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Hosted Projects - Standalone => Diaspora => Topic started by: CallSign_Reaver on September 07, 2012, 09:09:55 am

Title: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: CallSign_Reaver on September 07, 2012, 09:09:55 am
Currently I am able to fly out of the combat zone, and bring all the other fighters with me and not one missile gets through the wall of flak created by the Battlestar. Also you are able to finish the missions by just waiting outside the combat zone and there is no risk of the Battlestar ever being lost. I tried this on insane difficulty. Other then that this has been the Battlestar Galactica game I've been waiting for so long and have had a lot of fun playing it.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: MatthTheGeek on September 07, 2012, 09:18:44 am
The AI gets better in Insane. It is likely that, by cranking up the difficulty, you actually increased the Theseus' fire rate and hence its missile interception rate.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: CallSign_Reaver on September 07, 2012, 09:21:09 am
Okay, I tried it on normal and had the same problem but let me put it on easy and see then, Thanks.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: newman on September 07, 2012, 10:04:17 am
That's weird. In M1 (the first combat mission) on advanced and above I'd usually see the Theseus take one or two nuke hits if I failed to go nuke hunting when prompted about another volley of nukes.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: NGTM-1R on September 07, 2012, 10:09:33 am
The AI gets better in Insane. It is likely that, by cranking up the difficulty, you actually increased the Theseus' fire rate and hence its missile interception rate.

Doubtful; the screen is perfect on the Easy/Very Easy equivalents.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Sushi on September 07, 2012, 10:11:27 am
The AI gets better in Insane. It is likely that, by cranking up the difficulty, you actually increased the Theseus' fire rate and hence its missile interception rate.

Nope, doesn't matter.

Framerate, however, does. The flak screen unfortunately works better at smooth framerates.

Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: MatthTheGeek on September 07, 2012, 10:15:27 am
Heh. Sounds like FS beams.

Get a proper computer, or die like a nugget !
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Gunteen6 on September 07, 2012, 10:16:31 am
Seems a tad counter-intuitive to have fewer missiles get through on higher difficulties. I do agree that they need a liiiiitle more resistance to flak... I ignored missiles in M1 and Theseus took more damage from ramming than missiles.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: karajorma on September 07, 2012, 10:53:39 am
The basestar/Battlestar combat is likely to get rebalanced for R2 or R1.5 (whichever one is next) as at the moment the basestars aren't much of a threat.

The problem is that we're based on the miniseries, and they weren't much of a threat there either. 2 basestars pound on the Galactica for a good 5 minutes and what, 1 missile gets through? :D The same basically goes for many of the big battlestar/basestar confrontations except when the Battlestar in question is heavily outnumbered.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Dragon on September 07, 2012, 10:58:17 am
To be honest, it's a Basestar. It's a carrier, not a battleship. It's main weapons are Raiders, and those are a threat.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: karajorma on September 07, 2012, 11:07:30 am
Yes but the problem with that approach is that we simply can't have enough raiders in the game to make that realistic and still playable.

The FRED walkthrough mission* is a good example of this. I had to try all kinds of tricks to balance it and even then the mission still favours the Sobek quite handily.

 *check the FREDdocs folder and move FRED Tutorial Mission.fs2 to the missions folder if you want to play it without building it yourself.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: jr2 on September 07, 2012, 12:20:46 pm
So, then increase the effectiveness of the raiders' weapons, maybe shields (do they have shields)?
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: SpardaSon21 on September 07, 2012, 12:23:29 pm
This is Battlestar Galactica, not FreeSpace.  Nobody has shields.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Colonol Dekker on September 07, 2012, 12:38:27 pm
Stabuck has Plot bra armour.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: MatthTheGeek on September 07, 2012, 01:00:54 pm
Don't you worry, I'm pretty sure the Diaspora team is very well aware of the means at its disposal to balance ships.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: jr2 on September 07, 2012, 02:17:52 pm
yeah, I know
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Ace on September 07, 2012, 03:39:34 pm
Welcome to the word of balancing ;)

If we make the raiders too tough, players instantly die, etc.

If we make the Theseus too weak, with persistent damage people fail M5 through no fault of their own, etc.

