Could you add a gameplay setting that hides the battle predictions if checked?  They reduce the risk I'm willing to take because I have a good guess as to what the outcome will be.  I'd prefer to have to try and figure out if I can take an enemy fleet on by checking the combat rating.

I will clarify the language slightly.

1) Avoid the damage entirely (evasion)
2) Reduce the damage through a never ending source (armor)
3) Reduce the damage through a depletable source (shields).

now of course there are various flavors of those mechanics. For example armor right now removes a certain amount of damage, it could remove a % of damage as another option (not saying that's a good option just noting the design space). You could also have "reflection" type mechanics, where damage mitigated is rebounded back on the attacker. You can also have a defense that stops a lot of damage initially, but then provides a trickle of protection later (this would be regenerating shields, or HP repair type mechanics).

One potential problem with armor the way its written right now, its extremely penalizing to weapon generalization.

Lets say I have Ship X vs Ship Y. Ship Y was 10 armor.

Ship X has 10 laser. On average, Ship Y will absorb 5 damage per round.

Now take Ship Z with 5 laser and 5 missile. On average, Ship Y will absorb 10 damage per round (because armor is checked with each attack barrage).


This means it is very unoptimal to put multiple weapon types on a ship against anything with even half-way decent armor, which I think is the opposite of what your going for. You want ships with lots of variations, not a system where every ship has to go with 1 weapon type to feel effective.

Frogboy,

You forgot #4 point defense shoot arrows, catapults, bullets at those attacking you. Landmines, Claymore mines, punji stakes, Smoke screens are all modern PD for land warfare. Anti aircraft guns/ missiles as pd against aircraft.

Conversely the only real defense against kinetics is evasion as any ship hit by a rock coming at a significant % of the speed of light is going to know it has been nudged if it survives.

Speaking of Kinetics because dropping a big rock on a planet is exactly what mammals did to clear earth of the Dinosaurs so they could take over, there should be no ground invasions. They should either surrender or die once their orbital defense is neutralize. No officer who wanted to make it home to his loved ones is going to order a ground invasion, to do so would be the quickest way to doing an EVA without a suit I know of. 

Just my 4 cents worth on the invasion subject.

Hard counters being special mods sounds good to me.  I wonder if there's a way to get the math to work out in such a way that defenses do counter certain weapons better.

Just going down this rabbit hole you might be able to get things to work out in this order. First I would balance out the comparative damage per phase by increasing the damage of both missiles and beams.  CDP shouldn't be exact and kinetics should still have the highest CDP as this calculation doesn't factor in range.  This leaves missiles with the highest damage output and beams in a middle ground.  Right now beams and missiles get one volley before being in range of kinetics where they are decimated.

Comparative Damage per Phase (CDP) = Accuracy*Damage/(Mass*Reload)

Using your explanations of defenses above we can now see how they will stack against different weapon types.

Evade vs :

Kinetic:  Because kinetic in low damage, evade is far more likely to trigger against this option.

Beam:  Evade would be second best against beams due to beams higher damage output

Missile: The high damage output of missiles rarely can be evaded so evade tends not to work against missiles

Deflect works pretty well against all forms of damage acting as kind of a middle ground just absorbing incoming damage until they reach zero.  While not specialized it also tends to be the weakest form of damage mitigation because at some point it will fail and the ship will take all the damage.

For mitigating damage I would create a rule set saying:

If (incoming damage) > (armor) then roll a number between 0-(armor) reduce incoming damage by that roll.

If (incoming damage) < (armor) then roll a number between 1-(incoming damage/X) reduce incoming damage to that roll. X is probably a number between one and two.

Basically some amount of damage will always get through with this rule set.  This means you could set it up such that:

Mitigate vs :

Kinetic:  Because kinetic has the highest fire rate it will do consistent damage to the enemy fleet and be the strongest against armor overall.

Beam:  Mitigate would be second best against beams due to the decent fire rate on beam weapons

Missile: Armor negates most of missiles power if the armor has a higher rating than the missiles because if reduces their damage so much.

