SE V DJAS mod test game

[brianeyci]

For anybody interested, it was two hours before we started, mostly because my router's a piece of shit.

Then we started on PBW and the turns got rolling. I did the usual emergency build 12 BSY expansion, and a war started on turn five between destroyers and my fighters. Tuxedo's destroyers have 50 bonus to attack so they can actually hit fighters.

I think our next SDN game should be like this, little RP, more brutal, medium technology start. Once Tuxedo's mod gets perfected.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Right. I identified some kinks to work out during playtesting so far. As the game goes on, it should reveal some more balancing issues to work out. I'm especially interested to see whether one type of ship is clearly superior to the others, as that kind of defeats the purpose. Note, though, that someone doesn't necessarily need to use all four types (fighters, destroyers, cruisers, battleships) to win. For instance, someone could forget destroyers and just use cruisers, battleships, and fighters. The fighters would take down other fighters, the light mount cruisers would take down destroyers, the heavy mount cruisers would take down battleships, and the BB's would take out fortified planets and starbases. Alternatively, you could forget fighters and use destroyers to take them down. There are other combos that might be effective, too. The gist is that I don't want to make it so balanced that there's only one proper strategy of using all 4 types in equal amount.

I might add a couple more cool little things to the mod, also, but don't expect anything grandiose. I'm not really a modder, and maintaining a large mod is a big deal. There are other things that I want to spend my free time on, namely my Tensided roleplaying system. So people shouldn't be put off by the fact that my mod still uses Captain Kwok's logo and most of the data files still say "Balance Mod" on them, and the AI doesn't work. That's not going to change, because it's not really a true mod in the sense that the other mods are, it's just a set of tweaks to the balance mod to change the gameplay.

[brianeyci]

You could implement your idea into stock. Then you wouldn't have to piggyback on Kwok. But making stock "balanced" is kind of the point of balance mod so I get why you use it.

Those ten fighters getting assraped by my weapons platforms was beautiful.

You don't have to want to maintain a mod, so in my opinion better to start from the ground up and make a "final" version of the mod and release it, or keep it private if you do use Kwok's stuff since it is kind of his stuff. Or maybe just ask him. Who knows he might want to maintain such a version for you... it's just balance mod but with big facilities and streamlined hulls.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I'd never put it the time necessary to build it from the ground up. I do intend to keep it private, though, unless non-SDN people start clamoring for it, which I doubt since Kwok's next mod will do a lot of the stuff mine does, anyway. I think I made the right decision to build from the Balance Mod.

Hopefully we'll be able to try out ground combat, too. Seeing troop divisions duking it out with weapon platforms at long range with full sized APB's and CSM's is a thing of beauty.

[Kingside_Bishop]

Well, that was entertaining. Too bad the TCP/IP didn't work -- that would've been neat. Wierd how it cut out on me the second time around, though...

Anyway, I like the three-tiered ship system. The extreme speed of an escort with any appreciable number of engines, compared to the extreme lethargy of even a cruiser, really sets up a good contrast. My cruisers had movement of 6... that just wasn't enough to get anything significant done. Maybe up the maximum possible speed on the cruisers by a point or two, so that they can get into combat zones within some kind of reasonable time frame.

Converseley, I think the destroyer's a bit fast. With ships that fast, the universe no longer feels very big, and I think it should. I can understand wanting faster ships at the small end of the spectrum (I've always felt that small ships in stock don't get enough of a speed advantage), but the difference between a destroyer, movement 33, and a cruiser, movement 6, is a little extreme.

The increased component/facility thing is awesome -- I'm sure I'd make use of those big space yards, if we weren't playing so short and brutally. Especially on the homeworld, where you get massive construction rate boosts (and could build a bigger spaceyard in relatively short time), one of those would be simply awesome.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

You don't have to put the same number of engines on a cruiser as a destroyer, though. You can put as many engines as you want. If you dedicated the same percentage of kT to engines on a cruiser as a 33 move destroyer, I'm pretty sure you'd end up with movement 16. If that's not true, I'll certainly go back and tweak it, and perhaps slow the destroyer down some. I do think a destroyer that's built for speed should have 20+ moves, though, if not 30+.

