Author Topic: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak  (Read 22150 times)

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Offline Sushi

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
The realistic amount of Raiders would be... 784 or so per baseship? (I think that sounds right for the rack figure) Even if they launch half of their wings let's say it'd be crash ville far worse than the stability issues some players are currently having.

According to Battlestar wiki:

Quote
A basestar's complement of Raiders is estimated as high as 792 fighters[8], not counting fighters in repair or otherwise off-line. It should be noted that there are a total of 864 Raider launch slots on the arms of a pre-retconned Basestar. [9] In comparison, the retconned Basestar has only 434 Raider launch slots, a dramatic decrease from the previous version.

I had a test mission at one point called "All864" that actually had 864 Raiders in it, although they came in waves so you'd actually only have 70-80 or so in game at a time. Not sure what a "realistic" complement of fighters for the Sobek was, but that mission had something in the same 70-80 range.

It murdered my system, but I'm kind of curious how it would play with the new collision detection code...


Like Ace said, balance is tricky. It's one difficult task to make the fights objectively fair (so that a basestar and a battlestar, complete with their fighter wings, are fairly evenly matched). But once you do that, you still have the problem of making it so that its still fun for a single player... you need to make sure the player doesn't get completely overwhelmed, and also that they can still have an actual impact on the battle (or at least feel like they do)
« Last Edit: September 07, 2012, 05:30:49 pm by Sushi »

 

Offline Swifty

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Who said they have to deploy it all at once? That's a stupid thing to do, since if they somehow got blown up, the Basestar would be left defenseless. I'd say, use waves, and use more Heavy Raiders in proportion to Advanced and regular ones. I haven't seen too many Heavy Raider flights in campaign (BTW, I've seen an FS use of the term "wing" a few times in Diaspora. Unless the same error is made in the show, the correct term is "flight"), and more of them would certainly make the Basestar engagements tougher.

I was going to rename the header of Wingmen Status gauge from "Wingmen" to "Flights" like I did with "Monitoring" to "Sitrep" but I think I kinda left it on the backburner. :P

 

Offline Ace

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
It's not too late to fix it for patch 1 ;)

To address individual comments-

Dragon: Flight, Squadron, and Wing are interchangeably used in the show (actually different terms are consistently used by different writers!). Which is why we use them the same way.

Dirt McStain: On Flak fire and missile HP- We played with a few different HP values. For the purposes of letting enough through to cause some damage without letting people screw themselves over through the campaign the current values were selected.

Damaged missiles do full damage. There's no randomization on damage except for decay due to distance from blast.

On Heavy Raiders- Heavy Raiders are right now using bomber AI which means they're great at making a beeline to capships and causing damage to them but not good at self-defense. This is partly "WORKING AS INTENDED" (insert pic of smug overweight developer here) since if the Heavy Raiders were properly defending themselves in R1 new players would get very frustrated. For R2 the plan is to make them a threat to players, not just civilians and capships. (in M5 the civilians dying in rapid succession is generally due to the Heavy Raiders)
« Last Edit: September 07, 2012, 05:50:49 pm by Ace »
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Offline Meleardil

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Sobek class (Theseus) has 80 alert vipers and 40 reserve vipers. One baseship has that 800 raiders or so.

If baseship sends raiders in waves (in Mini, they seemed to deploy A LOT) ,all out battle would be some 100 vipers against 400 raiders in a 1 on 1 situation. Plus all the missiles and bullets fired at once, the flak, countermeasures, and so on. That is just 2 capital ships being angry, not a many capship big battle.

Unfortunately I have never heard about any game which could handle the thousands of AI's, the tens of thousands of objects and the hundreds of thousands of collision calculations all at once. 
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Offline Ace

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
The fact no one has called us out on the battles seeming small means we pulled off the illusion for R1.
Ace
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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Yeah, you guys did a really good job with that. People are complaining having to cycle through enemies - imagine having to cycle through 100 Raiders plus additional craft.

 

Offline Dragon

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Hotkeys. It'd be a good idea to patch them in, and to remember to assign them in future missions. They make targeting a lot more clear.

