screened ships to intercept these should be very high. (I think a side bar on the utility of golan III platforms is required to evaluate why a vessel that is required to maintain suppression in billions of cubic kilometers has missiles as its main armament)

A slight explanation of HW2's accuracy and targeting system is in order to illuminate some issues

missile weapons (in Warlords are only heavy ordinance) basically act by continuously pointing at the target using fixed rotation and linear accelerations, they keep trying until destroyed or a preset timer at which point they fizzle or detonate

bullet weapons (in Warlords include all fighter munitions, blasters, lasers and turbolasers) actually determine if they hit or not when fired. 'Velocity' determines the travel time to target (since turbolasers have the lagging visual effect the damage must travel at the same speed as the visual effect) Accuracy is determined by a random angular offset when fired, if in a simulation frame the vector of the weapon intersects another object the damage is applied there instead.

there is the ability to set a penetration threshold vs armor as a scalar to damage of the projectile, but that is currently disabled in the mod because it makes it very complicated to debug.

targetting is determined in the following order

1. the weapon list is looped through for weapons that have hit their recycle time
2. the weapon fire arc determines which ships are targetable, additionally the ships own collision mesh may provide occlusion
3. the targets are binned by range and some other criteria (type, importance, AI or player preference)
4. after a target is selected the weapon then rotates into position (using max alt azimuth rates and bounds)
5. the weapon fires and hit scan or collision detection routines are called for the projectile

Theoretically weapons can be set to individually target or target secondary targets if there are no primary targets, this is slow and disabled on some weapons

So the next two issues are weapon loadouts and statistics

This is where I think a lot of the contention comes in and it is understandable. I have used WEG values in the past for weapon loadouts, however some ships are just so utterly broken that those were revised. Also for some ships no other references exist so there must be some starting point for loadouts

so here goes an attempt at explaining the madness. The first point is to look at how the WEG system works. Simply you can look at it by saying that a roll of the dice is a X dice beating Y dice by Z to determine if any damage is done. I didn't bother looking at creating the series and formula but just brute forced it in excel comparing all hull and weapon values to each other. The interesting thing that comes out of this is that the WEG 4D corvette turbolaser only can hit the hull of an ISD 21% of the time even when it hits. it can only do damage 3% of the time of any significance. Whereas the 5D guns are going to deal damage 40% of the time and hit over 77% of the time. If a WEG roll doesn't beat by 3 it effectively didn't deal damage in the first place. So this is some metric for accuracy, deflection, penetration and total energy output rolled into one. Taking that into account it is interesting to see that a 10D turbolaser in WEG would core a 4D hull ship like a corvette with nearly every hit. WEG also takes a tremendous time compression into account, technically two ISDs slugging it out would last less than 30 seconds in combat vs each other, if not instantaneously vaporizing each other with lucky hits. So a time scale needs to be backed out of the WEG numbers to reach a 'damage value'

I took a target of an ISD vs ISD match taking no longer than 5 minutes as my target, obviously any other factors would speed up the destruction. This serves as one part of a benchmark.

Another benchmark idea I had (and haven't currently followed in game) was to take the ICS reactor annihilation rate and combine it with the fuel cell WEG rate to see what 1D really represents in joules. The basic process was to take various classes of ships, ratio their fuel consumption rate by their maximum reactor volume (basically the largest sphere that would fit in the ship) to that quoted to the Venstar and then apply that as a perfect mass /energy conversion (this is obviously overshooting and not taking into account different reactor types) Then applying that 1 fuel cell = 1 hour of combat (assuming weapons, shields, engines are all operating) then dividing by the total WEG D count for the ship (treating each battery as 5 guns I think) The rough result is that ISDs can achieve the necessary Saxton level bombardment strength for a DBZ while still allowing CR-90's to carry 4D weaponry, the caveat being that the corvette reactor can only fire the guns once every 45 seconds, whereas the ISD can fire each gun every 2 seconds. there's some other interesting things that should be analyzed about fuel density and total energy that needs to be dissipated, but I'll leave that for those that wish to discuss it.