The large and massive space yard facilities need a little more love, I think. Perhaps the massive one should only take up 5 spaces instead of 10, and they shouldn't cost so much. Then there could also be "advanced" SY's that cost a ton and take a long time to build, but give a boost for their respective sizes. Sensor arrays don't really seem to be worth it, either, as they currently stand. In my view, it was better to err low and boost as needed than to make something too good and then nerf it. People hate it when things get nerfed, myself included.

[brianeyci]

Fighters should be twice as fast as destroyer and destroyers twice as fast as cruisers. Or else an asshole could make a pure destroyer fleet, and set to run and run past anybody going after them. Even fighters couldn't hunt them down, and that's supposed to be their job. So if fighters are 30, destroyers should be 15 and cruisers maybe 8.

Large construction yards are nice because they cut down on micro. But if it comes down to easier micro or more of a chance to win, I pick winning ten out of ten times. Homeworlds are for resource production, and I'm already considering scrapping all my research facilities in our other game for resource miners (how are you guys doing in that, I'm using almost all my money!)

In a competitive SE game, yards are either orbital or on shit worlds, shit being low on resource percentages or a red. I don't see how that can change. The tradeoff has to be closer to five slots, and a ten yard had better replace forty orbitals and twenty normals to be worth it on a homeworld. Homeworlds start at 120/120/120.

Oh, and it would take forever, because you can only have one space yard a planet. It would be nice to figure out some way to "piggyback" from normal spaceyards onto advanced spaceyards, like Adamant Mod did with space yard expansions in SEIV.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Fighters should be twice as fast as destroyer and destroyers twice as fast as cruisers. Or else an asshole could make a pure destroyer fleet, and set to run and run past anybody going after them. Even fighters couldn't hunt them down, and that's supposed to be their job. So if fighters are 30, destroyers should be 15 and cruisers maybe 8.

That's exactly how it's currently set up. Destroyers require half as many engines per move relative to their weight as cruisers. Heavy fighters require somewhat less than destroyers relative, and light fighters require a lot less. A light fighter can easily have around 70 movement in combat.

Large construction yards are nice because they cut down on micro. But if it comes down to easier micro or more of a chance to win, I pick winning ten out of ten times. Homeworlds are for resource production, and I'm already considering scrapping all my research facilities in our other game for resource miners (how are you guys doing in that, I'm using almost all my money!)

In a competitive SE game, yards are either orbital or on shit worlds, shit being low on resource percentages or a red. I don't see how that can change. The tradeoff has to be closer to five slots, and a ten yard had better replace forty orbitals and twenty normals to be worth it on a homeworld. Homeworlds start at 120/120/120.

Oh, and it would take forever, because you can only have one space yard a planet. It would be nice to figure out some way to "piggyback" from normal spaceyards onto advanced spaceyards, like Adamant Mod did with space yard expansions in SEIV.

Apparently there's a way to modify SY rate on a planet with a facility. Kind of like Adamant's expansion, but using legitimate mechanics and not an exploit of the way upgrades worked. But yes, the large yards shouldn't cost much more or take much longer to build, and the massive one should be 5 slots instead of 10.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Let's forget the whole "turn a day until another marathon" idea and just have another pickup session this coming Sunday. You won't be gone already, Kingside, will you?

[Kingside_Bishop]

Sorry... I was going to run a turn today, but, you know... working, and all. Anyway, yeah, I'll still be around Sunday -- and maybe the Sunday after that, though I doubt it.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Brian and I are in google chat. We can start whenever you're ready, Kingside.