 

Offline Ravenholme

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Hotkeys. It'd be a good idea to patch them in, and to remember to assign them in future missions. They make targeting a lot more clear.

I have to agree with Dragon here, a way to hotkey Advanced Raiders and Heavy Raiders, so I can prioritise the cap ship killers would be nice.
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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Hotkeys. It'd be a good idea to patch them in, and to remember to assign them in future missions. They make targeting a lot more clear.

I have to agree with Dragon here, a way to hotkey Advanced Raiders and Heavy Raiders, so I can prioritise the cap ship killers would be nice.

Try hitting "n"  :p

I don't know EXACTLY what behavior they assigned to it, but it works for selecting heavies/advanced, so... =p

 

Offline JGZinv

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Unfortunately I have never heard about any game which could handle the thousands of AI's, the tens of thousands of objects and the hundreds of thousands of collision calculations all at once. 

Um...
Sins of a Solar Empire?
AI War Fleet Command
Supreme Commander
EVE?

Ok maybe not tens of thousands perhaps, but it's up there.
They are also not first person and so forth...
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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Hotkeys. It'd be a good idea to patch them in, and to remember to assign them in future missions. They make targeting a lot more clear.

I have to agree with Dragon here, a way to hotkey Advanced Raiders and Heavy Raiders, so I can prioritise the cap ship killers would be nice.

Try hitting "n"  :p

I don't know EXACTLY what behavior they assigned to it, but it works for selecting heavies/advanced, so... =p

Yeah, that targets the newest ship. That won't work as soon as they aren't the newest ships anymore. It would be much better to have hotkeys set for the priority targets.
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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
That's... weird. I could have sworn I read/saw somewhere that they changed the n function to target priority ships. whoops =p

 

Offline headdie

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
E cycles through anything on the Escort list, which is the priority list in FSO though F# keys and a user prompt generally work better
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Offline Ace

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
The patch adds F# keys for adv. raiders and heavy raiders. There's a few other issues introduced we're working out right now though.
Ace
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Offline newman

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Just a note from someone who built the damn thing - the basestar has 864 raider racks (this is the original Zoic version; the one they retconned to later had a significantly lower number of raider racks). But I imagine a basestar would carry at least that much raiders plus a complement of heavy raiders held inside the main hangar.
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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
An idle thought that just occurred to me: Would it be possible to make it so missiles/bombs are only targetable after they get past the flak wall (or maybe they get added to the regular hostile target roster at that point)? Even if they were more resistant to the AAA, there'd still be the problem of the one you happened to target being shot down by the battlestar before you got to it, and trying to chase them down mostly just results in loitering inside the flak as it is.

 

Offline crizza

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
I ****ed around with a BoE style mission where three basestars duked it out with one Battlestar and two frigates circling them...
Then I changed the firgates to battlestars as well, looked interesting but the missiles and flak fire of the caps just crashed my game^^
So, missile being only targetable after they pass the flak wall or nontargetable for the player at all would be interesting.
Guess it would be enough if only nukes would show up.
« Last Edit: September 11, 2012, 06:58:46 am by crizza »

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Poking through the Diaspora tables, it looks like Cylon warship missiles don't have the 'same turret cooldown' flag. This means that not only will base ships be a bit more dangerous on higher difficulties, they'll be more effective with higher pilot AI classes (turret AI class does nothing in FSO). If you want to make your individual base ships more effective, you might be able to achieve it just by assigning them top end pilot AI.

 

Offline Cerebus

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
I've got a mission where the battlestar takes on 5 baseships simultaneously (though it's fighter wings usually take out the first) and it depends on how the cylon fleet manuvers as to how they do.  if they bracket the battlestar it wont get up an effective flak defense and they'll kill it, so it's more about their positioning, I think the balance is good.

battlestars are way tougher than baseships, they are made out cartilage...

 

Offline MatthTheGeek

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Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Actually, nope. They simply have non-interceptable projectile turrets and excellent anti-missile defenses.

A Sobek has 850,000 HP. A Basestar has 2,400,000.

Yes, you read it right. A Basestar has more than 280 % the hull strength of a Sobek. Not taking into account potential armor classes, guardianing or whatever other tricks used.
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