So overall yes the baseships are weak and the raiders are weak. Intentionally. The idea is to capture the feel of the show and Galactica goes through a lot and we didn't want to frustrate new players even though we hit the "missions can play themselves" issue in a few places.

The Raiders and baseships in the campaign are weakened by a huge degree. The default loadout for the baseship can give the Theseus a pretty good kick in the teeth.

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.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: KaraBulut on September 07, 2012, 03:59:22 pm
It's a single player experience, while grabbing the player with audio and visuals that make him feel frakked up, sneakly actually support the player with gameplay elements that are balanced and give a non frustrating experience
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Dirt McStain on September 07, 2012, 04:07:53 pm
Wouldn't the easy solution here be to double/triple the hit points of the missiles so that it takes more flak fire to take them down? This probably means that it takes a few more Viper KEW shots to take down a missile. Question: do damaged missiles inflict less damage? Also, is there a bit of a random effect to the amount of damage a missile can make?

Also, slightly unrelated but, the Heavy Raiders weren't very smart at defending themselves. What's the issue with them?
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Dragon on September 07, 2012, 05:03:07 pm
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.
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.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Sushi on September 07, 2012, 05:25:41 pm
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: (http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Basestar_%28TRS%29)

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)
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Swifty on September 07, 2012, 05:42:32 pm
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
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Ace on September 07, 2012, 05:43:58 pm
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)
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Meleardil on September 07, 2012, 05:59:56 pm
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. 
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Ace on September 07, 2012, 06:06:34 pm
The fact no one has called us out on the battles seeming small means we pulled off the illusion for R1.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Dirt McStain on September 07, 2012, 06:23:03 pm
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.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Dragon on September 07, 2012, 06:43:41 pm
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.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Ravenholme on September 08, 2012, 04:16:04 am
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.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: EternalRuin on September 08, 2012, 09:51:23 pm
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
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: JGZinv on September 08, 2012, 10:25:12 pm
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...
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: rscaper1070 on September 08, 2012, 10:33:39 pm
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.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: EternalRuin on September 09, 2012, 04:13:48 pm
That's... weird. I could have sworn I read/saw somewhere that they changed the n function to target priority ships. whoops =p
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: headdie on September 09, 2012, 04:51:05 pm
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
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Ace on September 09, 2012, 08:18:04 pm
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.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: newman on September 10, 2012, 04:39:04 am
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.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: David cgc on September 10, 2012, 08:55:09 am
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.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: crizza on September 11, 2012, 06:25:12 am
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.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: General Battuta on September 26, 2012, 08:45:30 pm
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.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Cerebus on September 27, 2012, 10:00:43 am
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...
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: MatthTheGeek on September 27, 2012, 10:06:48 am
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.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: StarSlayer on September 27, 2012, 10:28:51 am
Sobeks are a lighter class of Battlestar in general while Baseships are larger then most Colonial vessels.  Not as small as a Valk mind, but still more compact then the Galactica:

(http://www.foundation3d.com/uploads/studio/2009/06/-30-379222.jpg)
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Narvi on September 30, 2012, 01:52:09 am
Sobeks are a lighter class of Battlestar in general while Baseships are larger then most Colonial vessels.  Not as small as a Valk mind, but still more compact then the Galactica:


Yeesh, that's small.

Where are they fitting eighty Vipers and the assorted Raptors in those little flight pods?
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: newman on September 30, 2012, 02:41:35 am


Yeesh, that's small.

Where are they fitting eighty Vipers and the assorted Raptors in those little flight pods?

This is a common logic fault with many sci-fi fans; if a ship isn't miles long, that means it's small :) A Sobek-class ship is still over a kilometer in length. For perspective, you could almost put three Nimitz-class carriers along her length. Her two "small pods" are each larger than an Essex-class carrier.
For further perspective, a 300-and-change m long Nimitz can house about 90 assorted aircraft at full capacity, each of which are quite larger than Vipers or Raptors. The Sobek may not be as large as the big G or Pegasus, but she's still a big ship that had plenty enough room for her complement.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: MatthTheGeek on September 30, 2012, 03:20:32 am
I blame FS and its wtfhuge fov.

Put your fov to something like 0.5 and big ships will suddenly look much more impressive.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Narvi on September 30, 2012, 07:20:30 am


Yeesh, that's small.

