Hard Light Productions Forums
Hosted Projects - Standalone => The Babylon Project => Topic started by: Raapys on July 14, 2005, 09:08:35 pm
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As IPAndrews said, all the ships are underpowered compared to their show counterparts. It think it should be balanced a little differently in the next patch, though.
For example: I pitted one Vorlon Cruiser against a Minbari Tenashi and had them fight.
Now, show-wise the Cruiser is about as strong as a Shadow Battlecrab, which in turn is much stronger than even a Minbari Sharlin.
However, in the test battles I ran the Tenashi squashed the Vorlon Cruiser ten of ten times, sometimes with as much as 90% of it's hull intact.
Also, the Minbari Sharlin win pretty easily against even the biggest Battlecrab. And that's when the Battlecrab is lucky enough not to have it's slicer turret destroyed.
My suggestion would be to increase the damage of the slicer beam some, make the slicer turret's hitpoints equal the ship hull, decrease the Minbari weapons' damage( especially considering *many* of them fire at once and that they're beam weapons and rarely miss), increase the damage of the Vorlon main turrets a fair bit, decrease the Hull strength on the Tinashi and Sharlin alot(even as much as 50%, they can take way too much damage right now), and vastly increase the Hull strength on the Vorlon cruiser & transport.
Now, the ships would still be underpowered compared to the show, where a Battlecrab takes out a Sharlin with a single beam, but it would hopefully adjust the balance correctly as to 'which ship win against which', while still mantaining a gameplay balance. But that's more the job of the mission creators.
Anyone feel free to chime in on any of this.
Love the work you've done with the game guys, thanks alot!
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In the Earth-Minbari demo's Last Stand, I made earth cap ships invincible just to see how long it will take them to destroy the Minbari ships. The Tinashi was destroyed fairly quickly but it took forever to defeat the Sharlins. Sharlin armour and turret armour needs to be reduced. It will still be more of a match than any other younger races cap ships. Fix it until 5 hyperions vs 1 sharlin is 50/50 in simulations.
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With the latest Base release, IPAndrews was handling tables instead of me. So I do not know if he has actually made any notable changes to ships and weapons entries that aren't new. However, I agree that balance of new ships, such as Shadow and Vorlon vessels needs to be reviewed. I intend to do that in the coming weeks.
As for Sharlin, I am not too fond to change Sharlin's stats at this point. I've found balance of the best capital ships of younger races to be quite fine.
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I agree with Mr. Fury here. The ships of the younger races are pretty much perfect the way they are. Sharlin is supposed to be very, very deadly while the Tinashi is an older and weaker support ship.
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Some hints for the makers of my favourite space-sim:
Sharlin is ok as it is, don't make it weak!
Shadow slicers should be 50% more powerful, like 2-3 hits of the large to detroy an Omega ;7...
The Vorlon Cruiser should be tougher and it's main cannon stronger similar as with the Shadows...
btw. the hp of Shadow ships are OK!
The Dilgars and Drakhs are well balanced!
Thats all...:)
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The first ones tend to stick all their most powerful weapons at the front of the ship and little on the sides. In the show that would be enough for the first one ship to vapourise the opposition at a distance. In TBP though because everything is underpowered the younger race ships manage to get close. Once that happens you get into the "dance of death" situation. Both ships circling one another. In that position the first ones' hefty forward weaponary is useless and the younger race ships with the better all over weapon coverage own them.
Try running the tests again but rig the mission so the first ones ships make at least some effort to keep the enemy ship in their forward firing arc.
In the meantime I thank everyone for the comments here and I will give them due consideration. Cheers guys.
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But shouldn't the shadow have a very wide firing arc?
And also, the battlecrabs could make a 180° turn in about 2 seconds. And even though the vorlons where only seldomly seen in battle, I guess the transports at least are as manouverable as the battle crabs.
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Originally posted by -Norbert-
But shouldn't the shadow have a very wide firing arc?
