The goal of this thread is to coordinate development on our project codenamed HighSpace - a mod for Freespace 2 that will be a mashup between it and High Fleet. A description of how the mechanics of the two games could be combined is available in the first thread.
Who we have
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@FCfromSSC - 2D/3D artist
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@netstack - developer, tester, and suggester of great ideas
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@Mantergeistmann - writer
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Me - developer
Who we need
The more the merrier, you are free to join in any capacity you wish! I can already identify a few distinct tasks for each position that we could split the work into
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developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code
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artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions)
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writers: worldbuilding/lore, quests, characters
What we have
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Concept art for a long range missle cruiser, curtesy of @FCfromSSC
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A proof of concenpt for “strategic” system map we jump into on start of the campaign. It contains a friendly ship and 2 enemy ships, you can chose where to move / which enemy ship to attack.
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A somewhat actual-game-like workflow. Attacking a ship launches a mission where the two ships are pitted against each other. If you win, the current health of your ship is saved, and you can launch the second attack. If you clean up the map you are greeted with a “You Win” message, or “You Lose” if you lose your ship.
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A “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships.
Updates
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The System Map and the Tactical View got minor pimp-ups. The System Map now shows the ship names, and the Tactical View has a grid to help with orientation, draws ship icons if the ships are too far away to see, and draws waypoint, and target icons to give some indications of the ship's current goals.
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The System Map now supports Battle Groups, and the player is now in charge of one - the original GTC Trinity cruiser, and a wing of fighters.
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We now have “just in time” mission generation. Like I mentioned in the previous thread, the scripting API gives you access to the file system, so it was pretty easy to generate a mission file on the fly. This has some advantages over using a “blank” mission file and setting up the mission via the API, because not all mission features are exposed to the API. The most obvious example here will be how there's no longer an “extra” player ship, just the ones explicitly declared for the System Map (in the previous versions you'd be flying a fighter, even though in theory there were no fighters in the System Map).
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Thanks to the fighters and their current load-out it's actually not that hard to win the game at the moment. Your cruiser will easily dispatch the Shivan one, and as to the corvette, you can order your ships to run away, and take out the turrets yourself, then order your ships to attack. It will take a while, but with a defenseless enemy it's only a question of time.
What's next
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The System Map didn't get a lot of attention so far, so I'd like expand it. It would be nice to move around an actual star system, add camera movement, and split/merge mechanics for fleets.
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The Tactical View is somewhat functional, but still needs to give a player handle on what's going on, and better control over their ships. I wanted to add subsystem status, beam cannon charge status, and a handier way to give advanced commands.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Spaceship Weapon Ideas
The three classic weapons of spaceship-based miltary scifi are the beam, the missile, and the railgun. The challenge from a game-design perspective is to make balance the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three, such that they have unique and rewarding niches in the tactical environment. The following is my take on them. There's a lot of assumptions baked into the descriptions here, and I don't know how much of this can actually be implemented in Freespace 2, but I figure laying it out is a place to start at least. Alternate takes are welcome, let's hear what you guys like. @netstack, it's ideas time!
Railguns
Railguns are powerful, cheap, easy to make, easy to maintain, and easy to feed, which makes them a nearly ideal primary armament. They're pretty good at hammering enemy ships and short and medium range, pretty good at point defense, and adaptable enough to fit a variety of roles, thanks to a wide selection of specialized projectiles.
The problem is that "pretty good" is about where they cap out. They're general-purpose low-tech weapons, and that means they lose out both in specialized roles and to the increasing benefits of tech advancement. They do get some upgrades and higher-tech variants that can compensate for these discrepencies, but they're simply outclassed by beams at the high end of the tech scale.
Variant Ideas
Submunitions - These shells break apart into a cloud of smaller projectiles, trading hard-target penetration for increase hit probability and damage against soft targets.
Guided Munitions - Larger warship railguns can fire shells with their own guidance package and manuevering thrusters to allow limited homing on target. These are much more expensive than standard railgun shells, but provide much-improved long-range accuracy. Due to the powerful forces involved in a railgun launch, the guidance packages are more limited than those found on torpedoes, but they're also more resistant to point-defense fire.
RKV - The capstone of railgun tech, RKV cannons launch projectiles at meaningful fractions of the speed of light. Greatly increased projectile speed means greater effective range and far greater terminal effect.