[Kingside_Bishop]

So, are we doing this again next Sunday? And, if so, will we be starting over with an updated version? If we do, it might be nice to start with a few more research points, so we can really experiment with levelling up massive construction. As it is now, starting with only 500,000, it's a major investment at 400k. Maybe if we bumped it up to 1-1.5m starting tech, there'd be more variety in who went with what construction levels, and we'd be able to more effectively test out the balance.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

That's true, but it also seems like we can only manage about 10 turns per sitting, so if we started over, it would be another handful of hours before anything exciting happened. Besides, we need a full scale war to really see how the different ship sizes play out against each other, against planets, etc. We should do at least one more sitting with the current game.

[brianeyci]

Throwing in the towel King? I don't think it's over.

Lamefighters with high ecm, high combat sensor and a decent weapon only seem good on a small map and early on before you mass together 50 destroyers. The problem is transit. I can't bring 1000 fighters through a warp point without carriers, and fighter bays launch slow as shit. Fighters are a completely defensive option, unless you have windows of opportunity with a lightly defended warp point.

And you actually did win. I had less than 100 fighters and you had 30 destroyer or more, so I lost. The only reason I beat it off was the mines. Invasion usually requires: a picket screen, core ships, repair ships, supply ships, minesweepers, at the very least. Ideally troop ships, ordinance ships, space yard ships, mine layers, satellite layers, colony ships, carriers, and in this mod bombardment ships to actually glass planets. In short I think you only lost because you didn't have enough basic fleet elements, not because of any huge difference in skill or technology.

If you ever mass together 100 destroyers and support ships, you will see, you will own. Oh yeah, PD guns are not ideal to kill fighters. They're good on picket ships to screen against seekers, but a fighter could carry 80 kT worth of armor and resist 3 PD shots. The king of anti-fighter is APB, and destroyers with many APB and emissive armor in this mod should annihilate fighters. The key is having as many APB as possible, so that might mean not using mounts, and a high enough combat sensor to actually hit with the APB. Which is hard, since I have ECM, but the destroyer starts with +50 to hit. PD guns are not worth the +20% or so for flak cannons just to kill fighters. They're only good as an anti-seeker screen.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I think PD guns might be good to kill fighters the way you've built them, though, light fighters with all engines and guns and no armor or shields.

[brianeyci]

That's true. But nothing stops me from shitting out 1000 fighters with armor.

If someone is rushing for fighter, the hard counter is APB. Anything else relies on the other person not adapting, and that just won't happen in a war. If I saw my fighters owned by PD guns, I would go armor ships.

Anyway King did win, so maybe PD guns work. But I don't trust PD guns with anti-fighter. I see King used the three different kinds of PD trick, but there's still the targeting problem and advanced fighters would beat PD. You can theoretically kill 5 different fighters with each PD ship with different kinds of PD, but some of the PD guns do 10 damage and won't blast through armor at all. While an APB destroyer could reliably kill 6+ fighters every two seconds.

King only lost to the mines, not fighters, so maybe PD works on lower level fighters. A fighter rusher on a more decent map would have armored and shielded fighters. The only reason I don't is research.

[Kingside_Bishop]

Yeah, I actually learned a lot from this ongoing exercise, and am continuing to learn. I figured out around midgame yesterday that PD isn't as good against fighters as I thought it would be -- it occured to me that a frigate with three different levels of APBs would be the most optimal choice, so I started pumping those out. Problem was, I already had 40+ PD ships sitting on the warp point, and I knew you wouldn't just be sitting there with only 100 fighters for long.

Turned out I was right, as the turn I invaded just happenned to be the turn you sent out mines.

Regardless, yeah -- I realized many of errors in between our play sessions, so I took my research in a whole new direction early yesterday, moving towards higher APBs and emissive armor, while building shipyard ships and sending them to the warp point.

It's not that I was throwing in the towel -- it's just, I don't think we're testing the mod very effectively. I am looking forward to testing out the effectiveness of cruisers and dreadnaughts, though -- I've finally got some coming off the production line, right when I need them.

What did you change, anyway, Arthur?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Well, I increased the range of sensor array and reduced size to 50 kT, reduced massive space yard facility to 5,000 kT and added advanced versions of normal, large, and massive space yard facilities which you get with space yards 6 that cost a lot to build / upgrade but have a +1,000 construction rate boost. Reduced the cost of non-advanced large and massive space yard facilities.