It has a fairly wide firing arc but not that wide that it can hit a ship to it's side. That would look rather silly in my opinion. And the turning speed of the ships isn't really an issue. It's the way the AI handles capship battles. The ships don't even make any effort to turn and face their opponents unless you script it in the mission. By default they just circle one another.
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I guess it's an artifact from FS1, where it made sense, since the ships had most of their firepower on the broadsides.
With the new shivans vessels from FS2, mounting most firepower in the front, they should have updated the AI too.
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Heya.
IPAndrews, yes I did test the ships by putting them far apart and destroying their engines: they basically stood facing each other and just shooting straight forward.
And doing so, the Tenashi won against the Vorlon cruiser 10 out of 10 times.
As for the Sharlin, I think it's a bit too strong. I mean, the biggest Battlecrab needs 5 or 6 shots to kill it, but by then the Sharlin has long since destroyed the Battlecrab. The damage output is also incredible.
So I'm still of a mind that it should have it's hull strength decreased at least about 20%. Both Shadow & Vorlon ships needs a *huge* damage boost, and Vorlon ships needs far more hull strength, so that the Battlecrab and V.Cruiser both can take a Sharlin in a 1on1 stand-still confrontation. And of course the slicer turret's hp need fixing. The Vorlon fighter should also probably be the fastest of all the fighters. Right now it's flying at 100 while the Minbari fighter is going at 130.
The rest seem to be balanced pretty nicely.
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Speed of the Vorlon fighter isn't that important... It's very monouverable and 1 beam hit from its lightning gun destroys every other fighter!!!!!!!!! ( tested )
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Originally posted by aipz
1 beam hit from its lightning gun destroys every other fighter!!!!!!!!! ( tested )
I think that's pretty fair. My other criteria should be that a large enough group of Vorlon Fighters should be able to take down a small battlecrab given a bit of time. They can do that at present but it takes them a little too long. So they could do with powering up a little bit too maybe. Although that'll make them even more lethal against the younger races. It's hard to get this stuff balanced without ruining playability.
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I see the problem. I would suggest that you aim for a realistic 'which ship wins against which' setup, and leave most of the balancing up to the modders. That way the mission creators just have to be careful to balance up the stronger ships with numbers, when the first ones are involved, but we would still get that 'awe' feeling when seeing a shadow/vorlon ship tearing up the younger races' ships as if they were little more than insects. That's part of the charm, I think.
By the way, what differences does the difficulty setting make? I tried a mission with a Tishat against 5 shadow fighters, but they could never hit me on normal difficulty, so I always won. But then I took it up to insane, and I was blown out of the sky in the first assault, even with several tries. Does it adjust both the accuracy and the firing rate?
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Your problem could be solved if SCP did something like Armor in RA2.
That means that every unit has armor type, say, "Light","Organic",or something and every weapon has assigned its "Warhead". Now more weapons can have the same warheads and warhead stores, how many percents of weapons damage takes which armor. For example:
Light= 100
Organic= 50
Now I dont (at least now) mod FS2 so I dont know if this is possible with or without SCP, but just take it as an idea.
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It's been added (or is in the process of being added) by WMCoolmon.
It would take a lot of rebalancing to get it working with TBP though.
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Adding the new armor table thingy bt WMCoolmon would require HUGE reworking of ship hitpoints and subsystem strenghts. The concept is still very interesting and may be worth doing, but I doubt it will happen anytime soon.
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First I'd like to say that the Babylon Project team have done a really great job. :yes:
However I to have noticed the balancing problems with the Shadow/Vorlon ships. In the show these ships could be destroyed by the younger races but only in a continued effort between multiple ships.
And most of them were destroyed before either of the Shadow/Vorlon ships were taken out.
For example; I put a single Omega class against a Shadow crab - the Omega won. Tried it again, the Omega won.