Beams
Beams are the ultimate high-tech, high-class weapon. They're ideal for defense against fighters, missiles and torpedoes, and the higher-powered versions are devastating to ships as well. Their problem is range, cost, and the supporting hardware they require, which often leave them underpowered relative to railguns as primary armament. There are a number of workarounds to these issues, but all generally involve some pretty serious tradeoffs in terms of rate of fire, limits on the number of shots available, or other drawbacks that relegate them to more niche roles.
Beams are tech-limited. The better a faction's tech base, the better beams get. The more resources a ship can dedicate to them, the better beams get. These effects combine to scale the effectiveness of beams exponentially as you move toward end-game units, until they effectively become the ultimate weapon for those who no longer concern themselves with the denominations of their currency.
Variant Ideas
Burnout - Greatly increased power, but only good for a couple shots before needing to be either replaced or replenished outside of battle. Often mounted as special anti-ship weapons on fighters.
Periscope - beam emitters can be buried deep in the hull, their fire directed through relatively light and agile reflector turrets. Beams set up this way are highly resistant to damage, while maintaining the responsiveness of light secondaries.
Pulse - The beam is pulsed rather than continuous, trading raw damage for a much faster cycle time. Typically used by dedicated point-defense weapons.
Hotshot - These weapons have traded off cooling support for increased power. Limits the rate of fire to allow for a cooldown, requires expendable heat-sink material, or both.
Missiles/Torpedoes
Missiles (the little ones) and Torpedoes (the big, capital-ship-killing ones) are excellent both offensively and defensively. They home on targets and they hit for serious damage. They're good against fighters, good against capital ships, good at point defense. They're highly adaptable, with variations suitable for every occasion. They let you launch battleship-killing salvos from a metaphorical rowboat. Why would anyone use anything else?
The biggest problem missiles present is logistical: missiles and torpedoes are complex, high-tech, expensive and bulky per-shot. This means that you can never carry as many as you'd like. They're the most expensive weapons system on a per-shot basis, and the bulk and expense makes resupply and procurement that much harder, so you can never get as many as you want either.
The second problem is that they're vulnerable to countermeasures, point-defense, and interception. Whether on offense or defense, volume of fire is decisive. Obviously, this aggravates the logistical challenges, but the more immediate drawback from a tactical perspective is that there's such a diversity of offensive and defensive tech in play that there's often an irreducible element of chance in serious engagements.
The third problem, particularly for dedicated missile platforms, is that magazines full of missiles tend to suffer catastrophic detonations when penetrated by enemy fire. This makes dedicated missile platforms rather more vulnerable than gun or beam ships.
Variant Ideas
Dumbfire - Lacks a guidance system, flying straight ahead until it hits something or self-destructs. Much, much cheaper, but worthless at anything but very short range.
HV Dart - Accelerates rapidly to very high velocity, relies mainly on kinetic impact to deal damage. These are effectively expendable pocket railguns.
Swarm - launches a swarm of mini-missiles, short-ranged and highly maneuverable.
...Okay, that's enough from me, at least for now. There's already a separate thread on shields, and we haven't even gotten into electronic warfare, targeting/illumination, and countermeasures yet.
Sorry for the late response. I have some experience with modding games, though I tend towards mainly balancing & adding smaller new functionalities and not total overhauls like this.
I’m also not sure whether this is the advice you're looking for, but as a general design choice I think it you maximize rich gameplay by using rock-paper-scissor systems and limited use items that can negate advantages with a strong emphasis on combined arms, and that can be risky but possible to be circumvented with skill. My favorite example - not scifi - is anti-tank encampments that shoot any tank to scraps in seconds, but that have middling reloading times and atrocious turning speed and so can still be routed with 3+ fast tanks if you plan a good approach. But if the same anti-tank encampment is properly supported with scouting, that approach is unlikely to work. But the scouting can be circumvented by limited-use smoke bombs … and so on.
I'm normally against one of the weapon categories being the ultimate in any circumstance such as high tech beam weapon supremacy. But with a RPS/limited use counter item system in place, you can have some weapons at a premium while still keeping the other viable. And the key to that is obviously armor/shields/point defense. In my game, all three would work in general, but armor would be especially good against railguns, shields against beam weapons (for theses two it can be vice versa as well), and point defense obviously against missiles, and to such a degree that even if beam weapons are better pound-for-pound at late tech, shields would be so good against them that you more or less have to pack the other categories to get around them. Since thus both attack and defence are strongly related, I’ll further talk about both concurrently. I don't think it makes sense to talk about weapons without also mentioning the defenses they try to get around.
