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.
Thanks much for this! It's neat seeing how different people approach the problems involved!
I'd agree with the railguns; they're crit-seekers, at least at the low-to-mid end when the projectiles are too small to fit a nuke warhead. I'm leaning toward beams just being balanced, in that they just sort of melt ships generally. The best defense against beams to my mind is speed, since faster ships have an easier time avoiding their engagement envelope while pelting them with projectiles. So that incentivizes the ship-builders to put heavy beams on faster ships, since they'll need to close the distance as rapidly as possible... or else just use a much bigger beam, and compensate by having it run on expendable coolant or something similar. Or possibly both; booster fuel could be dual-purpose coolant. A frigate that runs its beam for five seconds and then has to refill on coolant could be just fine, if that five seconds is enough to core other frigates or severely damage a destroyer.
Re: Armor, shields and point defense, the way I'm thinking about it is drawn more from what I know about modern naval combat, and the idea is that no defense is particularly good. The best defense is not to get shot at. Failing that, the defenses are there to make the best of a bad situation, and they all come with significant drawbacks. Armor's too heavy, and I just made a big post about various options for making shields less First-Order-Optimal and more of a specialized, situational defense.
I'd disagree. PD cannons, whether chemical or railgun, have a basic problem: they use small guns with lower velocities and shorter effective ranges to engage projectiles closing at very high speed. Pushing the engagement distance out as far as possible is very beneficial, but the further out you go, the more you need to compensate for lack of effective accuracy against a moving target with sheer volume of fire. This means your PD guns are probably better off firing very inefficiently in pursuit of marginal increases in effectiveness, because there's no point preserving ammo if the ship gets cut in half by a torpedo. I'd say PD guns should absolutely be limited by ammo, heat, capacitors, whatever other mechanics seem appropriate; fire efficiency is not really something they can afford.
Yeah, this is the sort of thing I'm really hoping we can execute in terms of encounter logic and, I suppose, enemy AI. I'm definately trying to think of directionality and intended attack profile for the ships I'm making. The gun cruiser I'm currently working on has beam periscopes in the nose of the ship, so it can cover something like a 340-degree arc, able to target pretty much anywhere but directly behind it, while the railgun batteries are set up to fire straight ahead only.
Shields generating heat would be a fantastic drawback, wish I'd thought of that for the writeup!
Excellent writeup sir, thanks for taking the time!
Tbh, while the Three-Body-Problem book series includes a lot of silliness, I think it's right that the most reasonable extrapolation of modern combat into future combat is an ever-widening gap in favour of offense, until almost all war is just shooting at all stars in the general vicinity of any signal you notice, with the purpose of blowing them up and eradicating all life in the system. So in a sense, I may even argue that I'm not just agreeing, I think you're not going far enough. But in games, realism is a tertiary concern for me; Imo, internal consistency is the most important (which admittedly some also call realism, which annoys me to no end) and balancing/variety of gameplay is the second most important.
My main issue is that if you want people to bother with defenses, you need to make them worth it. If armor is just too heavy people just won't run it, if shields build up heat and also depletes easily, people will preferably spend their heat budget on nothing but beam weapons. In the real world people bother even with sub-par armor because they only have one life, but in my experience it just doesn't really work in games. Even if you force them into running some defense, if it's strictly and significantly inferior to offense they will almost entirely ignore it, and for good reason - in which case most game design paradigms will tell you to forgo the mechanic and instead focus your efforts on the mechanics that matters. So if you want such a system, I'd recommend to not really bother with different defense designs, just give ships/components armour and health points and call it a day, spend your effort on weaponry, detection and its interception, hitting and dodging, there are enough other concepts. Most gameplay will then center around positioning as you say, since actual combat will usually be over in seconds.
You probably know more about it than me, but I'm not sure this basic logic holds up in ultra-high (sight) range combat such as space combat. If you can see the projectiles coming for quite some time before impact, and they have very limited capability of swerving once they're at high speed, even relatively low velocity bullets may have a decent chance to hit them. If ~10-100 bullets are on average enough to hit a rocket and each bullet is so small that the rocket takes up 1k+ times as much space as a single bullet, PD will naturally have a very good fire efficiency even without prioritising it deliberately. Though if the projectile doesn't include an explosive component, such a PD will probably not have enough kinetic energy to actually do anything.
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