Where are they fitting eighty Vipers and the assorted Raptors in those little flight pods?

This is a common logic fault with many sci-fi fans; if a ship isn't miles long, that means it's small :)

A Sobek-class ship is still over a kilometer in length. For perspective, you could almost put three Nimitz-class carriers along her length. Her two "small pods" are each larger than an Essex-class carrier.

For further perspective, a 300-and-change m long Nimitz can house about 90 assorted aircraft at full capacity, each of which are quite larger than Vipers or Raptors.

The Sobek may not be as large as the big G or Pegasus, but she's still a big ship that had plenty enough room for her complement.

Well I was kinda eyeballing it. I didn't think the flightpods were longer than 150 meters.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: karajorma on September 30, 2012, 07:33:28 am
To scale.



[attachment removed and sold on the black market]
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: David cgc on September 30, 2012, 07:47:05 am

Yeesh, that's small.

Where are they fitting eighty Vipers and the assorted Raptors in those little flight pods?

Galactica was able to fit eighty Vipers and all their raptors into one pod in season 3 and 4. Even though the pods are a bit shorter, a Sobek has four hangar decks to Galactica's one. That's almost as spacious as when they were running at 1/3rd capacity at the beginning of the show.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: TwentyPercentCooler on September 30, 2012, 07:54:09 am
The battlestars also have fewer crew members than modern carriers. Galactica had less than 3,000, didn't it?
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Angelus on September 30, 2012, 08:08:54 am
Yep, Gal had ~2800 crew due to being decomissioned. IIRC, the crew number were ~5000 during active duty.
Pegasus also had less then 2000 crewmembers ( 2500 standard), despite being larger then Galactica.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: TwentyPercentCooler on September 30, 2012, 08:20:02 am
Yep, Gal had ~2800 crew due to being decomissioned. IIRC, the crew number were ~5000 during active duty.
Pegasus also had less then 2000 crewmembers ( 2500 standard), despite being larger then Galactica.

Okay, thanks; I didn't think about the fact that Big G wasn't running a full complement. Even then, 5,000 is still fewer crew than the Nimitz.

My conclusion: scale in sci-fi is whack.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Angelus on September 30, 2012, 08:34:56 am
Yep, Gal had ~2800 crew due to being decomissioned. IIRC, the crew number were ~5000 during active duty.
Pegasus also had less then 2000 crewmembers ( 2500 standard), despite being larger then Galactica.

Okay, thanks; I didn't think about the fact that Big G wasn't running a full complement. Even then, 5,000 is still fewer crew than the Nimitz.

My conclusion: scale in sci-fi is whack.


Yeah, it is.
For comparison:


Galactica: ~1500m length, 5000 crew
B5 Omega destroyer: ~1700m length, 1000crew
Imperial Stardestroyer: ~1600m length, ~30000crew
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: MatthTheGeek on September 30, 2012, 10:03:55 am
And GTD Orion, ~ 2,000m, 10,000 crew

All the sci-fi universe have their own standards regarding ship sizes and crew ratio related to internal space and/or level of automation or whatever, but one thing tends to come a lot : capital ships. are. HUGE. compared to nowadays' carriers and stuff. While fighters are usually not much bigger than nowadays fighters.

We tend to miss that a lot because there's no point of reference in space. Which is why it's often useful to look at wikis and stuff to look for the size of stuff from time to time.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: newman on September 30, 2012, 11:40:26 am
The main reason sci-fi fighters tend to be small are set costs; larger set pieces require larger sets, and that all costs a lot :)
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Dirt McStain on September 30, 2012, 11:43:56 am
Just curious, could Colonial One land in a Theseus flight pod, like it did on Galactica?
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Angelus on September 30, 2012, 11:57:09 am
Just curious, could Colonial One land in a Theseus flight pod, like it did on Galactica?

nope, theseus hangar ceiling is to narrow.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Hades on September 30, 2012, 12:12:38 pm
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.
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.
You do realize that deploying your fighterwings in waves only makes them easier to kill, right? It makes picking off the Raiders easier. :P