You already mentioned many possible ways for the guns to function differently, so I'll only add a little bit to that. Railguns should be exceptionally good at causing specific component damage but cause low hull/structural damage, missiles cause large-scale hull/structural damage, while beam weapons cause less than either but also cause heat damage. Railguns recoil means that need to be mounted in a fixed position and so have a limited cone of fire, Beam Weapon cones are primarily limited by the position and size of the ship they're mounted on and Missiles can move on their own so they can go wherever they want. Likewise, armor would be primarily like an extra healthbar that gets slowly used up during the fight, and so it is very strong against alpha strikes but increasingly useless in long engagements. Shields would regenerate fast enough against slow rates of fire to be significant but they can still be depleted, so they are average against either. Point defense are the most extreme, they don't get depleted at all (even if you include an ammo system, point defense ammo should use up so little space as to be effectively endless). But you need a full gun per single projectile in a salvo, so they are strong against drawn-out engagements but bad against alpha-strikes. This already has many other implications, such as shields being better on larger ships (because the regen is harder to nullify through focused fire) or beam weapons being better on smaller ships (as they can get >180° cones). Armor and PD could similarly have directionality. A dedicated pursuit ship with extreme forward speed, forward-facing weaponry and armor but helpless if intercepted at an angle can be quite interesting for example. In general directionality and weapon cones add lots of variety and potential for outplaying.
So let's move on to heat. Heat should be a build-up bar that causes increasing damage at thresholds - mainly component damage at first, then organic staff if you model that, then eventually even structural damage. As you mentioned yourself, beam weapons should build up the most heat. Imo the same should go for shields; There is no reason for Armor to build up heat, and pd should build up less than beam weapons/shields. Every ship has a base dissipation and can set up cooling/radiating components, but these have diminishing returns as there should be only a limited number of good locations on any ship for such components.
So what gameplay would this add up to? Let's look at for example engagement length. A short engagement ship (let’s call that a Fighter) may be small, have lots of armor, and it can afford to run lots of beam weapons with minimal cooling (but should also run other weapons, especially missiles as they are naturally good at alpha strikes). It can have very high effective stats with very high manoeuvrability at the cost of not a lot of endurance and needing support/repair between fights. A long engagement ship (let’s call that a Patrol Ship) may be large with lots of shielding and pd with good cooling components, and primarily run railguns as offense on the broadside since it neither uses up ammo fast nor build up additional heat and a mix of support missiles and maybe some beam weapons on the backside (the former to support the broadside, the latter in case an enemy ship gets around). It can keep on going even through multiple fights at the cost of a weakness to dedicated alpha strikes, limited offensive capabilities and being generally more direction-dependent. You can also design an Hit-and-Run Anti-Fighter ship with Shields/PD + Beam Weapons/Missiles, but it would struggle with heat management, or design an Anti-Patrol Ship with Armor + Railgun, but that would have the opposite problem of not appropriately taking advantage of its heat pool (and thus having on-net worse stats overall).
At last, limited use items/actions. As mentioned, they should be mainly used to patch up weaknesses and should be designed for that purpose. For example, the Patrol Ship struggles with alpha strikes and may want to run some kind of smoke-like effect or a short-term shield overload that needs to be timed right. If the opponent just does an instant alpha strike that is easy, but any good opponent will try to start a "fake" alpha strike to get you to use up the ability and then attack in earnest. It's very important for these to be low investment and not too strong however, otherwise negating weaknesses becomes trivial.
So to recap all three elements I talked about add up to increasingly complex gameplay:
Since you already were talking about the first - intrinsically different dynamics of the weapons - I guess I'm especially arguing in favor of 2. and 3. . You don’t even need a long list of weapon subcategories, and in fact I’d postpone that to later and instead concentrate on making the key trifecta solidly balanced. More variety of low-investment, low-effect Limited-Use items/actions can also be a good way of adding some complexity without screwing up the balance too much.
