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A bit of background on the original process. Most of the racial blueprints were buit out using a hyper-advanced start and manually selecting the various weapons and specials for each ship class based on a chart of racial preferences and tech choices. I figured if I started at the end game, I could be assured of strong designs at a point many players complained that the AI ships were weak. I could also be reasonably certain that the designs would translate back to earlier points of the game due to the size standardization of weapons in Tactical Mod.
From there I'd play a game vs the single race I was testing blueprints on and attack them every time I saw their fleet refit to check what they had. This served me fairly well to start off but there were a few outliers where ships get weaker or end up with no weapons. They are pretty rare to see, but I wanted to make sure that the AI progression was actually following the pattern I'd assumed.
That brings us to now. To get more insight into how the blueprints evolve through the game, I've been putting the AI's in a sandbox game and watching them develop. At various intervals, 25 turns at first moving to 50 and finally 100 turns, I've been exporting the blueprints using a command WhatIsSol added.
I'm then formatting the output so its easier to read and noting any oddities within the designs themselves like lower strength and defense or unexpected weapons combos. I'll fix those first as they are easier to tackle. Then comes the hard part. The plan is to compare the progression of all designs against those of all other races to see if there are patterns that indicate races with particularly weak designs that need improvement.
I'll also be comparing these against my designs at each stage to see if there's a significant disparity between the generated AI blueprints and my own custom ones. This is all going to take some time and may not be fully ready for 3.3. My hope is that at the end of this process I'll have a set of really good AI blueprints that will be a challenge to play against.
I'm building out each design I export for each race to see how they progress through the game and identify poor choices or problem blueprints. For example, some ships were mounting Fast Missile Racks but didn't equip missiles. The intent was that their missile loadout would coincide with the fast missile racks, but that didn't happen leaving them with wasted space.
Once these blueprints are adjusted, I export another round of blueprints progressions and compare vs the previous to see if I've fixed things. Once I've hit up all races, I'll start comparisons vs human ship designs to see how they compare.
The hope is I'll have a set of more challenging blueprints for folks to play against. So far, an added benefit is that Darlok don't seem to be quite the pushovers they once were.
Elerians tend to have a pretty weak early game and Trilarians tend to have issues with their fleets appearing stronger than they actually are so I'm hoping tweaks to both will make them more interesting to play against.
As a final step, once all the blueprints are sorted, I'll be taking a look at the ship behaviors to make sure they work as expected in relation to both the upcoming UCP changes and with the blueprint designs themselves.
I've now finished working through all of the blueprint designs for each race and they should now be better optimized. However, I have realized that there are a few things off that I'm working to address.
I realized that, while performing fairly well, missiles, PD and computers just weren't quire right in providing meaningful decisions. For example, I've routinely dropped PD to keep better weapons with little to no consequences. It's just rare that it's needed. By the same token, computers were a thing I took if nothing else was better. I believe there's a few things at issue here. First, missile attack was too low making it too easy to reduce missile damage to an acceptable level with minimal PD. Second, computers provide too much bonus too early making PD intercept better.
To fix this I'm testing the following changes:
All computers provide 25 less BA bonus with the exception of Electronic Computers which now have +5.
This change makes cannons and beams a bit worse, especially early in the game. Expect a lot more misses. The goal is to make choosing advanced computers more valuable as well as ensure than missiles aren't overtaken by beams and cannons as soon as you get an Advanced Electronic Computer.
Nuke and Merculite attack values increased to 40, Pulson and Zeon normalized to 50. The net effect is missiles increase from 74% accurate to 84% at the start of the game and jump to 90% by late game. I've also slightly adjusted the size cost for missile mods and normalized nuke sizes with the other missile types now that they are more damaging.
This change simply helps missiles do more damage by hitting more often. This in turn makes ECM and higher numbers of PD more valuable to defend against missiles.
PD range increased by 10% and ECM protection increased by 10.
Both of these changes are to help make overlapping PD more viable to help defend and to ensure ECM provides a similar level of protection as it did prior.
If all goes well, these changes should be live in TM3.3.
This got me thinking I should spot check some of the Tactical Mod weapons since one of the goals is to have certain weapons much better in certain roles than other weapons. What's the point of roles if miniaturization negates the benefit by sheer weight of numbers?
When I first balanced the weapons for Tactical Mod I balanced them against all armor resilience values using the game's formulas for damage and hits. I calculated the raw DPS and the DPS adjusted for the space used by the weapon when first unlocked comparative to a weapon taking a standard 10 units of space. This worked out pretty well in terms of balancing one single weapon comparative one any one single other weapon.
However it turns out that wasn't so great in practice for a few reasons. First, weight of numbers. As the game progresses it wasn't uncommon for some slots on titans to mount 15-20 instances of a weapon making weapons like Plasma that intentionally underperform against armor, rather capable regardless. Second, miniaturization exacerbates this numbers issue by creating situations where a fully modded earlier weapon might take up significantly less space than a fully modded later game weapon creating situations where the ratio was nearly 2:1 in favor of the earlier weapon negating the advantage for something like Graviton.