The important fact to consider is that by treating each WEG battery as 5 guns the ISD I is then armed with 300 5D guns each firing every 2 seconds. This is still in direct conflict with the movie models for calibre (and we never saw this vast wall of firepower, though it is possible to extrapolate it from the deathstar turret fire rates)

Another point to consider is that the D scale may be simply a maximum rating for the weapon to fire at, a 7D gun is capable of charging, given the ships reactor, to a certain output. The actual time to reach that level is longer in smaller vessels with less reactor capacity (in the case of dreadnaughts and strike cruisers this makes a lot of sense)

(I can provide the spreadsheet for vivisection by those that are interested for both this and the WEG dice statistics)

So I had to use another approach for the game, because 300 guns was impractical from performance or sanity (having more than major ships is also a performance issue, so fielding a force necessary to take down a single ISD with just corvettes is stupid on many levels) even excluding the penetration capability a single ISD at this level would out-gun 46 corvettes with just its secondary guns in the first volley (and then out-gun them 22 times over in fire rate)

obviously taking a practical approach is just impractical for anything that would be playable. So I punted and took the golden ratios from EU blasphemy, 6 dreadnaughts per ISD and 20 gunships per ISD being an even match with good command. It looks marginally believable to the average person (who cares nothing of this level of discussion) and fits within the game engine limits

So I just starting with a simple ship, a corellian corvette, it is armed with 2 double 4D guns and 4 single 4D guns (visual inspection) ships like the gunship are armed with 4 double 4D turrets and multiple lasers and missile launchers. okay so far no problem there. Now on things like the Nebulon B I added a single dual 7D gun that is sometimes apparent in drawings on the forward bulbous hull section to give it a better fleet support role. batteries were converted to single weapons with augmented firepower. The real trick came on the mon cals and ISDs because IMO WEG butchered both beyond recognition.

I'll start with the ISD I, the current warlords load out is the following:
6 double heavy turbolasers (dubbed class 12s)
2 double heavy Ion cannons (dubbed class 6s)
12 single 10D cannons scattered in the superstructure
2 quad 10D for the large laterals
16 quad 5D turbolasers in the trenches
10 quad 3D lateral ion cannons
6 heavy proton torpedo launchers
2 minelayers

The class 12s are big ship killers and are around 4 times stronger than the 10D guns given their massive calibre and support structure
The cannons were an addition to provide better coverage for the ship.
the smaller ion count is made up for by the tremendous power of the class 6s ions

now for the ISD II
8 octal class 8 turrets
12 single 10D cannons scattered in the superstructure
2 quad 10D for the large laterals
20 quad 7D turbolasers in the trenches
6 quad 3D lateral ion cannons

So here's the rationale. The WEG D loadouts are completely unbalancing, without considering the penetration rates, the ISD I to ISD II jump is about 50% , but with the penetration taken into account, the vessel is almost 300% more powerful. With these new gunnery number the ships become more distinct but more in line with the 25-50% increase. The ISD I fills a role of a pursuit and mutifunctional cruiser with its ability to get more damage in per shot at range and disable ships easier. The ISD II becomes more effective in fleet engagements and vs multiple targets with faster tracking guns (coordinated fire on the octals), lower recycle times and less focus on ion weaponry and other armaments.

(the fixed executor has a load out equivalent to 150 times the ISD I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC3OoBSgFYs)

so the mon cals are even more screwed up and so received big fish guns
their effective load out became
6 penta class 9s
14 penta class 5s

this brings them to around 75% an ISD I which seems to be an acceptable number.


weapon damage is purely based on an arbitrary scale and is roughly a log/3 increase per D in terms of damage per second for turbolasers (again penetration is not being considered, just output vs recycle time) the scale was extended so that a 5D blaster is equivalent to a 1D laser, a 4D laser to a 1D turbolaser. This means a 2D blaster has an output of 2 damage and the 10D turbolaser has an output of 22000 damage. When penetration comes into effect the net is that even with hundreds of fighters firing blasters at an ISD they will never scratch it.

ion cannons are just bugged (engine issue) so they currently should be doing damage to subsystems but don't seem to do that correctly.

missile weapons are interesting. Fighter torpedoes have a yield of 3000 damage, so in mass they will initially damage ships, but because of a very long recycle rate they won't be effective against large vessels (effectively 120 b-wings all launching torpedoes at once could conceivably take an isd, they will definitely strip it of all subsystems. that's 1680 torpedoes all impacting at once) the interesting thing is that a corvette takes around 120 torpedoes (not 6 like xwing) so three xwing half squads can take out a corvette in an initial pass.