In discord we discussed how currently kinetic weapons dominate ship battles.  I've found missiles and beams to have little use outside their barrage functions.   I think this is in large part due to the fact missiles and beams have relatively low damage output compared to kinetic weapons as shown below.

An interesting question in the context of this game is how to make weapons relevant?

In an FPS a shotgun is good in close quarters but not very useful in an open field.  A sniper is the opposite of that.  If I was developing an FPS it is easy to know which weapons I'm designing around based on how I layout the map.

GalCiv combat and space in general is different.  There isn't really a map layout unless you're in nebulae or asteroid fields.   It really creates a difficult problem to make each weapon feel useful and not allow one to dominate the encounters.  I've thought about how I would do it and here's two ideas I came up with:

1.  Go For Balance:  In this case you would attempt to get the weapons closer to a balanced state by increasing the CDP of missiles and beams significantly.  In this case I would still keep their CDP below kinetics, because they get the first volley's and have the barrage function, but this would make sure they're still functional in combat. Kinetics should still be the top weapon choice for ship to ship combat.

Then focus on making the ship classes feel different and placing the emphasis of combat in fleet composition and construction rather than what weapons they're fielding.  This would be my preferred option overall.   

2.  Right Weapon for the Right Job:  In this case the player is attempting to pick weapons for the job they can do and each new Tier of the weapon improves or adds to that weapons capability to do a job.

Current CDP of each weapon type.  (I think plasma pods is supposed to have a higher CDP than disruptor banks, but currently it doesn't.)  

I'm only accounting for weapons that don't use special materials in this graph.

This is how I think I would go about making weapons useful for the right jobs.  Either give them special perks that just tell the player how they should function (easy) or make the math work out such that the weapons are better in certain cases (harder)

An example of this is missiles.  They already shoot first out of any weapon so we can lean into that initial volley and make it count by increasing the amount of damage they do in each higher tier.

Tier One:  These missiles are really only useful for they're barrage function and not much else.

Tier Two:  These missiles are somewhat functional in combat, able to destroy most unshielded fighters with two missiles

Tier Three:  These missiles are functional in combat, able to destroy most unshielded targets with their initial damage output, but slow reload will leave them sitting ducks if most of the targets survived by using shielding or evasion.  You might even further slow their reload just to make sure they get one volley before having to wait.

Tier Four:  Same as Tier 3 except with more power.

The CDP graph would look something more like this:

The large jump from 1 to 2 gives it the ability to destroy unshielded fighters, and the large jump from tier 2 to 3 allows it to destroy almost any unshielded target.  This could be done by either increasing the damage of each tier dramatically.  I used 2, 6, 20, 30 for each tier in my graph. Or you could add a perk that if enemy target is unshielded then this weapon gets +200% damage to that ship.

For beams I would lean into their high accuracy committing them to a fighter, bomber, frigate, and destroyer removal system.  They almost always land their shots, but it will take them a long time to whittle through the high health and defenses of cruisers, battleships, and dreadnoughts.  They would still need a boost to their damage output so they could do damage to those targets, but not so much that they can eat into the larger ships.

For kinetics they would struggle to hit anything smaller than a cruiser late game relegating them to more of a broadside cannon role in the end game.

Anyway I'd enjoy some more conversation on how other people think weapons should function.  This is the month they're planning to do a lot of that work based on the roadmap and discord comments.

A possible guiding principle for the combat system might be that a small weapon can't hurt a strong defense. As Asimov put it, "a shield that could take a Q-beam without working up radiation."

This suggests that a given defense can absorb most of the damage from each attacking weapon, if the weapon's damage is below a given level. Even many small attacks just wouldn't do much; each one would mostly just bounce off. It would be like a fleet of destroyers attacking a battleship with their guns; their shells just aren't strong enough to penetrate.

So the best weapons against heavily defended ships would be ones with high damage per attack. They would get that in trade-off of having a long cool-down – missiles, in other words. (Or large scale weapons, as Halicide suggests.)

But as you advance up the tech tree, and get more powerful weapons, even a kinetic weapon, which starts out with small damage per attack, could get strong enough per attack to get past an obsolete defense.