I mostly agree with you, but I don't know if having some weapon types be strictly superior is necessarily a bad thing in a single player game. Other than balance, there's also the question of progression. When there's a visually distinct weapon that you initially cannot obtain, but see in action, running into someone with it strikes fear into your heart, and when you finally get it brings joy. It can be pretty fun when done right.
Another way would be to have let's say 3 tech lvls, and the first tech lvl has only the base 3, the second has a variant for each, the third has another variant, for a total of 9 (and the variants are still similar enough so that they don't screw up balancing too much). But the base variants still get upgraded alongside. So you can have distinct "scary" high-tech variants without losing the basic balance.
I had to mull this one over, because on one hand yeah you can do it like that, but on the other there was something about it that I didn't like and I couldn't put my finger on.
My issue is that sometimes the balance feels forced. Take something like a fantasy medieval RPG, they often go with warrior / rogue / ranger (/various spellcasters / etc. etc. etc.), and then they try to balance them so that in the end everybody is mostly an even match for everybody else. It makes perfect sense, you wouldn't want one class to be obviously better then the others - otherwise, why even play them? It's even more important in multiplayer games to balance them out. Then, there's the equipment, warriors get to wear heavy armor, rangers light-to-medium, and rogues only light. Also kind of makes sense, it would be ridiculous of a rogue to run around in full-plate. So then you want to give the characters a sense of progression, so you come up with a tier system for the equipment... and this is exactly when you run into the effect I want to avoid. You have a level 1 warrior, and he's wearing full-plate, and then after lots and lots of adventures and gained experience he becomes a level 10 warrior, and he's wearing full-plate... but awesomer!
What's worse a rogue wearing
fetish gearleather armor can meet him head-on (as long as he's also level 10), and in my opinion that's just wrong. If a rogue wants to kill a fully armored knight, he has to wait until the dude goes take a shit and drop a massive rock on him, poison him, wait for him to go to bed and stab him in his sleep... anything other then fighting the guy head-on! Now granted, that means you have to give each class a way of accomplishing the goals in it's own distinct way, and that means work, which in turn might very well mean we'll go with the tech level system that you recommend, but if we could find a way to have actually distinct play styles for differently equipped fleets, that would make me very happy.I think we're not very far from each other in opinion. We both want different components to be viable to generate diversity of builds and gameplay, we're mainly quibbling about how complicated gameplay needs to get and how much needs to be "forced" through balance. I'm generally in favour of starting out with an extremely simple basic design and to generate emergent diversity through making all options genuinely viable. I'm not opposed to adding more complexity once the basic building blocks are solid, but one should be careful. In my experience, complex system may have more theoretic dimensions to generate theoretic diversity, but they very reliably devolve into there being just a single, maybe two or three, dominant strategies, and the balancing is even more work, not to mention that the complexity was a lot of work in the first place.
For your example, if we want to go for maximum realism: That's why "rogues" arguably didn't exist historically. Armour-less murderers at night could easily be armour-wearing knights at day. Highwaymen simply wore the best amour they could afford, and often were literally wayward knights. Realistic medieval combat, at a high "level", is just dudes in full plate armours with large shields, probably also on horses. No dual-wielding nonsense, no lesser armour categories, small knifes are strictly a back up weapon if you get into grappling on the ground. IF you want a rogue to exist as its own thing, particularly in team combat, they probably need a good helping of magic. Also, in most games I know, if there is a Rock-Paper-Scissor system (Fire Emblem for example), rogues are in fact not really able to take on armoured knights on their own without a significant level advantage. They usually use teleportation/fast movement to get close to ranged fighters/mages and kill them before they can unleash their spells, but armour they often struggle with.
As another example that may satisfy you, you could make it so that beam weapons/shields are balanced around early game cooling systems, and, as the cooling systems get better with tech, beam weapons/shields get better as well. But as the cooling is not infinitely strong and there are only a limited number of good slots for cooling, heat build-up will still limit ships in how much of either they can run, so they still have to make a trade-off between the best offensive component (beam weapons) and the best defensive component (shields) and will need to consider what other weapon and/or defense to run alongside it with spare slots. Together with an R-P-S system, it could still end up being reasonably balanced. Though from experience I suspect that it will end up being a system consisting entirely of two types of components in terms of gameplay - beam weapons/shields, and whatever is good against them, with any group that is good against something else playing at best an extremely marginal role. R-P-S systems ease up balancing a bit, but they're no replacement.
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