To me, who is a very big fan of B5, that is wrong. No way in hell could a Omega stand up against a Shadow ship.
Also the crab's turret tends to be destroyed all to quickly >.<. Maybe changing the hit-points, damage and turret health a little would help things?
Other then that, nice work! :)
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Well. The way I see it, the changes must be done quickly, or not at all. It doesn't motivate you to do campaigns for TBP if the balance is totally shot after the next release. So if changes are to be done, the should be very small changes. The hitpoint issue is not as big as it seems. It is very easy to correct in the mission making stage, it just requires a little creativity. For example in the previous release you couldn't really disable a Th'Nor because it would be destroyed before the engines were down. But by making events that gradually add a little extra damage to the engines at the same time as player is causing it solves the problem nicely. And it isn't very noticeable. And firstones ships are seldomly seen in numbers, if at all. And even then the damage they take... Well, do they take any damage...?
Ofcourse if the mission has "Battle of Coriana 6" syndrome you cant fine tune the damages for dozens of ships like that.
Originally posted by Gai Daigoji
To me, who is a very big fan of B5, that is wrong. No way in hell could a Omega stand up against a Shadow ship.
I just happen to know that balancing tables is hard as hell. And eweryone has their own opinions about it. So just keep your shorts on. The TBP team has done one helluva job already. It just is unfortunate that these balance issues surfaced after the release...
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Well the next release won't be a million miles away and the balance will change a bit for that since everyone seems to be pretty much agreed on this. Although next time it might be helpful for you guys to participate in the beta testing process :P
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I just happen to know that balancing tables is hard as hell. And eweryone has their own opinions about it. So just keep your shorts on. The TBP team has done one helluva job already. It just is unfortunate that these balance issues surfaced after the release...
You shouldn't confuse the unbalanced issue with us not being grateful or appreciating the work they've done; far from it. It's exactly the opposite, because I appreciate it so much, that I care at all.
Now, it shouldn't need to be justified that any of the First Ones' vessels can easily beat several of the younger races' ships of the same size; they're millions of years ahead of them technologically. So that leaves one issue: balancing.
And that's what I would want left up to the modders. So if the Mission creator decides to put a shadow battlecrab in the mission, one he wants destroyed, then he just have to make sure he puts enough firepower on the other side to manage to take it out; for instance 3 Sharlins or so, or perhaps the Vorlons come to help them out. Or perhaps the Shadow vessel just decides to leave, for reasons unknown, after wrecking havoc for a while.
Anyways, other than the First Ones' Ships, I think you've done a very good job balancing stuff. And I'll be glad to participate in the beta testing when it starts again.
I was wondering, though, are there more ships planned for the next release?
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If the weakness of the Shadow and Vorlon ships bothers you simply press the special hitpoints button and give them more :D
Problem solved. You don't even have to worry about distributing modified tables with your missions or any nonsense like that. :)
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And if you do modify your tables and come up with any nice values tell me about them eh? I'm happy to take onboard suggestions.
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I'm sure you wouldn't mind if someone went away and rebalanced everything to use the new armour system either.
Not that anyone is going to do that much work without demanding an avatar for it :D
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I'm not convinced the armour system is worth the effort of rebalancing all the ships.
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Well, I took your advice and spent the last 6 hours or so trying to balance out the new ships. The ships/weapons that have been modified are Shadow, Vorlon, and Minbari.
Now, I haven't done any testing with the existing campaigns, but I did do extensive testing with all the First One's ships versus other races ships, tweaking them in the process. I believe I have found a balance close to the show, but note that there's *significant* changes from the old setup.
The strength of the First Ones should now be pretty similar, with the Vorlon Cruiser being somewhere between the medium and biggest Battlecrab in power.
There's a big difference between the smallest and largest BC.
