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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  9mo ago (text post)   Edited 9mo ago   1465 thread views

The Motte Moddes: HighSpace (August 2023)

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

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

  • developers: “mission” code, “strategic” system map code

  • artists: 2D (user interface), 3D (space ships, weapons explosions)

  • writers: worldbuilding/lore, quests, characters

What we have

  • Concept art for a long range missle cruiser, curtesy of @FCfromSSC

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • A “tactical” RTS-like in-mission view where you can give commands to your ships.

Updates

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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).

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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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 gear leather 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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