Deploying them all at once and en masse helps them overwhelm the enemy fighters and the battlestar's defenses. (While keeping some Raiders for point defense duty around the basestar)
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Dragon on September 30, 2012, 12:59:26 pm
You do realize that deploying your fighterwings in waves only makes them easier to kill, right? It makes picking off the Raiders easier. :P

Deploying them all at once and en masse helps them overwhelm the enemy fighters and the battlestar's defenses. (While keeping some Raiders for point defense duty around the basestar)
You can't deploy 700 raiders at once without killing the engine. Waves are the only way to do this. Of course, they don't make much sense in-universe, but TBH, few engine limitations do.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: newman on September 30, 2012, 01:25:33 pm
Well I was kinda eyeballing it. I didn't think the flightpods were longer than 150 meters.

Well, even a quick glance should make it clear the pods take roughly half the length of the Theseus, so 150m doesn't work if the ship is 1km long :) As it happens, I checked - the ship itself is 1092m long (antennas included), and the pods are 544m long. So each pod is roughly 1.5x the size of a Nimitz-class. If that's small, I wonder what you'll say about the Valk which is about 400m shorter than the Sobek class :)
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Fury on September 30, 2012, 01:52:52 pm
The AI gets better in Insane. It is likely that, by cranking up the difficulty, you actually increased the Theseus' fire rate and hence its missile interception rate.
I don't know how Diaspora did their AI classes and profiles, but this is not necessarily true. It can be avoided.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: headdie on September 30, 2012, 02:50:34 pm
The AI gets better in Insane. It is likely that, by cranking up the difficulty, you actually increased the Theseus' fire rate and hence its missile interception rate.
I don't know how Diaspora did their AI classes and profiles, but this is not necessarily true. It can be avoided.

indeed there are a number of flags in different that can be used to tweek or remove this, "Same Turret Cooldown" being the main one, which is used in Diaspora
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: noodlezombie on October 05, 2012, 12:38:10 am
I think the main problem when it comes to balancing is that the type of combat you're trying to emulate inherently doesn't make any sense. Not your fault by any means, the game is utterly brilliant, but what I mean is that you're hampered by the source material. I never truly appreciated how illogical the tactics in BSG are until the first mission of Disapora, where the Theseus puts out a giant wall of firepower. And then I remembered a part of the show where the Galactica goes even further and surrounds herself in a 360 degree sphere of exploding shrapnel. But being able to fly around and look at it from any angle, and see how absurdly effective it is by watching missiles and raiders get destroyed almost as soon as you target them really makes it clear how...dumb...the Cylons are.

Consider: it's pretty clear from the series that the newest battlestars are being built based on the same logic and tactics as the very first ones. Big, heavily armed spacecraft carriers that can put up withering amounts of firepower that shreds strikecraft and is nearly impenetrable to missiles, and are so heavily armored that they can withstand munitions up to and including nukes, so even the occasional missile that gets through isn't a big deal. The Cylons obviously know this, they fought battlestars in the first war.

So why in the world, in spending 40 forty years preparing for their genocide, did they build their order of battle around strikecraft and missiles? Ok, yeah, they had their hacking trump card, but they couldn't be 100% sure it would work, and if it didn't they would be left slugging it out with 120 capital ships that are optimized to absolutely rape them.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Ace on October 05, 2012, 01:16:18 am
Well, when you consider the number of raiders and missiles a baseship should be able to fire at once, they are designed to overwhelm a battlestar's defenses.

Now for a game we have limited object counts before systems explode, so all 864 raiders per baseship and 720 missiles (120 banks, volleys of six at once) per volley is not something systems can really handle.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: MatthTheGeek on October 05, 2012, 02:48:23 am
Diaspora's balancing is biased toward the player. If the player was a Cylon, it would probably work the other way around. That's called gameplay.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: karajorma on October 05, 2012, 02:53:20 am
Yep, one of the most obvious examples of this is the fact that Cylon capship missiles are slower than in the show so that you have a hope in hell of shooting them down. Of course that did mean we had to tone the effectiveness of the flak screen down so that an occasional missile would get through.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Dragon on October 05, 2012, 08:56:19 am
Well, when you consider the number of raiders and missiles a baseship should be able to fire at once, they are designed to overwhelm a battlestar's defenses.