Heavy munitions like the SSDs concussion missiles or the ISD I/MC90 torpedoes have much higher instantaneous yields up to 50000 damage but are subject to being intercepted, they also have a substantial burst radius to damage subsystems and nearby ships (up to 500 m) the SSD has 200 launchers and the VSD I has 80 heavy concussion launchers. (this deserves more discussion as stated earlier)

So the last topic is ship health/shields

this one is a huge disappointment for me. Originally I had separate shield collision modeling with separate health values. This allowed ships to have a hull which would only take damage on shield failure or in specific circumstances and have various shield recharge rates and regeneration routines. Unfortunately this was buggy and VERY slow (lots of lag) so the decision was to give ships a general health regen based on their current health and subsystems. The shield regen rate is modified linearly with the ship health so a ship at near 0 health has a near zero recharge, at 50% it is regenning at 50% of its maximum.

the subsystems as disabled drop the regeneration rate of the ship. They have their own health and regan making them difficult targets and only practical for larger ships that are effectively invulnerable because of the general recharge. all fighters recharge their shields in 5 seconds, this works well for combat, giving rebel fighters an edge if they survive the initial encounter, if they are swarmed in the initial pass they are destroyed (it emulates the movies very well) they are vaporized if hit by any capital weaponry

corvettes have a 250 dmg/second recharge, frigates 500, heavy frigates 1000 and destroyers have 5000 dmg/sec (the executor has a 30000 per second)

what this does is allow large ships to be damaged by swarms of small ships or by massive volleys, but if a ship can leave combat temporarily or survives it quickly regains its health. This model works well if we consider that most dissipation is occuring in the shielding/hull combination, but with either missing it quickly falls apart and makes the ship very vulnerable.

fighters have health below 25, ISDs have health around 5 million. a corvette has health of 300000 (and an ISD can output 30K a second ideally) but the ISD regenerates the full health of the corvette in a minute

If I had the ability all sorts of shield effects would be possible (backup, multilayer, sectionalized, particle etc)

I know I missed some stuff I mentioned, but this should be a good starting point for discussion and it's too late to think straight at this point so I'll catch that stuff later.

I really am looking for input that can adequately leverage the existing engine since nothing until 2008 looks to have an equivalent moddability or capabilities.

[Howedar]

Glad to see y'all are still kicking around.

I've long felt that Warlords was strongly focused on playability and game balance as opposed to a truly accurate representation of the SW universe. I think that this really has to stay this way, particularly in light of the limitations of the engine (about which either you or I could go on at length).

I dunno. I don't see that there's a whole lot more that can be done, or any other changes that should be made. The modding community has polished the turd that is the HW2 engine about as much as it ever can.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

How fixed is the Executor? Last I played it a couple of months ago, I couldn't get it to do anything and destroying an MC80 would take 4-6 ISDIIs a few minutes to do would have taken an Executor a bloody 10-20mins. Effectively it is a shielded brick.

Great that you finally came here rather than the TF.N. I have stayed away from it after the rampaging mods of stupidity.

[Stark]

I think it's great that some attention is being paid to these aspects of Warlords, but as Howedar says engine limitations are going to restrict the amount of 'realism' you can introduce.

[Ritterin Sophia]

If you're going to use RPG stats, why not ask some of the D20 SWRPG players what weapons a ship has?

[evillejedi]

the executor was crippled because of a collision mesh issue that caused the majority of its guns to not fire. This isn't exactly MCs but it is illustrative of the executor now http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC3OoBSgFYs

as for d20, almost every ship is a conversion, most of the source material is still only D6 with the exception of what is in Starships of the galaxy and the jedi consoling EP3 updates (because WOTC decided to f'up starship combat even more so no one would want to use it at all)

also the intent wasn't to use the RPG stats, as they don't make sense for large scale combat, but to provide guidelines for relative values and rationale for not just arming the ships in a more sane way (I've already added point defense to every ship in the form of both small concussion launchers and lasers as well as flak barrages because the idea of wasting heavy weaponry to swat fighters is just utterly stupid)

[Ghost Rider]