Finally, specific mod combos are frustratingly difficult to balance well. For example, the base cooldown for cannons in Tactical mod is 5 seconds. For many weapons this is perfectly fine and with heavy mods this increase to 7.5 seconds. Beams are similar with times starting around 10 seconds an jumping to 15 seconds with heavy mods. Where the issue comes into play is with the specific combo of Autofire and Heavy weapons mods. In our cannon example, heavy will increase the firing time to 7.5 seconds which is then halved by autofire resulting in a cooldown of 3.8 second. Effectively you trade space for a weapon that doubles the damage and range while reducing the cooldown time comparative to the base version of the weapon. This leads to certain weapons like Phasors getting significant damage boosts simply because it fires so fast that any loss of accuracy is more than made up for by damage per shot combined with the raw weight of fire.
So where does that leave things? I've been working through weapons checking the DPS vs all armors and shields both modded and unmodded and against the relative bonuses granted by extra weapons from earlier miniaturized weapons. This has resulted in a lot of tweaks to weapons. Some are smaller in the case of Neutron and Mass Drivers while some are larger as with Gauss and disruptors or Fusion beams.
I'm in the process of testing these changes and with any luck it should be ready for release soon. In the mean time, if anyone is interested in playing a few games with a testing release, please add me and I'll be more than happy to give you the latest beta.
I wanted to say thank for this much improved version you have created because it certainly is a step closer.
Main Alternate Point: In moo2 you could select which weapons are active (green, red, yellow) or choose to wait / retreat / self desctuct ( and wah wah wah super critical explosion) --- have the devs tied our hands in this respect as well? Can we not simply time our shots? am i missing a key weapons control feature?
Thanks
Once again good work Vaaish....
PS one thing i have noticed in compared to skyrim mod community -uggg
step1 skse scrpit extender ? ~ moo extender possible?
To your points:
To be fair to the devs, I believe they expected MP to suffice, but ran out of money and time to work out things like tactical combat in MP. It's a hard problem because the players take their turn at the same time in CTS and if there's more than one human player it's a little boring to wait on combat to conclude. There's likely a solution to this, but not one that was found easily.
It's not entirely clear in CTS, but you can right click any weapon system and change it to manual operation. Once you do this, the weapon won't fire unless you select it and click an enemy. You can also use this toggle to determine which weapons are active by switching any you don't want firing to manual control. This is a bit tedious as fleets get larger though.
As of UCP 6.2, you can retreat a ship at any point in the combat. Due to real time it's a bit different and you may take a bit of damage but it should function fairly similar to Moo2.
Unfortunately, there's no great concept of self destruct like with Moo2. The devs instead added the ability "ram" enemy ships to effectively self destruct yours and cause damage to one ship. However, it's really wonky and very rarely connects so it's mostly useless. I've poked at Sol to change it to more of self desctruct but that's not happened yet. :)
I think UCP is effectively the SKSE of MOO :) Sol has added a ton of features for modders and even managed to get moo to allow us to import our own models.
(PS: getting feeback on this mod is like pulling teeth. If you see anything off, I'd love to hear about it!)
3.3 includes a major internal balance rework of the beams and cannons to include the effects of miniaturization on previous weapons to ensure that weapon roles aren't superseded by quantity of smaller weapons. This is mostly done.
The second part is a rebalance of missiles and computers to add more nuance between weapon types and make computers more important for using cannons/beams. This part was almost finished. In fact, I was doing final checks on the viability of missiles and when gunnery would overtake missiles in efficiency. However, one thing that just never seemed right was MIRV.
So I poked it and shifted MIRV to match Moo2. You get the equivalent of 4 missiles for the space of 2 missiles. This actually works quite well for smaller ships as it keeps them viable with just a single missile as the tech tree progresses and really make MIRV a useful mod. Unfortunately if you could mass missiles like on a cruiser or a battleship the total missiles would grow to silly numbers and would just destroy everything.
My options were to change MIRV (which I didn't want to change), increase cooldown (still not fixing the root issue), increase size (possible, but problematic for small ships), or adjust damage output per missile.
After a lot of tweaking, I ended up reducing damage on missiles starting at 15 for nukes and going up in increments of 5 to 35 for quantum missiles. My reasoning was that while bumping the size up to 20 units per missile would provide a nice correlation to Moo2 missiles with 5x shots, the inability to reduce this for smaller ships make this route a poor choice. Secondly, upping the cooldown just made firing take an unbearably long time between volleys that just didn't feel fun. So that left changing the damage output.
I was a bit reticent at first because it's a significant drop from previous levels, however it does match the comparison between between Lasers (1-4) and Nukes (8) in Moo2 by making Lasers (9) and Nukes (15) in Tactical mod. At least initially my test builds indicate that missiles are still rating higher than gunnery early game with a vanilla race like Humans but will get overtaken with higher computers and better cannons. I'll be running additional tests but this should result in more variety in viable weapon paths based on which race you are playing. At the very least, my DPS calculations chart now includes hit chances which gives more accurate real world estimate.
These are a few of the questions I'm asking as I run through and finalize the 3.3 update. I don't know that it will be perfect, but hopefully better that it was previously. In any regard, I think I need to step back and come at this with fresh eyes to tweak further in 3.4.
A few things I'll be looking into for 3.4 I know won't make 3.3: Futher profile tweaks for better usage of the UCP 6.3 profile fixes and looking into how I can reduce damage output late game so battles give you time to react and look a bit more cinematic.