Now for a game we have limited object counts before systems explode, so all 864 raiders per baseship and 720 missiles (120 banks, volleys of six at once) per volley is not something systems can really handle.
It's not that computers can't handle this kind of load (they can, as evidenced my numerous games, mostly RTSes), but the game engine is not only bad at this, it has some hard caps on object number. Also, did a Basestar actually launch all it's Raiders from the racks at any time in the show?
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: karajorma on October 05, 2012, 09:52:52 am
RTSs use much lower poly models than something like Diaspora does. While the engine does have flaws, let's not start inventing ones.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Dragon on October 05, 2012, 09:57:25 am
The hard caps are a hard fact (pardon the pun :)). Computers most likely could handle this kind of object load, but FSO isn't the best optimized engine in the world, if the CPU load is any indication. The recent optimization make it a lot better, but hard caps still remain.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: karajorma on October 05, 2012, 10:10:58 am
I want to play an FPS where there are 30,000 soldiers all fighting at once. Don't tell me it can't be done, I've seen Rome Total War do it 4-5 years ago! :p


That's what you sound like.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Dragon on October 05, 2012, 03:24:09 pm
Go play ArmA II. :) I haven't seen a mission with 30,000 units, but a computer powerful enough (and models done well enough) could support an FPS version of one of the smaller TW battles. 1000 AI units at once is definitely doable in RV, though it requires quite a computer. Also, unlike FSO, I don't think newer engines would actively prevent you from trying that, as long as you have an extra set of CPUs and top of the line GPU to actually render the huge battle. FSO caps at 400 ships in mission, and you can't go higher no matter what.

But as I said:
Also, did a Basestar actually launch all it's Raiders from the racks at any time in the show?
I haven't watched very much BSG, but I haven't seen shots of hundreds of Raiders pouring from a Basestar anywhere on the BSG wiki. That wouldn't be an easy thing to do on the set, either. If it didn't happen in the show, then there's no reason for it to happen in Diaspora.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Hades on October 05, 2012, 03:40:52 pm
I haven't watched very much BSG, but I haven't seen shots of hundreds of Raiders pouring from a Basestar anywhere on the BSG wiki. That wouldn't be an easy thing to do on the set, either. If it didn't happen in the show, then there's no reason for it to happen in Diaspora.
I haven't seen a picture of the Loki wing launching from the Carthage on the HLP wiki either. Does that mean it never happened?

Plus there have been scenes in the show where what could easily be hundreds of raiders launched from a Basestar at once. (too many to count)

Don't try to act like you actually know what you're talking about when it comes to BSG if you've barely watched any of it. Hell, "Don't talk about something you actually know little about" might be good advice for you in general.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Phantom Hoover on October 05, 2012, 03:41:22 pm
you mean the notoriously unoptimised and buggy arma 2?
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Angelus on October 05, 2012, 04:06:11 pm
There's at the moment no PC powerful enough to allow you to have hundreds of Fighters in an furball with capships.
And as someone who tried that just recently with an old mod of mine, i can tell ya: Nope.

The i7 system was boging down faster then anyone can say frak.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Dragon on October 05, 2012, 04:13:10 pm
you mean the notoriously unoptimised and buggy arma 2?
Well, it's a bit buggy and a resource hog, but you can't deny you can have a lot of units running around.
Don't try to act like you actually know what you're talking about when it comes to BSG if you've barely watched any of it. Hell, "Don't talk about something you actually know little about" might be good advice for you in general.
That's why I asked if there had been such scenes (twice, BTW), in case you failed to notice it (or ignored this fact out of spite). Episodes I've seen didn't deal with space battles, but rather the internal struggles within the Colonial Fleet (well, there was one Cylon boarding action with some Heavy Raiders, but that's it). I've actually done research on wiki, but it didn't gave a conclusive answer, so I asked here.

Anyway, it should be possible to bump the number of Raiders somewhat. Diaspora effects look awesome, but are actually rather subdued, using few particles and no animated projectile effect bitmaps. A Basestar wouldn't launch all it's Raiders at once anyway, since it'd be left defenseless if something went wrong and they were all shot down. Perhaps a "massive battle"-style mission with, say 100 Raiders of different types and a large amount of Colonials, plus the Basestar(s) and a Sobek-class BS could give an idea how well such a mission performs. This could put a little strain on the projectile limit though. I think I might even try that once I have some time (meaning: not soon).
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: General Battuta on October 05, 2012, 04:23:36 pm
Already done by Sushi.