Off to G&C.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

the executor was crippled because of a collision mesh issue that caused the majority of its guns to not fire. This isn't exactly MCs but it is illustrative of the executor now http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC3OoBSgFYs

as for d20, almost every ship is a conversion, most of the source material is still only D6 with the exception of what is in Starships of the galaxy and the jedi consoling EP3 updates (because WOTC decided to f'up starship combat even more so no one would want to use it at all)

also the intent wasn't to use the RPG stats, as they don't make sense for large scale combat, but to provide guidelines for relative values and rationale for not just arming the ships in a more sane way (I've already added point defense to every ship in the form of both small concussion launchers and lasers as well as flak barrages because the idea of wasting heavy weaponry to swat fighters is just utterly stupid)

So can i just redownload the latest updates and see any changes with the Executor?

What did you do with the Mon Cal cruisers anyhow? RPG stats for those were banal as they were stupid.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Huh? What is with that Executor? That Executor is significantly underarmed...

[evillejedi]

I'll need to upload the latest updates

the mon cals basically got thier 4D guns bumped to 7D equivalents and then added some larger guns


depends on what you consider underarmed, 150 isds worth? (btw it chewed through an ISD in less than 20 seconds with just the dorsal starboard guns)

[Ritterin Sophia]

With 150 ISD's using an Imperator II, I'm getting 1200 HTL. An Executor has 2000 HTL, 2000 TL, 250 Assault Concussion Missile Tubes, 250 Heavy Ion Cannons, 40 Tractor Beams, and 500 PD Laser Cannons.

[Crossroads Inc.]

You know the real problem here? Trying to mix what we want/know the ships SHOULD have.. and what the poor game engine is capable of producing before the whole thing collpases upon itself...

Even the master gamesmith evillejedi has limits of what is possible to preform...

That said, as long as the forum is open for input into said game. I have a ponderance... The Old Republic Dreadnaught. toughted as a powerful ship from the good old days, and many instances of a handful holding off an ISD.

Yet, in the game, I can pitch more than 10 at an ISD and still end up the looser, perhaps a strengthening of their arms are in order?

[Ritterin Sophia]

Im not sure, but didn't Thrawn send six Dreads against a single ISD? That seems like a pretty good benchmark.

[Medic]

Ah, I see the Executor's torpedoes no longer blow up on it's own shielding.
I have Warlords (both the 0.45b version that was made as a stand-alone download and the recent add-as-you-go-builds) but haven't played it in a while. I had no idea evillejedi would stumble upon this corner of the web asking for input, especially when the last news I heard was it might be shelved indefinitely due to work-related issues getting in the way.

Im not sure, but didn't Thrawn send six Dreads against a single ISD? That seems like a pretty good benchmark.

And a handful of TIE's. Don't forget the context though, that Thrawn attempted that was seen as insane, that he succeeded, nearly unbelievable.

An ISD should be able to take down MORE than 6 Dreadnoughts based on that description.

[evillejedi]

I did end up using the dreadnaughts as the benchmark, though I had to modify their use.

given that the major TL blisters protrude enough that at long range the ship has an incredibly small profile looking straight at the bow and the sloping armored appearance I made the dreadnaughts point directly at the target and stand off. They have no subsystems exposed to a frontal attack at range. Having the ships maneuver in battle seemed strange, but this attack style seems to benefit them immensely. the net result is that dreads should be about 7-8 to one on a star destroyer

for the executor comparison I am also including the secondary guns on the ISDs for comparison with my armament adjustments.

[Chris OFarrell]

Just posting to say thanks for all the hard work on the mod, it really really shines.

I remember in the initial mod on my old computer, firing the torpedo sphere just hung the whole thing I also appreciate in the more recent versions the streamlining of the ship types.

I have a little experiencing in tinkering with HW and HWC so I have some idea of just how much work you've put into this thing. Keep up the good work!

[Chris OFarrell]

Ah, I see the Executor's torpedoes no longer blow up on it's own shielding.
I have Warlords (both the 0.45b version that was made as a stand-alone download and the recent add-as-you-go-builds) but haven't played it in a while. I had no idea evillejedi would stumble upon this corner of the web asking for input, especially when the last news I heard was it might be shelved indefinitely due to work-related issues getting in the way.

Im not sure, but didn't Thrawn send six Dreads against a single ISD? That seems like a pretty good benchmark.