Vorlon Fighters are much stronger than Shadow fighters and any other fighters(the Nial being the ship with the most chance against it). There is a problem with Shadow fighters, however, and that is that the Difficulty Level makes a BIG difference in their efficiency(Difficulty level does not seem to affect beam fighters at all). At Insane they hit almost all the time, but at medium it's about average. I optimised these changes for Medium difficulty, any higher and they become too powerful. It should be noted that Shadow fighters have a hard time hitting Centauri Sentries, for instance, this because of the small size of those ships. But again, that's just realistic.
Other than that, the S.Fighters are about as strong as the Nials, depending on which opponents they fight.
I don't think the changes to the Minbari ships are significant enough to ruin any previous campaigns including the Minbari, but it would be nice if someone could test it.
Anyways, for the big ships you now need about 3 Sharlins to take out the biggest and medium Battlecrab, and about 2 to take out the smaller one. This varies, however, since even a single beam missing it's target for the Shadow ship can make a huge difference.
Missiles will unfortunately work extremly well against the shadow ships, because of the complete lack of AAA beams.
And because of the Freespace capital ship AI, there is no chance the Vorlon or Shadow capital ships will be able to fight anything in close proximity, so all actions by these ships would do well to be scripted, for best performance.
Anyways, the files are uploaded here.
http://home.ripway.com/2005-7/355794/TBP/ships.tbl
http://home.ripway.com/2005-7/355794/TBP/weapons.tbl
Placing them in your TBP folder\data\tables will make them override the current settings(make sure to backup any old files you have with the same name in that directory), and deleting the files again will restore the 3.2 release defaults.
Any comments, flames, criticism, etc. would be welcome.
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Originally posted by Raapys
I see the problem. I would suggest that you aim for a realistic 'which ship wins against which' setup, and leave most of the balancing up to the modders. That way the mission creators just have to be careful to balance up the stronger ships with numbers, when the first ones are involved, but we would still get that 'awe' feeling when seeing a shadow/vorlon ship tearing up the younger races' ships as if they were little more than insects. That's part of the charm, I think.
Let me tell you that I spent maybe 2 or 3 years working on the balancing of tables for this mod before anyone on the outside even had to play it. I see you've posted some tables there and hopefully IP can use them but let me tell you that it takes a long time to get things precisely the way they should be. You have to keep in mind several things:
1) Gameplay
2) Balance
3) Authenticity
People making campaigns will have less issue with this than someone who throws two ships into a mission and tells them to attack each other. Its not the way mission designers do it for FS2 and its not the way its done for TBP.
I haven't looked at things in a long while, but I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring for a bit here. Lots of time and effort spent balancing things back in R1 and R2...I think those things still probably are alright and some issues still exist with new ships. Thats not surprising.
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Thanks Raapys. I'll be sure to have a good look at those tables ASAP and see what I can use. I may not use everything exactly as you have it but I'm sure the work you've done will be helpful.
The balance of the new 3.2 ships should be better in 3.3. At which point people will probably have some comments on the balance of the new 3.3 ships. The alternative is sitting on new releases for months working on balance before release. Personally I think this way is better. I can get a guage as to what people think of balance much quicker in a thread like this after release, and people get to start writing missions with the ships. This has all been very useful feedback and will enable me to nail the balance for 3.3 which shouldn't be too long away.
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by Raapys
And because of the Freespace capital ship AI, there is no chance the Vorlon or Shadow capital ships will be able to fight anything in close proximity, so all actions by these ships would do well to be scripted, for best performance.
You could always blame it on the telepath you claim to have stationed on your own capships :D
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I think most of the ships need only an upgrade in their rate of fire. Remember, in the last episode of Season 2, the Centauri Ship attack 3 targets at once, at you can see that nearly 20 "red dots" flying against the targets
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You could always blame it on the telepath you claim to have stationed on your own capships
I was thinking the same thing. Though telepaths doesn't work on Vorlon ships.