Also, Dragon, there is no 'set' for BSG VFX shots. They use CGI. There are definitely a number of VFX shots of base stars launching huge numbers of raiders (and a couple instances in the show where their entire Raider complements are drawn away by a ruse, leaving the basestars exposed to close attack.)
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Swifty on October 05, 2012, 08:29:26 pm
I'd rather have hard limits cock block designers rather than trying to debug nebulous "malloc failed" errors caused by excessive objects so I wouldn't mistake them for a random memory leak.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Nighteyes on October 06, 2012, 09:29:53 am
Dragon, I'm reading this thread and honestly I don't get what your on about... the 400 ship cap? every game has limits, strategy games in particular, Starcraft has what, 200 units per army? FSO has much more advanced AI, and you don't need 400 ships in a mission to make it a good and enjoyable mission for the player.
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: newman on October 06, 2012, 11:58:23 am
RTS and 1st person perspective games just do things differently from every perspective. Saying a RTS has a ton of units doesn't mean a space sim can, or should. There are two issues to overcome; engine not being the latest modern one designed to take advantage of modern hardware notwithstanding, having too much units in a mission will bog down any hardware. And remember that you need to make it work across many different platforms - there's no better way of getting a reputation of a laggy, bugged, badly optimized game than having it only work well on 1% of the systems.

Secondly, unlike movies or tv-series, a game of this type will always focus on the player character, and that player character can't dogfight 800 fighters at once. It's a matter of balancing it out so the player has something to do that still feels important to the larger picture somehow, while everything feels enormous without actually using hundreds of fighters / dozens of capships / etc. We can talk about hardware and engine supporting or not supporting these enormous missions, but the fact remains there's very little reason to do this as we can actually make a good, fun, balanced game without frying your hardware and taking a year to do a single mission :)

Lastly, even in Diaspora's current state, it would be unplayable on a lot of systems were it not for a ton of Swifty's optimizations, so I wouldn't be too quick to wish for more particles / effects / fighters / general explodey awesomeness. As someone said.. "it's a game, not an art show" :)
Title: Re: Cylon Baseship missiles and nukes need more resistance to flak
Post by: Cerebus on October 08, 2012, 12:54:41 pm
Im starting to compensate for this in my mission by giving nukes to the heavy raiders, they carry the football to the endzone so to speak

it goes both ways, if you have the sobec launch it's "ICBMs" the raiders will shoot them down as well if you dont clear them out, they just cant stop the direct fire weapons. 


as far as the Cylons being "stupid," well they aren't stupid, they're immature.  they're not the near omnipotent kind of AI beings, and they are deeply personally flawed and emotionally immature, much like the replicants from blade runner.  If you haven't watched the BSG movie "The Plan," do.  It's not on netflix and I had missed the fact it came out at all (2010?)  If follows the the series from the very beginning (dont want to say when it ends) but from the Cylon perspective.  It provides some serious insight into the Cylon psychology and answers a lot that was speculative before.  The CNP was the trump card, Cavil was not interested in a contracted war with humanity, he wanted to exterminate the entire species in one grand opus and be done.  They're not stupid, they just fell prey to hubris.  The Galactica and the fleet survived, that was never intended.  They didn't have to be tough when they had an off switch for the entire enemy fleet.  They were confident in the CNP, and Cavil had a personal interest in keeping a time table due to "front row seat to a holocaust" he wished to put the final 5 through.  Their motives are not clear cut, hence flawed. 

in the show, neither battlestar was at full strength (not sure how many, but there was a portion of Pegasus crew on shore leave, hence the drafting civilians, and still managed to do quite well against multiple basestars across numerous engagements, years of heavy service, and the galactica was seriously outdated (thank the gods) A fully functional "modern" battlestar with a full crew and some serious motivation to fight should kick all sorts of arse.

that, and with resurrection, a baseship is almost akin to a UAV, and survivability really isn't a major concern