And a handful of TIE's. Don't forget the context though, that Thrawn attempted that was seen as insane, that he succeeded, nearly unbelievable.

An ISD should be able to take down MORE than 6 Dreadnoughts based on that description.

Sorry when did Thrawn send 6 Dreadnoughts against an ISD? I recall at the Katana fleet battle Bel'Ilbs brought in 6 dreads to attack the enemy ISD. Combined, with an ion cannon, they were quite capable of fighting the ISD to victory. WHen a fresh ISD arrived he had to divert 3 of the Dreadnaughts to engage it, but only 3 wouldn't hold a fresh ISD off for very long.

[Cykeisme]

Holy shit, I need Homeworld 2. I kid you not.

[Ritterin Sophia]

Ah, I see the Executor's torpedoes no longer blow up on it's own shielding.
I have Warlords (both the 0.45b version that was made as a stand-alone download and the recent add-as-you-go-builds) but haven't played it in a while. I had no idea evillejedi would stumble upon this corner of the web asking for input, especially when the last news I heard was it might be shelved indefinitely due to work-related issues getting in the way.

Im not sure, but didn't Thrawn send six Dreads against a single ISD? That seems like a pretty good benchmark.

And a handful of TIE's. Don't forget the context though, that Thrawn attempted that was seen as insane, that he succeeded, nearly unbelievable.

An ISD should be able to take down MORE than 6 Dreadnoughts based on that description.

Sorry when did Thrawn send 6 Dreadnoughts against an ISD? I recall at the Katana fleet battle Bel'Ilbs brought in 6 dreads to attack the enemy ISD. Combined, with an ion cannon, they were quite capable of fighting the ISD to victory. WHen a fresh ISD arrived he had to divert 3 of the Dreadnaughts to engage it, but only 3 wouldn't hold a fresh ISD off for very long.

Sorry, my bad, I haven't read TTT so I'm going off what I'd heard on here, I must have misremembered.

[InnocentBystander]

It's been a few months since I played, and I have no idea if any of this has been since done but:
Is it possible to make fighters a little smarter? Have them auto-target subsystems of large ships, automatically return to a nearby hanger when heavily damaged? Dock a little faster?

Fighters always struck me as very important in star wars, and for the rebellion especially. In warlords they seem kinda clunky and, for their price, not terribly effective. If they focused on subsystems (which you can do manually, but its a pain!) and were better at docking (they're so slow when docking, and forget it when the carrier is moving!) I think they'd be a lot more useful, and fun.

Just a friendly suggestion. I love stuff after .45, the models look great and it runs a lot better.

[evillejedi]

technically fighters should engage subsystems on their own (they have a secondary weapon that should do this) though the behavior is intermittent.

My approach with warlords has been to allow fighters to damage subsystems, but have a negligable effect on ship hulls.

speaking of ion cannons, the ion cannon has been reworked http://warlords.swrebellion.com/junk/ioncannon.avi (needs xvid)

[Crossroads Inc.]

By the by... Is there a quick simpl .big file we can download for Mac users? all the current files i've downloaded never work past the loading screen :..(

EDIT: I look forward to trying the new Dreadnaughts out, I do like them as a mid role ship and I'll be looking forward to see who good a group can take out an ISD.

[Cykeisme]

This looks like what Lucasarts should have done, rather than the laughable 2D space combat in EaW..

[InnocentBystander]

My approach with warlords has been to allow fighters to damage subsystems, but have a negligable effect on ship hulls.

I've noticed that; when you order a bunch of fighters to attack say, a gun on a star destroyer, they'll make short work of it. But its really a pain to do that for every single gun on the star destroyer, there are so many of them, plus the other subsystems (I have NO idea if breaking them does anything...). It would be better if the guns were grouped like on some of the super ships, but if they would automatically attack just subsystems... that would be amazing.


Also, a question. I noticed that AI ships tend to shoot down incoming missiles, but mine never seem to even try. I know my ships will use their hidden point defense guns shoot fighters, but from what I've seen, never missiles. Is there a way to order ships to shoot missiles or something? I notice most every ship has the 'deploy mines' button but they never seem to deploy mines, is this how you get missile defense or something?

[HSRTG]

If the point defense works like it does on PDS 7.3, you need to tell your ships to group attack something, even if its just one ship. Also, they need to be set to aggressive. Good luck.