I think most of the ships need only an upgrade in their rate of fire. Remember, in the last episode of Season 2, the Centauri Ship attack 3 targets at once, at you can see that nearly 20 "red dots" flying against the targets
The younger races' ships aren't the issue. The two newly implemented races, the Vorlons and the Shadows, are. I think I've managed to balance them pretty neatly in the files I posted though, but it's meant to be true to the show, so there's a big difference on the two races. Where originally a Sharlin would easily take any Shadowcrab, you now need 2 Sharlins to stand a chance against the smallest crab, etc.
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I figured I'd do the telepath thing with different AI classes. Only the AI.tbl does not seem to want to be expanded at the moment. Whenever I try and add new classes to it the existing classes become corrupted and their names become a mess of random characters.
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Well the telepath thing was a joke.
I never thought that it would be handled any other way than sexp scripting.
And we don't know if Telepath would work against Vorlon ships, because in the show noone ever tryed it. The Vorlon ships have their own intelligence, but they are controlled by the Vorlon they belong to.
For me that makes 2 instead of 1 potential weaknesses against Telepath.
1) Block the connection between Vorlon and Ship. The Ship itself MAY still be able to do somthing, but surely less effective.
2) Blackout, influence or mess in any other way with the ships mind (if it has a mind as such).
For both you would need stronger Teeps than for blocking shadowships, but it COULD be possible (even if your not an 3rd space alien ;) )
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The AI table is the perfect place for it. You can just reduce the ship's accuracy. That hurts a Battlecrab a lot. it's all powerful ship mincing death ray is useless if it keeps missing. Add to that the fact that you've got a change-ai-class sexp in there and you can do some nice scripting too. A ship full of teeps arrives, suddenly all your battlecrabs go dumb.
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But at least one or the other should be completely frozen in space, additionally to the other things.
But since that needs a strong telepath, of which not so many exist, your way makes a lot of sense.
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Vorlons probably have a way of blocking a telepaths influence over their ships or made their ships immune since they technically created telepaths from most of the younger races
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But still Kosh Ulkesh (the 2nd Kosh) couldn't stop Lyta from reading his thoughts even when she was still a P5.
So what could a good trained P12 do?
And I don't think the Vorlons ever thought of the Telepath turning against them.
Why would they have created free thinking telepath than instead of a kind of telepath drone?
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He soon taught her a lesson though ;) and she was already modified by them at that time and still he ended up making her reveal the trap set,by then it was too late of course.
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But still Kosh Ulkesh (the 2nd Kosh) couldn't stop Lyta from reading his thoughts even when she was still a P5.
Actually, he did. He noticed at once that she tried to scan him. And he blasted her halfway across the room, before he asked if she would want to know what was on his mind. And he forced open her mind later, before they tried to kill him. And all this when she had been enhanced by the vorlons to become even more powerful. She was no longer a P5.
The reason shadow ships can be influenced by telepaths is because of the person inside the ship who controls it.
Vorlon ships doesn't need anyone controlling them, so even if any other telepaths was strong enough to stop a Vorlon, it wouldn't help, since the ships control themselves.
And I don't think the Vorlons ever thought of the Telepath turning against them. Why would they have created free thinking telepath than instead of a kind of telepath drone?
The Vorlons hardly feared the younger races. Millions of years ahead of them technologically, and superior both in numbers and ship power, no one except the shadows could stand against the Vorlons. But that wasn't what it was all about, anyway. The Vorlons gave the other races telepaths so they could oppose the shadows on their own.
The Shadows can't be influenced by telepaths either. If you remember the episode where Mr. Morden is picked up by station security, and Sheridan has Talia walk past him. As she does, she tries to scan him. The Shadow guardians quickly ruin that attempt.
The 'evolution' goes like this; Normal person->Person who can read thoughts->Person who can move objects with his mind(telekinesis)->Being of energy(Vorlons & Shadows).