Also some minor stuff like maxed out troop and weapon platform tech at 1, which I simply forgot to do before, and removed the need to have construction 2 to get mines since they only give sweepers. Since that made Construction 2 give nothing and Con 3 only give robotics, I moved robotics to Industrial 3 and maxed Construction at 1.

Also, to increase the value of bombardment weapons vs planets, shield generator facilities now have 50,000 shields instead of 5,000 and massive shield facilities have 1 million.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

No session tomorrow unless you want to do it later in the evening, like starting at 8 PM PDT, as I'll be out of town until then.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I made a version 3 with some new changes, notably there are now specialized mounts for all different types of vehicles (except fighters, drones, troops) to give them a boost. Starbases and weapon platforms are pretty scary now, and the balance seems to be pretty OK. We should test it out next time and then it should be ready for a real game. We should do like a 6 system map. Even a small map is too big for the kind of test we're doing.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I rebalanced the racial trait costs according to utility. For instance, no one in their right mind would pay 500 points for +population when those same 5 could boost combat hit % or construction rate, and Ancient Race and Natural Merchant were simply gimmes at those prices.

Can we test the changes with a game this Sunday?

[brianeyci]

Sure.

This time I'm not going uber fighters. If you want to you can King. I want to see how the ship types match up. I'm pretty sure 50 destroyers massed together can annihilate fighters.

I might go an entirely one-dimensional strategy like all destroyer, just to see how it turns out. Or maybe two-dimensional, destroyers and a tiny bit of fighter.

[Kingside_Bishop]

I'm actually leaving today for my move, and won't be back until mid August. Sorry, but I'll let you know when I'm back up and running, eh?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

OK, so we'll just do 2 players, then. Perhaps over TCP.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Well, I couldn't help myself. I had wanted to rip the weapons out and replace them with a laser / missile / mass driver paradigm for a while, but I kept telling myself not to change too much from the BM. But then I discovered Devnull's SEV mod editor which makes it easier to do such a thing, so I went ahead with it. Balance actually seems pretty OK before tweaking, although the PD needs to be nerfed. It currently shoots down missiles with ease and gives it to fighters and drones up the ass.

Here's the basic idea: You have three basic weapon techs, projectiles, missiles, and pulsed lasers. Each one has 100 levels, and each level advances the damage roughly 20% and range about 2 LS. The techs advance both the big and the PD version of the weapon. Fighters mount the same weapons as everyone else, but they use miniaturized fighter mounts to do it. If you have a large fighter with Small Scale Construction high enough, you can actually mount regular sized weapons, and I can't remember how big the large fighters max out at, but I think you can even have a large fighter using a full sized nuclear missile. That will probably have to be balanced, but I like the idea of it. Armor and shields also have 100 levels, and are designed to actually keep up as they advance, unlike in stock where a lvl 100 meson blaster can one-shot a ship with lvl 100 shields and armor. Also unlike in stock, where branching techs require 30 or more levels of something before they become available, this tree is designed around the reality that most games are unlikely to see more than 20-30 levels of a 100 level tech actually unlocked. The 100 is just to make it effectively infinite.

The other idea that's not implemented yet is the breakthrough tech, think Total Annihilation where you have Tech 2 and Tech 3 units. Try to tech up too early, and you'll be sitting there with lvl 5 weapons and shields against someone with lvl 20 stuff and get pasted. But stay at Tech 1 too long and you'll find that even a lvl 30 nuclear missile won't compete against a lvl 10 photon torpedo (or whatever it ends up being called). Some things, like phased shields and cloaking, are unlocked by the breakthrough techs, so it also grants new abilities rather than just increased firepower and damage soaking. A breakthrough tech also opens up better mining and research paths, which will be needed since Tech 2 and 3 stuff doesn't come cheap. Once all of that is done (and it's actually not as much as it sounds like, though certainly not trivial), I'll probably start calling it a mod in its own right, and not just a tweak of the Balance Mod.