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Yep. Notice that Ironheart said that humans would meet up with him in a million years. Fast forwards a million years and what do humans look like? :D
Lyta was well above P12 after the modifications the vorlons had made to her (She hadn't fully explored her powers at that point but after Ulkesh was killed the vorlons made no further modifications to her so everything she had the power to do in season 5 must have been implanted before his death).
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The ships have a mind on their own, yes.
But think of that.
The ship is used to be orderd around and doing nothing whatsoever without an order.
Now take out or block out the being who gives the orders. Either it sits thight waiting for orders, or it is disoriented.
It may not be taken out completely, but it's surely less effective.
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Actually, no. If you had recently seen the B5 episodes like me, who watch them continually, even though I've seen them dozens of times already, you would have known that the ship can actually feel it's master's condition, etc., and can act completely on it's own. Like, for instance, it does when Kosh #1 is dead, and like it does when Kosh #2 is under attack.
And there's also the problem of blocking a being which is much more powerful than any telepath.
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could you give the battle crabs the games fighter AI?
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Nah, it's set up to use a turret, which fighters can't use from what I know. Fighters also move too close, which isn't a good thing considering the size of the Battlecrab.
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Shadow ships could probably benefit from Gunship AI, if it ever gets implimented. As for telepaths, I proposed a method of using it in-game, but not scripted.
Basically, any ship that might have a Teep onboard, would have a turret placed within its hull, so it couldn't be knocked out like a standard turret. The position and fof of that turret would reflect the line-of-sight requirement, so it would be behind windows with limited view. Of course, on a Minbari warship, with the 360 degree real-time viewing chaimbers, the fof is unrestricted. This turret would normally be without any weapons, but to engage Shadows, it would be equipped with a beam weapon. This weapon has no sound, no beam effect, no beamglow, no particles, and no impact effect. It would cause no hull dammage, but have a significant kinetic, EMP, and Electronics dammage. The Kinetic effect would act to quickly slow an attacking ship, the EMP would disrupt its targetting, and the Electronics (as with the D-Missile) would shut down all engines and weapon systems for the duration of the beam. This would be difficult during an engagement such as "Into the Fire" with both Shadow and Vorlon ships present (as Hostile and Neutral with "All Teams At War" enabled), a way to prevent this turret from fring at Vorlon ships would be beneficial. I've proposed to the SCP in the past, sexps which would allow orders to ship turrets other than fire-beam. Something like ai-turret-ignore and the ability to select "< any neutral >" and an option to select a specific turret on the selected ship.
IP- I was noticing your mention of AI to reduce turret accuracy, and I remembered something. It might be useful (if someone wants to recreate the S3 "Matters of Honor" engagement) to have one variant of the Shadow slicer bean weapon with a 100% miss rate (so that the beam will always miss).
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Originally posted by Fade Rathnik
could you give the battle crabs the games fighter AI?
Actually cap ships and fighters in terms of how they attack are almost the same. Its just the fighters are smaller and faster and thus the AI works better there.
Compared to present day AI, the FS stuff is very rudimentary.
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Originally posted by Trivial Psychic
It might be useful (if someone wants to recreate the S3 "Matters of Honor" engagement) to have one variant of the Shadow slicer bean weapon with a 100% miss rate (so that the beam will always miss).
I have been planning to add an "Inaccurate" AI class for ages. Like I said earlier though, every time I try to expand that table the damn bug hits.
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Actually, I was thinking that it could be done perhaps using the miss-factor fields in the beam data.
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You could but doing it using AI classes would work better. It's precisely the kind of thing AI classes are there for.
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I don't think it would be possible to 'out-teep' a Vorlon as it were. Not even Lyta could hold against Ulkesh for long, and she was their doomsday weapon.
They'd simply mindfrag whoever was going to try, IMO.
And, yes, the Vorlon ships are living, thinking entities. Anyone read the book 'The Shadow Within'? You get a few insights into Kosh's transport. It is, basically, a living creature that 'serves' Kosh willingly and faithfully.